Research and Scholarship.
Research Narrative
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My research agenda has tightened since earning tenure and promotion in 2018. My research continues to focus around three major theoretical concepts. First, the idea of teaching to transform prompts me to engage in research that helps preservice and inservice teachers develop lessons and teaching activities that highlight multiple perspectives and teach history from the people’s perspective instead of through the lenses of power. To this end, I have worked with other critical scholars in the burgeoning field of critical elementary social studies teacher education to publish pieces that are intended for teacher practice. An example of this work is my recent article Approaching the Teaching of War in the Elementary Classroom with Text Sets, which describes how to create a text set for a particular topic, and how to go about selecting an anchor text and supplemental texts for children to engage in a contemporary issues lesson.
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In addition to providing practical curricular ideas, I engage in research with my students in order to contribute knowledge to the field of elementary social studies education about who our methods students are, how they have perceived the institution of schooling, and how they attempt to teach using critical pedagogies in a divisive political climate. This research (Alarcón & Bellows, 2018; Buchanan et al., 2019) has revealed the problematic and pervasive nature of the sense of fear teachers describe when considering teaching topics they feel might be labeled “controversial.” Research like our article published in Social Education, describes a phenomenon our preservice teachers noticed about the plethora of curricular resources available online. The Pinning with Pause article (Gallagher, et al., 2019) offers a type of checklist for teachers to vet curricular materials for the aims of social justice.
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In addition to scholarly research, I have also engaged in several public speaking engagements that required me to do extensive research on race and its intersections with teacher education. In my Culture of 80% research, I lean on scholars like Sensoy & DiAngelo to guide participants through a synthesis of the ways racism has permeated our public schooling system for centuries. This research, presented in workshop format, walks participants through a self-reflection on their social identities. These workshops have been delivered to public school faculty, our advisors in the James Center, and during the CS4ALL events at App State in the summer.
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Finally, I have a history of international research that had to cease for a time due to giving birth to my son and of course, the global pandemic. It is my hope to continue this research in ways that can push the field of elementary social studies education as we consider experiences of those outside of the U.S. To make entry again into the field of international social studies education research, I completed and submitted a Fulbright Scholar application in hopes of returning to work with some old friends in Romania.
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The following notable indicators are intended to describe the various ways in which I have met the requirements for research in this portfolio submitted for promotion to full professor. I will focus on these indicators: 1) Collaborative editorial and authorship; 2) Intentional overlaps with scholarship and teaching, and 3) Public scholarly engagements.
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Notable Indicators for Quality Research Activities
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Notable Indicator 1: Collaborative editorial and authorship
I began my career in educational research as a graduate student in 2009, almost 15 years ago. My specialization was social studies education, so when I first began this work I was interested in everything. I kept my research questions broad and all-encompassing. I said yes to every invitation to engage in collaborative work. This led to a long list of publications pre-tenure, and a near encounter with burnout.
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Since giving birth to my son in 2016, then earning tenure and promotion in 2018, the focus of my inquiries have narrowed, and I am able to articulate more clearly the purposes for which I engage in research. My first edited book, (Re)Imagining Elementary Social Studies: A Critical Reader, hit the presses at the beginning of 2018. The process of writing this book, which was first conceptualized in 2015, opened my eyes to the ways in which critical pedagogy can be enacted not just in a university classroom, but in the choices we make within (and without) the traditions of academia. Our writing and editing processes were an enactment of inclusion, as we recruited junior scholars doing innovative research to contribute chapters. We also rejected the impersonal blind-review process typically espoused by academia. Instead, based on overlapping chapter proposal topics, we created supportive editing teams so that an editor as well as two colleagues, also contributing authors, read and served as peer-reviewers. Authors commented on the respectful, low-stress nature of the review process and other writing teams in the field have reported taking on similar procedures.
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Out of this work, and connecting with other mother-scholars within the field of social studies education, grew some exciting collaborative relationships. Within our College and University Faculty Assembly (CUFA) group within the National Council for the Social Studies, a group of mother-scholars organized a forum for us to meet for the first time face-to-face at our national conference in the fall of 2019. From that first meeting, the group grew, and we now have a Motherscholar Liaison on the CUFA Executive Board.
Notable Indicator 2: Intentional overlaps with scholarship and teaching
One of the projects that took off during 2018 and 2019 involved two of my motherscholar friends, Drs. Katy Swalwell (Iowa State) and Jennifer Gallagher (East Carolina University). We were noticing how our preservice teachers tended to search on sites of curriculum sharing, such as Pinterest, Teachers Pay Teachers, and the like. We created a vetting process for the lesson plans and activities our students were finding online and our Pinning with Pause article has been used widely in the social studies field and beyond. Out of our collaborative work, we found a problematic case of the “QU Wedding” that was being used all over the country, and critiqued its purpose, value, and appropriateness for use in the earliest grades. This case has become an analysis activity used in my methods course.
During 2019 I had the great fortune of collaborating with Drs. Blanton and Cheek from App State’s Reading and Special Education Department, to report on our findings using in-ear devices to coach student teachers in the field. Our interests crossed as Dr. Cheek had done e-coaching during graduate school, and Dr. Blanton and I shared a group of students who were interested in participating in the project. As a result of this classroom-based research, we published a journal article and a book chapter about our e-coaching study. With the onset of the pandemic in early 2020, further work for the three of us in this particular overlapping area of research stunted.
One way that I have consistently advocated for elementary social studies education in my methods courses is through modeling the use of children’s literature to teach social studies topics. My colleague Dr. Lisa Brown Buchanan (Elon University) and I recently published an article about teaching war to young children through the use of children’s literature. One way I plan to continue this work in an international context is by engaging in a study that looks at how teachers and students in schools intercept refugee children and talk about war in such a sensitive context. To carry out this research I have reached out to my friends in Cuj, Romania, and with their invitation, completed a Fulbright application in hopes of funding this international research.
Notable Indicator 3: Public scholarly engagements
During 2019, I began my in-depth investigation of racism in the U.S., first as a historical topic of interest with my secondary history education students, and then as a personal investigation of how racism has affected the landscape of public schooling over time. To delve into this work, one must be willing to “be comfortable in the uncomfortable” (Kumashiro, 2015) and also investigate one’s own racial identity, and how it was formed over time. In the summer of 2020, this individual study became a topic in which we were all interested, and one in which I was expected to discuss in public due to my new leadership role.
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As the Inclusive Excellence Faculty Fellow, my presence in a number of spaces led to a public sharing of my research, which I called the Culture of 80%, referring to the percentage of white, middle class women that make up the majority of the teaching force in the U.S. This percentage is also true for North Carolina. In this work, I argue that the dominant demographic of that teaching force is a culture in and of itself that begs us to examine it, especially when that percentage has not changed in over 100 years. As the children in our public schools and communities are continuing to grow more diverse, why then, isn’t our teaching force? I presented this work in a number of spaces, listed in bullet form on my website.
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These public scholarly engagements allowed me to think about my research in nuanced ways. There is scholarship that gets published, which is what I hope to do with the Culture of 80%, and there is scholarship that gets synthesized in small doses for larger audiences. Getting out of my comfort zone and presenting to a superintendent’s leadership team, a group of 50 seasoned teachers from across the state, and to the advisors in our own college helped remind me why I do what I do. I hope to continue these conversations throughout my tenure at App State.
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