AERA Presentations
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 News at AERA
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AERA Outstanding Reviewer Award
Dr. Rebecca Lowenhaupt, Associate Professor of Educational Leadership at the Lynch School of Education and Human Development, is the recipient of the 2021 Outstanding Reviewer Award from the AERA Open. This award honors the contributions and professional assistance of reviewers who make the AERA Open the leading journal it is today.
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Distinguished Career Contribution Award
María Estela Brisk, professor emerita of Teaching, Curriculum, and Society in the Lynch School of Education and Human Development, is the recipient of the 2020 Scholars of Color Distinguished Career Contribution Award from the American Educational Research Association.
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Five Lynch School Faculty and Alumni are Honored by AERA
Lynch School of Education faculty members Henry Braun and David Miele, along with alumni Kristen Renn and Sofia Chaparro, received awards for excellence at the American Educational Research Association annual meeting in New York City. The foursome joins Cawthorne Professor Marilyn Cochran-Smith, who was previously acknowledged as the recipient of the Division K Legacy Award.
AERA 2022 Annual Meeting
April 21 – April 26
This year's presentations are listed by date. Select from the titles below to view presentation contributors and descriptions.
Thursday, April 21
Teaching, Curriculum, and Society
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Melodie Wyttenbach & John Reyes
Description: In the spring of 2020, schools of all sectors across all nations were forced to close their doors as COVID-19 rippled through communities. Drawing upon the concept of liminality, which refers to a stage, state, or period of transition (Soderlund & Borg, 2017), this study investigated the intersections of the experience of liminality during the pandemic and Catholic school functioning for school leaders and teachers. Using qualitative methods, this paper presents the key characteristics of liminality as experienced within organizations, and provides an opportunity to interpret the impact of the pandemic on Catholic schools. Findings relating to individual and collective identity, purpose, and professional practice have significant potential in illuminating a path forward for this sector of K-12 education.
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Marisa Olivo & Reid Jewett Smith
Description: The purpose of this paper is to analyze the nature and impact of teacher candidates’ field experiences in an innovative urban preparation program in New York City— the Master of Arts in Teaching program at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH MAT). Data sources included interviews with participants, museum and school observations, and collection of artifacts and program documents. This paper argues that in order to prepare science teachers for NYC schools, the museum program recreated the urban teacher residency model by reinventing the concept of “field” in “field experience.” This argument is supported by three major findings about types of field experiences, socialization into multiple communities of practice, and the unique role of “senior specialists.”
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Jon M. Wargo
Description: In the 21st century, LGBTQ+ histories are increasingly represented in elementary English language arts (ELA) and social studies curricula. Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendender, and queer (LGBTQ+) picturebooks, in particular, are providing teachers with tools for discussing queer life and history through direct literary instruction (Ryan & Hermann-Wilmarth, 2018). Moreover, representations of queer (in)human characters (e.g., mermaids, unicorns, and hybrid species) as well as queer biographies have become increasingly common pedagogical tools in elementary classrooms (Authors, 2021). However, the critical implications of these multimodal representations have yet to be fully considered for their reparative possibilities. In this presentation, we present findings from two divergent yet complementary projects examining contemporary picturebooks featuring queer (in)human characters and historical LGBTQ+ figures. In so doing, we illuminate our analytical methodology that resulted in the creation of reparative multimodal content analysis (RMCA).
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Jon M. Wargo
Description: When Illinois Governor Jay Robert (J.B.) Pritzker signed House Bill 246 (the Inclusive Curriculum) into law in August 2019, little did he know that the first year of implementation (2020-2021) would be backdropped by a global pandemic, the murder of George Floyd, an insurrection on the United States capitol building, and a re-ignition of the culture wars. The bill, requiring that the roles and contributions of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ+) individuals be included in social studies instruction “prior to grade 8,” was unique. Unlike other states with queer-inclusive policy, the Illinois law is one of the first to assert that this was content necessary for elementary children and middle grades youth. Thus, with this assertion came both material and ideological tensions. Educators asked, “What (in terms of content) are we teaching?” and “Why (in terms of ideology) and how are we teaching it now?” Queer inclusion – for some Illinois educators – became a paradox.
