AERA Presentations 2024
Every year faculty and graduate students from each of the academic departments at the Lynch School present their research at the American Educational Research Association (AERA) Annual Meeting. AERA is the largest and most prominent interdisciplinary research association devoted to the scientific study of education and learning.
Representing topics seeking to answer the most pressing questions in the fields of education and human development, our scholars bring diverse perspectives to the Annual Meeting.
Lynch School AERA News
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2024 AERA Fellow
Dr. A. Lin Goodwin was selected as one of the 2024 AERA Fellows by the American Educational Research Association. This prestigious honor recognizes scholars for their outstanding contributions and excellence in educational research. Having been nominated by their peers and selected by the Fellows Committee and AERA Council, A. Lin Goodwin's dedication and expertise have made a significant impact in the field.
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2024 Dissertation of the Year Award recipient
At the American Educational Research Association (AERA) Conference this April, Jeremy Alexander, M.A. '09, Ph.D. '23, will receive the 2024 Dissertation of the Year Award within the Religion and Education Special Interest Group. He credits the Lynch School Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship he was awarded in the final year of his Ph.D. program for giving him the resources to focus on writing his dissertation.
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2024 Dissertation of the Year Award recipient
Alisha Nguyễn, Ph.D. '23, received the 2024 Dissertation Award from the American Educational Research Association (AERA) in the Family-School-Community-Partnerships special interest group (SIG). This prestigious award recognizes the research and advocacy work she did with immigrant families and young bilingual children during the COVID-19 pandemic.
AERA 2024 Annual Meeting
April 11 – April 14: In-person Meeting in Philadelphia, PA
This year's presentations are listed by date. Select from the titles below to view presentation contributors and descriptions.
Thursday, April 11
Counseling, Developmental, and Educational Psychology
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Sarah Fogelman, Babatunde Alford, Brianna Diaz, Trang Le, Yuwen Shen, Hannah Choi, Scott Seider
Description: Critical consciousness refers to the ability to analyze and challenge oppressive forces. One promising space for middle schoolers to develop the will and skill to challenge oppression and build a better world is in advisory periods. This qualitative study of a teacher professional learning community across five US schools explores how middle school teachers and students describe and understand the challenges and opportunities associated with advisory as a space for developing critical consciousness Preliminary results speak to finding developmentally appropriate activities for middle school students, how school demographic may impact the development of students’ empathy, and middle school as a prime moment for student integration of critical thinking with empathy.
Educational Leadership and Higher Education
Lessons and Reflections from Ghana: Toward Justice and Freedom in the United States Education System
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Earl J. Edwards
Description: This research paper symposium is intentional in theorizing liberatory education practices and research in the United States toward justice and freedom. One of the essential ways of dismantling racism, and creating educational possibilities is to seek models and frameworks beyond the US context. The symposium includes nine Black scholars who experienced Ghana. The scholars will discuss their experiences in Ghana and the importance of embracing and (re)claiming their identity and conducting research to dismantle anti-Black racism across the educational landscape and in greater society.
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Ryan Creps, Shadman Islem, Bingran Zeng, Angela Boatman, Andres Castro Samayoa
Description: This study examines the success of undergraduate students in computer science intervention programs offered by a non-profit organization in partnership with colleges and universities across the U.S. Using a novel dataset from the nonprofit organization and event history analysis, the study finds that Black and Hispanic students, as well as female students, are less likely to persist and pass the intervention courses. Additionally, the study finds that offering courses as for-credit options increases the likelihood of course completion for all students.
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Aashna Khurana, Martin Scanlan
Description: The purpose of this paper is to outline an emerging research-practice partnership centered on organizational learning to drive advancements in inclusivity. This project addresses this problem of practice by focusing on the core question: How can school leaders establish a research-practice partnership with a university to promote systemic transformation that fosters effective, inclusive, and equitable education while dismantling systemic injustices and creating fair educational opportunities?
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Vincent Cho, Segio D. Barragan
Description: This study investigates the evolving role of ClassDojo, a behavior management app, in facilitating communication between teachers and parents in K-12 education. Although prior research has predominantly focused on ClassDojo's role as a tool for school discipline, it also now employs functionalities geared towards parent communication and engagement. Employing qualitative interviews with teachers and parents from diverse grade levels across the United States, the study seeks to understand the various ways ClassDojo is used for communication, as well as the perceived benefits and drawbacks of these practices. Preliminary findings indicate varied typologies of use and advantages in promoting more private, instantaneous, and multilingual communication. This research contributes to the ongoing conversation about technology's impact on educational practices and school relationships.
Measurement, Evaluation, Statistics and Assessment
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Ella Anghel
Description: This study aimed to understand the goals of learners who took a Massive Open Online Course but did not intend to complete it, particularly those who ended up completing it in spite of their intention. We used a logistic regression model to predict course completion among 1,034 learners who did not intend to complete a course they took from Likert-style survey data and qualitatively coded open-ended data. We found that wanting to advance personal learning was associated with course completion, but academic and professional reasons were associated with lower completion rates. These results might inform course designers interested in engaging all learners. They might also serve researchers who want to understand the link between motivation and behavior in online contexts.
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Shaun M. Dougherty, Andrew F. Miller, Yerin Yoon
Description: Catholic schools have seen more than a 40% decline in enrollment over the past 20 years. While some of the drops in enrollment may have been spurred by the Church abuse scandal, the increase in schools of choice, principally public charter schools, may explain at least some of this decline. In this paper we estimate the effect of the opening of charter schools in proximity to Catholic schools. We find that the opening of a nearby charter school has a negative impact on Catholic school enrollment and increases the likelihood that the school will close. We also find that charter openings induce greater racial isolation. Finds are especially pronounced in K8 schools, rather than high schools.
Teaching, Curriculum, and Society
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): (UCTC) Cristina Hunter Gerry, Myra Rosen-Reynoso, Audrey Friedman, and Maria Morena Vera
Description: The growing number of charter schools, school takeovers, and vouchers have significantly increased options for school choice (Schneider & Buckley, 2002). Numerous factors influence Latino parents’ decision making about school choice. Catholic schools have often been assumed to be Latino parents’ first choice if they decide not to enroll their children in public schools. However, this is not always the case. For this study, we seek to understand why Latino families in Texas choose to enroll their children in Catholic schools and are these similar patterns for Latino parents in the Northeast. Was faith or faith formation the most important factor? Are there consistent differences across Latino sub-groups (Mexican, Dominican, etc…)?
