Edge: Carolina Education Review - Volume 7

CAROLINA EDUCATION REVIEW

VOL. 7

A COLLABORATIVE APPROACH TO PREVENTING SUICIDE AMONG BLACK YOUTH Three UNC School of Education researchers team up to bring clarity — and critical preventative measures — to an alarming trend | Page 10 Strengthening parent-child conversations to help improve language and literacy | 6

How can we reimagine educational categorization to be more equitable? | 20

UNC School of Education hosts international anti-bullying conference for first time outside of Europe | 16

SCHOOL OF EDUCATION | UNIVERSIT Y OF NORTH CAROLINA AT CHAPEL HILL

Propel the World The UNC School of Education is a community of collaborative researchers, practitioners, students, staff, and engaged alumni. We are dedicated to realizing the transformative power of education and to achieving equity in educational access and outcomes for all learners in a diverse and just society. Our work is guided by four pillars:

Educating the Whole

We recognize that learning is dependent on the well-being of children, their families, and their communities. With a focus on underprivileged and underserved communities, we seek work with educators, parents, schools, communities, and beyond, in partnership with other UNC-Chapel Hill units, to empower learners and communities to thrive.

Empowering the Leaders of Tomorrow

We empower educators and scholars to lead; to think creatively, act with passion, and strive for excellence and equity for all. Equipped to succeed in their professions, our graduates also emerge as leaders in their institutions and communities, and mindfully contribute toward continually improving and transforming them.

Collaborating for the Greater Good

We seek productive and meaningful partnerships across disciplinary and institutional boundaries, working with all stakeholders within and beyond formal institutions of education. A well-educated, diverse, and empowered public is key to addressing social inequities and injustices; promoting and supporting the health and well-being of all; and ensuring the competitiveness and prosperity of our state and nation.

Advancing Knowledge, Driving Innovation

We produce cutting-edge knowledge, and pursue innovative, research-based solutions to the most pressing problems of educational theory, practice, programs, and policy in North Carolina, the nation, and beyond.

Edge: Carolina Education Review is produced by the UNC School of Education.

Editor Jill V. Hamm Interim Dean and William C. Friday Distinguished Professor of Education Managing Editor Morgan Ellis Assistant Managing Editor Brittany Cowan Read more at ed.unc.edu/edge EDGE: CAROLINA EDUCATION REVIEW

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From the Dean school with a great deal of prior knowledge. Partnering with teachers, she works to connect students with texts that activate that prior knowledge and, ultimately, accelerate their reading comprehension.

We have faculty members who are laser-focused on ensuring the well-being, safety, and mental health of young people. Their work seeks to create positive school climates and helps to prevent bullying and adolescent suicide. They also work to train the next generation of educators who will likely serve as many K-12 students’ first and only mental health professionals.

Greetings from Chapel Hill.

I am excited to share another excellent issue of Edge: Carolina Education Review with you. In every issue since this magazine’s launch seven years ago, readers have met incredible researchers at the UNC School of Education who bring big ideas and diverse perspectives to the most pressing and persistent challenges we face in classrooms, schools, and communities — big and small, online and in-person, rural and urban.

In those seven years, we have nearly quadrupled our annual research expenditure; in 2023, that total was $22.2 million. As associate dean for research and faculty development during that time, I had an upclose view of the extraordinary creativity, vision, and dedication of many to achieve that growth. I can assure you that there is more groundbreaking research on the way — some of it you will glimpse in the pages ahead.

Within this issue, you will read about a range of work happening and see high-potential synergies that exist at the UNC School of Education. These are just some of the ways we Propel the World.

You will learn about the work of three faculty members dedicated to improving literacy from distinctly different perspectives. Kathryn Leech, Ph.D., who recently received an NSF CAREER Award, will bring her research around parent-child conversations — and their importance in the development of language and literacy — to rural North Carolina communities. You will also meet two recent faculty additions — Christian Ehret, Ph.D., and Courtney Hattan, Ph.D. Ehret works to understand student learning and literacy as those students navigate an increasingly digitized world.

Hattan’s research acknowledges that students come to

Dorothy Espelage, Ph.D., William C. Friday Distinguished Professor of Education and an internationally renowned bullying prevention researcher, organized the 2023 World Anti-Bullying Forum, the first time the biennial event has traveled outside of Europe. Inside, you will see highlights from the 3-day event, which brought together the world’s leading anti-bullying researchers, practitioners, advocates, and policymakers in North Carolina.

You will read about the unique spirit of collaboration that exists at the School and Carolina. School counseling faculty member Dana Griffin, Ph.D.; education policy faculty member Constance Lindsay, Ph.D.; and school psychology faculty member Marisa Marraccini, Ph.D., joined forces to take an interdisciplinary approach to understand the alarming increase of Black youth suicide — and then provide effective preventative solutions.

You will also hear from Thad Domina, Ph.D., Robert Wendell Eaves Sr. Distinguished Professor in Educational Leadership and a leading education policy scholar, whose most recent book brings a sociological lens to educational categorization and asks us to consider the harm it can cause to students in schools and well after they graduate. It is a fascinating read that also shows us new and better ways to approach how we categorize students.

Happy reading.

Jill V. Hamm Interim Dean William C. Friday Distinguished Professor of Education

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Lessons in Literacy As a high school teacher, Christian Ehret observed the importance of digital media in the lives of his students. As a researcher, he wants to understand the complexity of literacy and learning in an increasingly digitized world.

Story by Abigail Keller, UNC Research Communications Photography by Megan Mendenhall, UNC Research Communications

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hen Christian Ehret, Ph.D., was 5 years old, his parents would place a stack of books next to his bed for him to read before falling asleep each night. In middle school, “The Old Man and the Sea” by Ernest Hemingway became his favorite. He’s always been drawn to books about nature that involve adventure and perseverance.

So, it’s no surprise that his career landed him in the world of literacy as an associate professor within the UNC School of Education.

As the world has become more digitized, children are

experiencing literacy in ways previous generations never did. YouTube videos, Instagram reels, video games, and other media are replacing dictionaries, textbooks, and written letters.

Digital opportunities have opened doors for people to learn about whatever topics they’re interested in — but have revealed unexpected repercussions, such as a loss of face-to-face interactions and an increase in misinformation.

The word “literacy” generally refers to reading and writing skills, but when you tack on the word “digital” to it, the term encompasses so much more.

