Faculty Research Briefs
Connecting Research to Practice & Policy
During the academic year, we host an informal webinar series via Zoom highlighting the research of faculty members at the School of Education. Please browse topics and watch past talks below.
These conversations last about an hour and are open to all. We look forward to sharing the transformative research led by our faculty in the School of Education.
Past Talks
Making Their Move: Findings from the Next Move @ W&M ProgramEstablished in 2019, Next Move@W&M is a campus-based internship program serving young adults with developmental disabilities, through employment training and job coaching in placements across campus. Dr. Huber will share an overview of the program, initial findings across five internship sessions, and next steps for more rigorous evaluation of effectiveness. Next Move@W&M is funded by the Dean’s Innovation Fund in the School of Education |
Center for Gifted Education Panel: Impacting Education for High-Ability Learners: Current Research at the Center for Gifted Education (CFGE)W&M’s Center For Gifted Education (CFGE) is celebrating 35 years! A panel of CFGE directors will present "Impacting Education for High-Ability Learners: Current Research at the Center for Gifted Education." |
Janise Parker: Learning from the Past, Reflecting on the Present, and Planning for a Just FutureThis presentation will draw from Dr. Parker’s work with the Bray School Lab, where she will link key findings from her review of (a) learning material used to instruct the Bray School students and (b) the broader ideology surrounding the institution of slavery/social oppression to contemporary issues in K-12 schools. Participants will be encouraged to identify action steps one could execute in their respective roles to create a more just future for K-12 students. |
Elizabeth Talbott: Tips and Tricks for Science CommunicationElizabeth Talbott, associate dean for research & faculty development, School of Education, will present "Tips and Tricks for Science Communication." Pitching your research to policymakers, funders, grant reviewers, journal editors, or employers? Forget the elevator pitch—the narrative approach is what works! Learn how to hook your audience, identify gaps, and show how your research can close those gaps. Randy Olson’s (2015) book Houston: We Have a Narrative is our guide to better science communication. |
Kathryn Lanouette: Getting Local with Science and Data Science: Exploring GIS Mapping and Place-based Pedagogies in Elementary School ContextsIn this talk, Assistant Professor Kathryn Lanouette shared findings from a multi-year research collaboration at an elementary school, where she researched 4th- and 5th-grade students learning about ecological systems and data using participatory GIS maps. Dr. Lanouette also described how children’s connections to the schoolyard – social, emotional, and historical – shaped their understanding of complex ecosystem relationships as well as their sensemaking about data. |
Meredith Kier, Lindy Johnson, and Janise Parker: Camp EagerAn experimental, two-week summer camp partnership with Newport News Public Schools (NNPS), Camp Eager explores innovative ways to encourage more middle- and high-students from underrepresented groups, primarily girls and youth of color, to pursue STEM careers. Camp EAGER, directed by Meredith Kier, associate professor of science education; Lindy Johnson, associate professor of English education; and Janise Parker, assistant professor of school psychology, aims to Elevate engineering, Advance innovation, Guide learning, Effect change, and Remove barriers for all. |
Katherine Barko-Alva and Jennifer Bickham Mendez: Educational Equity and School Belonging among Multilingual Learners in Eastern Virginia: An Interdisciplinary, Community-engaged CollaborationDr. Katherine Barko-Alva, assistant professor of ESL/Bilingual Education, and Dr. Jennifer Bickham Mendez, professor and chair of sociology, present ongoing community-engaged research collaboration with the immigrant, Latine/x/o community in Eastern Virginia. This project has crossed disciplinary and methodological boundaries to engage William & Mary students, Latine/x/o, immigrant families, teachers/school officials, and multilingual high school and middle school students. Dr. Barko-Alva and Dr. Bickham Mendez discuss the elements and challenges of this kind of work which seeks to engage and learn from local communities to produce research and develop collaborative educational initiatives in service of community needs and interests. In this way, they endeavor to approach immigrant, Latine/x/o learners and their families, not simply as vessels of needs to be filled, but as full-fledged social agents who offer valuable resources both to their communities and to local schools. |
Janise Parker: Participatory Action Research: Centering Community from Start to FinishParticipatory action research involves a structured process of employing applied research to assist communities with improving their practices and addressing everyday challenges. Using the scientific method of “fact-finding”, action research is intended to be emancipatory in nature with the goal of responding to the needs of marginalized populations through social justice-orientated work. Action research is also executed in a collaborative manner, such as practitioners, community members, and university professors forming strategic partnerships to meet the identified needs. This presentation will review the process of action research and detail two case studies based on the presenter’s collaborative work alongside school-based mental health providers. Specific attention will be geared toward reviewing how university-practitioner partnerships can result in the development and implementation of empirically supported interventions for supporting youth, families, and school-mental health providers who are marginalized in K-12 school settings. |
Heartley Huber: Single Case Research Design: What is it and why should you use it?Researchers use single-case designs (SCD) to study the effectiveness of interventions for individual people, families, classes, schools, etc. These flexible designs allow researchers to draw scientifically valid conclusions about the effectiveness of treatment and have advantages over other approaches, including case studies and randomized controlled trials. Professors Heartley Huber, Ryan McGill, and Elizabeth Talbott provide an introduction to SCD along with examples of its application in counseling, school psychology, special education, and K-12 education. |
