Faculty Research Projects

Early grade reading programs in developing countries funded by USAID have largely been guided by models of learning to read in English. Drawing on literature in multilingual literacies, anthropology of education, and critical development studies, this project asks: Are literacy models, reading pedagogies, and reading assessments adapted to account for language structures, medium of instruction policies, and local histories of reading pedagogy? If so, how, and what are the consequences of those adaptations? The project entails a comparative case study of early grade reading policy and practice in Tanzania, a linguistically diverse country in sub-Saharan Africa with low rates of literacy. The study focuses on national, district, and local ministries of education and across eight schools. This project will expand our understanding of reading and pedagogy in multilingual settings and offer policy and practice recommendations for the field of early grade reading.

In the past decade, Brazil and the U.S. have experienced similar, yet distinct, political pressures eroding democratic governance and public education during a period of intense political polarization. In Brazil, an alliance of neoconservatives, neoliberals, and authoritarian populists (Apple 2003, 2013) has advanced a new conservative educational policy agenda through three primary avenues: the so-called “Non-Partisan Schools” movement, which aims to proscribe discussions of racial and gender inequality in schools (Lima & Hypolito, 2021, 2020); the avid promotion of homeschooling; and the militarization of schools (Lima, Golbspan & Souza, 2022). Parallel efforts in the U.S. have impeded discussions of racial inequality, gender disparity, sexuality, and gender identity by asserting ‘parental rights’ to curricular control; at the same time, neoliberals have expanded neoliberal market logics like “school choice” through vouchers and charters and the corporatization of education and funneled unusual amounts of money into local school board races (Henig et. al. 2019). Drawing on the sociology and politics of education, critical studies of educational policy, and literature on the privatization of education, this ethnographic comparative case study asks how alliance actors shape educational policy and practice in Brazil and the US, how those efforts vary across locations, and how school communities, including principals, teachers, staff, and parents, in demographically and politically disparate locations understand and respond to conservative efforts to shape educational policy and practice.

(co-PI with Lori Di Prete Brown)

Circle of Care (COC) is an innovative participatory action research effort to foster the wellbeing of orphans, grandmother-headed households (GHHs), and AIDS-affected schools and communities in Machinga District, Malawi. COC’s holistic model of care builds on best practices for participatory research, interdisciplinary collaboration, community mobilization, orphan care, and AIDS-competent schools; and leverages existing community assets to: 1) improve orphans’ and GHHs’ social, educational, emotional, physical and economic wellbeing; 2) transform school cultures and community leadership practices, and 3) document best practices to enable context-sensitive expansion throughout Malawi. This research-to-action project aims to support community mobilization and transformation, and to develop and disseminate project processes (such as identification of GHHs) and activities (such as Theatre for Development to mobilize against elder abuse) that can lead to more equitable international development processes and outcomes.

CoC is a partnership between UW-Madison (co-PIs Kendall and Lori Di prete Brown) and the Institute for Participatory Engagement and Quality Improvement, a Malawian NGO led by Dr. Zikani Kaunda. CoC received Baldwin Ideas funding and in-kind support from the 4W Initiative.

(in partnership with the Institute for Participatory Engagement and Quality Improvement)

Drawing on insights from the Circle of Care endeavor (see below), IPEQI and UW-Madison’s Global Health Initiative are embarking on the Engaged Community for One Health (ECHO) Project, underpinned by a syndemic approach that recognizes the interconnectedness of health challenges. This approach aims to mitigate the complex interplay between HIV/AIDS, malaria, cholera, COVID-19, poverty, food insecurity, gender disparities, and age discrimination, culminating in disparate health outcomes. By embracing a One Health perspective, the project acknowledges the intricate relationships between humans, animals, pathogens, and environments, focusing on comprehensive interventions.

The ECHO Project will address critical issues such as disease control, nutritional security, and environmental stewardship within the framework of recognizing the particular needs and knowledge of Elder-Headed Households (EHHs). For instance, a shift from mere chicken distribution to EHHs to comprehensive animal care will be implemented to counteract the threat of infections from deceased animals. Additionally, the establishment of a Non-Communicable Diseases clinic targeting the elderly will be bolstered by comprehensive medication adherence strategies to curtail the risk of antimicrobial resistance and protect both human and animal health.
ECHO will also emphasize environmental management, leveraging indigenous knowledge and community involvement to safeguard ecosystems. Educational initiatives within schools will promote sustainable practices, empowering both the elderly and the younger generation to foster environmental protection. More specifically, ECHO seeks to enhance the health outcomes of vulnerable households in Traditional Authority Nkula, Machinga District, Malawi, by:

1. Strengthening extension services in animal health, human health, and environmental health.
2. Improving school responsiveness to and school attendance of children within Elderly Headed Households (EHHs) and Child Headed Households (CHHs).
   Fostering the adoption of community-based activities supporting EHHs and CHHs.
3. The project is funded by UW-Madison’s Global Health Institute.