Drawing on data from a sequential mixed-methods (Cresswell, 2003) study examining how elementary educators in the 20 most diverse school districts in Illinois made sense of LGBTQ+ inclusive policy, this presentation explores how the problem space of queer inclusion – both as a personal belief and as a professional expectation – was communicated to and reconfigured by teachers in the first year of implementation. Utilizing sensemaking theory (Resnick, 1991; Spillane et al., 2002; Weick, 1995) and discursive institutionalism (Schmidt, 2008) as analytic tools, it zeroes in specifically on data generated from 88 video-cued qualitative interviews. Highlighting how educators responded to a video-recorded professional development seminar that framed the teaching of LGBTQ+ inclusive social studies as a “closed” curricular issue (Hess, 2007), findings highlight how teachers’ personal feelings and co-constructed understandings of policy (as refracted through their school, district, and community) were complicated and pushed them to understand the issue of queer-inclusion as complex and “tipping,” regardless of the law.
Joining other scholars interrogating LGBTQ+ policy implementation and practice at a national level (see, for example, Farley & Leonardi, 2021; Leonardi, 2017; Leonardi & Moses, 2021; Loutzenheiser, 2015; Meyer & Keenan, 2018; Taylor et al., 2016), this project aims not only to contributes significant understandings into the ideological constraints and supports of state-level K-12 policy implementation, but establishes a foundation for understanding the contextual factors and ethical dilemmas elementary educators, an under-studied group, employ in framing LGBTQ+-inclusion.
Educational Leadership and Higher Education
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Angela Boatman & Katrina Borowiec
Description: While career and technical schools have offered short-term credential programs for decades, a proliferation of digital badges, bootcamps, and other micro-credentials have recently emerged in the United States. How individual states envision their regulatory role in this space remains understudied. Our study focuses on shared challenges and policy recommendations gleaned from semi-structured interviews with leaders from 14 organizations, including state authorization agencies, public higher education system offices, and private educational providers. We conduct a cross-case analysis of the regulatory approval process, including the disruption and opportunities the COVID-19 pandemic presents to the industry. Based on these findings, we offer recommendations for state authorizing agencies and policymakers, as well as recommendations for future research.
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Raquel Muñiz & Andrés Castro Samayoa
Description: The legal system's legitimacy depends on those who are custodians of it reflecting the views and experiences of a broad swath of the country. In 2020, the law student population was 5% Hispanic and 5% Black. One reason for the lack of racial representation in law schools may be that they are not attuned to the needs, challenges, and values of their non-white students. We examine issues of minoritized students’ access to and participation in legal education, focusing on: 1) law school rankings as an initial hurdle to minoritized individuals’ access to a legal education, 2) law school climate, once a student gains access, and 3) the perceived value of a legal education as students proceed towards a legal degree.
Friday, April 22
Teaching, Curriculum, and Society
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Audrey Friedman, Myra Rosen-Reynoso, Kierstin Giunco, Charles Cownie, and Cristina Hunter
Description: The COVID-19 pandemic has significantly impacted all schools in the United States and the world, but in particular, urban schools. The nature of this crisis has brought new challenges to urban Catholic schools. This research employs a mixed-methods approach as quantitative (survey) data and qualitative (open-ended, narratives) data are used to identify and understand how 31 educators made and continue to make sense of the impact of COVID-19 on their instructional practice, self-efficacy, student learning, school mission, and their perceptions of educational inequity in the urban contexts where they teach. A key aim of this paper is to provide some examples of the current considerations and practices that have emerged from urban Catholic schools in response to the pandemic.