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Pedagogical pursuits The Edge: Christian Ehret’s research examines the emotional complexities of literacy and learning in children and youths’ increasingly digitized lives. That research takes a critical approach to technology’s role in enhancing community and in fracturing human connection, in deepening youths’ sense of self and in depleting youths’ wellbeing. His projects have focused on how adolescents learn to communicate and build community through affectively intense moments of esports play (competitive videogaming) in urban youth centers and how adolescents develop critical, algorithmic literacy through everyday social media use.

The American Library Association’s Digital Literacy Task Force offers this definition: “Digital literacy is the ability to use information and communication technologies to find, evaluate, create, and share information, requiring both cognitive and technical skills.”

In the ever-changing digital literacy landscape, Ehret analyzes the emotional dimensions of how people engage digitally to communicate, create, and connect.

Specifically, he focuses on how technology enhances community, deepens children’s identity, and affects their well-being.

“My research is centered around not just how kids are using digital media, but also how we can make educational experiences better — not just in school but in other contexts where kids are learning that you don’t normally think of,” Ehret said.

Although Ehret was interested in books from an early age, he didn’t always know he wanted to teach.

Growing up in Savannah, Georgia, he didn’t have to travel far to follow his educational aspirations at the University of Georgia, where he received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees.

Ehret taught classes at UGA while completing his comparative literature graduate coursework and writing a thesis on Herman Melville’s poetry.

Christian Ehret

He often found himself in the library, exploring his assignments alone and in silence. It was during this time that he realized that he didn’t want a future of isolation but instead to be around people and continue teaching.

One student created theirs using the online game “World of Warcraft.”

Even though he had already completed all his comparative literature degree coursework, he switched into the English education master’s program, graduating in 2006.

Ehret said he will always credit his teaching experiences for inspiring his research. In 2009, he decided to pursue a Ph.D. in Learning, Teaching, and Diversity from Vanderbilt University.

That same year, Ehret became a high school English teacher in Athens, Georgia, teaching all academic levels.

“I realized that I kept seeing how digital media meant something to teenagers in their everyday lives,” Ehret said. “It can be used to make them known differently to us as teachers in terms of their knowledge and ability. That drove me to want to understand more.”

He let his students create their own blogs to help them learn about web design and writing. But they learned so much more. He watched their creativity evolve as they personalized their sites and their relationships grow as they interacted with one another in new ways.

“What a lot of what people are doing online is very different now,” he says. “There’s some commonalities, but back then it was really important to identity development.”

For a different project on “All the Pretty Horses” by Cormac McCarthy, he tasked them with an interpretation analysis of the novel in any format they wanted.

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Associate Professor

Connecting pediatric patients While working toward his doctoral degree, Ehret spent three years in Nashville, Tennessee, developing a research project on teaching and interacting with long-term patients in children’s hospitals schools. To help bring a sense of normalcy to these students, Ehret taught the typical literacy lessons but also customized each patient’s education for their situation.

He wanted to better understand what they were already doing themselves in the hospital to learn, stay connected to friends and

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Digital literacy has made me the kind of researcher who doesn’t do research on people but does research with people.

family, and foster a sense of hope and community. Then, he could use that knowledge to inform a more youth-centered design process for his research.

Ehret involved multiple practitioners, which included hospital teachers, health care teams, and play therapists, to ensure these programs could be sustained over time and positively impact patients.

Teens with cystic fibrosis (CF) could learn more about their condition by creating their own YouTube videos on a shared channel. Or they could interact with other kids their age through game servers like Minecraft, since people with CF must limit their in-person contact with other CF patients to reduce exposure to germs and bacteria.

Additionally, the hospital school provided young patients the resources to produce videos about their interests, which helped them form a stronger bond with others and learn important skills like media production.

“When you’re feeling alone in a moment of uncertainty, doing something right and creating something therapeutic is what keeps us going,” Ehret said.

“Finding humanity in that space is important, and as kids talk about their creation, it connects them with other kids in that

virtual space.”

Exploring esports education Before coming to Carolina in August 2023, Ehret was a professor at McGill University in Montreal. During his time there, he focused on creating competitive video gaming teams to teach youth how to learn and coordinate in the esports arena.

For this work, he partnered with urban community centers in Montreal, focusing on those serving socially and financially marginalized communities.

The city is also where Ubisoft, a video game publisher known for games like “Assassin’s Creed” and “Just Dance,” has one of its largest headquarters.

Using the same design-based methods he incorporated in his hospital school research, Ehret brought in Ubisoft employees to not only help the young gamers interact with each other digitally but to learn from them.

Now, at the UNC School of Education, Ehret hopes to continue these research projects while writing about new and interesting topics.

In October 2023, he published a research article about #BookTok — a trend where creators recommend, review, and discuss books for readers by making engaging videos about them — and how these algorithm-driven social media platforms impact digital literacy.

Whether working with youth in the hospital or students in Carolina classrooms, he wants his teaching and research to inspire hope in the world to come.

“I think the most important thing is that digital literacy has made me the kind of researcher who doesn’t do research on people but does research with people,” Ehret said.

This story first appeared at endeavors.unc.edu, a publication of UNC Research.

The seven-year project was recently re-funded, and Ehret hopes to dig even deeper into the emotional components of esports and digital literacy.

“We’ve tried to focus youth on learning what to do with their energy to help them reflect not just on social development and team development but also on moments outside of gaming,” Ehret said.

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Building blocks of child literacy?

Conversations.

Kathryn Leech’s research is uncovering the power of parent-child conversations in the development of language and literacy. A new CAREER Award from the NSF will help her bring this work to rural communities, broadening our understanding of literacy.

Story by Lacy McKee, Bridget Bendezu, Ella Bartosik, and Kiki Kozak

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“H

ow do flowers bloom?” “How do we have a heart?”

To adults, these questions sound simple, maybe even silly. To children, they unlock the world, representing the very beginnings of one of the most crucial developments in childhood: the growth of language. For Kathryn Leech, Ph.D., an assistant professor at the UNC School of Education, that development and growth form the building blocks of child literacy.

In her research, Leech is committed to uncovering the power behind these parent-child interactions, focusing on language and literacy development in Pre-K children and how they develop these foundations socially, in a family or home context.

Activities such as mealtime, playtime, and bedtime may seem like normal family routines, but according to Leech, these contexts are pivotal moments for language acquisition. She has continued to investigate and work with families to improve these interactions throughout her academic journey — from graduate studies at the University of Maryland to postdoctoral research at Boston University and Harvard University to now at UNC-Chapel Hill.

