We encourage our students to work closely with faculty members on research, publishing, grant writing, and any special project with which the faculty member happens to be engaged. Such opportunities allow our students to cultivate their own interests, learning about research and program management, expanding their networks, and building their skills along the way.
Faculty Books, Research Publications, and Projects
Professor Carol Anne Spreen
Book Title: Creating Third Spaces of Learning for Post-Capitalism
by Gary L. Anderson, Dipti Desai, Ana Inés Heras, and Carol Anne Spreen
In this book, the authors’ post-capitalist approach to change focuses less on what we need to dismantle and more on what educators and activists are building in its place. Studying schools and other social organizations in the Global North and South, the authors identify and examine some of the most interesting counterhegemonic spaces in both formal and informal education today.
Professor Dana Burde
Book Title: Schools for Conflict or for Peace in Afghanistan
In this book, Dana Burde shows how aid to education in Afghanistan bolstered conflict both deliberately in the 1980s through violence-infused curricula and inadvertently in the 2000s through misguided stabilization programs. To promote peace, Burde argues we must expand equal access to quality community-based education for all. Drawing on research conducted on education in conflict zones around the world and incorporating insights from extensive fieldwork in Afghanistan and Pakistan, Burde recalculates and improves a popular formula for peace.
Professor Heddy Lahmann
Publication title: From Margins to Masterpieces: Charting Pathways to Strengthen Arts in Global Public Education
This global study spans 55 countries and draws on 54 interviews and 95 surveys with educators, policymakers, advocates, and arts leaders to examine systemic barriers to arts education and highlight scalable solutions. It features national models, advocacy strategies, and cross-sector partnerships, with recommendations focused on teacher training, community engagement, and positioning arts education as essential to the future of learning, innovation, and wellbeing.
Professor Rena Deitz
Publication title: Do Good Intentions Translate? The Rise, Transfer, and Localization of Social Emotional Learning (SEL)
This study examines how transferring a globally-driven social emotional learning (SEL) intervention impacts a refugee-hosting community in Palabek, Uganda. It explores whether SEL’s effectiveness may be compromised by inadequate localization and adaptations of measurements through a sequential mixed-methods case study. A locally-developed measurement instrument better reflected the community’s values around SEL and captured positive effects of an intervention. The study highlights the importance of contextually relevant and locally-driven SEL approaches and argues for a more holistic understanding of policy transfer that includes the impact on recipient communities.
Publication title: Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) Systematic Review
This systematic review provides an overview of the existing evidence on the effects of social and emotional learning (SEL) and soft skills interventions on social and emotional competencies, academic success, wellbeing, health, and resilience in development and humanitarian settings. Specifically, this report aims to: 1) uncover what SEL evidence exists in humanitarian and development settings; 2) understand what the evidence tells us, and 3) differentiate the findings by learning context, setting, and population.
Project Title: Thriving through Play: A mental health and psychosocial support classroom approach for educators in crisis-affected settings
Dr. Rena Deitz co-created the Thriving Through Play training with the MHPSS Collaborative, followed by an evaluation of the training in Ukraine following the full-scale Russian invasion in 2022. The training provides educators with the knowledge, skills and motivation to support students’ mental health and wellbeing using play-based strategies. It provides practical tools and activities for teachers to promote student wellbeing, respond to distress, and nurture their own wellbeing. The training guide aims to provide teachers in conflict settings across the world with the knowledge and skills to support students’ mental health and wellbeing in the classroom, using conflict sensitive learning approaches and learning through play.
