If the White Christian nationalist movement has significantly galvanized parent, community, and larger-scale political groups whose guiding ethos challenges teacher professional roles in shaping literacy curriculum and instruction, then how can literacy teachers and teacher educators better understand this movement, its interpretive orientation to…

The purpose of this project was to impact the participants' spiritual formation with an emphasis on cultural identity with a select group of White Christian college students at Calvin University in Grand Rapids, Michigan through a three-session small group that focused on spiritual formation, cultural identity development, and practicing spiritual…

Taking the form of three papers, this dissertation seeks to elaborate the role and experience of Black educators by shifting primary research perspective away from the classroom teacher to consider the systemic and organizational roles of racialized faculties. The first paper historicizes the 20th- and 21st-century stories of Michigan's Black…

We conduct the first quantitative analysis of "blind removals," an increasingly popular reform that seeks to reduce the over-representation of Black children in foster care by eliminating biases in the removal decisions of investigators. We first show that over-representation in most foster care systems is driven by Black children being…

The Dissertation in Practice was conducted as a collaborative group as required by the Doctorate in Educational Leadership program. Although researchers have established the benefits of principals of color, there is a stark shortage in the pipeline, much of which is because of the oppressive experiences they have in K-12 education as leaders. In…

To learn more about the experiences of families during the pandemic, and in particular their experience with additional support for child care, the Center for the Study of Social Policy (CSSP) interviewed families and experts in four states, and conducted a survey of 1,900 families across the country. CSSP's research efforts were designed to reach…

Using the chokehold as a theoretical framework to analyze the gendered and sexualized vulnerabilities of Black males, I place historical records in conversation with the temporal moment, particularly the allegations of sexual violence committed against Black males at the University of Michigan. In doing so, I conducted a critical discourse…

This qualitative case study focuses on two Asian transmigrant siblings who are teachers that lived in seven different countries and grew up navigating a multitude of geographic and cultural borders. Informed by the concept of transnational funds of knowledge, we examine the knowledge and lived experiences they built through the Asian diaspora and…

In this article, we--three Asian MotherScholars in the field of language and literacy education--conducted a collaborative self-study to examine how our individual and shared experiences as transnational mothers of emergent bilinguals have shaped our ways of promoting bilingualism and biliteracy. Our study drew on transnational feminist…

Over the past two years, there have been calls for racial justice in nearly every sphere of social and political life, including the field of education. As much of the nation reeled at yet another life violently taken at the hands of a police officer, education workers faced the challenge of responding to local and national demands for policy…

Decades of research underscore how important teachers are in students' lives. They are, in fact, one of the most important factors contributing to student success in the classroom. Teachers, particularly highly qualified and effective teachers, are a key ingredient in achieving student success. However, as with many aspects of education, years of…

In the spring of 2020, the COVID-19 virus shuttered schools across the country and world and calls for racial justice expanded into nearly every sphere of social and political life as the nation reeled at another life violently taken at the hands of a police officer. School system leaders faced difficult decisions about delivering instruction…

As schools across the US and around the world closed their physical buildings to stop the spread of COVID-19, students, teachers, families, and communities grappled with the shift to online learning. While emerging research examines how educators navigated this shift, little is known about how students experienced schooling as the pandemic…

This study presents a portrait of a White high school English teacher in an effort to understand the relationship between her White racial identity and her teaching about racism within a unit on "A Raisin in the Sun" in a predominantly White teaching context. The author argues that the teacher's ambivalent White racial identity…

Black parents of young adults with high incidence disabilities provide salient support to their children during and after postsecondary planning processes in high school. These parents serve a vital role concerning their child with high incidence disabilities' postsecondary planning processes. School counselors are well-positioned as social…