2026 Spring Retreat

Speakers

• Louis Gomez, University of California, Los Angeles
• Pamela Moss, University of Michigan

Agenda

• Introduction
• Small Group Task 1 – Fellows Only
• Small Group Task 2 – Fellows Only
• (Senior scholars in attendance welcome to participate in seperate, optional session.)

Speakers

• Louis Gomez, University of California, Los Angeles
• Pamela Moss, University of Michigan

Agenda

• Small Group Task – Fellows and Senior Scholars
• Closing – Including closing remarks from Alfredo J. Artiles, President, NAEd

SPEAKERS

Jackquelin Bristol, University of Colorado Boulder
Teacher Housing Initiatives: An Embedded Case Study of Race, Place, and the School-Housing Nexus
The rising cost of housing in many regions of the country has presented new challenges for schools and district leaders, including workforce instability, as teachers often are priced-out of housing markets where they teach or desire to teach. Teacher housing initiatives (THIs) are a novel and growing response to reduce costs for teachers and to aid recruitment and retention. However, while THIs are increasing, research on their impact is not. Drawing on 314 national surveys, 41 interviews, GIS mapping, document analysis and field observations, this dissertation addresses the following questions: (1) How do schoolteachers perceive and experience housing affordability challenges and how does race and class shape divergent struggles for housing among teachers? (2) How have district leaders and local stakeholders responded to limited access to housing for teachers? (3) How are teacher housing initiatives (in one district) experienced by teachers including time and duration at school/work, engagement with students, parents and families, and decisions to stay or leave the school workplace? and (4) In what ways does teacher proximity (via living in a THI in one district) shape important aspects of teachers professional skills such as relationships with students, parents and community members, and pedagogical practices? This study is grounded in critical racial spatial analysis, and sociological theories of the racialization of space, political economies of place, and the increasing precarity of teachers’ labor. Ultimately, this research addresses a critical gap in the field, particularly as districts across the country explore new ways to support educators through housing.

Lindsay Lanteri, Boston College
How Public Housing Redevelopments Affect Local School Composition
Over the last three decades place-based approaches have played a central role in addressing neighborhood concentrated poverty and housing quality problems endemic in public housing developments. Such policy approaches aim to improve local neighborhood resources, but the extant literature has not assessed impacts on one of the most important community-based resources: local schools and educational contexts. This study examines the spillover effects of public housing redevelopment via two federal programs, the HOPE VI and Choice Neighborhoods Initiative (CNI), on the racial and socioeconomic composition of local school landscapes. A novel, integrated 32-year school-level panel (1991-2022) dataset was created by combining data from the Picture of Subsidized Households database, which contains the universe of federal public housing sites in the United States; neighborhood-level data from the National Historical Geographic Information System (NHGIS); and school-level data from a combination of sources including the National Longitudinal School Database (NLSD) and the Urban Institute’s Education Data Portal. We estimated flexible-conditional difference-in-differences models to identify the causal effects of federal public housing redevelopment by comparing public housing sites that received federal redevelopment funds to their ‘statistical twin’ comparison sites that did not receive a redevelopment grant. This estimation technique adjusts for different treatment start dates and length of treatment and can estimate short- and long-term treatment effects. Findings show significant fade-in effects of federal public housing redevelopment on school-level poverty rates but no significant effects on student racial composition. Specifically, compared to matched controls, school landscapes near public housing redevelopments had a relative 2.81 percentage point decline in students eligible for free lunch 10 years post-redevelopment completion. Patterns were heightened within the most economically disadvantaged schools, and when public housing transitioned to mixed-income. This study advances intersectional understandings of the longer-term effects of neighborhood redevelopment policies and how they can shape local educational contexts.

Noel Um-Lo, Teachers College, Columbia University
Resettlement Schools and The Sacred and Secular Politics of Korean Unification
Born in China to North Korean mothers trafficked across the border, displaced youth arrive in South Korea only to find themselves suspended in a legal gray zone. They are granted citizenship as children of North Korean escapees, but excluded from housing, welfare, and education subsidies reserved for those born in the North. Scholarship on migrant and refugee youth has shown that states govern through logics of assimilation, multiculturalism, and securitized control?frameworks that demand performative belonging while withholding full access to rights, resources, and protection. Yet few have examined how migration governance can be embedded in a state project like unification, enacted through civil society institutions and structured by competing demands of recognition and exclusion. This dissertation examines how Korean unification, though receding as a geopolitical reality, persists as an infrastructural logic deeply embedded in the everyday lives of the North Korean diaspora. Drawing on over three years of ethnographic research with North Korean- and Chinese-born youth in South Korea and the U.S., this project maps the social life of unification through the circulation of money and labor across a transnational network that includes INGOs, churches, U.S. federal programs, and educational institutions. By following these youth within and beyond resettlement schools, this dissertation examines the pathways through which they become selectively visible to the South Korean state. In doing so, it asks: how do North Korean displaced youth and the civil society actors that govern them strategically mobilize the logic of unification for their own advancement?

CHAIR

Kendra Bischoff, Cornell University

SPEAKERS

LaShanda Harbin, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Uplifting Black Queer Youth Voices and Dreams in Education Safety Discourses
The safety of Black queer youth within and beyond K-12 educational spaces is affected by various factors, ranging from systemic racism to dynamics within Black communities. This qualitative multimethod study centers Black queer youth voices to learn about the complex dynamics that affect safety for Black queer students, with a particular focus on K-12 school experiences. Data collection in this study consists of two strands, or parts. In Strand 1, I interview self-identified Black queer and transgender young adults to learn about their safety experiences in Black communities and within educational systems. In Strand 2, a small group of participants collaborate in a series of six workshops that center Robin D.G. Kelley’s concept of freedom dreaming. These workshops are designed to focus particularly on the dreams these participants have for safer educational systems for all Black queer and transgender youth. By the end of the workshops, participants will have created a guide for educational stakeholders to learn about Black queer youths’ safety needs, their dreams, and ways to make those dreams come true through policy. This study contextually and theoretically centers Blackness in ways that are not always present in research about Black queer students. Education researchers and other stakeholders will better understand how Black queer youths’ lived experiences within Black communities can inform education policy, which may help them imagine innovative solutions to better protect Black queer youth in schools.

