IES Blog

This year, Inside IES Research is publishing a series of blogs showcasing a diverse group of IES-funded education researchers and fellows that are making significant contributions to education research, policy, and practice. In this guest blog, Dr. Marcia Davidson, an IES postdoctoral fellow in the Georgia State University Postdoctoral Training on Adult Literacy (G-PAL), shares her experiences and discusses her path forward.

Going Back for More

My career path has had many turns, but I’ve always focused on supporting literacy to ensure everyone can access education, no matter their location, age, or current ability. And I apply this to my life, too.

I started as a school psychologist, practicing for 15 years in Washington state, working with students with disabilities aged 3 to 21. I worked with teachers and small groups of students to provide support and additional instruction for those struggling with reading and realized that my training was insufficient to provide effective support. I was able to advocate for children who struggled with reading, but I wanted to know more about the research and the science that inform effective reading instruction. So I went back to school to earn my PhD in special education.

After finishing my degree, my first academic position was teaching special education and elementary education at Western Washington University. Despite being tenured faculty, I left academia to participate in research projects related to Reading First because I wanted to spend more time conducting and supporting research projects. This led to my working on an IES-funded Preschool Curriculum Evaluation Research (PCER) project and my deep interest in interventions that improve student learning.

Eventually, my career took more unexpected turns as I was recruited to consult on a USAID/World Bank initiative in reading assessment for low- and middle-income countries, the Early Grade Reading Assessment. My work with this project prompted a significant career change: I moved to Liberia as a senior reading advisor on one of the first pilot early grade reading projects.

I spent the next 10 years working with non-governmental organizations (NGOs) on NGO, USAID, and World Bank projects and then worked for USAID. My work focused on early grade reading interventions and support in South and Southeast Asia, the Pacific Islands, and Sub-Saharan Africa. In 2017, I left USAID but continued to support their projects, serving as the senior reading advisor for a scaled early grade reading project in Ghana.

A New Focus

Although my primary focus was supposed to be on children, I found myself drawn in by parents longing to learn themselves. In Liberia, a parent asked whether he could meet with a reading project teacher to learn to read. In Zambia, parents were meeting daily to review the reading lessons of their first-grade children with the hope that they might learn to read and support their children more effectively. In Nepal, a grandmother walked several miles up a mountain to her grandchild’s school so that she could learn to read by his side. Most recently, when I was in Ghana during the COVID outbreak, our team developed a radio reading program for families, and I again saw how excited parents were to work with their children and learn themselves.

I then turned my attention to my own country and realized that many adults in the United States also have literacy gaps and need good reading interventions. We face a reality in which 43 million adults in the United States (about 1 in 5) have very low levels of literacy and may struggle with basic reading comprehension. Of these, nearly 17 million adults could be classified as functionally illiterate. I began to wonder how research for U.S. adults with low literacy might differ from the work I had been doing in low- and middle-income countries and how adult literacy levels vary across countries.

Despite my interest in U.S. adult literacy, I realized that research had changed drastically and that there were new methods, designs, and approaches that I was less familiar with. So I decided to learn more and build new research skills by applying to become an IES postdoctoral fellow in adult literacy at Georgia State University.

Returning for More: A Fellowship to Reskill and Connect the Dots

I started my IES postdoctoral fellowship in the summer of 2021 in the GSU Postdoctoral Training on Adult Literacy (G-PAL) program. Here, I am researching interventions to support U.S. adults who struggle with reading. I want to extend my understanding of the role of morphology in reading acquisition, which I honed while working in Sub-Saharan Africa and South and Southeast Asia. In the United States and internationally, much of this research focuses on children. Teaching adults to read has often taken a back seat in literacy research, despite the critical need to address adult low literacy. I have seen the difference that learning to read can make in a child’s life, and I believe that learning to read for adults can also be life changing and exciting. For me, it is like closing the circle, from young children who are just discovering the delights of learning to read to adults who long to enrich their lives—and often livelihoods—with improved literacy skills.

Recently, I was offered a position as a senior education advisor to the Africa Bureau at USAID, and I will be leaving G-PAL to support the USAID team. However, improving adult literacy remains a priority to me, and I plan to continue my work on the projects I’ve started with my mentor, Dr. Elizabeth Tighe, on a morphology intervention for adults and on an analysis of process data on PIAAC literacy items. I also plan to volunteer at an adult literacy center when I move to Washington, DC for my new position. I am so grateful that I had the extraordinary experience of learning about the literacy needs of and effective interventions for adults who struggle with reading. I have a better understanding about the complexities of adult literacy learning needs and feel new urgency to address the learning barriers so many face. My postdoctoral experience has expanded my knowledge, methodological skills, and commitment. And I am confident that I will apply all that I have learned and continue to learn to my new position and beyond.

