Projects
Jump to:
â—† GEAR UP NC â—† C.A.R.E.S. Collaboratory â—† Paid Teacher Residencies â—†
â—† Literacy Innovation Leaders â—† Latinx Youth in the Borderlands â—†
â—† Family-School Relations â—† After Hurricane Maria â—† Toxic Tour, Revised â—†
â—† LIFE Project â—† The Toxic Tour â—† Literacy for Citizenship â—†
GEAR UP North Carolina
Gaining Early Awareness and Readiness for Undergraduate Programs (GEAR UP) North Carolina Evaluation
The federal GEAR UP grant program provides support for interventions that increase college enrollment and success for low-income students. The fourth statewide GEAR UP North Carolina grant provides services to fifteen districts in North Carolina to address common barriers to college entry and access. In this evaluation, EPIC provides formative information to state level GEAR UP NC staff and GEAR UP NC districts to promote continuous improvement and provides rigorous research evidence on the effectiveness of GEAR UP NC services to inform the field of college preparation and access programs. This evaluation combines interviews, surveys, and academic performance data to provide a multi-faceted look at the implementation of GEAR UP NC (more at EPIC's website​).
C.A.R.E.S. Collaboratory
Implementation and Impact Evaluation of ESSER-funded Supports for Recurring Low-Performing Schools
In 2020 NC started using a portion of the state’s Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) funds to continue support for recurring low-performing schools and districts (RLPSD). Supported by the North Carolina Collaboratory, EPIC is conducting a mixed-methods study to gain insight into the implementation decisions, challenges, and impacts of ESSER III-funded supports to RLPSD. We will examine: 1) How coaching and PD supports are being implemented in RLPDS; 2) the impact of coaching and PD efforts on teachers’ and principals’ turnover decisions and perceptions of their school’s working environment; and 3) the extent coaching and PD efforts affect student outcomes (more at EPIC's website​).
Evaluation of Innovative Staffing
Evaluation of Innovative Staffing Models and Technical Assistance: Strategic Staffing for Paid Teacher Residencies (SSPTR)
A number of technical assistance (TA) centers have designed TA programs to support partnerships between educator preparation programs (EPPs) and K-12 local education associations (LEAs) that seek to provide assistance for the design and implementation of innovative strategic staffing models that aim to support paid residencies. In these models, candidates spend a full year on a teaching team in a K-12 school under the supervision of mentor teachers. The key elements of these interventions have the potential to positively impact the development of student teachers and their outcomes as teachers of record. The ultimate goal of this work is to expand children's access to equitable and ambitious teaching and learning (more at EPIC's website​).
Literacy Innovation Leaders (LIL)
UNC System Office Literacy Innovation Leaders Pilot Program Evaluation (Literacy Instruction and Science of Reading)
The UNC System and five UNC System institutions are collaborating to improve the quality of literacy preparation for teacher candidates. This involves teacher educators redesigning aspects of their coursework, curriculum, and clinical experiences and both teacher educators and teacher candidates taking part in intensive literacy professional development. EPIC is evaluating the Literacy Innovation Leaders pilot to determine the extent to which preparation programs change, what enabled or limited that change, and what changes to literacy preparation mean for the knowledge and skills of teacher candidates (more at EPIC's website).
Latinx Youth in the Borderlands:
A Co-Constructed Narrative Examining Practices in Negotiating Self-Identity, Enacting Resistance, and Navigating Mexican-ness
This co-constructed narrative was undertaken to gain insights into youth perceptions about schooling in Arizona given the sociopolitical climate during 2020, to learn about how youth navigate multiple borderlands to establish their racial and cultural identities, and to consider their literacy practices in the work of navigating their identities. This work is situated at the center of Borderlands research, critical theories, and counterstorytelling. Youth participated as co-analysts and co-writers of portions of this work, designed as individual case studies with each of five participants between 15-18 years of age.
Family and School Relations
Race, Sense-Making, and Practice in the Construction of Family-School Relations
Leveraging grounded theory (Glaser & Straus, 2009) and iterative comparative analysis (Corbin & Straus, 2008), we analyze the data to determine how personal and professional experiences of individual and systemic racism affect three Black women teachers, and impact the ways in which they teach students and partner with families. We find that these three women share common identities and contexts (generation, race, gender, school context), yet, each draw from their experiences with racism in different ways – either by explicitly naming, pushing back, and disrupting racist school-based practice, or by insisting that race should not guide their focus and in fact that it is critical not to attend to race. Our study adds critical nuance to understandings of what teachers of color bring to the field of education, given their own personal experiences with racism.
After Hurricane Maria
Understanding the Educational Opportunities of Recently-Arrived Puerto Rican Students
In the aftermath of Hurricane Maria, Florida’s Mockingbird Public Schools (MPS) received approximately 3,500 students from Puerto Rico. The response to the displacement of Puerto Rican families involved quick decision-making by several stakeholders about how to receive students experiencing trauma and housing insecurity, and whose parents were under- or unemployed. How students experiencing displacement are integrated into their receiving districts is critical to their subsequent educational success and, given increases in extreme natural disasters, we need a better understanding of what care looks like in post-displacement contexts.​ Using a care framework, we examine the ways in which MPS enacted care toward Puerto Rican families as well as the ways in which families received such care.
The Toxic Tour, Revised
Environmental Justice in Southwest Detroit
This work draws on our research, conducted in partnership with the Detroit Hispanic Development Corporation (DHDC), to argue that youth participation in community-based civic engagement programs provides opportunities for them to use and increase their knowledge about social issues that impact their communities, to develop dispositions toward criticality and commitments to social justice, and to learn from others about effective ways to contribute to social change. They do this as they work with caring adults to address community issues that are both pressing and personal.​
LIFE Project
Learning Initiatives for Families and Educators
The LIFE Project responds to a unique need in teacher education in its preparation of candidates' effectiveness with K-12 learners. As teachers must be able to partner with all families in order to serve the needs of diverse students, teacher education programs must provide learning opportunities that develop interns' progress in this area.​
Providing opportunities to interact with students' families through three home visits and a school-wide event allows interns to pursue two key goals: 1) it helps them learn to mitigate cultural conflicts and misconceptions between home and school; and 2) it helps them recognize the differences in educational outcomes that occur along the lines of race, class, gender, ethnic and linguistic differences that are a function of institutional, social, economic, and political forces (see project website).
The Toxic Tour
Youth Changing the Narrative of Detroit
In this work, we discuss a community-based action project where young people from Southwest Detroit were engaged in the collection of important histories from their community. We argue that, through their participation in this community-based project, youth developed literacy practices that resemble those of historians and social scientists—ranging from gathering and analyzing primary and secondary sources to conducting interviews and doing research—while also applying a critical lens to examine mainstream narratives and create counter-narratives about the community where they reside (Solórzano & Yosso, 2002).
Literacy for Citizenship
How Youth Participatory Action Research Supports Critical Reflection on Social Issues
Drawing on analysis of student work, we will discuss the ways in which literacy supported youth's civic engagement in the context of sustainable democracy projects that engaged students from an alternative high school in the Humboldt Park neighborhood of Chicago in the investigation of social issues relevant to their communities. Our presentation aims to discuss: (1) the range of issues that students addressed; (2) the kinds of literacy skills and practices that students engaged in as part of their projects; and (3) the affordances and challenges of understanding civic engagement activities as a site for critical literacy learning.