Amber Johnson, University of Maryland
Waterbearers Against the Dark: Black Women of the South Carolina Sea Islands and the (Re)Construction of Black Education
In this critical ethnographic study, I consider water a material and metaphorical force of Black knowledge. It is what I argue Black women have carried and nurtured with Black children in intimate ways, even as formalized education was first introduced to formerly enslaved communities in the U.S. South during Reconstruction. Turning to the South Carolina Sea Islands, I build upon W.E.B. DuBois’ urge to consider Reconstruction as Black praxis and, thus, examine how Black women have made and remade Black knowledge (re)production processes amidst changing and complex sociopolitical landscapes. By bringing together public memories of Black Sea Island women (as scattered in archives) and private memories (as they live through Sea Islanders’ oral histories), I examine how these women have cultivated Black knowledges with children and the interplay of such knowledge work with public education. As a result, this dissertation offers a layered story that contends with the tangled relationship between state-sponsored education for Black communities?and its necessity for physical and material survival?and intimate Black knowledge (re)constructed by Black communities?and its importance for epistemological survival. Ultimately, I invite expansive notions of Black Education that privilege quotidian knowledge and Black communities’ unyielding commitments to (re)construct these cultural knowledge ways amidst landscapes that require the foreclosure of Black life. Equally importantly, this study positions Black women, especially of the South Carolina Sea Islands, as progenitors of Black knowledge in the U.S., everyday educators, and custodians of Black life. They are waterbearers against the dark.

Maya Revell, University of Oregon
Water Futures: Black Relations with Water as Knowledge in Southeast North Carolina
Amid uncertain climate futures, this dissertation explores how situated Black relations to water and place in Southeastern North Carolina offer vital, yet overlooked, knowledge for reimagining environmental, climate, and science education. Grounded in Black Ecologies, environmental education, and speculative pedagogies, this study contends that global antiblackness and enduring structures of slavery have disproportionately exposed Black communities to environmental harm. Simultaneously, Black communities have cultivated intimate, resistant, and creative relationships with the more-than-human world. Drawing on intergenerational stories of Black maritime labor; beach and swampland narratives; and, accounts of climate displacement and environmental organizing, this research investigates how Black onto-epistemologies can restory place and inform educational practices. The project engages educators and youth in interactive mapping and focus groups that center Black environmental relations, asking: (1) How can engaging with situated Black relations to changing waterscapes inform teacher practice and/or curriculum development? (2) How can these relations help teachers and students imagine and work toward desirable futures? (3) What conditions are required to realize these futures?

CHAIR

Ashley Smith-Purviance, The Ohio State University

SPEAKERS

Jadda M. Miller, University of California, Davis
Hoʻomalu ʻĀina Maui: A Critical Place-based Education Approach to Wildfire Mitigation and Land Stewardship
K-12 science education has an opportunity to enhance its relevance by connecting classroom learning to the complex social-ecological challenges students encounter in their communities. Through a community-based participatory research project with a high school ecology teacher, a local watershed nonprofit, and a biocultural conservation biologist, we examine a novel project called Hoʻomalu ʻĀina Maui (protecting the land of Maui, a name given to the project by the students), which combines culturally relevant pedagogy, critical place-based learning, and Kānaka ʻŌiwi (Native Hawaiian) Biocultural Knowledge. Through the Hoʻomalu ʻĀina Maui project, 21 high school students in Maui, Hawaiʻi, engaged in hands-on stewardship work for wildfire mitigation and riparian restoration. Through a mixed-methods research design, including pre-post surveys, pre-post interviews, observations, and artifact analysis, we explore how this project influences students’ (1) understanding of social-ecological systems resilience; (2) ability to integrate Kānaka ʻŌiwi Biocultural Knowledge with Western science practices; (3) agency with environmental science, and (4) sense of kuleana (responsibility). This project was collaboratively created after the devastating 2023 Lahaina wildfire and represents hope-in-action, a proactive response to trauma that fosters landscape and community healing. As many educators and researchers seek to transform K-12 science education into a discipline that prepares students with the resources and experiences to address social-ecological challenges, projects such as Hoʻomalu ʻĀina Maui allow our team to ask and answer research questions that critically inform and further advance the knowledge and practices of science education.

Emanuel Suarez Jimenez, University of California, Santa Cruz
Cuando los Maestros Tejen: Towards a Relational Theory of Digital Pedagogy from Oaxaca, Mexico
This dissertation examines how teachers in Oaxaca, Mexico design digital pedagogies in ways that challenge dominant frameworks for understanding teaching and learning with digital technologies. Drawing on relational and Indigenous epistemologies, this work conceptualizes digital pedagogies as socially, culturally, and materially organized practices through which teachers and students make meaning with and through digital technologies in relation to students, languages, communities, and local ways of knowing and being. Based on one year of sustained ethnographic engagement with five teachers across Indigenous and non-Indigenous educational contexts in Oaxaca, including interviews, classroom visits, digital artifacts, and participation in community and union events, this study traces how teachers experiment with, repurpose, and sometimes refuse digital tools as part of their broader pedagogical design work. In doing so, it repositions teachers not as neutral users of technology but as purposeful designers of pedagogical possibilities.The dissertation advances three central arguments. First, Indigenous teachers’ digital pedagogies are embedded in social, cultural, linguistic, and pedagogical commitments that exceed any digital tool. Second, digital technologies do not determine pedagogical design; rather, they reorganize the pedagogical work teachers are already doing. Third, teachers engage technologies through principled pedagogical decisions, deciding which possibilities, constraints, and assumptions can be adapted, repurposed, or refused. Together, these findings contribute to scholarship on digital pedagogy, teacher learning, and Indigenous education by offering a relational theory of digital pedagogy shaped by local contexts, commitments, and the futures teachers are trying to make possible.