Produced by Meredith Larson (Meredith.Larson@ed.gov), a program officer for IES Postdoctoral Training grants, and Bennett Lunn (Bennett.Lunn@ed.gov), Truman-Albright Fellow for the National Center for Education Research and the National Center for Special Education Research.

This year, Inside IES Research is publishing a series of blogs showcasing a diverse group of IES-funded education researchers and fellows that are making significant contributions to education research, policy, and practice. In recognition of Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month we interviewed Dr. Lori Erickson, St. Paul Public Schools, and Dr. Alisha Wackerle-Hollman, University of Minnesota, who are developing a screening tool to assess the language and literacy skills of Hmong preschoolers. In this interview blog, we asked Lori and Alisha to discuss the motivation for their collaborative work, what they have learned so far, and the importance of conducting research with ethnically and linguistically diverse students and communities.  

What motivated your team to study the outcomes of Hmong preschoolers?

Our team is a unique collaboration between practitioners at the St. Paul Public Schools (SPPS) and researchers at the University of Minnesota IGDILab. We are both deeply committed to supporting children’s full language and early literacy profiles across their languages to better inform instructional decision making and show a commitment to valuing culture through honoring children’s home language. When we started this project, we knew that the Individual Growth and Development (IGDIs) early literacy screening and progress monitoring measures were available in English and Spanish, and we had been implementing with great success. However, given that the district provides pre-K immersion programming in Spanish, French, and Hmong, it became clear that there was also a concentrated need for a valid, reliable tool to measure early literacy development in the Hmong language. The Hmong community, parents, and teachers voiced the need for a deeper understanding of the Hmong language and literacy skills that children acquire prior to and during the preschool period.

Prior to our current work, the IGDILab had significant experience developing the IGDIs Español, during which we refined a community-based approach for understanding language and early literacy development that took into consideration the developmental trajectory of each language, rather than as a translation to English. IGDI users noticed this difference, and SPPS approached our team about using a similar approach to develop the Hmong IGDI measures.

Please tell us about the two projects you have worked on together to address the early learning needs of Hmong students.

Our partnership has had the good fortune to receive two IES awards. The first award was a 2017 research partnership grant. We invested two years in gathering information from the community about what Hmong IGDI measures should include and developing a deeper understanding of the Hmong language landscape. The success of that program led to an IES measurement award to fully develop the Hmong IGDI measures. Currently in Year 1 of the measurement award, we have learned so much from both projects over the past four years.

• There is tremendous passion around the Hmong language. Stakeholders, including community elders, families, students, and educators, have shown a deep passion for celebrating and honoring the Hmong language. These discussions have focused on nuances of the language including generational differences, dialectical differences, and cultural representation.
• We have learned much about how the language has evolved. The Hmong language is spoken most frequently by elders. Children are often exposed to the language in the presence of elders, creating a cultural and social dynamic that requires inter-generational conversation to support language preservation.
• Although it is important to understand how a child’s native Hmong language can support their academic success in Hmong and English, it is also critically important to support Hmong language development to support social pride and cultural identity.

Throughout our work we have affirmed that studies like ours that focus on minoritized languages in concentrated communities are critical to support children’s success and to promote language preservation.       

How does your research contribute to a better understanding of the importance of studying low incidence populations, including ethnically and linguistically diverse students?

There are over 300,000 Hmong in the United States, and the Hmong population is the fastest growing of the East Asian group (US Census Bureau, 2017). Hmong Americans represent one of the most under-served cultural communities in the US, concentrated in two specific areas: the Midwest—St Paul, MN and Madison, WI—and the Central Valley of California (Pew Research, 2015).

Given the high levels of poverty and the large percentage of students entering the U.S. education system, Hmong Americans represent an important Asian subgroup that may continue on a negative academic and economic trajectory if meaningful intervention is not put into place.  The needs of Hmong Americans warrant our attention to bring educational opportunity and equity to a growing but marginalized group of children and to contribute to our broader mandate to conduct research that contributes to the betterment of all children.

Our effort to develop Hmong IGDIs will provide educators with a set of resources that are instructionally relevant—that is, the measures can be used to provide data that have direct implications for instructional practices, such as informing how to modify instruction to maximize Hmong language and early literacy development. In this way, our work aims to demonstrate a deep value of the Hmong language, support educators to understand children’s Hmong language and early literacy skills and improve their academic outcomes through differentiated instruction.