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): A. Lin Goodwin, Seung Eun Sunny Mc Devitt, Crystal Chen Lee
Description: Given the current global migration movement and the rise of anti-Asian racism, the role of teachers who share the identities of Asian immigrant students has become more imperative than ever (Kim & Hsieh, 2022). In the U.S., Asian/Asian Americans are the nation’s fastest growing group of immigrants (Hanna & Batalova, 2021); yet, the number of Asian/Asian American teachers is among the lowest in the teaching force (National Center for Education Statistics, 2020). Consequently, research on the voices, (counter)stories, and experiences of Asian/Asian American educators have been few.
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): A. Lin Goodwin, Seung Eun Sunny Mc Devitt, Crystal Chen Lee, Haeny Yoon
Description: This by-invitation workshop (with support from the Spencer Foundation) is designed to offer professional support and mentoring to advanced doctoral students and early career scholars who are members of SIG: REAPA (Research on the Education of Asian and Pacific Americans.
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Daniel Raphael, Sheikh Ahmad Shah, Jaai Uday Phatak, Avneet Hira, Helen Zhang, Mike Barnett
Description: This study examines the impact on middle-school students’ coding interest following a project-based learning approach involving a tabletop automated greenhouse. Using physical computing, students experienced how their codes could influence the greenhouse conditions by controlling different devices (e.g, fans). Data were collected through pre and post surveys and student interviews, and then those were analyzed in an explanatory mixed methods approach. Findings indicate an increase in coding interest across all students, regardless of race, gender, pre-survey score, or teacher. However, students with higher pre-survey scores demonstrated relatively greater interest gains, suggesting the curriculum's differential impact based on initial interest levels of the students. These results highlight the potential of our curriculum in fostering coding interest among students.
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Jaai Uday Phatak, Avneet Hira, Helen Zhang, Sheikh Ahmad Shah, Michael Barnett
Description: This presentation is a part of a Structured Poster Session. This study examines the perspectives of 8th-grade students about (i) the conceptions of data and (ii) in what contexts do they think about the use of data for decision-making. Interviews were conducted with these students and we used thematic analysis to analyze students' responses to these two research questions. Our preliminary analysis suggests that students associated the term “data” with concepts including information, numbers, evidence, answers to questions, statistics, graphs, charts, digital storage, or cellular data.
Friday, April 12
Counseling, Developmental, and Educational Psychology
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Scott Seider, Brianna Diaz, Babatunde Alford, Trang Le, Sarah Fogelman, Lexa Honeck, Emma Thompson
Description: Critical consciousness is the skill to understand and challenge oppression and its impact (Freire, 1970), and in times marked by conflict about teaching critical consciousness (and other material connected to race and racism), teachers face uncertainty in teaching what some deem as controversial topics, because of many factors, including fears of outside opposition, beliefs about the purpose of schooling, and policies, which can prevent teachers from engaging in this teaching (Ho et al., 2017). One underexplored element of this sort of teaching is how teachers might work collaboratively to teach controversial topics. Research has already shown that teachers working together in ongoing and site-specific teams can support teachers in sensemaking around the complexity of teaching (Charner-Laird et al., 2017; Darling-Hammond et al., 2009; Ronfeldt et al., 2015), a support structure that might be particularly relevant in teaching controversial topics. Teacher team structures like PLCs have been particularly meaningful for students’ social and academic outcomes at the middle school level (Hackmanm et al.2002; Wallace, 2007). This paper, drawn from a larger study about developing students’ critical consciousness skills, explores how teachers participating in PLCs thought about how, when, and why to teach lessons about critical consciousness with middle graders.
Department of Formative Education
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Tess Levinson, Francisca Carocca, Marina Bers
Description: Early childhood computer science (CS) education is a high-priority area around the world, leading to the creation of developmentally appropriate platforms, pedagogies, and curricula. However, despite an interest in early childhood CS education worldwide, most materials and tools are developed in the United States or Europe. In this study, we translated, localized, and adapted the Coding as Another Language (CAL) ScratchJr curriculum for kindergarten through second grade for use in two provinces in Argentina. We then evaluated it using a cluster-randomized controlled trial and multi-level modeling. The adapted curriculum significantly improved students’ coding knowledge and computational thinking compared to the control condition (p’s < 0.05), suggesting the CAL-ScratchJr curriculum can be successfully adapted for use outside the United States.
Educational Leadership and Higher Education
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Lauri Johnson
Description: Intercultural education during the 1940s involved teachers, school leaders, and university professors who implemented varying degrees of localized or systemic reforms to combat racial and religious intolerance during World War II and immediately afterwards. How these reforms were implemented in individual districts, however, often hinged on local politics and whether discussions about “race” and racism were included in intercultural curriculum guides and professional development activities. This paper explores the contours and limits of intercultural education in the Los Angeles City schools during the post World War II years, including the district’s focus on the UNESCO curriculum as its centerpiece, the initiative’s silence on issues of race, and the demise of the UNESCO curriculum through conservative activism during the early 1950s.
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Martin Scanlan, Andrew Miller, Melodie Wyttenbach, Elena Sada
Description: In this paper, we report an emerging research practice partnership of three networks of Catholic schools engaged in innovative and transformative pedagogies of character formation. Our analysis answers a central question: How do communities of practice within and among Catholic schools support pedagogies of character formation? Answering our core question, emergent findings in this research practice partnership point to two primary ways communities of practice (COPs) within and among Catholic schools support pedagogies of character formation: COPs create educational infrastructure that supports students’ character formation; this educational infrastructure then supports adults’ character formation. These findings have implications within and beyond the field of Catholic education for social justice education in general, and anti-racist education in particular.
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Whitney Hegseth, Andrew Miller, Michael O'Connor
Description: Educational leaders have been called in recent years to (re)build their systems to support student well-being, counter structural oppressions, and increase academic excellence/equity. With pandemic-related learning interruptions to reading skills and increased attention to “Science of Reading” discourses in the public, leaders are focusing many of their efforts on rebuilding their literacy instructional infrastructure. In this paper, we present findings from a cross-case analysis of three educational systems in one city (traditional public, charter, and Catholic) in order to investigate how school and system leaders engage the Science of Reading discourse and make changes to their educational infrastructure. We highlight key differences across each system and what these differences indicate about trends in the current instructional policy environment.
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Addrain Conyers
Description: Higher education has been increasingly politicized in recent years by legislative actions that threaten tenure, academic freedom, institutional autonomy, and shared governance. The side effects of these policies will impact academic freedom, tenure density, and shared governance. The paper will review tenure in higher education, the contentious politics that have led to political interference, and the detrimental side effects of tenure higher education policies. The paper concludes with recommendations to contend with the side effects of political interference.