Danielle Williamson, Graves Boston University
Segregation Academies: The Impact of “Whites-Only” Private Schools
In the 1960s and 1970s, white parents responded to the desegregation of public schools by organizing all-white private schools. In their most extreme form, these “segregation academies” replicated and preserved the dual system of racially segregated education that existed prior to Brown v. Board of Education (1954). My research examines the impact of this emergent form of private schooling on public schools, students, and communities. I begin by describing the growth and geographic distribution of the segregation academy movement by constructing a comprehensive dataset that draws on historical records, contemporary newspaper articles, existing qualitative research, and sports schedules. I find that the establishment of a segregation academy led to a decline in public school enrollment, primarily driven by white students exiting the public system. I also investigate whether this shift in enrollment was accompanied by changes in public school funding and resource allocation. In collaboration with Jennifer Withrow, I explore the long-term consequences of these developments on school-aged individuals. Motivated by our short-term findings, we assess the long-run impacts on educational attainment, prime age income, and geographic mobility. In a separate chapter co-authored with Michael Holcomb, I examine how the entrenchment of segregated schooling influenced historical voting patterns and contemporary racial attitudes in the Southeast.

CHAIR

Megan Bang, Northwestern University

SPEAKERS

Micah Card, University of California, Santa Cruz
Problematizing the Panacea: Early Childhood Educators’ Experiences, Perceptions, and Priorities in the Context of California’s Universal Preschool Rollout
Advocates argue that universal prekindergarten (UPK) can increase access and wages in the inequitable early childhood education (ECE) market, supplement the childcare needs of working families, close educational achievement gaps, and increase the economic power of the nation via future returns on investment. California is set to transform the state’s system of education in both function and scale through its new UPK initiative, introducing a new public school grade for 4-year-olds and a new teaching credential to staff it. These changes represent a critical case not only for the analysis of education policy but fundamental questions of what (pre)school is, the relationship between the form and function of educational provision, and what it means to be an educator. This study centers on the most feminized, racialized, and historically exploited labor force in U.S. education: early educators. Early indications suggest these policies will fundamentally shift ECE provision across the state, including work conceptions, conditions, and training in ways that may further marginalize the existing workforce and exacerbate inconsistency in ECE quality across the field. Theorizing policy as socially practiced within power relations, this qualitative study examines how educators across sectors and regions experience, navigate, and negotiate these policy changes. Data include a survey of ECEs, interviews, and ethnographic case studies of early educators at work. The primary contribution of this study is contextualized data and nuanced analysis of early educators’ lived experiences, which are underrepresented in research and policy, contributing to ongoing inequality and poor working conditions in ECE.

Andrew Frangos, University of Chicago
Making Choices or Making Options? Race, Community, and Collective Action to Transform School Options
About one-third of U.S. public K-12 schools today did not exist thirty years ago. Even amidst declining enrollments and school closures, parents continue demanding new schools. I argue that a better understanding of these demands and their context can help districts and communities lead the public toward building more equitable school systems. School choice positions parents and caregivers as individual consumers of education options. However, when faced with options that do not satisfy their ideals, some parents engage in collective strategies to address school options directly. I call such strategies second-order school choice to capture the intention to transform or defend the options and accessibility that bind individual choices. With the aim of theorizing and empirically describing second-order school choice, this dissertation investigates a series of failed proposals to secure a high school for Chicago’s Greater Chinatown area. First, I draw upon two years of ethnographic fieldwork with Chinatown community organizations to analyze their role in shaping public discourse about race and community during the most recent proposal for a local high school. Second, I develop a historical explanation connecting the evolving set of school options around Greater Chinatown with the dynamics of urban and education politics to reveal distinct periods regarding who is empowered to demand new schools and why. Lastly, I analyze the perspectives of local parents who chose to engage in collective action, showing the tensions between school choice, community identity, and solidarity that districts and community organizations seek to navigate in education planning processes.

Kemigisha Richardson, Teachers College, Columbia University
Reconceptualizing Inclusion through the Lived Experiences of Disabled Students in Contexts of Forced Displacement: A Comparative Case Study
The concept of inclusive education remains elusive, with ambiguous goals and models shaped predominantly by education research conducted in the global North, which typically overlook the diverse ways inclusion is understood and experienced by students with multiple marginalized identities. This comparative case study, conducted in refugee-hosting districts in Uganda, uses qualitative and visual methods to analyze and reconceptualize inclusion in contexts of forced displacement by centering the myriad identities, knowledge, and lived experiences of forcibly displaced disabled students. Grounded in theories of intersectionality that examine the intersection of disability with other axes of inequality, such as citizenship, race, class, and language, as well as postcolonial analyses of disability and displacement, this study uses student reflective journals, classroom observations, and semi-structured interviews with students, caregivers, teachers, and education stakeholders in Uganda’s refugee response to explore the multi-dimensional and contextual factors that contribute to students’ understandings and experiences of inclusion in both rural and urban settings. This study seeks to expand understandings of inclusive education by recognizing students as valuable knowledge producers whose insights are vital to inform education policy, practice, and research oriented towards creating transformative and liberatory learning environments grounded in equity and justice.

CHAIR

John Diamond, Brown University

SPEAKERS

Sage Hatch, University of Oregon
Implementing Indigenous Studies Curriculum Standards: Case Studies of a Complicated Curricular Process
Sage Hatch is a citizen of the Confederated Tribes of Siletz, who was born and raised in Siletz, Oregon.† His dissertation research examines the implementation of the Oregon Tribal History/Shared History policy that mandates curriculum content about Oregon’s Indigenous peoples be included at every grade level and across all major subject areas. Mr. Hatch’s work challenges the idea that the work of implementing such curricular mandates is contained primarily in the classroom–in lesson planning and instructional delivery. He documents the way teaching Indigenous studies content inevitably challenges pervasive settler colonial ideologies, precipitating pushback from students, parents, and even educators unfamiliar with this material.† Mr. Hatch argues that it makes more sense to think of curricula†as existing at a collective level in shifting, self-replicating discourses that circulate in communities. One of the implications of this study is that education for a more inclusive and just world will require more than preparing teachers to be truth tellers who dispel ignorance about various subjects. Ignorance is resilient; it reasserts itself and is reinforced by popular media and political culture.† Such teaching aimed at social change will additionally require teachers to become part of local communities, integrated with organizations and local conversations that can collectively sustain curricula like the Tribal History/Shared History mandate.