Stephanie Blackmon: Technology Integration: Implications for Privacy & TrustIn this presentation, Dr. Stephanie Blackmon, Class of 1963 Associate Professor of Higher Education, discussed elements of privacy and trust in technology integration through the lens of learning analytics. She included information from her recently co-authored work on learning analytics and discussed considerations and implications for learning analytics use in higher education. |
Janise Parker: Supporting Black Students through School-Community PartnershipsCommunity support for youth and adults represents a longstanding strength among Black families. Drawing from her current work and seminal research, Dr. Janise Parker, Assistant Professor of School Psychology, summarizes why educators and researchers should be intentional about collaborating with predominately Black community organizations to support the development of Black K-12 students. A second aim of the presentation is to discuss how interdisciplinary research and collaborative partnerships with community organizations can serve as a mechanism for applying theory to practice, with a specific focus on identifying “what works.” |
Natoya Haskins: African American Women in Counselor EducationAfrican American women in the field of counselor education continue to experience different and often difficult professional trajectories. Over the last 9 years Dr. Natoya Haskins, associate professor of counselor education, has focused her scholarship, in part, on exploring the lived experiences of African American women in counselor education as well as illuminating ways that counselor education and the counseling profession can address their unique professional needs. This presentation focuses on her most current scholarship using Womanism as a clinical paradigm and structural support for African American women in counseling and in counselor education. |
Heartley Huber: Improving Inclusion for Individuals with Disabilities: The Power of PeersAssistant Professor Heartley Huber discusses the significant impact peer partners can have on the social development, inclusion, and acceptance of students with disabilities in schools. She presents her research on peer-mediated interventions in inclusive school settings for students with autism and developmental disabilities and shares some considerations for implementing similar peer-mediated approaches for youth and young adults with disabilities in community and employment settings. |
Robert Knoeppel: Measuring Opportunity: The Equity RatioThe conceptualization and measurement of educational adequacy has been a process that has engaged scholars for nearly three decades. The term came to be associated with “third wave” class action suits wherein plaintiffs brought suit against their respective states claiming that inadequate funding for education was unconstitutional and resulted in inequitable learning opportunities for children in property poor communities. Scholars have argued that the ‘benchmark’ of a finance system should be whether that system provides adequate resources so that schools and districts can deploy strategies to help all students learn. Despite repeated calls for changes to state funding models, many states continue to rely on a foundation program to fund public education; these models have been described as inadequate to meet the demands of educating all children to mandated levels of proficiency. This misalignment of resources to intended outcomes of schooling have led to calls reform in order to provide equal and adequate educational opportunity. The equity and adequacy of finance policies has historically been measured separately from that of student achievement. Robert C. Knoeppel proposes an equity ratio that utilizes measures of dispersion of student performance and finance to measure opportunity. |
Patrick Mullen: The Work before the Work: A Discussion on Factors related to Thriving on the JobDr. Mullen is an associate professor in the counselor education program. In this webinar, he discusses his research related to professional wellbeing and self-care. The presentation includes a reflective journey into the work helping professionals do in an effort to remain passionate about their work. In addition, Dr. Mullen reviews a series of studies about this topic within the school counseling profession. |
Elizabeth Talbott: Reimagining use of Multi-Method, Multi-Informant, Multi-Domain Assessments in Education ResearchEducation research requires the use of data to understand domains as diverse as academic achievement, school climate, school bullying, and psychosocial functioning. Yet, there is little to no guidance from research about how to interpret and use these data to make decisions. In this talk, Dr. Talbott describes a comprehensive assessment approach to address this problem. |
Megan Tschannen-Moran: The Vibrant School Scale: Adopting a strengths-based focus on student voice, cognitive engagement, and playfulnessHow would you describe the ideal school? Dr. Tschannen-Moran describes her Vibrant School Scale, a measure she and a team of doctoral students developed that captures the dynamics of enlivened minds, emboldened voice, and playful learning in schools. |
Erica Wiborg: Complexities in Pedagogy: Analyzing Whiteness DiscourseThis research explores how whiteness dominates discourse in higher education leadership learning environments to compliment and complicate critical leadership pedagogy and teaching methods. This study pushes against written or spoken language as the only discourse studied and analyzes interactional behaviors between students and instructors, as well as how what happens in the classroom is in conversation with the overall curriculum of leadership learning in higher education. The capacity of educational institutions and their actors to influence or alter discursive practices is enormous and this study examines how whiteness discourse is embedded, as well as negotiated in leadership learning. |