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Martin Scanlan, Andrew F. Miller
Description: The study examines the integration of Ignatian pedagogy and its principles—context, experience, reflection, action, and evaluation—into the curriculum and teaching practices aimed at character formation. It examines how Jesuit Schools Network, Nativity Coalition Schools and TWIN-CS Schools implement their mission through curricular and extracurricular activities designed to instill a deep sense of ethical responsibility, compassion, and a commitment to social justice.
Furthermore, the study examines the role of the Jesuit educational community—including teachers, administrators, and staff—in modeling these values and creating an environment that supports the comprehensive development of students. It assesses the effectiveness of Jesuit educational practices in promoting a reflective and discerning approach to ethical issues, encouraging students to engage with the world around them thoughtfully and with a strong commitment to the common good.
Measurement, Evaluation, Statistics and Assessment
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Henry Braun
Description: NCME Career Award Address
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Jihang Chen, Zhushan Mandy Li
Description: This study introduces variational approximation as an efficient alternative to Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) for latent variable model (e.g., CFA and IRT models) parameter estimation. Through a simulation study, we demonstrate that Variational Approximation offers precise results in high-dimensional, small-sample settings while significantly reducing computational time.
Teaching, Curriculum, and Society
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Faythe Beauchemin
Description: The recent affective turn in literacy education has further underscored its critical potential as an act of resistance against dehumanizing forces that impact students’ schooling and life experiences (Dutro, 2019; Leander & Ehret, 2019). In this presentation, we take up affect as relational and performed forces that emerge from the inbetweenness among people, objects, and material and discursive contexts. We examine how two U.S. Latinx teachers and their young bilingual students co-constructed affect and play in translanguaging read-alouds with a bilingual text that centered their culturally-rooted ways of knowing and being.
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Haeny Yoon; A. Lin Goodwin; Celia Genishi; Anne Haas Dyson; Amanda Reeves Fellner, Cassie Brownell, Kuan Leu & Nicole Fox; Ranita Cheruvu, Haeny Yoon, Lum Fube, Maria Paula Ghiso & Clarissa Fleury-Feldberg; Harper Keenan, Leah Dúran, Rebecca Lopez, Fahyolah Antoine & Samantha Nadal
Description: This symposium is titled after and based on a recent book by Haeny Yoon, A. Lin Goodwin and Celia Genishi. Dismantling racial injustices requires an intentional divestment from white privilege and an investment in educational opportunities, policies, and curricula that support communities of Color. Drawing from an edited collection of early childhood scholars/activists/educators, this session engages participants in sustained, collaborative conversations that gesture towards remaking and revisioning four focus areas: literacies, methodologies, intergenerational relationships, and community spaces that foster equitable, inclusive, and more just early childhood communities. Intended to destabilize the theory/practice divide, the session features responses from early childhood teachers of Color alongside facilitated dialogues with contributors to the volume. We aim to move out of the “halls of academia” (AERA 2024 call) and collaboratively ideate towards collective liberation.
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Samantha Ha DiMuzio
Description: "Safe space" is a contemporary educational controversy, characterized by exceedingly polarizing stances for or against the term. However, “safe space” is more than just a provocative hot-button issue. Instead, this dissertation contextualizes demands for safe space as part of the broader, enduring movement toward diversity, equity, and inclusion in higher education, which must remain an educational priority. This hybridized inquiry brings together traditions of situated educational philosophy and participatory design research to rehabilitate how educational stakeholders should operationalize safe space, attuning to the interplay between safety, risk, and place-making as essential resources. In partnership with six undergraduate students whose marginality spans race, socioeconomic class, gender, and sexuality, I advance the argument that the current conceptualization and application of safe space stops short of subaltern student flourishing and ignores the role of spatiality. On the side of safety, I propose a conceptualization of safety, not as antithetical to risk, but as a threshold condition of risk-taking vis-à-vis transformative liberal education. On the side of spatiality, I draw upon critical geography, phenomenology of space and place, and rich place-based testimonies to propose a thick definition of place that provides a more holistic approach toward supporting subaltern students in hostile campus environments and recognizing the place-making practices that those students already enact. It is the hope that as a result, students, educators, and administrators will be able to apply these thick guidelines about place-making toward safety in their efforts to redesign campus places to be conducive to subaltern students’ transformative liberal learning.
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Samuel Lee, Austin Moore, Maria Moreno Vera, Katherine L. McNeill
Description: Teachers can change curricular materials in order to create equitable opportunities that position students’ multiple ways of knowing as authentic science practices. However, teachers need support in problematizing standardized linguistic practices (e.g., academic English language) in school, which positions emergent multilingual learners (EMLs) as deficient language users. This qualitative case study investigates how co-design work within a professional learning community supported teachers in creating equitable sensemaking opportunities for EMLs. We used thematic analysis of interviews and video data to discuss teachers’ design and reflective work around supporting EMLs’ equitable sensemaking. The teachers strategically used visuals to support sensemaking, while promoting inclusive language practices. This underscores the significance of collaborative teacher efforts in creating equitable science education for diverse learners.
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Ankhi Thakurta
Description: I will draw in this presentation on my Comparative Case Study (Bartlett & Varvus, 2016) alongside urban migrant girls in India and the U.S., the world’s two largest democracies. I foregrounded these young people because they face context-specific, yet comparable barriers to civic inclusion across these two nations (e.g., along the lines of age, ethnicity, gender, and more). In my study, I – an Indian American urban immigrant woman – used practitioner research (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009) to examine how thirteen girls across India and the U.S. engaged with civic learning in two separate virtual education spaces that I facilitated. Specifically, I traced how they transacted with a literacy curriculum that foregrounded their existing civic identities, knowledges, and literacies. While the wider project aimed to explore how this form of curriculum could support their civic flourishing, this presentation will examine its methodological dimensions by considering the following question: what were the affordances and tensions of using practitioner inquiry to explore the civic landscape alongside India and U.S.-based urban migrant girls?
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): (UCTC) Audrey Friedman, Charles Cownie, Kierstin Giunco, Maria Moreno Vera, Myra Rosen-Reynoso, Andrew Miller
Description: Teachers are “whole people” who bring intellect, passion, experience, and learning to professional practice. Formative practices that support teachers’ intellectual, emotional, and spiritual identities serve their full selves increasing productivity, job satisfaction, and retention. This research collected survey and interview data from 26 urban Catholic school principals and 16 teachers in 6 geographic regions in the United States to identify practices, partnerships, and structures that support teacher formation in their schools, and the challenges leadership face around teacher formation. Preliminary results show that spiritual leadership that nurtures strong community, teacher-selected and differentiated professional development, emotional care, and workplace spirituality compensated for low pay, suggesting that formative practices can improve retention in all educational settings.