Rita Kamani-Renedo, Stanford University
Translating Ethnic Studies: Examining the Racial Literacies of Multilingual Newcomer Immigrant Youth and Their Ethnic Studies Teachers
In 2021, California became the first state in the United States to require Ethnic Studies (ES) for its high school students. This mandate will go into effect in the 2025-2026 school year amidst a complex political climate. ES has been recognized for its transformative impact on youth whose cultural, linguistic, and epistemic legacies have long been marginalized within U.S. schools. Nevertheless, we know little about what it means to teach ES, and other critical pedagogies centering race and racism, to students who are navigating new racial and linguistic landscapes as recently-arrived immigrants (“multilingual newcomers”). To address this need, this study explores the experiences of ES teachers in newcomer-serving classrooms and the ways their students make sense of this educational space. I bridge educational research on racial literacies and sociological theories of transnational racialization to examine the racial ideologies that migrant youth carry with them into classrooms, and how teachers attend to them. I employ a multi-sited ethnographic design that observes students’ and teachers’ discourses and practices across three sites: 1) a 12th grade newcomers ES classroom, 2) a 9th/10th grade newcomers ES classroom, and 3) a Collaborative of six high school teachers of multilingual newcomers. I draw on over eight months of participant-observation, interviews with teachers and students, and artifact analysis to examine how students and teachers interrogate race and racism across borders of language and geography. Findings will help attune critical pedagogical approaches to the dynamic and nuanced ways that young people make sense of today’s world.

CHAIR

Bryan Brayboy, Northwestern University

SPEAKERS

Yared Portillo, University of California, Berkeley
¡A Fandanguear!: Studying Son Jarocho Music Workshops as a Translingual Cultural Practice
In recent decades, the fandango?a gathering where participants play son jarocho, a popular music born out of movements of resistance in Veracruz, MÈxico?has been taken up by multilingual Latine communities across the U.S. In this participatory musical gathering, children and adults are side-by-side participants playing jaranas (stringed instruments), singing verses in Spanish, and dancing zapateado (tap dance). Focusing on the everyday musicking and learning of intergenerational fandango students in the U.S., this study analyzes the role that folkloric literacies play in the lives of racialized bilingual learners. Through a participatory design research study with a fandango collective in California, I ask: (1) how do the intergenerational, cultural and translingual dimensions of the fandango afford opportunities to engage in and hone translingual practices; and (2) how does the fandango, as a cultural practice, engender a range of opportunities for consequential learning? Data collection includes participant observation, audio and video recordings, semi-structured interviews, and pl·ticas. Grounded in sociocultural approaches to literacy learning, this study examines how the sociolinguistic and sociopolitical dynamics of fandango classes create pathways for students of all ages to develop and sustain translingual practices, and how these practices can empower students to participate musically, socially, and civically in their communities. Situated at the intersection of music education, sociolinguistics, and sociocultural approaches to learning, this interdisciplinary study expands understandings about how the everyday musicking practices of racially and linguistically minoritized communities can be vehicles for heritage language learners and emergent bilinguals of all ages to hone their translingualism.

Liora Tamir, New York University
The social role of language education amidst ongoing conflict: Hebrew-language education for adult Palestinians in Jerusalem
The lack of proficiency in Hebrew, the official language of Israel, among its Palestinian Arabic-speaking citizens and residents is central to the deep socio-economic gap between Palestinians and Jewish-Israelis and a barrier to their participation in the Israeli labor market and higher education (Tehawkho & Kalisher, 2023). Accordingly, Hebrew-language education (HLE) for adult Palestinians in Israel is informed by instrumentalist perceptions of second-language acquisition and teaching as a means for economic integration. My dissertation contextualizes HLE within the ongoing and escalated Israeli-Palestinian conflict and Jewish-Palestinian power discrepancies in Israel. Conceptualizing language as a core component of individual, group and national identities (Giles & Byrne,1982; Anderson, 1983), and language-learning as a process of negotiating identity boundaries and shaping intergroup interactions (Gardner & Lambert,1972; Norton, 2013), I explore the unattended social implications of HLE. Focusing on the city of Jerusalem as one of the conflict’s most contested sites, the study asks: how does adult HLE for Palestinian learners in Jerusalem inform Jewish-Palestinian intergroup relations in the city? Through a mixed-methods design encompassing classroom observations, interviews with learners, teachers and managers in multiple institutions, participants’ diary-entries, textbook analysis and surveys, the study offers a holistic examination of how Palestinian learners and Jewish and Palestinian teachers navigate Hebrew-language learning and teaching amidst conflict. Concurrently, it explores associations between HLE and intergroup attitudes and behaviors. The study highlights the potential in reconceptualizing adult language-education as a mechanism that can either ameliorate, perpetuate, or exacerbate intergroup tension with implications for language-education policy and pedagogy.

CHAIR

Sarah Dryden-Peterson, Harvard University

SPEAKERS

Alexis Hunter, University of Colorado Boulder
We Have Everything We Need: Ancestral Healing Informing Pathways to Collective Liberation in the Lives of Youth of Color
This three-article dissertation addresses the growing focus on young people’s mental health by examining how Black/African, Latine, and Indigenous youth in community organizing spaces percieve healing as deeply connected to social justice advocacy. Youth-led community contexts are increasingly embracing practices grounded in healing justice, critiquing the limitations of Western, Eurocentric mental health models, and centering the rich healing traditions within communities of color. To uplift youth of color as experts in their own healing and liberation, this dissertation draws on Black/African extra-colonial traditions, including both pre-colonial and anti-colonial practices. Guided by Christina Sharpe’s (2016) viewing praxis of wake work, the dissertation explores how young people make meaning of the relationship between healing and justice-oriented action. It also offers design principles and insights for community-based participatory research. This work contributes to the field of education by identifying how schools and educational institutions can learn from youth-led community spaces to better support mental health and well-being in the face of ongoing antiblackness and systemic catastrophes.

Iman Lathan, State University of New York at Buffalo
The Secondary Diaspora: Black Women in NCAA Division I Basketball
This Black feminist qualitative case study examines how the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA)’s internal mechanisms shape the Division I educational pathway as a secondary diasporic conduit for Black female basketball student-athletes amid the unprecedented popularity of Division I women’s basketball. In so doing, I unravel how the neoliberal intercollegiate sports model engages, exploits, and disposes individuals descended from the African Diaspora to sustain its operations. The research delves into the NCAA as a neoliberal structure, akin to a secondary diasporic vessel, directing Black female student-athletes? descendants of the Black Atlantic Diaspora?to predominantly white institutions (PWIs). Employing Black feminism and a queer diasporic lens, this study unpacks how Black female ball players, coaches, and parents and caregivers/guardians perceive their roles, positions, and experiences within the confines of the NCAA’s neoliberal structures. This research not only bridges the gap in NCAA, race, women, and sport research but also offers an innovative perspective on understanding the dynamics of people’s movement and the influence wielded by modern institutions of higher education. The objective of my study is carried out by using semi-structured interviews, archival analysis, and a social media analysis of the NCAA Instagram account. Furthermore, by drawing upon Black feminism and a queer diasporic lens, this work provides a fresh perspective on comprehending the complexities of human mobility and the impact of contemporary higher education institutions.

