Exploring Family Civics
This three year exploratory mixed-methods project will examine how a leadership training designed for racially and ethnically diverse parents/caregivers and their children fosters the civic engagement of families in their communities, targeting school- and district-level policies and practices. We hypothesize this training has the capacity to build the skills, confidence, and knowledge for children and parents to participate and lead change in different political systems within their communities.
The project will work specifically with the Children’s Leadership Training Institute in collaboration with the Parent Leadership Training Institute across a few sites. The training is a 20-week program that supports parents in advocating for their children inside and outside of the home. As parents engage in the program, their children also participate in parallel content that fosters their civic knowledge and skills. The project team will collect observational, interview, and survey data to better understand how this leadership program influences the families’ civic practices and engagement and develop a measure of family civic engagement. Findings from this study will inform families and youth leadership interventions and programs that promote how families can become civically engaged in their communities.
Funded by the William T. Grant Foundation (Read the press release for more information)
Transformative Justice at the Intersection of Schools and Teacher Education
This multi-site project is a university-based partnership to support pre-service and cooperating teachers to incorporate transformative justice pedagogies into their classroom instruction and community. School-based transformative justice builds on the principles and practices of restorative justice, not only centering relationships and encouraging democratic engagement to respond to injustices in school settings, but also recognizes the role of curriculum and pedagogy to examine and contextualize issues racism and byproducts of oppression that may inform how the community responds in a manner that understands the harm caused and works to restore relationships.
The project team members will examine a set of professional development activities that support the pre-service and cooperating teachers integration of transformative justice into classrooms, interview teachers about the experiences over the year, and elicit student perceptions of transformative justice practices in their classrooms. The project aims to inform district and state policies around school-discipline practices, provide a model to integrate transformative justice principles and pedagogies into teacher preparation programs, and provide a reliable classroom measure to gauge transformative justice practices in a given time point.
Funded by the University of California – Berkeley and Spencer Foundation