In your area of research, what do you see as the greatest research needs or recommendations to address and improve the relevance of education research for diverse communities of students and families?

Volumes of research demonstrate the importance of language and early literacy development during the preschool years. However, this research has provided little attention on low incidence populations, including ethnically and linguistically diverse students (for example, Hmong, Karen, Somali, and Indigenous dialects). These children’s outcomes are just as important as those of majority populations. We must invest in these low-incidence populations to create a more equitable educational experience for our youngest learners.

An omnipresent need in this arena is the need to involve and collaborate with the communities, families, and educators that education research intends to serve. Indeed, the strongest parts of our work involves the feedback we receive from community and family members. Our team includes three Hmong community members as staff, and we continuously engage the community in our process. Our initial interview and focus groups drove the creation of a community level survey to gather input on what features of the language were most important to the community. We then used those data as a catalyst to form a strong partnership between the community, family members, and the research institution, which has resulted in a process that is meaningful to all parties. If we expect our education research to be meaningful in communities of practice, we must improve how we value and collaborate with those communities in partnership.

How does your research contribute to a better understanding of the importance of diversity, equity, and inclusion in education?

This work has a direct connection to equity and inclusion in education. The Hmong are a low-incidence population, which has contributed to their marginalization. As an example of how this community experiences marginalization and inequities, we share our experience in the IES review process. When we first submitted our application for a measurement goal project the review panel provided a weak score for our application noting that they could not justify the resources of an IES award on such a small population, among other weaknesses. These results illustrate just how inequitable our system has been. When we reapplied the following year, we developed an argument around equity. Fortunately, the reviewers agreed with our rationale and funded this project.

We fully recognize the Hmong community is small and highly concentrated, and we fully believe developing the Hmong IGDI measures will provide a meaningful resource to these communities to support Hmong children’s language and early literacy development. As our nation continues to grow in diversity, we will see more and more languages in our classrooms. We must develop procedures and resources that can support all students, not just those historically centered. As evidence grows, we are learning about how a child’s native language used in community can be an asset to their academic performance in the classroom, even when the instructional language is English. These findings provide evidence of how inclusive practices that include native languages can be beneficial to all students, not just to monolingual English speakers.

Produced by Caroline Ebanks (Caroline.Ebanks@ed.gov), Team Lead for Early Childhood Research and program officer for the National Center for Education Research.

In recognition of Mental Health Awareness Month, we spoke with Dr. Elizabeth Stormshak (University of Oregon) about her intervention, the Family Check-Up (FCU), which addresses emotional and behavioral challenges during times of transition for students with or at risk for disability. Dr. Stormshak has been testing the efficacy of FCU during different student transitions, from its initial iteration focused on the middle to high school transition, to implementation during the transition to kindergarten, to a “booster” intervention to support in the transition to middle school. The FCU intervention now includes an online version for middle school students, which is especially suited to the transition from virtual to in-person learning.

Let’s start off with the transition for young children. What are some challenges facing children at risk for behavioral problems and their families as children transition into kindergarten?

Our work has focused on family challenges and contextual stressors that impact the successful transition to schools, such as parent mental health, stress, and parenting skills. Our approach to intervention has focused on providing support to families as they transition with their children to elementary school through brief, strength-based, adaptive interventions to reduce problem behavior and enhance academic outcomes.

How does Family Check-Up address these challenges?

First, the FCU helps parents assess their own strengths and their child’s strengths, building on “what is going well” as they consider ways to focus on areas that need support. This strength-based approach to intervention helps motivate caretakers to consider different ways to manage child behavior and emotional problems in the home, which has implications for the transition to school.

Second, the FCU is a brief intervention that is adapted to the needs of families. No family receives the exact same intervention content because the focus is always derived from an individualized assessment that is norm-referenced and guides intervention delivery.

Why was it important to build the FCU to support the transition to middle school?

Middle school is a difficult time for youth and families. Caretakers tend to “disengage” during this time, which can lead to mental health and behavioral problems for youth. The FCU focuses on “re-engaging” parents during this critical transition. The intervention was originally focused on reducing risk during the transition from middle to high school. Interestingly, the FCU is an ideal intervention for all transitions that a child and family might experience (school entry, middle school, and high school). Therefore, extending FCU to help families with the transition from elementary to middle school seemed like a natural and critical extension of our work using FCU to support school adjustment during the other periods of transition. 