As the recent recipient of the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program Award, Leech will further her research to optimize parent-child interactions in scientific learning through book reading, a common context that exposes and initiates conversation between parents and children.

This award will also enable her to interact directly with a population traditionally underrepresented in research – children and their families from rural communities – thus broadening our understanding of literacy and promoting family involvement in science education.

Learning through language Leech’s research journey began as an undergraduate at Kenyon College, where she considered a career path in public policy or education policy. It wasn’t until she worked with an Early Head Start preschool in rural Ohio to fulfill service-learning requirements that she realized her interest in language development during early childhood. Observing how children learned language in the classroom inspired her to study what is known as “language-mediated learning” or the use of language to facilitate learning, memory, and problemsolving in social settings.

Building on these early experiences and interests, her work has helped advance an interdisciplinary approach to the field, emphasizing that it is not just decoding text and comprehension that impacts literacy. It’s the everyday interactions that caregivers have with children that help build a foundation for future reading success.

“That’s where I really got interested in these questions about what promotes language development,” she said. “How can we work with parents to encourage them to promote their child’s language development?”

Leech’s research methods typically involve her and her team members directly observing families in lab and home environments, gathering a language sample of a child and parent during an activity like interacting with a toy or reading a book. This transcript is coded, and

language is categorized based on certain influential factors for the child’s language learning. From there, the researchers design interventions, such as encouraging questions and providing additional conversation prompts for caregivers, to measure the effectiveness of those interactions in language development.

One of the main factors Leech measures in these conversations is the presence of decontextualized language, a form of language that is not grounded in the present. These conversations can look like the parent referencing something that happened in the past or something that will happen in the future, as well as more complex topics, including explanations about how things work.

For example, Leech created and has studied the impact of using R.E.A.D.Y. — or Recall past events with your child; Explain unfamiliar concepts and words; Ask questions; Discuss future events; You can make a difference in your child’s future academic success — to encourage parents to incorporate certain types of language into their daily interactions with their children, such as recalling past events, explaining new words and concepts, asking lots of questions, and discussing the future. This acronym is designed to be parentfriendly and easily rememberable to encourage the parent to use more decontextualized, complex language to increase their child’s literacy.

“What we found in our work is that parents’ questions directed to

The Edge: Kathryn Leech specializes in children’s language and literacy development during early childhood, taking an interdisciplinary view and collaborating with researchers in developmental psychology, linguistics, and speech and hearing sciences. Her work seeks to understand how children’s social interaction with caregivers supports that development.

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children support child language development because they encourage the child to talk more,” she explained. “So when the parent asks something like ‘Why were you so sad?’, that opens up the conversation, and the child answers with more than one word and encourages back-and-forth conversation, an experience we know is very helpful for language learning during this age.”

Capitalizing on curiosity Leech classifies her research on the role of parent-child interactions within three interrelated themes.

First, she investigates the contexts and specific aspects of conversations that foster language and literacy development. Second, she aims to develop interventions to enhance literacy and learning so parents can have more complex, authentic conversations with their children.

Her goal is not to try to change what families do but rather to reinforce the positive practices already present in their interactions.

“We develop interventions and call them parent-focused interventions.

The idea is based on research indicating that providing parents with information about these types of conversations, as well as building their self-efficacy and their confidence as an important teacher for their child, is a way that we can encourage parents to engage in more of these types of conversations,” she said. “We test whether we can provide parents with this information and whether that then corresponds to an increase in their child’s language and literacy development.”

Her third theme focuses on how children learn in these interactions, more recently in the area of scientific thinking. This research interest began while transcribing parent-child conversations in graduate school and realizing how children learn more than

just vocabulary and complex language, but also the foundations of abstract scientific concepts, a type of contextualized language.

This final theme has encompassed the majority of what Leech is focusing on now in her research at UNC, measuring topics from how children learn about electricity to how blood is pumped in the body.

“Three- to five-year-olds ask a ton of questions. They’re extremely curious, and this is what we consider to be a prime period to capitalize on that curiosity, to encourage parents to ask questions and provide explanations. We think this is a way to get children interested in science.”

Focusing on authenticity Much of Leech’s research in early childhood scientific learning comes from observing conversations and designing interventions that are authentic and relevant to each family dynamic and culture. Central to this approach is moving away from formal learning contexts, like museums and classrooms, to focus on interactions at home.

During her post-doctoral studies at Boston University, Leech studied children’s conversations with parents around exhibits at the Boston Museum of Science. This mutually beneficial relationship allowed her to gather research and for the museum to gain insights into the exhibits’ effectiveness.

However, Leech realized that studying these conversations in this space was not gathering an accurate representation of all families living in the area. Museums are often situated in cities and may be financially inaccessible to some families.

“I wanted my current work to focus specifically on the home because we know that, for kids this age, science is everywhere in their everyday lives,” Leech said. “How can we understand how these conversations are occurring in the

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Kathryn Leech Assistant Professor home between caregivers and their children, particularly for rural families where there may not be a museum that’s easily accessible?”

Being in the home also allows Leech and researchers to expand their methodology by gathering a larger sample of a parent-child interaction.

With technologies like the LENA Recorder — a small, child-safe recording device worn by children known as the “talk pedometer” — they can record research subjects throughout the day, providing comprehensive snapshot of a child’s life and interactions.

“Because children’s language and literacy development is affected by many factors, having multiple measures often gives you a richer picture of what’s going on,” she said.

In Leech’s future research with the NSF Grant, she also plans to collaborate with the parents themselves in crafting specific interventions through co-design workshops, making sure the conversations are authentic to the families participating in the research.

“We realize that we want the families that we adapt the interventions for to understand: ‘Is this relevant to you?

What do you value?’ and then make our adaptations accordingly.”

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Following is a Q&A with Leech, who talked about plans with the NSF Career Award, collaborating to develop an AI tool, and where her work is headed.

during book reading. Could you share more about how this app works and its potential impact?

How do you see AI affecting your future research on child literacy?

What does this NSF CAREER Award mean to you? What will you be able to do with this award, and how will it impact your research and our understanding of parent-child literacy?

The most important thing to say is that I do not see AI as replacing adults in these interactions. We’ll learn so much more in the coming years about how children learn from AI-powered technologies. The availability of it is so new and widely accessible, and this principle really guided the design of this project. We wanted to see how an AI-powered conversational agent can support or augment conversations between child and parent.

I was excited because this was an opportunity for me to align all three of my research themes together in one project, which hadn’t happened before.

