TSS faculty are actively engaged in numerous grant activities and special projects related to preservice teacher education and the continuing professional development of practicing teachers locally, nationally, and internationally.
These professors have a strong commitment to social justice. They work to link K-12 education and doctoral student education to create better educational experiences for all students.
Dr. Alyson Adams is a clinical faculty member and Associate Director for Teaching and Teacher Education in the School of Teaching and Learning, with close ties to schools and educators through job-embedded graduate programs and school reform work in the Lastinger Center for Learning. Her research focuses on teacher learning within professional development as well as the impact of job-embedded graduate programs on both teacher learning and student outcomes.
Professional learning communities and instructional coaching are two areas of emphasis in her work with schools. Her grants are largely foundation grants, with a recent $350,000 grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to focus on professional development policy and advocacy. Dr. Adams is also a national facilitator for the National School Reform Faculty, an organization focused on improving teacher collaboration through learning communities, and incorporates the emphasis on structured and intentional dialogue into her graduate teaching and her collaboration with colleagues.
Dr.Blake Beckett is a Clinical Assistant Professor in the Teachers, Schools, and Society Program in the School of Teaching and Learning. In her dissertation research, she studied the intersection of Universal Design for Learning and Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy in her own practice as a middle school language arts teacher. After 25 years teaching K-12 in public schools, Dr. Beckett’s teaching and research in higher education continue to be focused on understanding how diverse students experience school spaces and how educators can more effectively support their success. As an experienced practitioner researcher, Dr. Beckett also focuses on supporting the development of inquiry skills and strategies in both pre-service and in-service teachers to help them improve their own practice. Additionally in this position, she supports emerging practitioner scholars in the Teachers, Schools, and Society EdD program who are working to increase educational equity in various school contexts.
Dr. Briana M. Bivens is a Clinical Assistant Professor in the Teachers, Schools, and Society program where she teaches courses in the history and social foundations of education. Her teaching is informed by an expansive and interdisciplinary notion of education, and she\’s also taught courses in women\’s and gender studies and child, youth, and family studies.
Building on her time as a community-based educator and organizer in Georgia, Dr. Bivens’ scholarship focuses on the theory and history of community-based education, youth political education, and sustainable movement-building. Her current book-length project draws on archival, oral history, and community-engaged methods to document and analyze the history of child and youth work at the Highlander Research and Education Center. She is especially interested in the how the care and political education of young people has supported and can support social movement sustainability. To carry out this project, Dr. Bivens has received grants from the American Educational Research Association (AERA) and Friends of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Libraries. Her research has been published in popular media outlets and academic journals including Education Week, Educational Studies, and the International Review of Qualitative Research.
Dr. Taryrn Brown is a clinical faculty member in the School of Teaching and Learning with specialization in Teachers, Schools, and Society. As a member of the American Educational Research Association (AERA), the American Educational Studies Association (AESA), and the National Association of Multicultural Education (NAME), her research broadly examines the interpretive, normative, and critical perspectives of education both inside and outside of schools. With emphasis on the experiences of minoritized individuals and communities, much of her work emerges from the intersections of race, social class, and gender.
Dr. Brown has worked closely in her previous experiences in university-community initiatives, more recently with the non-traditional pedagogical space, the Awesome Clubhouse @ La Escuelita, which encouraged curiosities directed by children that intertwined with their personal realities, and their own self-directed interests. This educative work has been and continues to be a driving force behind Dr. Brown’s passion of integrating university-community initiatives to serve students. The role of pedagogical spaces for critical conversation within the student and community experience is a priority for Dr. Brown in the preparedness of future practitioners, educators, and community leaders.
Currently, Dr. Brown is working with research that seeks to place an effort on addressing the gap in practice and knowledge, speaking directly to the discursive nature that often imposes itself on the lived realities of minoritized communities. Through an intersectional analysis, Dr. Brown values most the importance of highlighting actual lived realities in these communities. Moreover, providing insight into the ways in which advocates, supporters, practitioners, and educators can acknowledge implicit biases that exists in interactions and thoughts on minoritized groups.
Dr. Chonika Coleman-King is currently Assistant Professor of Teachers, Schools, and Society at the University of Florida. Her research focuses on how best to prepare teachers and teacher candidates to teach with an emphasis on social justice in schools that serve economically disadvantaged children and students of color, specifically Black children. Her research interests also include the development of culturally responsive curriculum and teaching practices across content areas. Additionally, Dr. Coleman-King focuses her work on anti-racist teachers, urban education, and the experiences of Black immigrant and Black American youth in U.S. schools. Dr. Coleman-King is the author of the book, The (Re-)Making of a Black American: Tracing the Racial and Ethnic Socialization of Caribbean American Youth which documents the complex interplay between race, class, and immigrant status for Afro-Caribbean immigrant youth and the role of schools and families in helping students develop their racial and ethnic identities. Her grants include the National Science Foundation, Integrative and Collaborative Education and Research (ICER) grant for $390,000 and the National Science Foundation, Discovery Research preK-12 (DRK-12) grant for $45,000. She also has a grant for $850,000 from Knox County Schools, where she is tasked with helping educators develop competencies around teaching racially, linguistically, and socioeconomically minoritized students.