Measurement, Evaluation, Statistics and Assessment
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Ummugul Bezirhan & Matthias von Davier
Description: The root mean square deviation (RMSD; von Davier, 2017) is a sample size-free residual-based DIF measure but with this measure, the question becomes which threshold to use. The aim of this study is to utilize a robust measure of dispersion, the median absolute deviation (MAD), to determine a flagging rule for contaminated observations (Tukey, 1960). MAD classifies an observation as an outlier if the difference to the median of the other absolute distances exceeds a certain boundary. A cross-validation study using the PIRLS 2016 data was performed, and items that are not identified as outliers in the initial run were artificially contaminated. This study is the first attempt to implement a robust decision criterion for outlier detection on the example of PIRLS 2016. Determining misfitting items is especially important for explanatory purposes in large-scale assessments, and can be further examined by working with content experts and translation verifiers in order to come up with potential differences that led these flagged items to be systematically different from regular data points.
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Katherine Reynolds & Lale Khorramdel
Description: Cross-country comparability (measurement invariance) in contextual scales is a topic of ongoing concern in international large-scale assessment. Invariance evaluation strategies relying on multiple-group confirmatory factor analysis often find that the strictest levels of invariance are not achieved. This work utilizes a partial invariance modelling approach in the framework of item response theory (IRT) to evaluate cross-country measurement invariance in the TIMSS 2019 context scales. The approach was applied using both the Rasch partial credit model and generalized partial credit model, and invariance results were compared for both models. Analyses proceeded by estimating a set of common item parameters for each scale and unique or country-specific item parameters for a subset of items for which the common parameters did not show sufficient fit according to item fit statistic.
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Reid Jewett Smith & Marisa Olivo
Description: This organizational analysis examines a historic shift in the way that teachers are being prepared to teach in public schools at new graduate schools of education (nGSEs). nGSEs are stand-alone graduate schools that offer initial teacher preparation and licensure and are state certified to grant master’s degrees in education. The objective is to construct an organizational analysis of a new population of organizations, nGSEs. By conducting a comprehensive nationwide analysis, this paper will (1) shed light on the organizational characteristics of nGSEs, highlighting what sets them apart from traditional schools of education, and (2) analyze how the emergence of nGSEs is inextricably linked to the marketization of public education and the influence of well-funded and well-heard reformers in the private sector.
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Matthias von Davier, Lillian Tyack, & Ji Yoon Jung
Description: Automated scoring of simple responses (multiple choice, numerical input, short responses) using natural language processing or basic pattern recognition has been used in testing for quite some time. More complex responses collected using items that aim at more authentic performances are typically scored by human raters. However, recent developments in artificial intelligence (AI) such as deep neural networks as well as modern machine learning (ML) tools make inroads into domains that were considered to require human judgment until recently.
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Bethany Fishbein, Michael O. Martin, & Pierre Foy
Description: This presentation will provide an example of using various response time and other measures derived from event log data to investigate non-response behaviors in the TIMSS 2019 Problem Solving and Inquiry (PSI) tasks relative to “regular” digital TIMSS items. TIMSS routinely has reported results for two types of non-response: omitted and not reached (defined as all the blanks to the end of a booklet part following two omitted items). For the PSI tasks, the event log data enabled determining whether a student actually visited an item screen, the time they arrived, and how long they spent. The screen level (item level for screens with only one item) timing analysis showed that a non-ignorable percent of students stopped responding with time remaining in the assessment session, perhaps because they became fatigued. The timing data, especially in mathematics, showed that higher percentages of students stopped responding (21%) than ran out of time (14%). In science, the results were 13 percent and 11 percent, respectively. At the eighth grade, the results in mathematics were 14 percent stopped responding and only 3 percent ran out of time. In science, there were similar completion rates between regular items and the PSI tasks.
Saturday, April 23
Teaching, Curriculum, and Society
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Deoksoon Kim, Katrina Borowiec, Stanton E. F. Wortham
Description: The COVID-19 pandemic catalyzed unprecedented change in higher education. It was important to support students’ well-being during this crisis. One approach is formative or whole-person education, which has three central components. Formative education emphasizes wholeness, supporting students’ integrated development along intellectual, social-emotional, moral/ethical, and spiritual dimensions; supporting the development of students’ sense of meaning and purpose; and fostering community. This study presents a survey instrument that measures faculty members’ engagement in formative education online. Our exploratory factor analysis of the pilot instrument yielded high internal consistency (Cronbach’s alpha=.94). The final one-factor solution pointed toward a unidimensional construct, consistent with theory.