Siyue Lena Wang, University of California, Los Angeles
Becoming the “Mystical Unicorn”: Understanding the Racialized Illegality Experiences of Undocumented Asian College Students in California
Undocumented Asian (undocuAsian) college students represent a growing yet overlooked and underserved population in immigration and education research. Despite their increasing presence, they are often rendered invisible by dominant narratives that frame undocumented students through racialized stereotypes, such as the “model minority.” UndocuAsians face distinct challenges shaped by ethnicity, immigration pathways, and geopolitical histories, intersecting with racialized perceptions of illegality and systemic exclusion. These barriers complicate their navigation of higher education and deepen their marginalization within institutional contexts.This study examines the lived experiences of undocuAsian students in California through the conceptual framework of “becomingness,” capturing the dynamic processes through which they negotiate undocumented status, racialized identities, and belonging. Drawing on multi-site critical ethnography and 100 in-depth interviews with 66 undocuAsian students, this research reveals how higher education institutions perpetuate invisibility while serving as critical spaces for resistance and belonging. UndocuAsians engage in strategic disclosure, collective advocacy, and community-building to challenge exclusionary structures and redefine citizenship through everyday resistance. By centering the agency, creativity, and resilience of undocuAsian students, this study challenges deficit-based narratives and highlights their strategies for cultivating joy, solidarity, and resistance. It contributes to immigration, race, and education scholarship by offering actionable insights for institutions to better support undocumented students. Ultimately, it calls for transformative policies to address intersectional barriers faced by diverse undocumented and underserved populations, advancing equity in higher education.

CHAIR

Bianca Baldridge, Harvard University

SPEAKERS

Linyun Fu, University of Chicago
Exploring the Dynamics of a Culturally Sensitive School-Based Social-Emotional Learning Program for Rural Chinese Children: Evaluating Effectiveness, Mediators, and Moderators
Approximately 110 million children, 37.1% of the total child population in China, reside in rural areas. These areas are commonly associated with family poverty, parental migration, poor school and neighborhood environments, and limited access to mental health services. Given these cumulative risk factors, rural children endure negative mental health and educational outcomes that could be ameliorated through school-based social-emotional learning (SEL) programs. While such programs have shown significant promise in supporting children’s development in Western contexts, few have been studied in non-Western, resource-constrained contexts such as rural China. This dissertation aims to investigate the impact of a culturally sensitive SEL program, co-developed by the author in collaboration with school social workers, school psychologists, and rural teachers. The study is theoretically informed by ecological systems theory, social learning theory, resilience perspective, and the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL) SEL framework. The study seeks to 1) enhance understanding of the effectiveness of this culturally sensitive SEL program on improving children’s social-emotional competencies, reducing internalizing and externalizing problems, and improving educational outcomes; 2) elucidate the change mechanisms, and 3) identify the specific subgroups that benefit most. This study adopts a matched-pair, cluster-randomized design involving fifth-grade students from 18 rural experimental schools and 18 matched waitlist control schools in southwest China. Potential contributions of this study to education include advancing evidence-based educational practices, promoting culturally tailored school-based interventions, fostering educational equity for rural students, and informing policies on integrating SEL into the regular school curriculum.

Nicollette Mitchell, Vanderbilt University
From Seeds to Giant Sequoia Trees: Exploring the Formative role of Equitable Geoscience Pedagogy for Black womens’ thriving
Governmental and disciplinary organizations have contributed millions of dollars toward the demographic diversification of geoscience education (Callahan et al., 2017; Marin-Spiotta et al., 2020;Wolfe & Riggs, 2017). Despite these efforts, the geosciences have remained the least racially diverse of all STEM fields for more than four decades (Bernard & Cooperdock, 2018). Given the importance of postsecondary education for exposure and socialization of marginalized student populations (Cropps, 2023), the geosciences need equity-oriented and intersectional educational research to inform and support these ongoing efforts. My dissertation explores postsecondary geoscience education through Black feminist qualitative inquiry. The questions guiding this work include: (1) What influences the intersectionality of Black women geoscientists’ experiences in post-secondary geoscience environments?, and (2) How do features of postsecondary geoscience pedagogy influence Black women’s persistence in the field? Through this work, Black woman geoscientists engage in written autobiographies, semi-structured individual interviews, and focus groups to explore the educational practices and relationships that play a critical role in shaping their geoscience experiences. Findings from this work posits considerations for educators and researchers who hope to engage in equitable educational practices and further diversify geoscience and STEM fields more broadly.

Davis Vo, University of California, Los Angeles
Revising Roles, Transforming Trajectories: Evaluating Community College Baccalaureate Programs’ Implications on Educational Access and Equity
In the past two decades, there has been a rise in community colleges that are authorized to offer bachelor’s degree programs. Community college bachelor’s or baccalaureate (CCB) programs fundamentally shift the role and function of community colleges. My dissertation is a multi-method research project that will utilize qualitative and quantitative approaches to explore the implications of CCB adoption on educational access, success, and equity. Using institutional and/or state datasets, I will conduct descriptive and inferential analysis to explore CCB-related trajectories, with considerations to students’ varied social backgrounds and contexts. Additionally, using causal inference methods, I will examine whether CCB graduates earn significantly higher (or different) wages compared to their academically and demographically similar counterparts (e.g., students who matriculated into CCB programs but have not graduated). As part of a separate analysis, I will explore meaningful educational access through various dimensions that are relevant to community colleges generally and CCB programs specifically, such as administrative burdens, economic factors, fields of study, geographic influences, social forces, and time-related considerations. To explore meaningful educational access, I will conduct semi-structured 1-on-1 interviews with prospective, current, and exited (e.g., students who have completed or paused enrollment) students from at least four community colleges in California, home of the largest community college system in the United States. Through this analysis, my dissertation aims to generate rich insights in the ways that CCB programs contribute to the alleviation or reproduction of economic/social stratification, (im)mobility, and (in)equality/(in)equity.