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Maria C. Olivares, Ali R. Blake, Yuxuan Wu
Description: We share our development of the Nurturant Educational Design Framework for STEM learning experiences that are nurturant by design. The framework guides our design of a pediatric learning environment that offers learning experiences to supports young patients’ developing sense of identity and agency; exploration and play with expansive STEM ideas and engagements; and growing curiosity about STEM phenomena. Guided by onto-epistemic heterogeneity (OEH) (Warren et al., 2020), the Nurturant Framework holds that knowing and being are inextricably connected and liberatory education is “deeply rooted in the pasts, presents, and futures that sustain and imagine multiple values, purposes, and arcs of human learning” (p. 278). The framework realizes critical sociocultural learning theory through cultural affirmation, simultaneous materials sensing, and multimodal learning.
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Zhexun Xin, Brian K Smith
Description: Ethical considerations have always been at the core of educational research. Today, the scope of ethical considerations extend far beyond the fundamental principle of "do no harm." Educational researchers must now navigate a multifaceted landscape that encompasses inclusivity, transparency, community engagement, social justice, and adequate use of research outcomes. This moderated panel discussion will explore new trends and current perspectives on ethics and equity in today’s research settings.
Saturday, April 13
Counseling, Developmental, and Educational Psychology
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Scott Seider, Babatunde Alford, Brianna Diaz, Trange Le, Sarah Fogelman, Kelly Ward, Hehua Xu, Kaila Daza
Description: Critical consciousness refers to the ability to analyze and challenge oppressive forces. Philosopher-educator Paulo Freire asserted that nurturing young people’s critical consciousness should be the primary goal of education so that youth develop the will and skill to challenge oppression and build a better world. One promising space for this critical consciousness work in the middle grades is advisory. This mixed methods study explores how middle school teachers and students describe and understand the constraints and affordances of advisory as a space for antiracist education. One preliminary finding emerging from our analyses is that students are more confident than their teachers that advisory is an appropriate and beneficial place for learning and discussions about racism and resistance to racism.
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Ji Hye Park, Eric Dearing
Description: Self-regulation difficulties during childhood have been linked to body weight status and the development of obesity later in life. However, there is a lack of systematic examination of this relation in poverty contexts. “Skin-deep resilience” research highlighted a seemingly contradictory effect, where higher self-control skills among low-income minority youths were associated with adverse health outcomes. Nonetheless, this research has several methodological limitations and has not specifically focused on overweight/obesity issues in elementary school-aged children. Using nationally representative data, our study addresses these limitations and expands prior research on self-control and obesity. We found no evidence supporting the skin-deep resilience phenomenon. Our results suggest consistent associations between teacher-rated self-control and body weight status for children in poverty and non-poverty settings.
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Jiwon Ban, Elida V. Laski
Description: Children’s math knowledge before kindergarten is predictive of their later academic achievement and life success. Parents’ home numeracy support is positively associated with and predictive of their children’s later math skills. More recent studies, however, have highlighted the importance of non-numeric math support for children’s broad math achievement. Additionally, teacher math support in preschool is understudied. This symposium examines current research on early math support by parents and teachers including often overlooked non-numeracy skills: patterning and spatial support. Five research projects will be presented varying in the factors of math support included, the type of non-numerical support, and methodology. These projects promote a broader understanding of the factors of early math support at home and school.
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Elianny C. Edwards
Description: This study examines 7 years’ worth of district wide school incident reports for one of the largest, most diverse school districts in the country with the largest school police department. The aims are to 1) understand the most prevalent issues threatening the safety of students 2) determine the most qualified personnel for addressing said issues, and 3) examine the relationship between district financial investment in school policing and safety issues.
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Soyoung Kim, Rosie Rohrs, David Miele
Description: The present study addresses these limitations by examining whether teachers’ beliefs about their ability to motivate their students when teaching mathematics (i.e., their motivational efficacy) are a better predictor of their use of motivational strategies than their efficacy beliefs about their ability to support students’ cognitive processing (i.e., their cognitive efficacy). We also examined whether teachers’ motivational strategy use potentially mediated the associations between each type of efficacy and job satisfaction. Finally, because there have been mixed findings regarding predictors of teacher efficacy (e.g., Klassen & Chiu, 2010; Lauermann & König, 2016), we examined the relations between teachers’ years of teaching experience and each type of efficacy.
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): David Miele
Description: Building on work by Miele et al. (2019), the original aim of this study was to examine the moderating effects of elementary school teachers’ growth mindsets about intelligence on the relations between teachers’ ratings of individual students’ math ability, the practices they engage in when those students are struggling, and changes in students’ math motivation over the course of one school year. When examining the results, we were surprised to observe a positive association between students’ perceptions of teachers’ restrictive practices (e.g., being told to hurry up when struggling with a math problem) in the fall and their ratings of math value in the spring (controlling for baseline). This led us to further explore the cross-sectional and longitudinal relations between the constructs in our study, and to call into question the stability of these constructs over time. The purpose of this presentation is to relate the findings of this exploration to a central theme of the symposium: the importance of accounting for context-specificity when examining the associations between teacher beliefs, instructional practices, and student outcomes.
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): David Miele
Description: Students’ motivational (MR) and emotional (ER) self-regulation form important components of their learning and academic lives. While there seems to be consensus that motivation and emotion are closely intertwined, MR and ER have been studied in relative isolation from one another. The papers in this session jointly aim to contribute to a better understanding of possible interrelations between MR and ER in academic settings in terms of the types of regulatory strategies used to handle motivational and emotional challenges during learning as well as possible determinants and outcomes of regulatory students’ strategy use. Presenters will reflect on implications for cultivating integrative theoretical perspectives on MR and ER, and for designing impactful interventions that foster adaptive self-regulation in academic settings.
Department of Formative Education
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Stanton Wortham
Description: In the contemporary academy, we are challenged by data-driven, technical, “post-humanist” educational policy and practice. We are also challenged by approaches that reduce people to demographic categories and see truth and goodness as mere ideology masking power relationships. These are not just topics in the world for us to comment on. They shape our lives as academics. Why do university faculty teach the courses and build the degree programs that we do? Why do we choose certain topics and affiliate with certain academic movements? We make professional choices because of a complex mix of intellectual interests, personal commitments, institutional needs, and social expectations. In doing so, our institutional contexts play an important role in shaping the choices we can envision and the practical pathways that are open to us.