Educational Leadership and Higher Education
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Rebecca Lowenhaupt, Betty Lai, Gabi Oliveira, Aaron Jennings and Almi Abeyta
Description: The COVID-19 pandemic has been a defining catastrophe. This study focuses on an urban community in New England at the epicenter of the pandemic, with high rates of illness, death, financial hardships, and a halt to in-person school and services that lasted over a year. Drawing on organizational change and sensemaking theory, we conduct a thematic analysis of 20 interviews with cross-sector community leaders (e.g., government officials, school district administrators, non-profit directors, church leaders) to evaluate how leaders made sense of the COVID-19 pandemic. We also explore how sensemaking led to responses to providing basic needs and establishing collaborative networks to address child wellbeing. We explore the implications of these findings for ongoing and future environmental jolts and crises.
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Paulette Andrade Gonzalez, Rebecca Lowenhaupt, Jenna Queenan & Ariana Mangual Figueroa
Description: Recently, immigrant-origin youth have faced increasing challenges in the midst of hostile federal policies. Educators play an important role in supporting them as they navigate these challenges. Our paper explores how teachers’ personal and professional identities, as well as the contexts in which they work, influence their understanding of their responsibilities in serving immigrant-origin students and families. Through analysis of survey and interview data from two school districts, we found that educators who identify as immigrant-origin and/or ESL or bilingual educators are more likely to view supporting immigrant-origin students as their responsibility. District-wide communication, the predominant racial-identity of educators, and proximity to the border can impact whether or not educators take on this responsibility. Implications for leadership are discussed.
Measurement, Evaluation, Statistics and Assessment
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Emily Gates & Kayla Benitez Alvarez
Description: Evaluators have opportunities to advance equity within evaluations, yet little research has examined whether and how evaluators center equity in evaluation practice. This paper explores whether and how evaluators in New England address inequities and advance equity throughout evaluation phases. The study uses a complementarity, sequential mixed methods design comprised of a researcher-developed online questionnaire administered to a convenience sample of practicing evaluators (n=82) and individual, semi-structured interviews with a subset of this sample selected to maximize variation (n=21). Eight overarching findings suggest that despite evaluators’ attempts to center equity, it remains largely “on the sideline.” This is due to evaluators’ sense of being professionally unprepared, contractual and contextual constraints, and working against some conventional professional and methodological norms.
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Larry H. Ludlow, Henry I. Braun, Ella Anghel, Olivia Szendey
Description: Robert Kegan’s constructive-developmental model (1982; 1994) suggests that age and life experiences typically support the development through multiple stages of more advanced ways of meaning-making, of understanding the world, in several stages. We describe the design and validation of a self-report instrument that captures changes in meaning-making capacity as conceptualized by Kegan. Employing Rasch/Guttman Scenario (RGS) scale procedures (Ludlow et al., 2020) and 10 sets of MTURK iterative pilot study administrations, we present three unique scales for measuring Kegan-like meaning-making in three different contexts experienced by emerging adults: family, school, and friends.
Sunday, April 24
Teaching, Curriculum, and Society
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Marilyn Cochran-Smith, Emilie Reagan, Wen-Chia Chang
Description: For the last two decades, there has been widespread attention to teacher preparation evaluation and accountability from both within and outside the field. In fact, accountability has been regarded by many policy and other actors as a key mechanism for “fixing” teacher preparation, which has repeatedly been characterized as a “broken” system. This session takes up questions related to equity and teacher preparation evaluation systems by focusing on intersecting roles, layers of contexts, and organizations and by bringing together presenters who are differently positioned. The major goal of the session is to consider what it would mean, what it would take, and what it would look like to make equity the central goal of teacher preparation evaluation systems.