What have you found so far? Has FCU been found to improve student outcomes?

Our work at kindergarten entry has clearly linked the FCU intervention with a variety of important school-based outcomes, including reduced problem behavior and enhanced parenting skills and home–school engagement. In our primary outcome paper from this research, we found that engagement in the intervention led to improvements in parenting skills—including limit setting, parent self-efficacy, and parental warmth—which then led to reductions in child behavior problems from kindergarten to second grade.

Our work supports the FCU model as an effective intervention for children and families during the transition to school. We continue to follow this sample of children and families into the middle school years. Our data collection for this project will end during the 2022-2023 school year. At that time, we will be able to examine the impact of the kindergarten and middle school intervention combined and compare this group of children to a control condition with no FCU as well as groups that received intervention only during kindergarten entry and only during middle school entry.

Your latest project is part of a new competition, Research to Accelerate Pandemic Recovery in Special Education. How has the FCU been adapted to address the needs of students following the disruptions of COVID-19?

I am excited to pursue this work and apply my interest in child and family mental health to the pandemic recovery. My whole career has been focused on the mental and behavioral health of children and families, and I hope to make a difference during this stressful time in society where mental health challenges for youth and their families have escalated.

We are eager to provide the FCU Online to schools in our area (Portland, Oregon) to address the recovery of students and families after the pandemic. Our work on the FCU Online began in 2015, well before the pandemic. Initial results of a randomized trial (supported by postdoctoral fellows funded through a postdoctoral training grant) supported the online approach for reduction of child emotional problems and improvement of parenting skills, especially for at-risk youth and parents. We expanded the model during COVID-19 in multiple ways, including adaptations that make the online model more accessible to families from a variety of backgrounds. The FCU Online can be delivered in both Spanish and English, is available on smartphones, and is easily delivered by schools because it can be supported by a range of providers, such as school counselors or behavioral health specialists.

The FCU Online has also been adapted with new content since the COVID-19 pandemic, including a module on Healthy Behaviors for Stressful Times that provides support to caretakers focused on healthy routines, coping, listening skills with youth, and management of depression and anxiety. We are excited to partner with schools in Oregon to implement this online approach to service delivery.

What are the next steps for your research?

The next steps in our work involve a focus on implementation and dissemination of the FCU Online model in schools. We have conducted focus groups and data collection with school providers over multiple grants and projects and have integrated this feedback into the FCU Online content and process. We look forward to continuing to build on this work in our new grant and to adapt the FCU Online to our changing times. We know that mental health and behavioral problems are going to persist for children and families, and evidence-based solutions that can be disseminated widely are going to be critical for helping us recover from the long-term mental health impacts of the pandemic. 

Dr. Elizabeth Stormshak is the Knight Chair and Professor of Counseling Psychology and Human Services at the College of Education at the University of Oregon, 

This interview was produced and edited by Julianne Kasper, Virtual Student Federal Service Intern at IES and graduate student in Education Policy & Leadership at American University.

Virtually every school district in the United States educates a child whose parent or guardian is serving in the Armed Forces. This May for Military Appreciation Month we asked Timothy Cavell, University of Arkansas, and Renée Spencer, Boston University, to discuss their IES-funded project on school supports for military-connected students.

What motivated your team to study military-connected students?

We got interested in studying military-connected students through our work on youth mentoring. We saw the potential for school-based mentoring to offer a measured response to the needs of military-connected students who are generally resilient but who, at times, need extra support. With funding from IES, we developed a system for delivering school-based mentoring that was anchored by a district-level military student mentoring coordinator who forged home-school-community action teams composed of school staff, military parents, and community leaders. This project heightened our sensitivity to the high mobility that characterizes military-connected families. These students experience 6 to 9 moves during their K-12 years—a mobility rate 3 times that of non-military children. Our current IES project, the Active-Duty Military Families and School Supports (ADMFSS) study, looks beyond mentoring to explore other kinds of supports that might benefit highly mobile military students and parents. We want to know how school supports might foster school connectedness for military students and parents.

What are your preliminary research findings?

We’re still in the early phases of data analysis and working on manuscripts for publication, but we can share a few things we’ve learned so far. Our findings are based on collecting three waves of parent and student data across two separate cohorts of elementary and middle school students (N = 532).