This paper describes a personal transition from one kind of institution to another, in pursuit of a context in which academics can embrace soulful ethical development as central to their work and in which we can pursue formative along with distributive justice.
Philosophers of education have consistently discussed human flourishing as a key goal of education. Against narrow technical visions of education, most philosophers have kept in view the multiple dimensions and capacities that educators must attend to – vocational and cognitive, but also civic, ethical, emotional, interpersonal, and, not least, in the ancient language of Socrates, Plato, and Diogenes, cosmically soulful. Philosophers have also emphasized the integration of these capacities.
This paper describes a transition to an institution open to developing a collective focus on “forming meaningful lives” or “educating the whole human being” as central to research, teaching and service across the school. We emphasize the “formation” of undergraduates, meaning a concern for their ethical, emotional, interpersonal and soulful development, in addition to vocational and cognitive ends. This context also allows a rapprochement between formative, whole person development and the pursuit of social justice.
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Marina Bers
Description: In this study, we conducted a randomized controlled trial to examine the effectiveness of a computer science (CS) curriculum, Coding as Another Language-ScratchJr (CAL-ScratchJr) on the programming and computational thinking skills for students from kindergarten to second grade classrooms. Using multilevel modeling regression analysis with a sample of 1057 students, we found that the CAL-ScratchJr curriculum was effective in improving students’ programming skills but no significant differences were detected for students’ computational thinking skills. These findings shed light on the educational efficacy of CAL-ScratchJr as a promising CS curriculum for young children. Implications on policy and future research were also discussed in the paper.
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Caitlyn Bolton
Description: This paper draws on research in the Zanzibar National Archives to describe the educational exchange between the American South and British colonial Zanzibar. Evoking leaders in African-American education from Washington to Phelps-Stokes, “practical” agricultural education purported to be “adapted” to Africans’ specific needs. Yet it was also “adapted” to racism and the political and labor needs of the colony, as it neatly promised to limit Africans’ political ambitions and provide a steady labor supply in the post-emancipation plantation economies of American cotton and Zanzibari cloves. Repeated calls for “more practical” education until independence evince both the illogics of colonial planning and the undaunted ambitions of Zanzibari students, who pushed beyond prescribed limits to forge lives beyond the fields.
Educational Leadership and Higher Education
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Katrina Borowiec, Angela Boatman
Description: In recent decades, there has been growing attention to students’ general well-being, but comparatively little attention on their financial well-being. Finances are a major concern for students. We build on related research and theory to develop our conceptualization of students’ financial wellness as a multidimensional construct comprising seven domains: financial knowledge, financial attitudes, financial behaviors, financial socialization, support for college, financial hardship/challenges, and student background characteristics. We further support these propositions through empirical data from interviews with financial educators and interviews and surveys with high school, undergraduate, and graduate students. Our conceptual model offers a new way for higher education scholars and practitioners to understand the interrelated dimensions that comprise student financial wellness.
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Andrew Miller (with Kevin Burke from the University of Georgia)
Description: Elsewhere the authors (2023) have argued that, in spite of precipitous declines both in schools and enrollment over the course of the last half century, “Catholic schooling in the United States remains an important point of comparison to public schooling” (p. 39). Importantly however, Catholic educational research has largely failed at developing alongside research trends methodologically, epistemologically, and particularly in its engagement with various critical and post-critical movements across sociological, anthropological, feminist, post-structural, and queer traditions. The fulcrum point of this argument sits at the decision to engage in apologetics for Catholic schooling to justify its continued existence and to bolster economic and ideological arguments for public funding mechanisms to ‘save’ Catholic schools. The upshot has been a move to project public policy arguments for Catholic schooling over and particularly against public schooling in the pursuit of presumably scarce public funding. The field has prioritized competition over comparison, in other words.
This paper seeks to reset the conversation away from neoliberal narratives emergent from econometric arguments mired in crisis ordinariness (Berlant, 2011) and toward a more fulsome, inclusive, and we think theologically consistent argument for Catholic education rooted in Kerygma.
Measurement, Evaluation, Statistics and Assessment
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Ji Yoon Jung, Lillian Tyack, Matthias von Davier
Description: Coordinated Paper Session on automated scoring. Specifically, the presentation is about AI-based Automated Scoring of Multilingual Responses in International Large-scale Assessment.
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Margeau Jong, Dr. Zhushan Mandy Li
Description: Roundtable paper session on Innovative Methodologies in Item Response Theory. Our paper: An unofficial tradition for decades, each summer the mailboxes (now inboxes) of high school graduates are flooded with surveys about their college selection. Since the development of Enrollment Management, schools have collected a wealth of data used by researchers for many types of analyses. An Item Response Theory model may provide new insights into the relationship between survey responses and the latent trait of propensity to enroll. We examine the application of a Generalized Partial Credit Model to a survey section of 15 Likert-style items asking first-year admits to an undergraduate program to rate features of the school. In an ever-changing higher education environment, colleges must prioritize analyzing this data in order to build evidence-based enrollment management practices.
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Dihao Leng, Matthias von Davier
Description: Girls consistently outperform boys on average in international large-scale reading assessments. This study categorized students into three types utilizing mixture models on PIRLS 2021 process data: “Rapid”, “Middle”, and “Slow”. The “Rapid” type includes more boys. The study examines whether the response process types explain gender achievement gaps in reading.
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Ella Anghel
Description: Existing studies on Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) examine learners’ engagement processes but have not explored links between them and motivations to enroll. In our previous work, we identified intrinsic, professional, and prosocial motivations for taking MOOCs. In this study, we used process mining to compare the course engagement patterns of these groups. We found that throughout the course, the intrinsic group was the most engaged, but the prosocial group became the most engaged by its end and was more engaged in the course’s forum. Our findings enhance the understanding of the relationship between motivation and engagement and suggest that MOOC developers may want to consider why some groups are less engaged and change the course structure accordingly.
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Matthias von Davier
Description: At NCME 2023, just a few weeks after the GPT-4 was released, we organized a panel discussion around the potential implications of GPT-4 and other advanced AI tools in educational assessment. With a year having elapsed since the last well-attended session, we propose a new panel discussion to reflect on how the landscape of assessments has been shaped and elevated by the transformative influence of powerful AIs ever since.
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Matthias von Davier
Description: Discussant for individual papers. Estimating Student Achievement in Large-scale Assessments. Exploring Ways to Facilitate Estimation of Mean NAEP Achievement of Schools. Forgoing Invariance Assumptions for Better Measurement in Comparative International Education Survey Research. Improving School Aggregate Scores by Accounting for Missing Achievement Data.
