The Future of Education

The Future of Education

These students from the School of Education’s three degree programs are forging their academic paths to make a difference in their field.

By Phillip Jordan

Not Just Skating By

Jessica Cai loads up on research opportunities and ed tech projects as an undergraduate SAGE Scholar.

Jessica Cai skated and danced competitively in middle and high school. As in, seriously competitive. She trained year-round, won regional titles, and reached the pinnacle of her sports. In 2014, she made it to the United States Figure Skating Championships. In 2017-2018, she won silver and gold, respectively, at the National Solo Dance Finals.

Competing at the highest levels at that age came with challenges; chief among them was keeping up with her education. As Cai spent more time pursuing her athletic dreams, she had to sacrifice traditional schooling and the typical social life of a high school student. While her school provided her with a flexible, hybrid model for remote learning, Cai knew she wasn’t getting the same benefits and insights that her peers received each day in the classroom.

“That’s where my interest in online learning began,” she says. “I realized I was giving up a higher-quality education in order to pursue these things I was interested in outside of class. So, I became very interested in educational research and education technology – even if I didn’t know those terms yet – because I knew I wanted to help in that realm and improve remote education.”

Now a fifth-year senior at UCI studying education sciences, Cai is already doing just that. Last year, the SAGE Scholar earned a spot as a research assistant and instructional designer for online courses in the School of Education’s Science of Learning (SOL) Lab. The SOL Lab is a collaborative research group that explores the development of human thinking and learning. Lab researchers – under the direction of Lindsey Richland, professor and associate dean of graduate programs – investigate children’s cognitive development, reasoning skills, and learning in dynamic, complex, everyday settings.

“Jessica’s exceptional work ethic and indefatigable eagerness to explore, coupled with her heightened capacity to operate at high levels, made her uniquely qualified to immediately join the SOL Lab,” Richland says.

In her first project with the lab, Cai played an integral role in the planning, filming and editing of a project designing and videotaping Common Core math curriculum instruction. The results are helping to serve Title I elementary students in various Orange County school districts.

“That was such a great opportunity to dive deeper into ed tech,” Cai says. “I got to work with some really cool gadgets and cameras, even use Final Cut Pro for the first time and do a little bit of coding. It’s all about finding the best ways to support children’s learning development and get to higher order thinking.”

Cai received extensive training in the lab on instructional design and educational media production from her peer mentor, Joseph Wong. She also brought plenty of her own experience, which enabled her to both grasp the highly conceptual learning pedagogies being employed in the project, and also managing and troubleshooting the actual filming.

“It is not so often we see an undergraduate student operate at such high levels managing several critical roles at the same time,” Richland says.

This year, Cai is supporting research led by Rachel Baker, assistant professor of education, focused on learning how people learn – and how educators can make learning easier. Cai is also taking advantage of other academic avenues UCI offers. In addition to her double-major in education sciences and English, Cai has a double-minor in Chinese studies and business. And a recent internship with McGraw Hill, the educational publisher and ed tech industry giant, helped Cai realize her passion for instructional design could take her down nontraditional paths, if she so chooses.

“Whenever someone at school suggests something they think I might be interested in, I apparently just say ‘yes,’ ” Cai says with a laugh.

What’s next? Cai hopes to enter a doctoral program after she graduates; she has her eyes on UCI’s School of Education Ph.D. program and a concentration in Teaching, Learning and Educational Improvement.

And, yes, you can still find her at the skating rink quite often. Cai may not compete for medals anymore, but her time on the ice offers a respite from the classroom — and a reminder of her pledge to make remote learning easier for those following in her skate-grooved path. “I never knew what I wanted to be growing up,” says Shannon Klug. “But I knew how I wanted my job to feel. I wanted to work in a field where heart matters and where every day is dynamic, flexible and exciting.”

Coming Full Circle

MAT student Shannon Klug champions bilingual education in the same kindergarten classroom where her own journey began.

“I never knew what I wanted to be growing up,” says Shannon Klug. “But I knew how I wanted my job to feel. I wanted to work in a field where heart matters and where every day is dynamic, flexible and exciting.”

Her career search has taken her back to her origin story. This fall, Klug, a native English speaker, will do her student teaching in Spanish – in the same Gates Elementary kindergarten classroom in Lake Forest where she was once a student. Making the experience even more memorable: She’ll be teaching alongside her own beloved kindergarten teacher.

“I am more excited about this journey beginning than anything else in my life,” Klug says. “My love for Spanish was born in that kinder classroom that I’ll now be teaching in, and that means so much to me. My teacher there, Sra. Maria Regueiro, was amazing. I have the best memories of her. And I feel so lucky to be paired with her because she is still so passionate about what she does.”

Klug is a student in the School of Education’s Master of Arts in Teaching (MAT) + Multiple Subject Credential program, which graduates students with the skills and licensure needed to teach all grade levels and content areas within the elementary school curriculum. Students who complete the program graduate with both a master’s degree and a teaching credential. She’s complementing her studies by concurrently enrolling in the School’s Bilingual Authorization Program (BAP).

“My experience so far has been everything I was hoping for,” she says. “There are not many programs out there that support bilingual and equitable education the way UCI does.”

Susan Guilfoyle, her bilingual coordinator in the School of Education, says Klug enhances the program, too.