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Patrick McQuillan & Ksenia Filatov
Description: In the 21st century educational opportunity in the U.S. is not equitable. Countless studies chronicle an ongoing achievement gap generated by the underperformance of Black and Brown students urban schools are disproportionately charged with educating. With these concerns in mind, we draw on ten years of research conducted with three urban principals and their schools as participants in the Lynch Leadership Academy at Boston College. A professional development program for early-career urban school leaders, the “Academy” aims to help principals mobilize faculty, engage students and families, and enrich their own professional efficacy. Through our research we generated an analytic framework, the Systems Transformation Heuristic (STH), which intends to help urban school leaders empower their school communities to enrich student achievement and eliminate the opportunity gap.
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): So Lim Kim & Deoksoon Kim
Description:This study explores six middle school English as a Second Language (ESL) learners’ science literacy in an invention-based learning (IBL) project—a new approach to problem-based learning, in which students are presented problems which require them to invent something. Based on analyses of writing samples, interviews and fieldnotes we describe how middle school ESL students demonstrated scientific understanding and developed science literacy during the IBL project. Findings indicate that the students better understood scientific concepts and procedures from the curriculum, developed their ability to argue scientifically using evidence and reasoning, and learned to apply curricular knowledge to real-life experiences.
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Jon M. Wargo
Description: Drawing on data from a semester-long practitioner inquiry (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009) study, this paper examines how prospective teachers in a Teaching Diverse Young Adult Literature course centered difference through discussion. Drawing on the three class sessions wherein the focal texts centered on the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) experience, this paper looks at how the LGBTQ subject was discursively shaped over time. In so doing, it asks: How do prospective teachers in a ‘Teaching Diverse Young Adult Literature' course discursively construct the LGBTQ subject?” and “What discourses, oppressive and liberatory, circulate as participants encounter different LGBTQ-themed texts?”
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Jon M. Wargo
Description: Conceptualized as an anthropological study of educational policy, this project explores how elementary teachers in the first year of policy enactment understand, interpret, and teach LGBTQ-inclusive social studies in Illinois. Designed as a sequential mixed-methods study, it examines the material and ideological affordances and constraints teachers identify as obstacles and supports for teaching LGBTQ-inclusive social studies. Simultaneously, it details how the LGBTQ subject - as made sense of by teachers - is discursively produced as (in)human. Building on scholarship that considers how educational policy is interpreted, implemented, and mediated, this paper reveals the promises and precarity embedded in the work teachers do in understanding, interpreting, and teaching queer inclusion.
Educational Leadership and Higher Education
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Heather Rowan-Kenyon, Mandy Savitz-Romer, Tara Nicola, Steph Carroll, Laura Hecht
Description: The purpose of our study is to examine the role of state leaders who support school counseling to increase our understanding of how these departments might optimize counseling practices to have a positive impact on students' college readiness. This study utilized qualitative interviews with 30 state leaders responsible for school counseling to capture ways in which they understand their role in supporting school counselor practices in their state. Findings include evidence of great inconsistency at the state level related to the purpose of this position. We also found that there are no accountability mechanisms for enacted school counseling policies.
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Rebecca Lowenhaupt, with Dafney Blanca Dabach and Brian Tauzel
Description: There is an urgent need to investigate how K-12 school districts as systems respond to immigration policy. Drawing from concepts from immigration theory (i.e., contexts of reception, Portes & Rumbaut, 2006) and organizational theory (loosely-coupled systems, Weick, 1976), we ask: How do central office staff respond to changing federal immigration policies? Data sources include an all-staff survey from one district (n = 1049) and qualitative interviews (n=37). We found that when mitigating deportation-related threats, central office staff standardized procedures to increase student protections yet continually emphasized the need to draw boundaries (to “stay in our lane”). Yet they simultaneously supported innovation with post-secondary supports. Districts as organizations may diversify tactics to manage the complexity of immigration in schools.