Another aspect I am excited about is that in addition to a research plan, all NSF CAREER projects have to include a plan to influence education in some way. My plan is focused on the Human Development and Family Science (HDFS) undergraduate major to develop and help to formalize more undergraduate research participation.

The students with whom I’ll be working will be working on my research project. At the same time, I hope to contribute to a more formalized track students can take, getting more students interested in research earlier in their time at Carolina. When we get them interested in their sophomore year, they have time to build up their experience and set them up for potentially going on to graduate school or whatever their next step is.

I went to a college where there weren’t graduate students, so the research experiences were focused on undergraduates. I’ve always had undergraduates in my research group, and they’re super important to the work I do, so I think this is very rewarding to be able to contribute hopefully to the HDFS program to make something that is sustainable.

You also have a collaboration with colleagues at MIT that involves developing an AIpowered app to aid parents

We designed an AI-powered conversational agent that is used during a book-reading interaction.

The parent reads a book to the child, and the conversational agent is designed to listen for marker words in the text. When it hears a word, it chimes in with a question to encourage the parent and child to have a conversation using R.E.A.D.Y. talk. We have tested this in different studies and found that it does work and that for the most part, parents and children enjoy the experience. It increases talk during book reading, and the children are significantly more engaged when they’re reading with this agent.

We just finished a study where we measured the child’s vocabulary learning and found relative to kids who didn’t read with the agent, reading with the agent was associated with greater gains in vocabulary. So we’re seeing some learning from these experiences.

We also are excited because we built the original architecture of this agent in 2019, without the large language models that are now available. Our team and MIT, which is responsible for the software development part of it, are making good headway into a second version that incorporates large language models like OpenAI so we can do a lot more than what

we were able to initially.

Where do you see your research headed in the next few years?

I’m really interested in scaling my work more than I have early on. I’m still relatively early in my career, and so I think now that I have accumulated some of the evidence for some of my findings, I’m excited to develop interventions that have much more of a wide-scale impact than some of the proof-of-concept work that I’ve done previously.

Technology comes into play as a potential method to disseminate this type of information in a much wider way, for example through phones and texts. I can see providing interventions through conversational agents as a scaffold where we don’t require having a human to train parents or to coach parents like we currently do.

Whether that is effective, that’s an empirical question, but I can see us moving in that way. The reason why is not to do it because it’s cool, but to do it because we can make a bigger impact on more people given the resources that we have.

R EF ER ENCE S Leech, K., Wei, R., Harring, J. R., & Rowe, M. L. (2018). A brief parent-focused intervention to improve preschoolers’ conversational skills and school readiness. Developmental Psychology, 54(1), 15-28.

Leech, K. A., Wheat, D., Rowe, M., Blatt, J., & Dede, C. (2023). “Literacy is everywhere!”: using digital technology to broaden how parents view the home literacy environment.

Applied Developmental Science, 27(4), 389-402.

Leech, K. A., Haber, A. S., Jalkh, Y., & Corriveau, K. H. (2020). Embedding scientific explanations into storybooks impacts children’s scientific discourse and learning. Frontiers in Psychology, 11, 1016.

Leech, K. A. & Rowe, M. L. (2021). An intervention to increase conversational turns between parents and young children. Journal of Child Language, 48(2), 399-412.

Lin, G. C., Schoenfeld, I., Thompson, M., Xia, Y., Uz-Bilgin, C., & Leech, K. (2022, June). “What color are the fish’s scales?” Exploring parents’ and children’s natural interactions with a childfriendly virtual agent during storybook reading.

Interaction Design and Children (pp. 185-195).

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With family and community involvement, and JEDI-influenced culture, schools can help prevent suicide among Black youth A unique collaboration between researchers from across the UNC School of Education seeks to bring clarity — and critical preventative measures — to an alarming trend seen among Black youth.

Story by Claire Cusick

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n recent decades, the rate of suicide among Black boys, children and adolescents, has shown an alarming increase.

However, most cultural discourse on suicide prevention is framed around non-Latinx White (NLW) culture, rendering suicidality in Black youth nearly “invisible.” (Bath and Njoroge, 2021) Three UNC School of Education professors from across disciplines joined together to better understand why the increase is happening, to bring necessary and overdue visibility to this line of scholarly inquiry, and, most importantly, to protect this most vulnerable group of young people.

Marisa Marraccini, Constance Lindsay, and Dana Griffin, together with a colleague from Texas A&M University and two UNC-Chapel Hill graduate students, published “A Trauma- and Justice, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (JEDI)-Informed Approach to Suicide Prevention in School: Black Boys’ Lives Matter”

Left to right: Constance Lindsay, Marisa Marraccini, and Dana Griffin in School Psychology Review as a call to action for addressing suicide prevention in Black boys.

That publication, a first step in their collaboration, outlined action steps for school psychologists, calling for a trauma-informed approach to better support Black students. They aren’t stopping there.

Together, they are examining potential missed opportunities for mental health care and areas of Black youths’ school experiences that may lead to increased risk of suicide. Then, they plan to develop evidence-based guidance that will enable school professionals to take a more active role in preventing

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The Edge: The UNC School of Education boasts a range of scholarly expertise that creates impact across education. In a unique collaboration, School faculty members from school counseling, school psychology, and education policy are combining their expertise to provide solutions to address an urgent need and an understudied research area — the increasing rate of suicide by Black male youth.

Together, they hope to better understand the underlying factors and then provide critical prevention efforts.

suicide among Black boys.

Providing clarity Lindsay, Griffin, and Marraccini each came to this project with motivation for improving systems of care for Black students, who have historically been overlooked in each of their research areas.

Lindsay, Ph.D., who focuses on policies and practices to close racial achievement gaps in education, has found that having an educator of color has the most salient effects for persistently lowincome Black boys. Her research found that having a Black teacher for one year in elementary school raised long-run educational attainment for Black male students, especially for those from lowincome households.

For the most disadvantaged Black males, Lindsay and a team estimated that exposure to a Black teacher in elementary school reduced high school dropout rates by 39% and raised college-going aspirations.

“I’m always interested in thinking

For many students, school counselors are the first and sole provider of mental health support. However, in many schools, school counselors are not seen as mental health workers, and as such, are often overlooked as a mental health resource in schools.

what will make both school and their lives better because we have many years of longitudinal data available here in North Carolina and can answer many interesting questions about students’ lives,” she said.

As a school counselor, researcher, and faculty member who prepares the next generation of effective school counselors, Griffin, Ph.D., said that schools need better approaches when it comes to mental health, especially for marginalized youth.

