The research of the faculty of the Donna Ford Attallah College of Educational Studies has been recognized both nationally and internationally for tackling the most pressing educational and social issues that confront communities, families, schools, and children. Recently published and ongoing faculty research is highlighted below.
The LGBTQ Youth Research and Advocacy Project is a collaboration of Attallah College faculty, the American Civilian Liberties Union (ACLU) of Southern California, and the Central Coast Coalition. The goal of the LGBTQ Youth Research and Advocacy Group is to generate awareness of the experiences of LGBTQ students in California public schools and to advocate for LGBTQ-inclusive educational policies. In order to achieve this goal, stakeholders, which include researchers, community leaders, and legal advocates, analyze and disseminate public data on LGBTQ youth to schools, districts, county offices of education, and community-based organizations throughout California. Visit this page to view the research data »
Attallah College of Educational Studies Professor, Dr. Randy Busse has collaborated with former doctoral student Jaime M. Flowers to publish new research in Contemporary School Psychology. Titled “Development of a rating scale for the measurement of other-esteem,” the article presents a validation study of a measure they dubbed the Other-Esteem Rating Scale (OthERS).
Researchers have found self-esteem neither to be strongly related to achievement nor to anti-social behaviors in children and adolescents. Due to the inconclusive findings on the benefits of higher self-esteem, an additional concept may be warranted. Other-esteem was coined by Philip Hwang as respect, acceptance, caring, valuing, and promotion of all human beings, without reservation. The participants were 226 undergraduate students.
Attallah College of Educational Studies Assistant Professor Dr. Rachel Lambert has published an article in Teaching Children Mathematics, a practitioner journal of the National Council for Teachers of Mathematics. “Number Strings: Daily Computational Fluency” outlines a mathematical teaching routine, focusing on the work of a teacher collaborator in Los Angeles with her second grade class.
Attallah College Associate Professor, Dr. Meghan Cosier's latest book, Enacting Change from Within: Disability Studies Meets Teaching and Teacher Education, received a favorable review in Teachers College Record.
The book is available on Amazon and provides a useful and compelling framework for re-envisioning the possibility of education for all students. However, the philosophies of Disability Studies (DS) can be seen as contradictory to many mainstream values and practices in K-12 education. In an ever-shifting educational landscape, where students with disabilities continue to face marginalization and oppression, teachers and teacher educators are seeking ways to address these educational inequities. They desire realistic and specific ways to work toward social justice, from within the confines of current education systems.
Attallah College of Educational Studies Associate Professor Dr. Miguel Zavala has published his latest research in Urban Education. The article, titled "The Role of Political Education in the Formation of Teachers as Community Organizers: Lessons From a Grassroots Activist Organization," is based on a 3-year qualitative case study of political education projects within an urban teacher-led grassroots activist organization.
The article explores the formation of grassroots political education and how it mediated the development of teachers as community organizers. Through a documentary and narrative account, this article argues that the mediation of political education must be understood relationally and that “teacher as community organizer” is an important and emergent paradigm in social justice teacher education. Implications for social justice teacher education and research on the development and sustainability of social justice educators are suggested.
Attallah College of Educational Studies Assistant Professor Dr. Quaylan Allen has published an article in Anthropology and Education Quarterly titled, "They Write Me Off and Don't Give Me a Chance to Learn Anything": Positioning, Discipline, and Black Masculinities in School.
The study examines the schooling of black male students in a U.S. high school. Drawing upon positioning theory and student resistance literature, he describes how the students make meaning of the pathologizing positioning practices of the school, including how they resist and internalize dominant discourses about black masculinity and how their performances of particular masculinities within the school are met with surveillance, regulation, and discipline.
A prestigious SAGE policy journal, Policy Futures, now has a special edition that reviews and discusses the work of Attallah College of Educational Studies Professor Dr. Peter McLaren.
This special issue began as a book review symposium, which attracted so much interest and sustained engagement from its contributors that the decision was made to expand the format to allow for a more dynamic response to Peter McLaren’s The Pedagogy of Insurrection: From Resurrection to Revolution. As the special issue developed, it became clear that a number of the contributors engaging with McLaren’s text found both resonances and productive dissonances between their own thinking and McLaren’s position.
Attallah College of Educational Studies Distinguished Professor in Critical Studies Dr. Peter McLaren and Professor Suzanne SooHoo have edited a book that will be released soon. Radical Imagine-Nation: Public Pedagogy & Praxis provides a platform for critical educators, public intellectuals and activists from all over the world to promote, share and discuss various new issues and developments in critical education and social movements.
The book engages dialogically with critical scholarship and activist work in accessible ways that serve the common good. Radical Imagine-Nation serves as a meeting place for progressive educators— from scholars and practitioners to community activists and other cultural workers. It constitutes a space where critical theorists, community activists, internationalists and Freirean educators present new ideas for creating social relations.
Attallah College of Educational Studies Professor and Assistant Dean of Research, Scot Danforth, has published a new book titled Becoming a Great Inclusive Educator. This Second Edition offers educators the guidance and resources to become great inclusive educators by engaging in a powerful process of personal and professional transformation. Inclusive education continues to grow in popularity and acceptance in the United States. But most teachers, both general and special educators, are poorly prepared to be successful in inclusive classrooms and schools.
Undoubtedly, the challenge to professionals involves the acquisition of new knowledge and skills. But inclusion requires far more. It calls upon educators to trouble everything they think they know about disability, to question their deepest ethical commitments, to take up the work of the Disability Rights Movement in public schools, and to leap headlong into the deepest waters of the rich craft tradition of inclusive teaching.
In the first peace leadership focused book, Assistant Professor Dr. Whitney McIntyre-Miller co-wrote a book chapter with Michael Wunduh: "The Integral Perspective of Peace Leadership: The Life and Work of Christiana Thorpe of Sierra Leone" in Peace Leadership: The Quest for Connectedness. This book examines the concept of peace leadership, bringing together scholars and practitioners from both peace and conflict studies and leadership studies. Pre-order Peace Leadership: The Quest for Connectedness before its release in August.
Attallah College Assistant Professor Cathery Yeh has published her first book, Reimagining the Mathematics Classroom, now available, published by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM). Reimagining the Mathematics Classroom presents a comprehensive systems approach to examining mathematics teaching. It synthesizes and illustrates current research on the essential elements of mathematics teaching and learning, unpacking each component—the classroom physical space; mathematical discourse, tasks, assessments; and families and communities—and providing concrete practical strategies and tools teachers can apply directly to their work.