CHAIR

Michal Kurlaender, University of California, Davis

SPEAKERS

Megumi Asada, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey
Teaching logic for social justice: Connecting advanced mathematics and logic to an abolitionist perspective
Mathematics and mathematics education are implicated in broader societal inequities. These inequities can manifest in racialized and gendered classroom experiences and are perpetuated by the very practices students are encouraged to employ. While some scholarship in the K-12 context describes possibilities for the use of mathematics toward socially just ends, this area has been limited to statistics and computation, leaving proof unexplored despite its critical role within K-16 mathematics. This study aims to develop, and test the viability of, a learning trajectory for how students can use competencies from proof-based mathematics to support their sensemaking about prisons and abolition. The study consists of two cycles of constructivist teaching experiments with pairs of undergraduates, in which they practice identifying and relaxing assumptions in a geometric context and apply these practices to understanding prisons and abolition. Through design and enactment, I will develop an instructional theory that describes possibilities and limitations for bringing sociopolitical topics into logic and proof.

Joshua Gilbert, Harvard University
Synthesizing Psychometrics and Causal Inference: Applications of Latent Variable Models to Treatment Heterogeneity, Psychological Networks, and Learning Transfer
Evaluating the effectiveness of educational interventions presents two distinct challenges: measurement of outcome variables through psychometrics and estimation of program impact through causal inference techniques. Education research has been unnecessarily constrained by the separation of these two domains, and their synthesis is a promising area of methodological research that can inform ongoing substantive debates in the field. I contribute to this synthesis through three dissertation studies. In Study 1, I demonstrate how the common approach to estimating treatment heterogeneity on test score outcomes using interaction effects is susceptible to bias if treatment effects are correlated with item easiness. I show how analysis of item-level treatment effects can eliminate the bias. In Study 2, I explore network psychometrics, in which psychological traits are considered complex systems rather than unidimensional continua. While common in other fields, network models are rare in education research, in part due to computational constraints. I demonstrate how to leverage item response theory modeling approaches to make inferences about causal effects on network structures when direct estimation is not possible, and apply the proposed approach to randomized controlled trials in education. In Study 3, I extend an analysis of a content literacy intervention with two years of new data to examine the persistence of effects over time and potential mechanisms of interdisciplinary learning transfer from language to math using latent mediation analysis. I conclude by summarizing the implications of these studies for education research.

Chinyere Odim, Brown University
Wealth, Education, and Culture: Sketching a 21st Century Black Elite
Historically, sociological study on “The Black Elite” has relied upon the theoretical roots of Du Bois’ “Talented Tenth” ideology to make sense of how African Americans who have gained professional and economic success in society have done so through the use of well-resourced and prestigious educational opportunities. This traditional pathway to elite status continues to have scholarly merit, however, it inadequately accounts for two recent developments in the areas of racial identity and class-based study: 1) an increase in immigration, broadening Blackness through an acknowledgement of the African diaspora; and 2) the proliferation of high-status creative, athletic, and entrepreneurial professional opportunities not requiring a traditional educational pedigree. This dissertation investigates the existence of a contemporary Black elite that is more heterogeneous and multi-faceted than previously imagined, the result of diversification of Black identity and greater access to lucrative professional opportunities. Through in-depth interviews with well-resourced Black parents of school-aged children and participant observation within sociocultural hubs frequented by Black elites in New York City and on Martha’s Vineyard, this project seeks to re-examine the boundaries of who “counts” within the Black elite construct, identifying key strategies for deployment of resources and family legacy-building. Illuminating the agency of individuals at the intersection of seemingly contradictory identities, this study unearths perspectives underrepresented in the studies of elites and Black life.

CHAIR

Erika Bullock, University of Wisconsin-Madison

SPEAKERS

Noriega Miranda, Marino University of Wisconsin-Madison
Mission and Revolution. The Contentious Meanings of Catholicism, Secular Education, and Peasant Religiosity in Mexico’s Post-revolutionary Educational Reform (1910-1940)
My dissertation examines how promoters of secular education in the Mexican Rural School project reflected, debated, and problematized Catholicism as a fundamental influence shaping the lives of peasants and Indigenous peoples. After the 1910 Revolution, the Education Ministry believed that the Rural School could integrate the populations that, according to its top officials, had been excluded from the realm of “culture” in an environment defined by isolation and religious superstition. I focus on how secularization became a discourse that emerged through the detailed observation, theorization, and objectivization of indigenous catholicism as an obstacle to educational progress. Through archival research, the project analyzes how scientific and humanistic disciplines in the early 20th Century defined and discussed the effects of Catholicism, local religion, and superstition in shaping peasant subjectivity. I take the cases of historians who reconstructed early colonial missionaries as exemplar figures of an integrationist Catholic educational philosophy to emulate; educational comparativists that thought of Catholicism as a defining feature of Mexican educational potential though its differences with other world religions; psychologists theorizing superstition as a mental state imprinted in peasants by the slowness of the rural environment; and finally, ethnomusicologists and arts educators that abstracted the religious aspects of rural life from a secularized notion of peasant culture to incorporate in the national curriculum. This studies primary contribution is showing how an essentialist notion of secularization can function as a means of othering, through its articulation with categories of race, class, or ability.

Austin Vo, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
The Revolutionary Power of Tradition: Educational Cadres in Village Schools and Decolonization
How does education shape national liberation? Scholars have shown that urban educated indigenous elites were central to decolonial movements, but few have examined the foundational role of rural schooling in shaping strategies of national liberation and collective mobilization. In this dissertation, I examine how agrarian life and village education shaped divergent decolonial trajectories in the former French colonies of Senegal and Vietnam, rooted in Islamic and Confucian traditions, respectively. I collected archival records across France, Senegal, and Vietnam to analyze how education structured interactions between indigenous rural elites, urban elites, colonial authorities, and an emergent working class. Village schools emerge as key institutions, mediating tensions between rural and urban politics, as well as tradition and modernity. I contribute to research on rural rebellion, nationalism, and comparative state formation by centering how colonial-era schools conditioned the spread of political ideologies and became contested sites of governance and insurgency. By re-centering village education, the dissertation offers a bottom-up view of indigenous social mobility to examine how schooling in agrarian contexts informed the possibilities—and limits—of national liberation.

