Faculty EDJI Research

EDJI Research: Studies race, gender and immigrant status in information communication technologies, and cultural diversity and its implications in online networked learning spaces; investigates gender and racial/ethnic inequality in educational opportunities/resources and student experiences/outcomes in STEM fields.

EDJI Research: Specializes in educational policy evaluation, with focus on the issues of educational equity and accountability. Grounded in equity-driven critical quantitative research frameworks, his work is dedicated to public education reform for transforming the lives of disadvantaged/minoritized students and closing educational inequalities and achievement gaps among diverse racial and social groups of students. He has authored several books on this topic, including The Testing Gap (Information Age Publishing, 1997), The Anatomy of Achievement Gaps (Oxford University Press, 2016), and Centering Whole-Child Development in Global Education Reform (Routledge, 2022). His research has informed evidence-based policy across the nation, including the Harvard University Institutional Antiracism and Accountability Project and the UCLA Civil Rights Project. His current Fulbright-funded international research investigates the issues of educational equity in Asia.

EDJI Research: Explores and interrogates the conceptualization and enaction of social justice at the intersections of education and mental health, in order to create community-based systems of support for the futurity of marginalized communities.

EDJI Research: Expands the multicultural knowledge base through scholarship on race, racial identity and racism-related stress, queer and trans identity, acculturation and other multicultural issues. Explores training and curricular applications in counseling psychology with an emphasis on structural competence and increasing understanding of multicultural change efforts in higher education.

EDJI Research: Engages in research that focuses on the psychosocial wellness of communities minoritized by race, sexual orientation and gender identity, as well as research on increasing the retention and graduate rates of students of color in graduate psychology programs. In addition, she works to train culturally competent mental health professionals.

EDJI Research: Has partnered with disability organizations to conduct large-scale surveys of community participation barriers for individuals with disabilities, with particular attention to equitable access to employment. Clinical experience and research study of the impacts of social support and financial hardship on families after traumatic brain injury. Current authorship includes guidance in promoting more culturally responsive program evaluation for counseling practitioners and agencies.

EDJI Research: Examines assistive technology (AT) access and usage among underrepresented populations, specifically under the domains of workplace accommodations, and the participation status of historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) and small African American-owned technology firms in the federal assistive technology-research and development enterprise through STEM pathways. In addition, researching employment disparities among multiple marginalized people with disabilities during the COVID-19 pandemic.

EDJI Research: Explores educational spaces in which Black youth and families survive, thrive and navigate, and the role of race and anti-Blackness within these contexts.

EDJI Research: Examines the policies and practices that affect low-income, first-generation and racially minoritized students' access to postsecondary education and successful completion of a postsecondary credential.

EDJI Research: Studies how a variety of education stakeholders both inside and outside of schools collectively negotiate and implement their visions of just, equitable, and excellent education through school district turnaround, leadership, governance, and administration.

EDJI Research: Focuses on cross-national comparisons of educational policy and educational inequalities, including gender and socioeconomic inequality in student achievement and career expectations. She also focuses on the mechanisms, including state policy, through which low-income and historically underrepresented, minoritized youth in the United States are denied access to opportunities for high-level STEM courses in high school, associated capitals, resultant college entrance patterns and STEM majors.

EDJI Research: Studies racial, gender and class inequalities in schools and the impact on students' social and academic experiences, particularly during the postsecondary transition.

EDJI Research: Studies how higher education environments and practices transform the engagement and success of linguistically and culturally minoritized students, in particular, international and immigrant students.

EDJI Research: Researches neoliberal reform, the politics of education, and the ways social policies and actors either mitigate or reproduce structural violence affecting young women and girls in U.S. and global contexts.

EDJI Research: Focuses on the creation of a culturally responsive instructional supervision paradigm to create more equitable pedagogical practices in the classroom, as well as the creation of more equity-oriented educational leaders in predominantly white rural spaces.

EDJI Research: Intersectional examination of race, racism, anti-Blackness and inequality in higher education. Examines the components of a multicultural environment and the necessary, concrete strategies, competencies, evaluation and practices to create and maintain such campus environments.

EDJI Research: Studies how gender norms shape higher education institutions and the experiences of university faculty, staff and students.

EDJI Research: Employs critical and asset-based frameworks to investigate campus racial climate, first-generation students' sense of belonging, student activism and resistance efforts, and the various ways race, ethnicity and im/migration policy inform undocumented collegians’ educational experiences.

EDJI Research: Explores the importance of creating diverse leadership pipelines and supportive principal preparation curriculum for K–12 school administration and the process of multi-party sensemaking in school leadership.