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Jihang Chen, Zhushan Mandy Li
Description: The application of Bayesian methods in assessing the reliability and validity of educational and psychological instruments, such as Bayesian CFA and Bayesian IRT, is growing. However, research on model fit statistics for model diagnostics within Bayesian CFA or IRT is limited. This study introduces two novel statistics for assessing model-data fit within Bayesian IRT: posterior predictive model check (PPMC) and a Bayesian variant of the root mean square error of approximation (BRMSEA). A simulation study compares the performance of these methods, considering model misspecification, sample sizes, and prior information. The 90% posterior probability interval of the BRMSEA, with cutoff values as .1 for the upper limit, is found valid for evaluating model fit, even with small sample sizes.
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Margeau R. Jong, Zhushan Mandy Li
Description: An unofficial summer tradition for decades, each year the mailboxes (now inboxes) of high school graduates are flooded with surveys asking about their college selection process. Since Enrollment Management was developed (Maguire, 1976), schools have gathered data as part of their enrollment efforts. Some colleges conduct their own research and some others use service providers that sell products to administer these surveys. This has generated a wealth of data over time that researchers have used for descriptive (Kanarek, 1993), regression (Royo-Vela & Hunermund, 2016), factor analysis (Kim, 1993), and other analytical procedures. A model utilizing Item Response Theory (IRT) may provide new insights into the relationship between a student’s latent trait (the propensity to select the school) and their survey responses. The current study examines data from 1,399 first-year students admitted to a traditional 4-year undergraduate program at a nationally ranked liberal arts college. We endeavor to fit a Generalized Partial Credit Model (GPCM) (Muraki, 1992) to a survey section of 15 Likert-style items rating the quality of school features. In an ever-changing higher education environment, colleges must prioritize analyzing this data in order to build evidence-based enrollment management practices.
Teaching, Curriculum, and Society
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Faythe Beauchemin
Description: Building on studies exploring academic and sociopolitical aspects of translanguaging (Babino & Stewart, 2020; Poza, 2017), we draw upon ethnographic and discourse analytic methods to examine the academic and social (García, 2009; García & Kleifgen, 2020) functions of translanguaging in ESL lessons with two newcomer students. We found the social and academic functions of translanguaging worked together to foster bilingual language development, togetherness in learning, and re-position the newcomers as competent learners in contrast to common deficit perspectives of emergent bilinguals. These findings illustrate how ESL teachers and their students can leverage the multifunctionality of translanguaging to meet and exceed ESL language goals in ways that foster students’ bilingual/biliteracy development, affirm their bilingual/biliterate identities, and re-position them as biliterate, capable learners.
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Yoonmi Kang, Deoksoon Kim, Katrina Borowiec
Description: This study explores the experience of two teachers creating digital stories. We ask how digital story-making fostered their professional identity development as teachers. We use case study methods and visual grammar analysis, drawing on Unsworth’s systematic functional linguistic analysis (2001) and Author et al. (2021)’s sociocultural approach, to analyze the digital stories. The results show that the teachers found digital story-making to be a positive experience, an opportunity to express their voices and facilitate reflection as developing teachers. Both teachers also appreciated digital storytelling as a way to share with others and receive feedback about their work in a way that helped the development of their teacher professional identities.
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Sharon Chang, Sibel Akin-Sabuncu, Laura Vernikoff, Colleen Horn, A. Lin Goodwin
Description: The professional identity development of teaching residents of color was examined in residencies in the northeastern U.S. Through the lens of perezhivanie, a mental schema humans established to resolve dissonances, we employed narrative research methodology to analyze participants’ program archival data, in which stories were narrated regarding how participants constructed themselves as teachers. Discourse analysis revealed that participants’ personal histories are sources informing critical pedagogy. Two themes emerged regarding residents’ perezhivanie as they resolved dissonances via cultural filters shaped by their life experiences as historically marginalized. The first involves how they professionalized their teacher-self to construct their personal practical knowledge with community members; the second relates to how they transformed their personal-self to imagine a new community of practice.
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): A. Lin Goodwin; Kara Mitchell Viesca; Maria A. Flores; Jennifer Robinson; Tanya L.M. Samu; Oon Seng Tan; Anu Warinowski & Mirjamaija Erdmann
Description: UNESCO (2021) has called for “a new social contract for education” that “must address the existing web of inequalities that perpetuate educational and social exclusions.” This session brings together teacher educators from Finland, New Zealand, Portugal, Singapore, and the U.S. to share perspectives on preparing teachers to uphold such a social contract and work towards a just, equitable and peaceful future for everyone. How are teacher educators rethinking the why, what, what for, and how of teacher preparation? What are the big challenges now facing teacher educators? What will it take to transform teacher education? The session will engage participants in small group discussions around these critical questions, and in imagining creative solutions together.
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Rachel Roegman, A. Lin Goodwin, Elyse Hambacher, Andrew Pau Hoang, Emilie M. Reagan, Jalea Turner, Laura Vernikoff, Rachael McKinnon
Description: Much rhetoric and multiple discourses exist around the concepts of justice in teacher preparation. Despite overall embrace, a common understanding of justice remains unclear. In this critical co-constructed autoethnography, we examine discourses taken up by teacher educators surrounding justice-oriented teacher preparation. Autoethnography provides a useful framework for analyzing our perspectives across institutional and sociopolitical climates. We come from five different states and different institution types. Findings highlight the importance of context, but the contextual differences we found were unexpected. For instance, we found that conservative policies seemed to galvanize teacher educators, motivating them to collaborate and subvert oppressive mandates. We conclude with implications for our own practice as well as a research plan to expand this inquiry.
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Ankhi Thakurta
Description: Literacy scholars have found that curricula integrating diverse literary texts can enable historically minoritized youth to theorize and address civic injustices – and cultivate, by extension, their civic identities. Yet, little scholarship has explored how this form of education can support the civic learning of a critical group: Asian American girls. In conditions of heteropatriarchy and anti-Asian hatred, these youth confront unique intersectional barriers to sociopolitical belonging. This paper draws on a practitioner research study that addressed this gap by tracing how eight Indonesian American girls in a large northeast city transacted with literary texts for civic learning in a virtual critical civic education community. The paper traces two findings and the significance of this topic for the education field.
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Kierstin Giunco
Description: The Teacher-as-Researcher SIG business meeting and reception is an opportunity to network, learn and share information, and strengthen our community of practitioner researchers and advocates. A retrospective of the TAR SIG and resources will be shared. Dr. Yolanda Sealey Ruiz, Lum Fube, and Dr. Jen McLaughlin-Cahill will discuss their collaboration around Archeology of the Self, drawing connections to teacher research and our SIG.