(co-PI with Dr. Amita Chudgar and Dr. Tom Luschei)

A global consensus is emerging around the importance of providing marginalized youth with relevant secondary schooling. Currently, powerful stakeholders are defining and prescribing notions of relevance that do not incorporate the experiences, needs, and aspirations of marginalized youth themselves. Global models of relevant secondary education that lack youth perspectives will be at best irrelevant and at worst counterproductive, yet they have the power to shape national policies and secondary education opportunities for the 1.5 billion youth living in developing and emerging economies and in fragile states. At this historic moment, youth-centered research that analyzes a diverse range of marginalized students’ experiences can play a key role in shaping discourses, policies, and practices to support relevant secondary education. With funding from the Spencer Foundation, Drs. Chudgar, Kendall and Luschei are conducting a two-year mixed-method study in rural and urban public secondary schools in Colombia, India, and Malawi, where they have strong research networks and where youth face distinct sources of marginalization, including violence and displacement, extreme poverty, HIV/AIDS, and climate change. Drawing on the common and contrasting insights emerging from these diverse contexts and youth, Drs. Chudgar, Kendall and Luschei aim to deepen understanding of and make visible marginalized youths’ schooling experiences, needs, and aspirations to inform improved global and national secondary education discourses, policies, and practices. The project received funding support from a Lyle Spencer Award.

Tikuyendadi (“We Are Moving Together” in Malawi’s national language, Chichewa) responds to the Government of Malawi’s legal obligation, and the pressing needs of children with disabilities and their schools, to radically decrease the barriers that stand in the way of achieving quality education for all children, including every child with a disability. Tikuyendadi brings together parents, students, teachers, school and local leaders, and district governmental and non- governmental officials, to document current Special Education (SE) practices in a diverse range of primary school settings; identify existing SE best practices in public primary schools; support community and school mobilization, dissemination and uptake of low-cost, sustainable SE best practices; and disseminate advocacy results to support system change and disability rights movement efforts to provide equal, inclusive, transformative education for all.

In so doing, Tikuyendadi aims to decenter U.S. models of SE, which are currently being promulgated in Malawi despite their lack of cultural, political, and economic appropriateness; and replace them with models of effective, appropriate, creative, and transformative SE models that center the sense-making, daily lives, and educational experiences and needs of children with disabilities, their families, and their schools.

Tikuyendadi is a partnership with Dr. Aydin Bal, Lori Di Prete Brown, and Stella Hauya (Institute for Participatory Engagement and Quality Improvement).

(co-PI with Dr. Sophia Friedson-Ridenour)

Around the world, and particularly in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), children’s schooling is increasingly threatened by climate change and its interactions with disease vectors and socio-cultural, political, and economic systems. At the same time, schools face increasing expectations that they will play a key role in helping children learn how to successfully adapt and respond to climate change. We propose to map the two-way relationship between climate change and education in Ghana and Malawi, where the co-PIs have conducted more than 35 years of combined research on education policy and practice. Building on the strengths of efforts in the 2000s to create a holistic framework for conceptualizing the impact of HIV/AIDS on education in SSA, our two-way mapping will provide a framework for educators and policymakers to think holistically and critically about how climate change impacts the physical, health, social, economic, and community wellbeing of all educational stakeholders; recalibrate existing educational policy concerns (e.g., access, quality, management) to account for these impacts; and translate these insights into equity-generating efforts to empower students, families, teachers, and policymakers with the skills, knowledge, and capabilities needed to navigate rapid change and improve children’s outcomes, livelihoods, and “disaster resilience”. The project received funding from a Spencer Foundation Small Grant.

This is an ongoing project utilizing data from the China Education Panel Survey (CEPS) to investigate gender disparities in student attitudes, aspirations, and performance related to STEM fields. The project has resulted in three publications, focusing on the roles of social comparison and gender-math stereotypes:

Kim, Jinho, Ran Liu, and Xiaohang Zhao. 2022. “A Big (Male) Fish in a Small Pond? The Gendered Effect of Relative Ability on STEM Aspirations under Stereotype Threat.” European Sociological Review, jcac037.
Liu, Ran. 2020. “Do Family Privileges Bring Gender Equality? Instrumentalism and (De)Stereotyping of STEM Career Aspirations Among Chinese Adolescents.” Social Forces 99 (1): 230-254.
Liu, Ran. 2018. “Gender-Math Stereotype, Biased Self-assessment, and Aspiration in STEM Careers: Gender Gap Among Early Adolescents in China.” Comparative Education Review 62(4): 522-541.

The next stage of this project will continue to investigate social and individual factors contributing to gender disparities and stereotypes in STEM education, including two new papers examining the roles of teacher-student interactions and student comparative advantage in math over non-math performance.

This 1-year project is funded by a grant from the American Educational Research Association (AERA) which receives funds from the National Science Foundation ($25,000; NSF-DRL #1749275). Using big social networking data, it aims to develop three sets of measures of network characteristics at the county level: 1) network heterogeneity; 2) network-embedded socioeconomic resources; and 3) network-embedded inequality structures. Linking these measures to county-level data on student academic performance and disparities, this project will examine four research questions: 1) Are counties with similar levels of socioeconomic and education resources more connected, thus reinforcing inequality of resource distribution? 2) How is county network heterogeneity associated with county average student academic performance and performance disparities across class, gender, and racial groups? 3) How are county embedded social network resources associated with county average student academic performance and disparities? 4) How are county embedded network inequality structures associated with county average student performance disparities?