• Personal connections seem to matter most to military connected students and parents. Of the many types of school supports we measured, including things like welcoming practices and social and emotional learning supports, students rated having teachers help new students feel welcome when they first move into the school as most important. Parents rated ongoing communication with the school as most important.
• School supports likely matter. In preliminary analyses of our data, we’re finding associations between measures of school support and academic and psychosocial functioning. Parents who reported receiving school supports they considered important also reported higher quality parent-teacher relationships, stronger perceptions that schools were welcoming of military families, and less parenting stress compared to parents who reported receiving fewer school supports they considered important. Students who reported receiving school supports they considered important reported feeling more connected to school, higher academic efficacy, higher school engagement, and greater family support than students who reported receiving fewer supports they considered important. Although military-connected parents often noted a preference for not being treated differently from civilian families, they do appreciate school supports geared specifically for military-connected students. Some examples include an orientation, open house, or school tour at the beginning of the school year; lunchtime groups specifically for military-connected students; and access to the military family life counselor.

Based on your preliminary research, what advice would you give schools on how to best support military-connected students?

Most military families seem to weather the stresses and strains of multiple moves, but there are times when these families and students need additional support. The majority of military-connected students attend civilian schools where teachers often lack understanding of and appreciation for military family culture. We learned from our work that military-connected parents greatly appreciate when school staff acknowledge the distinct nature of military family life and “see” their family’s sacrifice. Simply recognizing the distinct challenges and sacrifices these families encounter can go a long way, and small accommodations (for example, not penalizing students for being absent on the day an active-duty parent returns from deployment) are highly valued.  

What has been the most rewarding aspect of this project for you as a PI?

Without a doubt, it’s the level of appreciation expressed by the families who participated in our study. We were surprised that many felt our study was an effort to see the challenges faced by military-connected students, a group often considered the most invisible within a school. It is meaningful to engage in work that touches the lives of families who make important sacrifices to serve our country.

What are the next steps for your research team?

We just received recommendation for funding from the Department of Defense to develop and conduct an initial evaluation of a digital tool that can be used to support the school transitions of military-connected students in the elementary and middle school grades. This tool will capture information about the transitioning military student that is catalogued in a teacher-friendly e-dossier that parents can share with new teachers before the student arrives in their classroom.

We hope this tool will empower military-connected parents to act with greater agency when their family moves, and their student makes yet another school transition. By sharing this information with the new school, it provides military-connected students with just-in-time support and receiving teachers with just-in-time training about military family life and the needs of this new student.

Renée Spencer is a professor at the Boston University School of Social Work. Her research is rooted in relational perspectives of human development and much of her work focuses on distinguishing factors that facilitate positive and meaningful youth mentoring relationships from those that contribute to mentoring going awry. Dr. Spencer’s research highlights the importance of tailoring mentoring to the specific needs of special populations of youth, such as systems-involved and military-connected youth.

Tim Cavell is a professor in the Department of Psychological Science at the University of Arkansas. His research focuses on the role of parents, teachers, and mentors in selective interventions for children who are highly aggressive or chronically bullied. Dr. Cavell also examines school-based strategies to support elementary school students from military families.

This interview blog is part of a larger IES blog series on diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility (DEIA) in the education sciences. It was produced by IES program officer Vinita Chhabra (Vinita.Chhabra@ed.gov), parent of military-connected students. For more information about the study, please contact the program officer Katina Stapleton (Katina.Stapleton@ed.gov).

This year, Inside IES Research is publishing a series of blogs showcasing a diverse group of IES-funded education researchers and fellows that are making significant contributions to education research, policy, and practice. In recognition of Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month we interviewed Dr. June Ahn, associate professor of learning sciences and research-practice partnerships at the UC Irvine School Of Education and PI of the IES-funded Career Pathways for Research in Learning and Education, Analytics and Data Science training program. Here’s what he shared with us on how his background and experiences shaped his career and how his work addresses the importance of diversity, equity, and inclusion in education.  

How have your background and experiences shaped your scholarship and career?

I am a child of immigrant parents who came to the United States from South Korea. Neither of my parents graduated from higher education but were able to find stable, working-class jobs as postal workers in Rhode Island. These details very much shape the experiences I’ve had and how I think about my work. For example, growing up in an extremely small Korean-American community, not many people outside of the community understood my background and family history. I had to learn to navigate many different social groups with diverse ethnic and cultural histories. As a child of immigrants, I very much understood how education was seen as an important mechanism for social and economic mobility. At the same time, I was keenly aware of how my experiences and realities were often absent or misrepresented in my schooling, the curriculum, and experiences with educators. 