Sunday, April 14
Counseling, Developmental, and Educational Psychology
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Rosie Rohrs, David Miele
Description: The present study examines whether effort source beliefs (i.e., beliefs about whether effort is elicited by task difficulty or by students’ motivation) help explain why some individuals may be particularly likely to perceive women as working harder than men to succeed on math tasks. Participants (N = 211) responded to vignettes in which a student with a typical woman or man’s name received a particular score on a math exam or homework assignment. For each vignette, they were asked to rate the student’s effort and ability. Later they completed measures of effort source beliefs and stereotype endorsement. Although our primary hypotheses were not supported, exploratory analyses indicated that effort source beliefs may contribute to biased judgments in specific contexts/situations.
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Hyun Young Cho, Elida V. Laski, & Marina Vasilyeva
Description: Statistical learning (SL), an unconscious cognitive process used to extract regularities, is well-established as a fundamental mechanism underlying learning, yet its connection to numerical knowledge acquisition remains underexplored despite the prominence of patterns in number systems and operations. This study examined 54 first graders, analyzing the association between SL and arithmetic principle knowledge. Executive function, SL, and arithmetic accuracy and latency for addition and subtraction were measured. The results revealed that SL is a unique construct from executive function. Furthermore, it negatively predicted addition problem latency, and the link between SL and subtraction accuracy depended on children's experience with subtraction. These findings further illustrate SL's role in arithmetic development and emphasize the significance of familiarity in SL research.
Department of Formative Education
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Deoksoon Kim, Katrina Borowiec, Drina Kei Yatsu, Stanton Wortham
Description: The COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated many challenges that ELLs face, including limited technology access and communication barriers between teachers and families (Sugarman & Lazarin, 2020). The pandemic also threatened teachers’ self-efficacy as they struggled to learn new technologies while maintaining student engagement (Cardullo et al., 2021). This study examined a new online after-school program that supports ELLs’ academic language development while providing teaching experience to students interested in supporting ELLs. The findings describe teachers’ perceptions and their development as they adopted new techniques and strategies, how teachers navigated challenges, their professional identity development as language teachers, and pedagogical implications.
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Marina Bers
Description: This study examines the impact of an early computer science curriculum, Coding as Another Language and the growth of coding skills on students' math and literacy achievement. Results from a randomized controlled trial with 680 K-2 students showed that implementing the CAL curriculum did not yield a significant impact on literacy and math achievements, but growth in coding skills positively predicted both outcomes.These results allay concerns regarding potential trade-offs between computer science instruction and core subjects, highlighting the positive influence of coding skill development on math and literacy achievement. The implications of these findings are important for educators, policymakers, and researchers as they deliberate the integration of computer science education into the curriculum for young learners.
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Ghaida S. Alrawashdeh
Description: A significant number of children lack the ability to read age-appropriate texts around the world, impeding their educational and personal development. This randomized controlled trial explores the effectiveness of personalized and adaptive learning technology (PAL) in improving early Arabic literacy in Jordan, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia. The study compares the impact of PAL with a non-adaptive reading platform. Data collection involves assessments and questionnaires, analyzed using hierarchical linear modeling. Results show that PAL positively influences reading achievement, with increased usage leading to significant learning gains. Gender, socioeconomic status, and country-specific factors influence reading outcomes. The study emphasizes the need for increased exposure to Modern Standard Arabic, improved teacher training, and equitable resource distribution. Implications for educators and policymakers are discussed.
Educational Leadership and Higher Education
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Raquel Muñiz
Description: Black women have endured intersecting racism and sexism throughout American history. Specifically, Black women are underpaid , overlooked, and overworked; these same injustices occur in the American higher education tenure stream for Black Women. The papers in the symposium rely on theories such organizational betrayal, intersectionality, legal research methodology, and College + University Teaching Environment (CUTE) Framework. Within the context of these theories, the symposium researchers use qualitative and narrative data to examine how structural oppression hampers Black women seeking tenure and promotion. Common problems embedded in the gendered racism are lack of informed mentoring, inconsistent tenure and promotion policies, workplace bullying, and limited fiscal resources. The symposium advances solutions and institutional practices that discriminatorily exclude Black women from tenure.
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Earl J. Edwards
Description: Effective implementation of the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act requires collaboration within and between agencies. However, this can be difficult for communities with limited resources and majority Black and Latino populations. This manuscript examines a historically divested urban school district’s challenges when establishing community partnerships for supporting homeless students. Using an anti-deficit achievement framework and structural racism lens, interviews with district, local government, and community-based organization personnel illustrate how homeless liaisons overcome structural and political barriers by seeking informal support networks outside their city and partnering with organizations beyond their immediate jurisdiction to better serve students experiencing homelessness.
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Andrew Miller, John Reyes, Melodie Wyttenbach, Gilbert Ezeugwu
Description: Recent research has emerged suggesting there are many diverse contemporary school systems that have begun redesigning core organizational structures in pursuit of the broad policy goals of educational excellence and equity (e.g., Peurach et al., 2019). One of the most notable of these changes has been the emergence of what Bulkley, Marsh et al. (2021) refer to as “portfolio-managed models.” (or PMMs) In this paper, we set out to investigate superintendent perceptions of organizational conditions in regional, Catholic (arch)diocesan systems of schools that have long had decentralized, portfolio-style approaches to system organization. The paper's findings center on the embrace of limited role of superintendent leadership, constraints afforded by organizational structures, and minimal attempts to disrupt these patterns of system functioning.
Measurement, Evaluation, Statistics and Assessment
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Henry Braun, Matthias von Davier, J. Chen
Description: Developing new indicators of potentially problematic, country-level results in TIMSS.
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Henry Braun, I. Kirsch
Description: Large-scale Assessments in International Contexts
Teaching, Curriculum, and Society
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Faythe Beauchemin
Description: Researchers and literacy educators have underscored the need to prepare preservice teachers (PSTs), who are largely white and speak English as their primary language, to teach in linguistically diverse classrooms (García-Sánchez & Orellana, 2019; Ortiz & Franquiz, 2015). These classrooms are overwhelmingly dominated by monolingual ideologies that ignore, devalue and erase bilingual students’ linguistic resources and identities. Responding to this reality, a growing number of scholars have called for teacher education programs to take a practice-based approach to teaching in ways that draw upon bi/multilingual students’ language practices in schooling (Nash et al, 2018). In this paper, we explore how PSTs who do not share the cultural and linguistic backgrounds of their students engage read-alouds using translingual children’s books with small groups of multilingual students as part of an elementary literacy methods course.