“School counselors have the capacity and position to address the mental well-being of students,” Griffin said. “For many students, school counselors are the first and sole provider of mental health support. However, in many schools, school counselors are not seen as mental health workers, and as such, are often overlooked as a mental health resource in schools.”

Griffin, who grew up in rural Virginia, said she knows well the need rural communities have for better and increased mental

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health services, especially. Griffin currently leads the U.S. Department of Education-funded Helping Heels program, a five-year project that is placing school counselorsin-training in rural high-needs elementary and middle schools to help close gaps in mental health care access.

Marraccini, Ph.D., conducts research that aims to prevent adolescent suicide and works to promote child and adolescent mental health in the context of their daily lives, specifically school settings.

She knew from earlier research that school connectedness — when students feel connected to their school community and that adults and peers in school care about their learning and about them as individuals — can have a protective effect against suicide.

For their collective work, Marraccini said the team began by reviewing literature across different ethnic, racial, sexual, and gender identity

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groups, and looked at school connectedness specifically.

from different research perspectives and methods, Lindsay said.

However, in that review, they began to see that a positive relationship with an adult as a protective effect against suicide was relatively unexplored for Black youth. A more comprehensive approach might be required.

“We have several colleagues interested in improving schools for students,” she said. “We’re figuring out the best data and the best methods to get a good answer for this problem.”

“When we really begin to disaggregate the data, it becomes less and less clear for Black youth specifically,” she said. “Feeling connected to school is important, but we need to learn more about how school connectedness fits within the broader context for Black youth, including system-level risks such as systemic racism.”

The three also wrote their conceptual paper to begin to create clarity. What did existing research show? What did it not show?

They examined more deeply how current school practices — staff exhibiting implicit and explicit bias, a culture that encourages nebulous “grit” in the face of systemic racism — intersect with psychological risk factors to prevent or exacerbate suicide risk in Black boys. Because of its complexity, this issue benefits

Lindsay pointed out that a lot of research shows the positive impact of Black youth having a Black teacher, but less about understanding why it does.

“This type of collaboration can uncover what’s behind these relationships,” she said.

An upstream approach to a long-standing problem American schools exist inside American culture and cannot consider themselves exempt from historical oppressions forced upon Black people. American schools legally excluded Black students until 1954, and from that, systemic inequities remain.

The three researchers believe one current threat to Black students may be the persistently high rate of disproportionality regarding discipline and behaviors for Black youth, a policy area Lindsay’s work

Dana Griffin

Griffin, an associate professor in the School Counseling program, currently leads a $2.27 million U.S. Department of Education grant that places school counselors-in-training in two rural North Carolina counties to provide critical mental health supports for underserved students. has focused on and worked to address. In a recently published article, Lindsay and a colleague found that Black teachers are less likely to refer Black students

Five protective factors associated with lower suicide risk in Black youth 1. Strong family relationships, closeness, and support 2. Religion and spirituality 3. Community and social support 4. Personal factors (e.g. academics, emotional well-being) and positive racial identity 5. Environmental factors (e.g. housing, income, employment)

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The need for trauma- and JEDI-informed practices to support Black youth •

A recent meta-analysis indicates that, compared with non-Latinx White (NLW) youth, Black students are more than two and a half times as likely to be disciplined in school.

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More than 75% of students of color in need of mental health services do not receive treatment, especially among urban and Black students.

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If students are assessed for mental health concerns, they are more likely to be diagnosed with conduct, behavioral, or learning disorders than NLW youth, and less likely to receive treatment for internalizing symptoms.

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These diagnoses are often associated with symptoms seen by educators as “problem behaviors,” leading to punitive practices that reinforce the school-toprison pipeline.

for discretionary education placements. In previous work, they found the same for harsh exclusionary discipline practices.

Compared to NLW youth, Black students are more than two and a half times as likely to be disciplined in school.

the school-based professionals who can provide the upstream care needed in these situations.

But when there are huge caseloads and/or staffing shortages, Griffin said school counselors are often not able to do the work they are trained and there to do.

Professionals interpreting behaviors as “acting out” or as so-called “problem behaviors” may be missing cries for help that go unheard.

“What we are seeing now with staffing shortages is that counselors are being pulled into classrooms to be substitute teachers, which means that they’re not addressing the mental health needs of the students in the schools” Griffin said.

In her work and research to prevent suicide, Marraccini wants schools to start further upstream, well before school staff members assess a single child’s behavior.

How can schools put measures in place to prevent suicide, to address risk before it occurs?

“There are a lot of pieces coming together that made me curious about whether disproportionate disciplinary referrals are a specifically suicide-related risk,” she said. “I wondered whether schools are missing opportunities to provide mental health care when they see trauma-related symptoms. Are they misinterpreting those symptoms as ‘behavioral problems’?”

For Griffin, school counselors are

And school counselors can only do so much. Counselor education training programs need to teach school counselors best practices for working with and alongside families and communities to address mental health of their youth, along with a need to understand the stigma related to mental health that can exist in the Black community. For example, Griffin said, sometimes there are beliefs around mental health and well-being that aren’t always positive.

“Sometimes the overly simplistic

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Constance Lindsay

Lindsay, an assistant professor, conducts research on policies and practices that help to close racial achievement gaps in education. reaction is that a student, parent, or caregiver should turn to faith, to pray,” she said. “That solution doesn’t work for everyone.”

Serving the most vulnerable students’ mental health needs Working closely with families and communities is one of the JEDIinformed frameworks that the

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authors recommend.

other two on this project.

JEDI stands for justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion. A traumaand JEDI-informed approach to preventing, identifying, assessing, and intervening against suicide in Black boys is holistic and considers “the historical and ongoing dehumanization of Black boys to help facilitate a change in the contemporary narrative about Black lives,” Marraccini, Lindsay, and Griffin write. “Instead of taking a deficitoriented approach that places blame on Black boys, a trauma-informed approach fosters compassion and empathy, allowing individuals to see the impact of trauma that may have previously been invisible to them.”

“This has been one of the best research teams I’ve been a part of,” Griffin said. “We acknowledge the expertise we all bring to the table.

We talk, we listen to each other, take ideas, and then proceed. These are the type of people I love to work with.

They’re passionate about it and are open to suggestions and hearing other perspectives. I think that makes the work we are doing even stronger – a true interdisciplinary approach to suicide prevention in Black youth.”

This framework also includes “recognition and nurturing of Black cultural strengths and resilience,” which “aims to enhance protective factors against suicide, eradicate aggressive disciplinary referrals, and lay the groundwork for implementing culturally grounded, school-based suicide prevention efforts focused on supporting Black boys,” they write.