These facets of my history shape the kind of scholarship that I pursue, where I strive to—

• Design new learning environments for STEM education that turn an empathetic eye towards fostering rich experiences for minoritized youth, for example, by linking science learning with writing in science fiction clubs, carefully designing game experiences to expose diverse learners to science, using social media tools to show how science is fused into everyday lives and selves, and creating STEM learning environments built into actual city and neighbor spaces so that young people and their families can see how science and play can be joined together
• Develop research-practice partnerships with educator and community partners to co-create solutions that are relevant to their needs, for example, to foreground an understanding of race, our histories, and racial justice as the focus of education improvement, as well as to help educators better support foster and homeless students who experience hardships as they traverse K-12 education systems
• Create experiences for minoritized students at UC Irvine through an IES Pathways Training Grant to learn about educational data science and analytics and build their identities and skills while preparing for future graduate study

At the heart of this scholarship is my interest in building learning experiences that support students from diverse racial identities and partnering with communities while centering issues of race in how we develop solutions.

In your area of research, what do you see as the greatest research needs or recommendations to address diversity and equity and improve the relevance of education research for diverse communities of students and families?

I think researchers need to realize that we are products of our own racialized histories, meaning that we bring our unique perspectives and blind spots to how we frame scholarship. The research questions we devise, what we decide is worthy to study, and our research design choices all come from our histories and ways we have been conditioned to understand the world and other people. Knowing this, I firmly believe that we need to build capacity for education researchers to understand how to be more empathetic in our approaches, to learn how to better partner with communities—not just inform them of our findings—to make research more relevant to local stakeholders, and finally to learn ways to step back and let others in the community have their voices centered in the research process. These skills and dispositions do not mean that we abandon what we know about how to do research or science. Instead, they give researchers tools to better understand how to value our own diverse histories and bring them into our research projects.

Beyond these methodological needs, I think that future research to address diversity and equity must continually go back to the lived experiences of the youth and families we are trying to reach. Even if research might illuminate trends and inequity, these findings mean little—and tell us little about what to do—unless we also couple our findings with an understanding of how our partners experience these inequities or lack of inclusion. 

How can the broader education research community better support the careers and scholarship of researchers from underrepresented groups?

There are a few inflection points that I think are important to continually support the careers of researchers from minoritized groups. First, representation matters. Universities and organizations need to strongly encourage their faculty or workforce to continue to seek out and hire folks from underrepresented groups. This task should never end, or organizations can quickly move backward. Funding decisions for which scholars and what research endeavors are supported also need to continually ensure that diverse scholars can build their careers, and that innovative ideas begin to permeate through academic communities.

However, representation is not enough. Deliberate attempts to change workplace culture is vital to supporting the career growth of scholars. In my own life experience, I’ve often felt unsupported because the cultural norms, the behaviors that colleagues and supervisors enact, and the ways that a “system” continues to position someone as not welcome, help push individuals out. It is easy to spot egregious, clearly racist, situations. However, the most damaging experiences are usually enacted by well-meaning individuals who don’t understand how to be self-reflective about their blind spots and take responsibility for how their ways of working may hurt scholars from minoritized groups. This type of change cannot be made with a DEI workshop or other typical strategies that organizations take. Change can only happen if individuals can be truly self-reflexive, take personal responsibility for their own actions, and actively work from the perspective of minoritized scholars. This is slow work requiring multiple hard conversations and many years of trust-building.

What advice would you give to emerging scholars from underrepresented, minoritized groups that are pursuing a career in education research?

I am so excited about the next generation of scholars in education research. My advice is threefold.

• Trust that your past histories, experiences, and perspectives give you a unique insight into issues of education, teaching, and learning. The fun challenge is to continually seek out what makes your perspective unique and to confidently communicate this uniqueness to your academic communities.
• Seek out senior mentors who both support your vision and act in ways that position you for more impact and recognition. Early in my career, I had senior mentors who were co-PIs on grant-funded projects with me. This allowed me to further my research vision and gain entryway into important avenues of resources for scholarship. These acts of strategic mentorship propelled my career and put me in position to pay it forward to the next generation of scholars.
• Cultivate supporters outside of your home research institution and build long-term trust in relationships by continually doing good work with integrity and kindness. This type of work is slow, taking years to cultivate, and requires a lot of patience and faith that doing the right thing will pay off in the long run. However, building a career on good research, trusting relationships, and kindness builds a strong foundation from which scholars from minoritized groups can jump off from while withstanding many challenges one might face.

Produced by Katina Stapleton (Katina.Stapleton@ed.gov), co-Chair of the IES Diversity and Inclusion Council and training program officer for the National Center for Education Research.