Research
New York City Parents Speak Out
New York City Parents Speak Out is a research project led by a team of researchers at the Graduate Center, the City University of New York’s (CUNY). As members of the PhD program in Urban Education, we are also parents, teachers, school leaders, community organizers, and activists dedicated to social and racial justice. We’ve worked with and alongside schools, and we know that there are many stories, struggles and hopes that are being overlooked. We’ve developed a project to hear directly from NYC parents and guardians, about education during the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as the increased attention on injustice and civil rights as our city and schools respond to systemic racism. We hope that this interactive, participatory project, will result in policy-shaping and public forms, including a podcast of NYC’s school communities so that educational leaders can better support families and children.
READ the Brief: COVID-19 and Racial Justice in Urban Education: NYC Parents Speak Out
See the Media Response to the Project
Children Framing Childhoods
My longitudinal research, Children Framing Childhoods, explores the shaping role of gender, race and immigrant status in how thirty-six children (age 10-12) represent themselves and their perspectives on immigration, social and cultural differences, and family-school relationships through photography and video. A follow up project, “Looking Back,” examines a sub-sample of these young people at ages 16 and 18 and asked them to reflect upon their images from childhood as a window on their changing identities, desires, aspirations and educational trajectories. This project has generated a treasure trove of youth- generated audio-visual materials which challenge dominant (mis)representations of children and youth growing up in urban, culturally diverse, poor and working-class communities, and compel us, as adult viewers, to re-think our evaluations of their capacities and desires. My recently released book, Children Framing Childhoods: Working-Class Visions of Care and its accompanying website explores how the young people used their cameras to compose their identities and to highlight the centrality of care and care work in their learning and growth. Here is a more detailed description of the methodology and an article about the project from the Harvard Gazette and multiple publications about the project throughout the process.