The solution requires collaboration among researchers with different areas of expertise, practitioners, and community members. Prevention experts must work with school counselors because school counselors know their environment the best. And that partnership must find its way to changing policy. The solution is not “yes or no,” it’s “yes and,” Griffin said.

Creating needed conversations Marraccini, Lindsay, and Griffin agree that more research is needed. This first paper focused on Black boys, but Black girls also endure disproportionate discipline in schools and face higher suicide risk than NLW girls.

“Statistical disparities are usually so outsized for Black boys that it draws attention, but that doesn’t mean that things are great for Black girls,” Lindsay said. “That’s one of the reasons why I’m excited about this project and why it’s so important. There’s a lot of nuance.

There is an overall disparity, there’s so much that is behind it, that’s driving it. I think we’ll have the opportunity to dig deep.”

Marraccini said she hopes the paper’s inclusion in School Psychology Review will lead to more awareness among other fields.

“What are some things that students need in school that we can start to build?,” Griffin continued.

“Having a diverse teacher workforce is a piece of it; having support and resources in the school; having a welcoming school environment.

There are a lot of different ways that we could intervene. Bringing all of our different lenses to the table allows us to do that.”

“A big hope was that we could outline the historical and the sociopolitical context of what has happened and continues to happen in our country, so as we’re trying to work with families, teachers, and administrators in the context of seeing behaviors that can be considered, ‘problem behaviors,’ we pause and think about all the other co-occurring issues, including trauma,” she said.

Each researcher said they benefited from engaging with the

“The big takeaway is that we should be looking at and assessing

Marisa Marraccini

Marraccini, an associate professor, aims to promote child and adolescent mental health in the context of their daily lives – school settings.

Her research focuses on suicide prevention and supporting youth with mental health challenges. behaviors through a lens that is trauma-informed — not only because this is what’s right to do for a child in any given moment, but because it may also be an important piece of the puzzle toward suicide prevention in the long-run.”

R EF ER ENCE S Marraccini ME, Lindsay CA, Griffin D, Greene MJ, Simmons KT, Ingram KM. A Trauma- and Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (JEDI)Informed Approach to Suicide Prevention in School: Black Boys’ Lives Matter. School Psychology Review. 2023;52(3):292-315. doi: 10.1080/2372966x.2021.2010502.

Bath E, & Njoroge WF (2020). Coloring Outside the Lines: Making Black and Brown Lives Matter in the Prevention of Youth Suicide.

Journal of American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, 60 (1), 17–21.

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UNC School of Education hosts first World Anti-Bullying Forum outside of Europe

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he UNC School of Education hosted the 2023 World Anti-Bullying Forum, advancing the worldwide fight against bullying, over three days — Oct. 25-27 — in Raleigh, N.C. WABF 2023 marked the first time the biennial event was hosted outside of Europe.

Dorothy Espelage, Ph.D., William C. Friday Distinguished Professor of Education and an international leader in bullying prevention research, organized and coemceed WABF 2023, which was

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powered by BRP – a global leader in powersports products.

The event drew nearly 600 attendees – researchers, practitioners, policymakers, educators, youth, and additional professionals representing more than 30 countries – who presented at or engaged in more than 70 events, including keynotes, workshops, symposia, paper sessions, a poster session, and more.

During the opening ceremony, Fouad Abd-El-Khalick, then dean of the School, delivered greetings and underscored the ways in which the

School’s vision, mission, and guiding pillars, as well as research and programming, align with and support the goals and work of the Forum. He also noted the need for continued, wide-ranging collaboration in research and implementation to move the needle on the challenge of bullying in schools.

The opening ceremony also featured remarks from now-Her Royal Highness The Queen of Denmark and North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper.

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Opposite page: A youth panel focused on online safety — presented by the UNC School of Education, UNESCO, Friends, and the Walt Disney Company — was one of several highlights on the first day of WABF 2023. Above: Dorothy Espelage and Sameer Hinduja welcome attendees during the WABF 2023 opening ceremony. Left: Now-Her Royal Highness The Queen of Denmark talks with youth panel participants. Below: Fouad AbdEl-Khalick introduces North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper during the opening ceremony.

Photos by Jafar Fallahi

Hosted by

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Above, left: Attendees engage during a poster session with more than 80 posters presented.

Above, right: Sameer Hinduja leads a panel focused on social media, featuring employees from TikTok, Instagram, and Snapchat. Left: Dorothy Espelage is presented with the 2023 BRNET-WABF Career Achievement Award. Below, left: Debra Pepler presents her keynote, “Moments Matter: A Shift in School-based Bullying Prevention with a Developmental-Relational Perspective,” in a conversation with R. Bradley Snyder from the Talking About Kids podcast. Bottom, right: Enrique Chaux presents the keynote “¿Top-down or bottom-up?: Insights from 20 Years of Socio-emotional Policies to Prevent Bullying in Colombia.”

Photos by Jafar Fallahi

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Above: Faculty member Dorothy Espelage, North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper, then-Dean Fouad Abd-ElKhalick, and now-Her Royal Highness The Queen of Denmark pose for a photo during the WABF 2023 opening ceremony. Right: Attendees listen during a panel discussion. Below: Christine Babkine, BRP director of corporate social responsibility, addresses attendees on the first day of WABF 2023.

Photos by Jafar Fallahi

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Schooled and sorted:

Rethinking categorization Thad Domina’s new book, “Schooled and Sorted: How Educational Categories Create Inequality,” explores a ubiquitous practice in U.S. schools, categorization, and how it creates disparities — but doesn’t have to.

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or the last 20+ years, Thurston “Thad” Domina, Ph.D., the Robert Wendell Eaves Sr. Distinguished Professor in Educational Leadership, has studied every level of education, utilizing various analytical tools to understand the impact of families, schools, and educational experiences on child development and transition into adulthood. His work continues to report on educational disparities and focuses on educational policies and strategies that promote the development of more equitable communities.

A new book — “Schooled and Sorted: How Educational Categories Create Inequality” — co-authored by Domina and Andrew M. Penner, Ph.D., a professor of sociology at the University of California, Irvine, and Emily K. Penner, Ph.D., an associate professor of education at the University of California, Irvine, explores disparities created by a ubiquitous practice in education — categorization.

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on all of their tests got platinum IDs; students who scored in the top two categories on all of their tests got gold IDs; everybody else got white IDs. The school required students to wear these IDs all day long and even created express lunch lines and other goodies to reward students with platinum and gold IDs.