Jasmine Norma Watson, Pennsylvania State University
Memory as Resistance: AfroBrazilian Oral Histories of Education across São Paulo’s Black Movement
My dissertation project explores how AfroBrazilians in São Paulo created fugitive counter-educational spaces to cultivate communal reflection, historical consciousness, social critique, and Black pride before, during, and after the military dictatorship, between the years 1937 and 1988. The oral history project I utilize for my project is titled The Trajectory of Black Paulistano and was collected in 1988 for the centennial celebration of abolition in Brazil. The interviews center the experiences of Black militants, mothers, teachers, and community intellectuals in spaces across the city of São Paulo. I juxtapose oral histories of three generations of AfroBrazilian organizing to locate intersections of resistance strategies in Black São Paulo rooted in community, youth, and education. A common trend in Brazilian historiography labels Brazil’s Black movement as fractured, fragmented, and overall lacking a “historical moment” that brought people together on race-based issues. Often, these arguments are based on comparative analysis of the U.S. Civil Rights and Black Power Movements and therefore center Black U.S. Americans and diminish AfroBrazilians’ contributions to Black Diasporic histories of resistance. My research shifts this trend by centering AfroBrazilian placemaking and pedagogical resistance. By using oral histories and employing a Black U.S. and AfroBrazilian Feminist lens on intimacy, my work identifies more contributions by Black women, students, community intellectuals, and the narratives of those who have been overlooked in the history of Black resistance. I employ a Black Feminist framework of intimacy as a lens of analysis to illustrate how themes of love, fear, and care, when understood as strategic survival tactics, uncover what I call “intimate pedagogies of resistance”. Centering lived experiences, intersectional identities, and oral histories, I argue that counter-educational spaces operated as sites of race-based organizing and communal archives sustained throughout the Black movement in Brazil. I engage the questions: (1) How did different generations’ use of education illustrate their engagement with legacies of state-sanctioned violence? (2) How did AfroBrazilian communities use fugitive counter-educational spaces during periods of democratic government and military dictatorship to cultivate political consciousness and intellectual discourse? (3) And what continuities can be traced between AfroBrazilian intimate counter-educational practices to national commemoration through oral histories?

CHAIR

Dara Walker, The Pennsylvania State University

SPEAKERS

Santiago Ojeda-RamÌrez, University of California, Irvine
Latinx Youth as AI Designers: Building Their Communities’ Present and Future
Latinx youth in the U.S. are often framed as disengaged from technology and underprepared for STEM fields?a stereotype that not only distorts reality but contributes to systemic underrepresentation in tech fields. As generative AI rapidly reshapes society, these same youth face heightened risks from biased algorithms and automation-driven job loss. Yet, AI also offers powerful possibilities. When embedded in critical and culturally sustaining approaches, AI can become a tool for empowerment, resistance, and imagination. This study investigates how Latinx youth can be positioned not as passive users, but as designers of AI-powered artifacts that articulate their communities’ needs and futures. Drawing on critical and speculative design, students engage with AI to explore its social, ethical, and cultural implications, while envisioning technologies that reflect justice-oriented futures. Rather than centering technical mastery alone, this project emphasizes AI as a medium for cultural expression and civic participation. Conducted through participatory design-based research at a predominantly Latinx high school in Santa Ana, California, this study involves co-designing and implementing a curriculum with three teachers and over 50 tenth-grade students. Together, they explore how design practices rooted in Latinx knowledge and aesthetics can support critical AI literacy. Three questions guide this research: (1) What features of co-designed artifacts support critical AI literacy? (2) How do Latinx youth use AI in critical design to examine societal impacts? (3) How do they use speculative design to imagine socio-technical infrastructures for community transformation? This project offers a framework for reimagining AI education as a culturally grounded, justice-oriented endeavor.

Isabel Salovaara, Stanford University
Engendering the State: Aspiration, Government Jobs, and the Coaching Industry in Bihar, India
India’s ‘coaching industry’ is a vast agglomeration of education businesses that promise to help young people secure their professional futures. In crowded classrooms or on India’s thriving EdTech platforms, tutors teach test strategies and modes of self-presentation tailored to passing exams and landing jobs. Once the tool of metropolitan middle classes, reinforcing alignments of social, cultural, and economic capital, coaching is now increasingly being utilized by provincial young people squeezed by structural inequalities. Through an online and in-person ethnographic study of the coaching industry, this research aims to understand the effects of aspirational orientations among Indian youth historically disadvantaged by caste, class, and gender. Examining the coaching industry for government jobs in Bihar—a state often cited for its gender- and caste-based inequalities—this project analyzes: (1) how marginalized youth and their families utilize the coaching system to envision and materialize successful futures, (2) how aspirational identities are constituted in the interactions, narratives, and labors of teachers and students in coaching classrooms, and (3) the ways coaching shapes the broader landscape of life possibilities for young women and disadvantaged castes. Through participant observation, semi-structured interviews, and biographical case studies of Bihari coaching teachers, students, and parents, this ethnographic study shows that supplementary education can be a tool for expanding aspiration, not only for promoting social reproduction. As one of the first ethnographic monographs of a “shadow education” system (Bray 1999), this work contributes a qualitative analysis of the motivations and effects of non-elite participation in supplementary education to this growing body of scholarship.

CHAIR

TBD

SPEAKERS

Juan Camilo Cristancho, University of California, Irvine
Violent Crimes, Classroom Quality, and Child Learning and Development: Investigating the Effects of Community Violence on Education Outcomes

Despite growing recognition of the harmful effects of violence on youth, important gaps remain in our understanding of when, where, and how these effects manifest. This dissertation investigates how exposure to community violence affects young children’s development and early learning environments. Paper 1 is a meta-analysis synthesizing the literature on the effects of objectively measured community violence exposure on children’s cognitive, behavioral, and emotional outcomes. By coding over 2400 estimates across more than 22 studies, this analysis quantifies the overall impact and examines heterogeneity by exposure timing, outcome domain, and research design. Preliminary results reveal a left-skewed distribution of effects, consistent with expected negative outcomes, and suggest that many studies are underpowered. Additional analyses explore publication bias and identify conditions under which violence has stronger effects. The second study focuses on Colombia and examines how recent homicides near early childhood education providers influence both classroom quality and children’s developmental outcomes. Using administrative data and detailed geocoded information, the study estimates the effects of violent events by timing, proximity, and baseline classroom resources. Results suggest that classroom quality, particularly pedagogical interactions, is sensitive to recent exposure, with effects that may be more persistent than those observed for child-level outcomes. Together, these studies shed light on specific mechanisms linking violence to developmental outcomes and provide policy-relevant benchmarks for early interventions that strengthen resilience and protect early learning environments from the harmful ripple effects of community violence.