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Rebecca Lowenhaupt with Megan Hopkins, Hayley Weddle, Veronica Salas,
Description: A confluence of demographic and policy changes over the last few decades place state education agencies (SEAs) at the center of efforts to ensure that civil rights law is upheld for multilingual learners (MLs). Situated in the context of a research-practice partnership (RPP), this study examines SEA leaders’ approaches to implementing federal policy for ML students, and explores the contextual factors that enable and constrain their efforts to uphold MLs’ civil rights. Our work is grounded in critical policy scholarship to situate SEA leaders’ work in the complex contexts and systems in which ML policy is implemented (Diem et al., 2018; Weaver-Hightower, 2008). We apply this ecological perspective to a previously-developed framework used to explore how school leaders enact social justice in their implementation of ML policy (Mavrogordato & White, 2019).
Measurement, Evaluation, Statistics and Assessment
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Matthias von Davier, Ina Mullis, Erin Wry
Description: The International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement, more widely known as IEA, supports the theme of the WERA 2021 Focal Meeting by showcasing the advances of its flagship TIMSS and PIRLS in their transition to digital assessments. Digital assessments mirror the need of educational systems to prepare students around the world for the realities of a changing world. Students are living, learning, and will at some point be working in a world that relies on digital technologies at an almost universal level. Educational systems cannot ignore that a vast majority of students in many countries spend hours online every day. Learning about and implementing digital assessments are necessary steps for countries on the path to preparing students for their future.
Counseling, Developmental, and Educational Psychology
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Sidney May, Scott Seider, Brianna Diaz
Description: This mixed methods, longitudinal study utilized survey data from a sample of BIPOC adolescents’ (n = 643) and qualitative interviews with a sub-set of adolescents (n = 39) to consider changes in adolescents’ awareness of economic inequality throughout high school. Additionally, interviews were analyzed to consider how participants explained the causes and effects of economic inequality. Adolescents demonstrated significant, linear growth in their belief that poverty was caused by structural factors, with no significant differences between different racial and gender groups. Results from interviews supported quantitative findings; a majority of students shifted to providing structural causes to explain poverty. When adolescents provided sources of their beliefs, responses most frequently cited personal experiences, and a handful involved media and school-related experiences.
Monday, April 25
Teaching, Curriculum, and Society
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Anna Noble & Patrick McQuillan
Description: In a time of increasing accountability, school leaders are besieged with challenges to improve student performance, increase teacher capacity, and develop leadership skills to better meet the needs of increasingly diverse student populations. Though instructional leadership is often a primary demand of their work, principals may be pulled towards more immediate concerns. As seems no surprise, in these environments of competing pressures, principal turnover is common, with consequent negative outcomes for schools and students . Trust, elemental to a school’s culture, is contingent on the relationships between members of the organization, which may be impeded by the threat of turnover in leadership. These conditions necessitate an understanding of how principals can influence their school system so as to balance competing concerns while preparing the system for unknown future challenges. Given the range of individuals, groups, structures and interests present in schools, it is best to think of schools as complex systems— systems comprised of diverse agents undergoing continuous change with the potential to become complex adaptive systems— using this perspective to guide our understanding of the work of school leaders within a larger system. Drawing on the concept of emergence from the field of complexity, the goal of this study is to explore the ways in which one principal was able to impact a school’s adaptability by examining processes of distributing authority and creating a common school vision.
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Andrew Miller, Charlie Cownie, Myra Reynoso, Michael O'Connor, Adam Agostinelli
Description: Catholic schools in most cities exist in hyper-competitive school choice marketplaces. During the COVID era, the things Catholic school leaders did to allow their organizations to thrive in this marketplace led some Catholic schools to survive and others to close. Yet a narrative emerged in the popular press that the organizational response of Catholic schools to the COVID era was superior to that of the public sector. In this paper, we investigate Catholic school leaders’ organizational responses to the global pandemic and assess these responses in light of institutional logics and organizational identities. We find that Catholic school leaders were more aligned with market competition in their actions than with the definitions of solidarity central to their organizational identity.
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Marilyn Cochran-Smith
Description: This symposium offers a ‘state-of-the-art’ picture of education drawing from four new studies addressing practitioner enquiry. It is framed by three clusters of traditions of the development of education as an academic discipline in universities internationally. Presentation 1 features close-to-practice (CtP) research, including a systematic review of the quality of published practitioner research. Presentation 2 addresses practitioner enquiry from the perspectives of a school-university partnership; presentation 3 from researchers carrying out professional doctorates; and presentation 4 from the voices of children in the research-practice arena. The dichotomy between the trend in national (and increasingly supra-national) control of the work of teachers versus the emancipatory roots of practitioner enquiry forms the basis for recommendations for research, and education as a discipline.