This study is supported by the Center for Research on College-Workforce transitions. Utilizing data from the College Internship Study, we investigate the alignment among student internship experiences, academic training in major programs, and career plans. Findings indicate variations in the internship-major alignment and internship-career alignment across gender, race/ethnicity, and major programs as well as their intersections. Additionally, internship-major alignment and internship-career alignment were found to be positively associated with overall internship satisfaction. Findings provide preliminary insights into the internship-major-career alignment and its implications for students’ internship experiences, informing potential strategies for diversifying the workforce and enhancing school-to-work transitions. This study also proposes a tripartite alignment framework for future internship studies.

This project examines the effect of sibship structure on adolescent cognitive ability in China. Preliminary results show a negative effect of having siblings on adolescent cognitive ability, and this effect is more evident among girls than boys. Three mediation mechanisms are discussed: children with siblings tend to 1) have lower levels of parental education involvement and parent-child interaction; 2) spend more time on housework; and 3) possess fewer education resources. Further analysis reveals how these three mechanisms work differently for boys and girls in families with different sibship structures; in particular, girls with elder brothers are more likely to lose parent attention, while girls with younger brothers are more likely to shoulder increased domestic labor. As China has ended its One Child Policy and more children will live in households with siblings, this study points to the potential exacerbation of gender inequality and calls for the development of policy initiatives to address the adverse impact on girls.

(Collaboration with Siyun Gan)

School and childcare facility closures during the COVID-19 pandemic have led to a dramatic increase of childcare burden at home, which is shouldered disproportionately by women than men. Leveraging nationally representative survey data and anonymized mobile tracking data, this study examines the impact of school and childcare facility closures on gender inequality in the increased childcare burden during the pandemic. It also investigates the potential intersectionality between gender, race, and class in shaping gender inequality during a crisis. The following research questions are examined: 1) Are there gender disparities in increased childcare time during the pandemic? 2) Do gender disparities in increased childcare time vary by race and household socioeconomic status? 3) Do counties with more closures of schools and childcare facilities suffer from more severe gender inequality in increased childcare time?

Pointing to decades of drug-related violence against the most vulnerable, experts have declared the War on Drugs a failure. This has opened space for a drug policy reform that promotes decriminalization of illicit crops. In Colombia, these two global responses to coca cropping have resulted in the coexistence of an illegal coca economy and an incipient legal coca market. Yet, little is known about the interfaces between legal and illegal markets, and the lived schooling experiences of educators and students. Drawing from contemporary theories of the state, political economy, and emergency education, the proposed study will examine how two global responses to coca production—the War on Drugs and the Drug Policy Reform movement—shape school life. It will analyze the effects of illicit and licit coca markets on school management procedures, curricular decisions, and educators and students. Designed as a comparative case study, this research combines archival work with interviews and in-depth participant observation. It focuses on (1) how educators and students make sense of the political influence state and non-state actors exert over schools; and (2) how they perceive coca-related activities intersect (or not) with key aspects of school life. By highlighting the intersection between state-market configurations and schooling, this research has implications for education policy and the education of children and youth distributed across the drug supply chain. This study has been funded by the National Academy of Education (NAEd)/Spencer Post-Doctoral Fellowship.

In 2010, Juan Manuel Santos assumed the presidency of Colombia, and in eastern Colombia, Eleonora Martínez accepted the position of principal of the Rafael Baralt school in La Serenidad. While Santos was making war and peace from Bogotá, Campos-Valles experienced the consequences of these decisions in an area disputed by two insurgent groups: the National Liberation Army (ELN) and the Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). This project uses archival data and in-depth interviews to examine the evolution of the social relations that give life to state institutions in the education sector in the transition from war to peace.

While other victims of the armed conflict have remained invisible, stories about refugees are omnipresent. Refugees are protagonists of news, blog entries, podcasts, novels, documentaries, movies, art exhibits, and even recipe books. Hollywood stars like Angelina Jolie, Cate Blanchett, and Ben Stiller have produced videos encouraging the public to support refugee populations, taking concerns about refugees outside humanitarian aid. Regardless of the outlet, all these messages share a certainty about what it means to be a refugee. Using the 1951 Convention and Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees, these messages boldly define a refugee as “someone who is unable or unwilling to return to their country of origin owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or political opinion.” Under this definition, the term refugee appears clear, categorical, and universal. But, how did this term come to be seen this way and gain its global currency? How do policymakers and civil employees in locations far away from the place that gave birth to the category appropriate the term? How is refugee status displayed in everyday life? Drawing on the literature on the anthropology of the state, migratory and refugee studies, and comparative and international education, in this project I focus on Ecuador, an understudied refugee-hosting country of the global south, to tell the story of how this one word — refugee — transformed the migratory and educational policy landscape. Using multi-sited ethnographic methods, I examine how incoming forced migrants from Colombia became an object of policy concern in Ecuador, how various national and international institutional actors helped to set up a refugee regime, and the impact of that regime on the experiences of Colombian migrant youth.