EDJI Research: Studies success, health and well-being in higher education, especially centering the experiences and outcomes of Black and Indigenous college students, staff and faculty.

EDJI Research: Through ethnographic, historical and policy analyses, Dr. Wu's research centers on how marginalized students and communities experience structural vulnerability and negotiate educational change amidst rapid social, economic and global transformation. In particular, she has pursued three main lines of research: rural minority education, immigrant youth and families, and child disability and special education.

EDJI Research: Uses co-design to investigate how neurodivergent students can be better served by higher education.

EDJI Research: Studies the challenges that students of different ages, gender identities, races and curricular backgrounds encounter in technical courses in order to provide implications for the design of differentiated instruction.

EDJI Research: Examines library services to underserved and marginalized populations including first-generation, low-income and post-traditional students.

EDJI Research: Aims to support respect for difference, care for community data, and social and ecological justice by examining uses of data, information, and technologies and the effects of these practices.

EDJI Research: Studies equity, diversity, justice and inclusion issues in librarianship, particularly the worklife experiences and retention of BIPOC librarians.

EDJI Research: Uses co-design to investigate how neurodivergent students can be better served by higher education.

EDJI Research: Qualitatively examines how anti-Blackness emerges in language education and (language) teacher preparation to effect meaningful curricular, pedagogical and policy changes in these spaces.

EDJI Research: Focuses on equity, particularly with new media and multimodal literacies in classrooms, primarily in rural settings.

EDJI Research: Seeks to develop accessible and ecologically valid assessments of young children's social-emotional skills that minimize implicit bias and relieve teacher burden.

EDJI Research: Focuses on designing online, hybrid and in-person inclusive learning environments in higher education settings to fully engage cognitively and culturally diverse learners in multi-disciplinary contexts.

EDJI Research: Focuses on how learners from diverse backgrounds learn about complex science phenomena, within informal learning environments, such as museums, community centers and afterschool programs, how learners from diverse backgrounds use science knowledge while negotiating environmental problems in their everyday lives, and how to build partnerships with relevant stakeholders to design effective science learning environments for youth across several diverse communities.

EDJI Research: Co-designs, implements and studies learning environments that expand access to, relevance of, and participation in computing; applies critical dialectical pluralism to broaden conceptions of student engagement; and plans and facilitates near-peer mentoring and teaching with high-schoolers and middle-schoolers, especially in partnership with members of minoritized communities.

EDJI Research: Examines professional socialization and identity development of graduate students and postdoctoral researchers, mentoring relationships, and mentoring practices in higher education related to self-efficacy, sociocultural inequity, and belongingness within and across educational contexts.

EDJI Research: Explores critical literacy pedagogy with diverse children’s literature, especially picture books created by Black, Indigenous and persons of color (BIPOC) authors/illustrators. Additional interests lie in equitable teaching practice within early childhood and elementary contexts.

EDJI Research:  Examines the teaching and learning of Black history education in schools and society and studies critical theories of race, multicultural teacher education, and socio-historical aspects of curriculum history and theories with an emphasis on Black Education.

EDJI Research: Uses narrative and multimodal methods to investigate ways that teachers explore racial positions (their own and others) through book discussion, personal narrative, dialogic interaction, and reverent listening; investigates how multimodal communication in elementary school engineering contexts positions multilingual learners and children of color with more just and equitable opportunities for learning.

EDJI Research: Studies how knowledge about Latinx communities and groups is (re)produced in (school) spaces.

EDJI Research: Studies the literacy practices and identities of adolescents in classrooms and communities with a concern for culture, equity, and justice.

EDJI Research: Critiques how policy and politics shape and are shaped by the intersectional qualities of gender in global, South American, and US urban contexts. Her ethnographies and qualitative, social science-informed studies are concentrated on three areas: teachers’ work, curriculum/textbooks, and school food. As a first-gen, feminist, interdisciplinary public intellectual, she strives to demystify policy, to cultivate and support policy protagonists through teaching and long-term community collaborations, and to transform educational decision-making into an inclusive process focused on realizing human rights and just transitions.

EDJI Research: Investigates how intended, potentially implemented, and implemented curricula can contribute to unequal opportunities for traditionally minoritized students, including African American students and students of color. Furthermore, I examine the racialization and systemic discrimination experienced by Asian American students, teachers, and parents in their K-12 mathematics education.

EDJI Research: Explores the ways crafting, art-making and other design activities can intersect with and enhance equitable learning in formal and informal environments; designs educational experiences in ways that highlight and honor voices and practices that are traditionally minoritized and undervalued in educational settings.

EDJI Research: Focuses on cultivating diversity in the teaching profession through innovative, community-centered models of teacher education and preparing teachers to work with students in historically under-served schools.