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Katrina Borowiec & Deoksoon Kim
Description: The COVID-19 pandemic brought unprecedented change in schooling in the United States and around the world. Many teachers taught remotely for the first time, with little training or preparation time. This qualitative study explores teachers’ experiences during the pandemic by conveying five teachers’ voices as expressed through both interview data and digital storytelling projects. Digital stories are two- to five-minute multimedia projects, combining audio, video, music, and text. Our results describe teachers’ resilience during this crisis while highlighting challenges that teachers faced in adjusting to a virtual environment.
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Charles Cownie, Andrew Miller, Myra Rosen-Reynoso, Annie Smith, Younghee Park, and Kierstin Giunco
Description: At the end of the 20th century, Fr. Joseph O’Keefe, S.J., and a team of researchers collaborated to study the specific trajectories of urban Catholic schools and to identify what it means to, in their words, “sustain the legacy” of these schools (O’Keefe et al., 2004). The current study examines the way that the legacy has been sustained, enhanced, or adapted over the course of the past twenty years and whether or not the “courageous, comprehensive, and collaborative vision” called for by O’Keefe and Goldschmidt (2014) has been fulfilled. This mixed-methods study includes data on curriculum and instruction, services offered, and religious practices of urban Catholic schools across the United States.
Educational Leadership and Higher Education
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): John Reyes & Michael Warner
Description: The rush to respond to the wave of social activism in the wake of George Floyd’s death left a number of school leaders, specifically those within faith-based educational settings, to reckon with a community response that required an examination of and response to the anti-racism within the school setting. Through a literature review and a series of semi-structured interviews, this paper details a study that examines the extent to which the current body of knowledge informs the challenges of responding to anti-racism in faith based educational settings and investigates the lived experiences of school leaders in operationalizing their response within the context of their leadership roles and responsibilities.
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Angela Boatman & Ryan Creps
Description: A proliferation of bootcamps and micro-credentials have emerged in the past decade as an alternative to a traditional postsecondary degree. We describe the landscape of enrollment and certificate completion in the U.S. from 2005 to 2017, including how the characteristics and goals of students enrolling in non-degree programs have changed. Incorporating data from IPEDS, we compare micro-credential students to associate degree holders and to high school graduates to understand the differences and similarities in student populations over time.
Counseling, Developmental, and Educational Psychology
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Sidney May, Scott Seider, Brianna Diaz
Description: This qualitative study considered the development of a commitment to antiracist activism among Black and Latinx adolescents (n = 50) over 4 years of high school. Four waves of interviews with participating adolescents were analysed using a critical consciousness framework to consider participants’ descriptions of their developing commitment to antiracist activism and the factors contributing to this development. From these analyses emerged five different trajectories of adolescents’ developing commitment to activism that included steady growth over 4 years of high school, more sudden growth in the final years of high school, steady growth in the beginning years of high school followed by subsequent disengagement, and, finally, students whose commitments remained consistently high or low throughout high school.
Tuesday, April 26
Educational Leadership and Higher Education
Boston College Lynch School Contributor(s): Andrew Miller, John Reyes, Melodie Wyttenbach, Gilbert Ezeugwu
Description: Individual Catholic school leaders in the U.S. have been engaged for the past 40 years in addressing persistent student enrollment declines. Yet system-level leaders have mostly supported local efforts rather than engage in intentional system building reforms. In this paper, we provide initial evidence of an investigation of Catholic sector superintendents’ perspectives on why system-level leaders have not been involved in systematic reform efforts. This paper reveals how system-level leaders across the Catholic sector in the U.S. have come to terms with the lack of systemic reform in the sector at a moment when they all have agreed that the sector needs to improve its practice in order to survive in a hyper-competitive, market-driven landscape.