Dr. Elyse Hambacher’s research focuses on two overlapping areas within the field of teaching and teacher education. First, her research examines the development of educators’ critical social justice literacy and how teaching for social justice is operationalized in education settings. Second, she explores the social contexts in which teaching and learning occur, especially (but not exclusively) as it pertains to how teachers create communities of success and resilience for youth who do not demonstrate traditional definitions of success. Dr. Hambacher received the 2019 Diverse: Issues in Higher Education’s Emerging Scholar Award, a national recognition to scholars in the academy striving to make society more just. Funded by a grant from the Spencer Foundation, Dr. Hambacher is currently working on a project that examines how justice-oriented white educators in a predominantly white school district engage with concepts of race, anti-racism, and whiteness.
Dr. Hambacher has worked with students and educators at various levels including pre-service teachers, inservice teachers and administrators, and master’s and PhD students. She has also helped higher education faculty improve their pedagogy as a facilitator for the Association of College and University Educators. Prior to working in higher education, she was a classroom teacher in Miami, FL, and taught English in Kumamoto, Japan.
Dr. Nancy Fichtman Dana’s research focuses on teacher and administrator professional development with a particular focus on practitioner inquiry, the systematic and intentional study by educators of their own practice. She has published 11 books and over 100 articles and book chapters on the topic. Throughout her career, she has worked extensively in supporting schools, districts and universities in implementing powerful programs of initial teacher preparation and job-embedded professional development through inquiry across the United States and in many countries, including China, South Korea, Belgium, Portugal, The Netherlands, Slovenia, and Estonia. She has been a leader in national movements focused on clinically-centered teacher education, chairing the Association of Teacher Educators’ first Clinical Practice Fellows Symposium, and serving on the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education’s Clinical Practice Commission.
Funded by a 3.2 million dollar grant from the Institute of Education Sciences, current research with colleagues and doctoral students is focused on online teacher professional development. Additional research projects are focused on preparing the next generation of teacher educators, practitioner inquiry and the creation of more equitable classrooms, practitioner inquiry in international contexts, and teacher educators as policy actors. Dr. Dana’s support of doctoral students was recognized with the 2018 Association of Teacher Educators Duaine C. Lang Mentoring in Teacher Education Award and the 2019 University of Florida Dissertation Advising/Mentoring Award.
Dr. Sevan Terzian’s research focuses on the history of education in the United States. His first book, Science Education and Citizenship: Fairs, Clubs, and Talent Searches for American Youth, 1918-1958, traces the changing civic justifications for extracurricular science programs. Dr. Terzian’s second book, American Education in Popular Media: From the Blackboard to the Silver Screen, is an co-edited volume of historical essays from leading scholars and former students about the portrayals of schooling through radio, film, and television. Currently, Dr. Terzian is researching a book-length study of the racial dimensions of “giftedness” in twentieth century American education.
Dr. Terzian belongs to numerous professional organizations including the American Educational Research Association (AERA), History of Education Society (HES), Organization of American Historians (OAH). He was pleased to host the annual Southern History of Education Society (SHOES) conference at UF in March 2018 and he remains grateful for the opportunity to collaborate with wonderful colleagues and many dedicated graduate students.
Dr. Vicki Vescio is a clinical faculty member in the School of Teaching and Learning where the focus of her work is on teaching master’s and doctoral level courses in the areas of curriculum, social justice, qualitative research methods, and culturally responsive teaching. Her research interests include critical whiteness studies, advancing preservice and inservice teachers’ understandings of equity and social justice as it relates to their daily practice, and examining the experiences of queer faculty and students within heteronormative institutions such as schools. Dr. Vescio typically disseminates her scholarship in publications designed to reach practitioner scholars. Dr. Vescio is a member of the American Educational Research Association (AERA), National Association for Multicultural Education (NAME) and the Association of Teacher Educators (ATE). As a member of these organizations she has served on national level committees including the Qualitative SIG Book of the Year, the Critical Educators for Social Justice Dissertation Committee, and she has been a Co-Chair of the NAME Conference Proposal Committee for several years.
In her current work, Dr. Vescio is collaborating with other program faculty and doctoral students on projects that include examining the culturally responsive classroom practices of preservice and novice teachers, investigating the experiences of international graduate students who supervise preservice teachers in practicum placements in U.S. contexts, studying the relationship between online doctoral students participation in a cross-class project based learning experience and their understandings of social justice content knowledge as well as their development as critical action researchers, and examining autoethnographic critical incidents with a queer theory framework to explore ways of countering narratives of heteronormativity.