“Shannon is the very first graduate of a local dual-language immersion K-12 program to enter our MAT+BAP program at UCI,” Guilfoyle says. “I’m thrilled to have her perspective in our program, and I know she’ll make an outstanding bilingual teacher. I hope we see many more students like Shannon, too, who have a personal experience attending these types of schools.”

Klug’s inspiration for entering UCI’s Bilingual Authorization Program was born out of her own positive experience, starting at Gates Elementary, in Saddleback Valley Unified’s award-winning K-12 Dual Language Immersion program. Now, Klug has the chance to help students and families benefit from the same path that helped bring her dreams into focus.

“I want to be an advocate for bilingual education, and for the community and global perspective it provides,” she says. “I hope to encourage families that it’s possible to come into the program as a native English speaker and become fluent within a couple of years. And to show them that embracing a culture outside of my own has been beneficial in so many ways.”

Klug was a Spanish major as an undergrad at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo. She has always enjoyed the sciences, too, and wants to give her students the space and support they need to feel safe and confident about pursuing any subject that piques their curiosity. “For instance, science was never my strongest subject as a student and I didn’t enjoy the way we learned it,” Klug recalls. “But once I connected with it, I loved learning new things in my science classes.

“With today’s new standards, I’m so glad that science is now more of a discovery process where students get to take charge of their learning. There’s less emphasis on memorization and performance, and more on practice and exploration. I’m so excited to connect science to my students’ worlds and help them become more confident.”

Ultimately, Klug wants to nurture a classroom environment where equality is valued and both teacher and student ideas are challenged in positive, respectful ways. That goal is part of Klug’s developing teaching philosophy, one she’s refining at UCI – founded upon her desire to engage with, enlighten and understand her students.

“I hope to make a difference in as many lives as I can,” Klug says. “We don’t always know what a student’s home life and support system is like, so sometimes being their teacher has an even greater impact than many people can imagine.”

Pursuing Technology with Purpose

............................................................................ Doctoral student Valery Vigil aims to increase Latinx interest in STEM fields through her Graduate Research Fellowship from the National Science Foundation.

Most doctoral students don’t receive a Graduate Research Fellowship from the National Science Foundation (NSF) in year one of their Ph.D. studies. But most doctoral students also didn’t start working on their proposals when they were still undergraduates.

Valery Vigil is not like most students.

She did, indeed, begin working on her NSF application during her senior year at UC Santa Barbara. Then she developed her proposal statements during her time in UCI’s Competitive Edge Research Program, a pre-entry summer research program that supports entering doctoral students from diverse backgrounds. By the time she actually began her Ph.D. program, she only needed a month to incorporate feedback from mentors and faculty before submitting her application.

Today, Vigil, just 23, is a third-year doctoral student in UCI’s School of Education, where she specializes in Teaching, Learning and Educational Improvement. And, yes, she is an NSF Graduate Research Fellow, working on a wide range of research in support of her proposal on “Innovations in Artificial Intelligence: Promoting Latinx Children’s Science Learning and Engagement with a Bilingual Conversational Agent.”

“As a first-generation college student who has battled imposter syndrome and self-doubt in my academic journey, receiving this fellowship and research opportunity was extremely validating,” Vigil says.

She hopes the fellowship helps her grow as a researcher, writer and communicator – all skills that will help her become a professor at a research institution. In line with her NSF research, Vigil wants to encourage Latinx and other underrepresented students to pursue higher education and careers in STEM. And she hopes to connect her research to her teaching – incorporating her findings on cognitive psychology and digital learning into AI-assisted science learning environments.

“I want to build on the values instilled in me by my immigrant parents,” Vigil says. “My goal in life is to pave the way for tens, hundreds or thousands more low-income minoritized children to find and seize the academic opportunities that have meant so much to me.”

For those who knew her as a child, Vigil’s academic achievements come as little surprise. She grew up in California’s Central Valley in the agricultural community of Ducor. Vigil’s elementary school was so small that multiple grade levels would often be grouped together. But her high school science classes opened up new worlds to explore. She enrolled in an Environmental Science Academy program to take advantage of additional STEM learning opportunities – even though it meant 12-hour days away from home, accounting for the two buses she had to take and her other extracurricular activities each afternoon.

Vigil’s enthusiasm for learning carried her through her psychology studies at UCSB, where she served as an undergraduate research assistant and contributed to the publication of a STEM children’s book.

Collectively, it’s all served as a launching pad for her time in the School of Education. In addition to her NSF Fellowship, Vigil has also co-authored papers in some of the leading publications on educational psychology and human-computer interaction, including Child Development and Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology.

“Valery’s deep understanding of the cultural and linguistic assets of the Latino community, combined with her knowledge of digital learning, child development and co-design processes, has allowed her to make extraordinary contributions to our Converse to Learn project,” says Mark Warschauer, professor of education. “I’m confident that she will become a true leader in research and development of AI-based learning media that can advance educational and social equity.”

But it’s not just savvy scholarship that Vigil has brought to the School. She’s also striven to create community and camaraderie among her peers, embracing every mentorship and service opportunity she can. Among other roles, she has served as coordinator of the School’s Digital Learning Lab, member of the DECADE CommunityBuilding Committee, and student representative on the Ph.D. Admissions Committee. For her efforts, she received the 2021-2022 Service Award from the Association of Doctoral Students in Education.

As one of her fellow SOE graduate students noted: “Valery has gone above and beyond for others as an early scholar in the program. She values community and it shows.”