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Aaron Coleman
Description: Drawing on the efforts to increase the ethnoracial diversity of the U.S. teaching workforce, this study explores a minority-serving program that prepares predominantly teachers of Color. Recent research shows the positive impact of teacher candidates of Color on all students, particularly for Black students. However, the recruitment efforts have yet to result in significant demographic changes in the teacher workforce or teacher preparation experiences. This study examines how students of Color perceive their experiences as they attend a program within a northeastern predominantly white institution (PWI). Moreover, this study will explore how minority-serving program spaces influence the learning of teacher candidates of Color in addition to providing tools and barriers against the racialized harm that occurs in PWIs.
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): (UCTC) Charles T. Cownie, Audrey Friedman, Myra Rosen-Reynoso
Description: Catholic Colleges and Universities (CCUs) in the U.S.A. are responding to a reckoning of historical racial biases with initiatives to reimagine education. This symposium focuses on institutional actions, from administrators to classroom practices, to integrate antiracism during a time of increased tension about the purpose and future of this work. Each presenter shares research that responds to the question: How are CCUs living their Catholic missions through their support of justice and equity initiatives? Underscoring each is a belief in the necessity of transformation. We link this transformation to Catholic social thought across institutions. In doing so, we respond both to this moment and anticipate what is needed for the future. This symposium is a collaboration with other Catholic universities. We will be presenting on the components of UCTC curriculum that builds the capacity of our teachers to address bias.
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): A. Lin Goodwin; Betina Hsieh & Jung E. Kim; Cathery Yeh & Naehee Kwun; Yeji Kim & Sohyun An; Noreen Naseem Rodriguez & Sohyun An
Description: Amidst the rise of anti-Asian bigotry and the state-led onslaught on anti-racism education, this symposium aims to center AsianCrit in teacher education research and practice. In the session, 7 Asian American scholars will present their research, which employed AsianCrit lenses to investigate invisibility, misrepresentation, and racist experiences among Asian American teachers. The ways to foreground AsianCrit and Asian American studies in teacher education to challenge white supremacy and racialized constructions of Asian Americans will be further discussed. By bringing scholarship on AsianCrit in teacher education together, this session will expand our understanding of the lives and experiences of Asian American teachers and the substantial value of AsianCrit and Asian American studies in promoting anti-racism, equity, and inclusion in education.
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Ankhi Thakurta
Description: In the racialized structures of educational research and praxis, too often are BIPOC educators, youth, and communities asked to subsume their creative, raced, and cultured selves for the purposes of knowledge production or learning, a form, we argue, of self-fragmentation. This workshop creates a space for attendees to gather and reflect on the role that arts-based research and teaching– creative approaches to knowledge-making that can center BIPOC ways of knowing and being– might play in resisting that fragmentation in order to pursue a vision of educational justice. Co-facilitated by three BIPOC educator/researcher/artists, this workshop will be divided into four parts: co-learning, co-teaching, co-making, and co-reflecting, during which participants will engage in conversation and arts-making to collaboratively construct visions of justice.
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Faythe Beauchemin
Description: This symposium presents findings from four papers exploring how pre- and in-service teachers learn about, negotiate, and employ translanguaging pedagogies. We argue that translanguaging pedagogies are essential knowledge for all teachers, offering a framework for dismantling linguistic hierarchies and pedagogical practices for inviting students to use all their language resources in schools. We present data from four distinct contexts, including undergraduate preservice teachers in literacy methods courses preparing to teach in English-medium classrooms, an inservice teacher working with a researcher in a dual language bilingual education classroom, and graduate level in-service teachers who are new to translanguaging theory and pedagogies. Findings across studies illustrate how translanguaging pedagogies can be taught and taken up in a variety of school contexts.
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Kierstin Giunco
Description: Mentoring session hosted by the Qualitative Methods SIG.
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Arundhati Velamur, Ali R. Blake, Sarah C. Radke
Description: This paper examines mathematics as a regime implicated in the (re)production of imperialism, neoliberalism, and racial capitalism. Through an ethnographic account of two events at a prominent mathematical conference in a US city, we trace the construction of mathematics as a political project of the state. Through Star’s (1991) attention to the marginal person in a community and Ahmed’s (2012) approach to understanding institutional life, we make sense of the institution of mathematics by examining institutional responses to the actions of marginal actors across two events at the conference. We believe acts of resistance work to reclaim the politics of mathematics towards liberatory ends and follow these acts of resistance to surface the shifting cultural politics of the discipline.
Virtual Only
Will be available in the AERA i-Presentation Gallery.
Educational Leadership & Higher Education
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Deborah V. Hogan, Benjamin Longstreth
Description: First-generation college students (FGCS) make up over 40 percent of the population of college students in the United States, but they account for only one-third of college graduates (Startz, 2022). FGCS, particularly those from racially marginalized populations, face unique challenges that may negatively impact their college experience. This scoping review synthesizes the research on sense of belonging for FGCS of color since 2000 and identifies guiding frameworks, common barriers at predominantly White institutions (PWIs), assets they can leverage, and effective practices for cultivating a sense of belonging. The common barriers include building capital, cultural incongruency, family dynamics, mental health, finances, and peer connections. FGCS of color leverage assets to persist through challenges, including aspirational, social, familial, navigational, and community capital. Effective practices for cultivating a sense of belonging include creating positive faculty and staff connections, collaborating with family support systems, developing peer networks, creating counterspaces, and meeting financial need.
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Deborah V. Hogan
Description: Several studies have explored the relationship between racial climate and sense of belonging for Black students at predominantly White institutions (PWIs), but few studies have focused on Black student-athletes (BSAs), specifically how athletic participation shapes their perception of racial climate and sense of belonging. The current study explores how Division I (DI) football culture influences the social capital BSAs develop among coaches, teammates, and people outside athletics and how these relationships interact with the BSAs’ perception of racial climate at PWIs to impact their sense of belonging. Using Critical Race Theory (CRT) and sense of belonging frameworks, semi-structured interviews were conducted with 10 former Black football student-athletes (BFSAs) from DI institutions. The study revealed one overarching theme: the perception of campus climate is key to belonging for BFSAs. The subthemes highlight the factors that shape the perception of climate, such as precollege attitudes and experiences, as well as relationships with teammates, coaches, and people outside athletics. The results suggest important implications for coaches and athletic staff members at PWIs looking to recruit and support BFSAs.