Jaime Ramirez-Mendoza, University of California, Davis
Combatting Hidden Ledgers: How Students (en)Counter Racialized Burdens in the Financial Aid Process

Financial aid is often framed as a race-neutral pathway to college access. This dissertation challenges that assumption by examining how systemic racism operates within financial aid ecosystems, particularly for first-generation Latinx students. Drawing on racialized administrative burden and community cultural wealth frameworks, the study conceptualizes financial aid as a racialized bureaucratic system that shapes both access to aid and the forms of capital students mobilize to navigate it.

Using a phenomenological approach, I conducted 76 semi-structured interviews with students attending California’s public two- and four-year institutions. Guided by Administrative Burdens Theory, findings show that most students experienced significant learning, compliance, and psychological costs when completing the FAFSA or California Dream Act Application. Yet the type, frequency, and intensity of these burdens varied by race, parental education, and documentation status. Historically excluded students encountered more complex documentation demands, heightened verification scrutiny, and greater uncertainty.

An in-depth analysis of 34 first-generation Latinx students further applies Racialized Administrative Burden Theory to illuminate how these burdens are produced and sustained. Organizational logics requiring proof of deservingness, the uneven distribution of resources, the normalization of Whiteness as credentialed capital, and the gap between formal rules and institutional practice collectively delayed, deterred, and jeopardized students’ access to aid.

By centering student narratives and integrating racialized administrative burden theory with community cultural wealth, this dissertation advances more racially explicit explanations of inequality and ultimately demonstrates the urgent need to recognize systemic racism as an intersecting, compounding factor within the financial aid ecosystem.

Yu Wang, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Beyond exclusion: A historical examination of Chinese international student protests during the Chinese Exclusion Era (1882-1943)
This study investigates three key protests by Chinese international students during the Chinese Exclusion Era (1882-1943), highlighting their opposition to anti-Asian racism. These protests include the 1906 protests at the University of California, which addressed student entry difficulties; the 1909 nationwide protests sparked by the Elsie Sigel murder; and the 1923 protests at Columbia University against the play The Flower Candle Wife for its harmful portrayal of Chinese culture. The previously overlooked Chinese student activism occurred during a historical period when the Sino-U.S. Boxer Indemnity Scholarship Program made China a significant source of international students to the United States, even as the Chinese Exclusion Act restricted immigration. By examining these students’ experiences through three interconnected lenses, such as U.S. imperial ambitions, the construction of Asian American identity, and their participation in transnational networks, this project uncovers the complex interplay between education and immigration policy, U.S.-China relations, and the shifting global landscape. Despite facing prejudice, these Chinese students actively challenged stereotypes through protests, fostered a sense of belonging in America, and contributed to the development of a broader Asian American identity. Not only did they defiantly resist the internal logic of imperialism and oppression, similar to their peers in other territories under U.S. imperial expansion, but their resistance to racism also deserves recognition as a crucial part of the comprehensive narrative of U.S. minority student struggles prior to the Civil Rights Movement.

CHAIR

Bayley Marquez, University of Maryland

Teaching in the U.S. right now can feel like working inside a moving crosscurrent: intensified public debate about what belongs in classrooms, shifting state and federal policy signals around DEI and “divisive concepts,” and a growing patchwork of curricular and institutional constraints that shape what faculty feel able to assign, discuss, or facilitate. At the same time, education communities are navigating sustained burnout and workload pressures, alongside rapidly evolving expectations related to generative AI, academic integrity, and student learning.

This session will be practical and reflective, focused on what it takes to teach with rigor, care, and clarity in this climate: designing resilient courses, facilitating difficult conversations, communicating expectations and boundaries, protecting space for inquiry, and sustaining a teaching identity without burning out. Speakers will share lessons learned and offer adaptable frameworks to use across contexts and provide concrete strategies they can apply immediately in their classrooms.

Speakers

• Claudia Cervantes-Soon, Arizona State University
• Michelle Fine, City University of New York

Moderator

• Keon McGuire, North Carolina State University

Tenure is often framed as an endpoint, but in practice it can be a beginning: new freedoms, new responsibilities, and new questions about what kind of scholar—and colleague—you want to become. This session invites Fellows to think beyond tenure as a long-term horizon and to consider how scholarly careers evolve after that milestone, including how people choose research directions, take intellectual risks, and build sustainable, values-aligned bodies of work over decades.

The conversation will be practical and reflective, sharing lessons learned about navigating post-tenure pathways: shaping an agenda with lasting impact, balancing writing and leadership opportunities, mentoring and field-building, making purposeful service choices, and protecting time for creativity and renewal. Fellows will leave with frameworks and concrete strategies for imagining (and planning toward) a post-tenure scholarly life that is both ambitious and sustainable.

Speakers

• Terrance Green, University of Texas at Austin
• Kimberly Griffin, University of Maryland

Moderator

• Cassie Brownell, University of Toronto

The NAEd/Spencer Fellowships have long been dedicated to supporting scholars whose research has the potential to transform the educational landscape. However, we recognize that even the most rigorous research often struggles to bridge the gap between academic publication and meaningful policy change.

This session will be practical and reflective, focused on specific strategies fellows can use to build and strengthen the relationships they have with policymakers and practitioners. We want to help scholars translate their work into compelling, accessible narratives that resonate with decision-makers without sacrificing empirical integrity. Speakers will share lessons learned, offer actionable strategies, and adaptable frameworks that make research approachable, ensuring it reaches the key decision-makers who can implement the changes the fellows are researching for.

Speakers

• Maxcy Grasso, Scholars Strategy Network
• Larry J. Walker, University of Central Florida

Moderator

• Carrie Sampson, Arizona State University