Q & A with Tina Smith-Bonahue, Ph.D., Associate Professor in the School of Special Education, School Psychology, and Early Childhood Studies

What basic questions does your research seek to answer?

How can professionals working in early childhood settings use authentic, culturally relevant strategies to improve outcomes for vulnerable children? My research seeks to address this question through two lines of inquiry.  One line examines how teachers and other care providers can structure authentic and play-based interactions that promote social and emotional competence and critical thinking in young children. The second line of research explores how teachers and other early childhood professionals can ensure that their work is culturally relevant through meaningful partnerships with families.

What makes your work interesting?

In the past 20 years or so, researchers, policy makers, and even the general public have become aware of the tremendous potential for early education to have a long lasting impact on high-risk children’s developmental outcomes. With this increased attention, high stakes testing and methods to ensure accountability are being applied to preschools, changing and challenging the way we think about early childhood. Similarly, state-funded preschool programs have a mandate to focus on pre-academic and school readiness skills. As a result, studies suggest that time for play is on the decline in preschool classrooms. Since years of scholarship also tell us that play is essential for children’s well-being, finding ways to ensure that play has a place in preschool classrooms has become part of my research agenda.

As more and more children, particularly children from under-resourced communities, have the opportunity to participate in structured preschool experiences, ensuring that these environments are culturally relevant and family-friendly becomes a challenge. When teachers engage families effectively as partners in their children’s learning and development, everyone benefits. But for teachers who are overwhelmed by accountability demands and the day-to-day demands that come with caring for young children, engaging families can seem like a daunting task.

What are you currently working on?

Working with colleagues and graduate students here and at another university, I’ve spent the past several years examining how helping in-service teachers make sense of the diversity among the families of the children they serve. We were also interested in identifying professional development strategies that improve teachers’ ability to engage families in meaningful ways in their classrooms. Our next projects extend this work by examining preservice teachers’ beliefs about diverse families and what kinds of pedagogical strategies best prepare them to form true partnerships with the families of the children they will serve. Of course, understanding the perspectives of professionals is only half the equation in school-family partnerships, so I’ve recently begun a project with our local Head Start to gather data from parents to determine which parent engagement strategies work well, and what barriers prevent them from partnering with their children’s teachers.

Another research team and I have been analyzing the literature on play in early childhood for the past 10 years. Based on this analysis, we will explore teachers’ understanding of the role of play in children’s learning and early education. We’ve also just completed a project examining the effectiveness of children’s literature for teaching very young children emotion vocabulary and social problem solving. We hope to learn specific strategies for using authentic literature to promote social and emotional growth in very young children with developmental disabilities.

Q & A with Kent Crippen, Ph.D., Associate Professor in the School of Teaching and Learning

What basic questions does your research seek to answer?

My research program embraces the grand challenge of providing an inclusive and robust science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) workforce through the design, development, and evaluation of cyberlearning environments—those providing authentic experiences in STEM through the use of networked learning technologies. Currently, the following overarching questions guide this inquiry:

• What forms of cyberlearning are effective and transformative for addressing the chronic problem of under-representation of specific populations of people in STEM?
• How can the use of design in this pursuit inform our understanding of learners, the processes of knowing, learning and teaching, as well as amateur and professional development in both formal and informal STEM education contexts?

In the practice of our research, these questions are focused on compelling practical problems that exist in real-world settings that are complex, enduring, and difficult to solve, like the disproportionately low numbers of females pursuing engineering degrees. This work involves the dual purpose of trying to solve the learning problem(s) while at the same time generating new insights related to the processes of learning and the relationships among the people, tools, and context of the problem. Through our work, we seek to describe how learning occurs in a particular setting (for whom?) and to detail the required environmental characteristics for affecting the desired outcomes (under what conditions?).

What makes your work interesting?

The most interesting parts of my work are the people I collaborate with and the problems we try to address together. Collaboration and mentoring are two core values of my research group and they are reflected in all aspects of our work. Collaboration requires an intimate working relationship and melding of priorities among a diverse team of people, including students, policy makers, and researchers with diverse forms of expertise. Successful research involves communication and negotiation in order to leverage the team’s capacity for addressing the problem in a sustainable way while also affording the opportunity to develop our theoretical understanding of the problem itself.

What are you currently working on?

We are currently engaged with three major projects that are funded by the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, respectively: FOSSIL (DRL-1322725), ChANgE Chem (DUE-124568, 1625378), and CATALySES (SEPA-1R25OD021901-01).

In collaboration with faculty from the Florida Museum of Natural History, FOSSIL is addressing the limited participation by the public in natural history research through a networked community of practice in which amateur and professional paleontologists collaborate in learning, the practice of science, and outreach. We have developed an evidence-based social messaging campaign that is enacted across an ecology of different technologies, including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and our own myFOSSIL community site (www.myfossil.org). We are currently investigating activities for amateurs that are situated within the established best practices for paleontology—from planning a field trip to having a specimen included in a museum (both physical and virtual)—including the social spaces where they exist (e.g., face-to-face, virtual, or combination).

Working with colleagues from engineering and chemistry, ChANgE Chem is transforming the general chemistry curriculum for engineering students to a more contextually relevant and engaging experience. This endeavor employs the use of cognitive apprenticeship strategies to develop activities that emulate and make explicit the way engineers think, comprehend, and work. We have re-envisioned the discussion component of the courses (i.e., recitation) with a series of mini-design projects and are currently using our model to transform the laboratory curriculum based upon the Grand Challenges for Engineering.

CATALySES is the continuation of a long-standing collaboration with the UF Center for Pre-Collegiate Education and Training (CPET) on a scientist-teacher partnership model of professional development for secondary teachers. With this current project, we are investigating how the scaffolded process of constructing interactive online materials is mediated by teachers’ classroom experiences and local context to influence the translation of scientist-teacher experiences to their practice.