Thurston “Thad” Domina Robert Wendell Eaves Sr. Distinguished Professor in Educational Leadership

As soon as children enroll into schools, they are placed into categories beginning with “kindergartner.” From there, they might fall into categories such as English language learner, honor roll student, or free lunch recipient, among many others.

In “Schooled and Sorted,” Domina and his co-authors explore processes of educational categorization to explain the complex relationship between education and social inequality — and to identify strategies that can help build more just educational systems.

Following is a Q&A with Domina about the new book — its origins, the harms categorization can cause beyond schooling, and more.

What was the impetus for this book? Was there something you were you seeing in your research or your peers’ research that made this so necessary?

The school’s principal thought he’d come up with a way to give students an incentive to succeed academically – something like the varsity letters that athletes wear on their class jackets. I worried that those colorcoded IDs would create inequalities that would follow kids through their lives. I eventually got the chance to study the school, and it turned out I was right to worry. The kids who got low-status white IDs based on just a single missed question on a test looked worse on a wide range of later outcomes than nearly identical kids who had just eked out a gold ID. And this difference was particularly pronounced for kids of color and kids from low-income families.

That story got me thinking hard about educational categories, which made me realize that much of the work we do around education and inequality is all about educational categories — classrooms, honor rolls, academic tracks, credentials, and degrees — and the way those categories interact with broader social categories like race and gender. In the book, we argue that understanding those categorical processes is crucial for understanding education as a social institution. We think of schools as places for teaching and learning — and they are. But that’s

One day, at least 10 years ago, I got a phone call from a reporter who had learned about a school that had begun giving students ID cards that were color-coded based on their end-of-grade test scores. Students who scored in the highest category

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not all they are. They can’t operate without building categories, and we can’t understand the link between school and social inequality without looking closely at those categories.

Is there a category, one that appears innocuous and is ingrained in schools and in the public consciousness, that is particularly harmful to students or a particular group of students?

One category I think a lot about is the category of free lunch students.

This is an interesting case because it’s a compassionate impulse that leads our educational system to categorize students at lunchtime.

Because we want to make sure that students whose families have low incomes aren’t going hungry, federal policy pays for schools to give free meals to students whose families make less than 130% of poverty and reduced-price meals to students whose families make less than 185% of poverty.

For many kids, these school meals are a lifeline.

But being categorized as a free lunch student also marks a student as poor, often conveying a stigma that they carry with them far beyond the school lunch room. My work suggests that doing away with the category by giving free meals to all students is especially helpful for reducing the chances that kids who would have once been free lunch students get into disciplinary trouble at school.

How does categorization manifest beyond schools?

One of the most powerful ways

The Edge: Thurston “Thad” Domina’s work has long sought to find educational policies and strategies that help to create a more just, equitable, and inclusive society. Collaborative work with researchers at UC-Irvine seek to find solutions to disparities caused by placing students in a wide range of categories.

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One category I think a lot about is the category of free lunch students. This is an interesting case because it’s a compassionate impulse that leads our educational system to categorize students at lunchtime.

We argue that the first step is just taking a careful, self-reflexive look at the categories schools create. If we think carefully about our educational categories and what they’re doing, we open up the possibility to build better and more equitable schools.

educational categories manifest beyond schools is by giving meaning to categories that operate elsewhere in society. Here’s an example: At many racially diverse high schools, Black and Hispanic students are often placed into low-track and vocational classes while White and Asian students are placed into higher-track, advanced classes.

This reality is troubling on its face because it represents an inequality across racial lines in students’ opportunities to learn. Worse, these racialized tracking practices help to reinforce stereotypes around race and academic achievement.

In this way, racialized tracking gives meaning to racial categories.

Categorization is seemingly inextricable from education.

How might a district leader begin to make existing categorizations more equitable?

There aren’t quick fixes. It takes an inclusive, community effort to see the harms associated with existing categories and to imagine newer, more equitable ones. Here’s one rule of thumb that strikes me as broadly useful: “Low-scope” categories — where students are sorted and resorted into different educational environments repeatedly over the course of a day, a school year, or an educational career — are generally more equitable that “higher-scope” categories that stick with students.

An example of a low-scope sorting system is a school that creates opportunities for students to pick their own courses at several points in an academic year. Such a system allows students to sort and re-sort themselves, giving them the chance to build diverse webs of social connections in the school. Successful low-scope sorting systems provide students with multiple pathways to educational success that respond to their diverse needs and interests.

Are there successes when it comes to recategorization or doing away with categorization?

Here’s a historical example I find telling: In the late 19th century, when American educators were building some of the world’s first freely accessible mass systems of

education, many cities operated what were called “monitorial schools.” In these schools, a hundred or more students were arranged in a large room, organized in rows based on their mastery of basic reading and arithmetic skills. Kids started at the back row, and if they demonstrated academic competency, they could move up, row by row. Many students never made it out of the back row, others might slide back if their peers progressed faster than them.

Ultimately, if students made it to the front of the room, they could graduate to the position of “monitor,” where they were tasked with helping the students seated in rows.

At some point, monitorial schools were replaced by the age-graded schools we know today — where 6-year-olds are grouped together in 1st grade, 7-year-olds in 2nd grade, and so on. This system strikes me as far more equitable. Even though the 2nd graders get more advanced instruction than the 1st graders, the system has mobility built into it — as you age, you advance. I also like that it’s built around a student characteristic — age — that cuts across race, gender, social class, and many other social fault lines.

I like thinking about age-graded school because it’s a reminder that we can — and do — create equitable categories in parts of our system. I hope “Schooled and Sorted” helps and challenges educators to build on that success in their contemporary practice.

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Expanding the science of reading, fostering equity in literacy With a background in upper elementary and middle school language arts and social studies, Courtney Hattan saw the need to draw upon her students’ prior knowledge for better reading comprehension. Her research seeks to activate that knowledge.

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eaching in both rural and urban school settings, instructing upper elementary and middle school students in language arts and social studies, Courtney Hattan, Ph.D., an assistant professor in the science of reading, brings a broad perspective to her scholarly work.

As a teacher, Hattan observed a common challenge: the frequent task to activate students’ prior knowledge to enhance their comprehension of texts, coupled with insufficient instructional strategies for accomplishing this.

The experience inspired her to pursue graduate studies in educational psychology at the University of Maryland, where she

focused on researching techniques to activate students’ prior knowledge before, during, and after engaging with unfamiliar texts.

