Ariel Borns

Ariel Borns is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Educational Policy Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Drawing on the interdisciplinary field of comparative and international education and anthropological perspectives in education, Ariel is interested in the ways in which global education policies, such as instructional coaching, are understood and implemented locally by educators. Ariel’s dissertation research explores the interplay of equity-driven educational reforms around pedagogical leadership, language, and literacy in schools serving multilingual students in Indigenous communities in Guatemala. She has conducted qualitative research on projects affiliated with the Wisconsin Center for Education Research, including one that has examined how literacy coaches adapt to a school district’s K-5 literacy reforms. In other work, Ariel has examined migrant and refugee youth’s experiences of belonging and activism in a community-based organization as they contend with the intersecting challenges of racialized immigration and education policies in the US. Her research has been supported by the NAEd/Spencer Dissertation Fellowship, Foreign Language and Area Studies fellowships, a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Fellowship, and the Arvil S. Barr Graduate Fellowship from the School of Education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She holds a M.A. in Educational Policy Studies from University of Wisconsin-Madison, a M.A. in Teaching from Clark University, and a B.A. in International Development and Social Change and Spanish from Clark University. Prior to her doctoral studies, Ariel was a public-school teacher in the US.