Hattan’s doctoral dissertation investigated instructional methods for knowledge activation with fifth and sixth graders. She compared a conventional approach of asking “what do you know” to strategies like annotating texts and a novel method called relational reasoning. The results revealed that relational reasoning questions proved to be the most effective approach in improving students’ comprehension. Relational reasoning encourages students to not only consider how their knowledge and experiences are similar to the text they are reading,

Courtney Hattan Assistant Professor

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but also how what they already know is unusual, opposite, or different from the information presented in the text.

Before coming to Carolina, Hattan was an assistant professor at Illinois State University. Now as a faculty member in the Culture, Curriculum, and Teacher Education and Learning Sciences and Psychological Studies concentrations of the School’s Ph.D. in Education program, Hattan continues to explore systematic ways to build students’ literacy while drawing upon their knowledge, with a particular focus on rural and underserved student populations.

Hattan shares her expertise and insights on literacy, enhancing reading comprehension, and the importance of equitable instruction in this Q&A. Can you provide a broad overview of your research interests in literacy and reading comprehension?

My work primarily centers around the role of knowledge in reading comprehension. I take a comprehensive view of knowledge, encompassing content knowledge across various subjects such as social studies, science, mathematics, the arts, and language arts. This breadth of knowledge serves as a fundamental element

that students must both activate and build upon to enhance their reading comprehension.

Additionally, I consider topicspecific knowledge, which pertains to information relevant to a particular text. This extends to understanding students’ diverse experiences, their cultural awareness, and linguistic proficiency, and recognizing the potential assets that multilingual students bring to the reading process. Background knowledge also includes strategic knowledge, which involves understanding reading strategies and their application, as well as awareness of different text structures.

In my research, I maintain an equity lens, focusing on students’ strengths rather than their deficits.

I believe that mixed methods research is particularly powerful in this regard, as it doesn’t solely rely on numerical data but also considers the perspectives of students and other stakeholders.

In one of my recent studies, we conducted both pre- and postinterviews with teachers, further expanding our understanding by including multiple viewpoints. This approach allows us to explore the convergence and divergence between quantitative and qualitative data, providing a more comprehensive perspective.

The Edge: Courtney Hattan’s research centers on the interplay between readers’ knowledge and what they understand and remember from text. Her work bridges sociocultural and cognitive theories of learning and literacy, employs mixed-methods research designs, and seeks to build communityinformed researchpractice partnerships.

I adopt a broad perspective as well. The science of reading encompasses a body of empirical research that investigates various aspects of reading. This research includes quantitative, qualitative, and mixed-method studies and covers foundational reading skills, comprehension, reading strategies, motivation, and assessment. In essence, the science of reading is a multidisciplinary field that examines all facets of reading, making it a comprehensive body of knowledge.

How does your research contribute to enhancing reading comprehension, especially for rural and underserved communities?

We were intentional about including engaging texts, informational texts, multimodal texts, and more complex text ... so students could make connections and see their knowledge developing across sources.

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My approach aims to provide knowledge-building opportunities in ways that are equitable and help traditionally underserved students succeed.

In my recent work, I’ve used books and intentionally curated text sets that build students’ knowledge while also exposing them to diverse perspectives. For example, in a rural Illinois district, I began working with teachers in fall 2020 to observe lower elementary language arts instruction, which served as the cornerstone for the professional development we provided to the teachers. Fast forward to the academic year 2021-22, where I collaborated with first-grade teachers to create a curriculum unit centered on social studies concepts related to the community. This initiative not only addressed the first-grade social studies curriculum’s emphasis on the community but also intertwined literacy seamlessly. In the subsequent academic year, 202223, I continued this collaborative effort, this time working with second-grade teachers and integrating social studies standards about economics.

We were intentional about including engaging texts, informational texts, multimodal texts, and more complex text, based on the quad text set framework, published by Lupo et al, so students could make connections and see their knowledge developing across sources. This work has solidified the importance for students to see themselves reflected in texts, while also gaining windows into new perspectives.

Could you share some strategies or interventions you’ve studied that promote equitable literacy outcomes?

When I consider the concept of equity in education, I am reminded of the importance

of evidence-based practices.

These practices draw on work conducted across fields, ranging from cognitive and educational psychology, neuroscience, and curriculum and instruction. They guide us in areas like assisting students in decoding words, improving spelling, helping students select appropriate reading strategies, and considering the importance of motivation in reading.

It is critical to think about the choice of texts we use to impart these evidence-based practices.

This selection process is an integral part of the science of reading.

We, all researchers, educators, and policymakers, should evaluate whether our instructional materials and decodable and complex reading materials feature content that might be perceived as culturally relevant. When examining texts that are provided in a curriculum, I recommend that teachers ask questions such as: Do the authors of the texts used in my classes share similar experiences and backgrounds as my students?

Do the texts feature characters with similar experiences or aspirations as the students in my classroom?

Can I ensure that every student in my classroom is reflected in the texts in my curriculum? My hope would be for teachers to consider substituting new or complementary texts to the curriculum that build upon their students’ experiences and existing knowledge.

However, diverse text selection is not enough. Teachers also need to consider the instructional supports that are used during reading. For example, are teachers asking students to simply retell what happened in a story or are they also providing historical context and encouraging students to critique and go beyond the surface of the text?

What have been some of your favorite personal experiences or anecdotes that highlight the impact of your work?

I love seeing those “lightbulb” moments where a student suddenly connects with a concept.

For example, in a recent study, I did with second graders building economics knowledge, one boy who had resisted writing at first got so excited sharing a piece he wrote using the new vocabulary words. It was powerful to see how systematically developing knowledge through authentic texts motivated his literacy growth.

I’ve also had profoundly moving conversations with teachers I’ve collaborated with, who feel like they’ve gained new tools to provide effective and equitable instruction. Those individual connections keep me going even when the higher-level challenges seem overwhelming.

What future directions do you see for research in the field of literacy, reading comprehension, and equitable instruction?

I’m interested in leveraging my available data from the study in rural Illinois and moving forward with the analysis process. One of my primary aspirations is to collaborate with elementary school teachers, particularly those who are mandated to implement a knowledge-building curriculum.

I want to sit down with these teachers and engage in a dialogue about their experiences with the curriculum. I’m interested in knowing what aspects they appreciate, what they find challenging, and what remains unclear to them. Additionally, I’d like to take one or two units of the curriculum and explore potential modifications based on students’ unique contexts, while retaining elements that work effectively.

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The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Education Campus Box 3500 Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3500

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