The ISLS Emerging Scholars Program, funded by the Wallace Foundation, is a step towards elevating and supporting the work of scholars from ethnic, racial, cultural, and/or linguistic backgrounds that have been systemically marginalized and underrepresented within the ISLS. Our hope is to expand the field’s understandings of, and methods of studying, learning processes and learning environments by encouraging and empowering emerging scholars’ long-term engagement in, and contribution to, ISLS. The initiative is further focusing on supporting outstanding and innovative research that focuses on addressing educational injustices through the research methodologies and/or topics under study.
List of Scholars
2021-2022
- Mariam Alhashmi Zayed University (UAE)
- Claire Alkouatli University of South Australia (Australia)
- Jessica Sujata Chandras Wake Forest University (USA)
- Tiffany M. Nyachae The Pennsylvania State University (USA)
- JooYoung Seo University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (USA)
- Angela Stewart Carnegie Mellon University (USA)
Biographies & Projects
Mariam Alhashmi
Assistant Professor
Department of Education Studies Chair
Zayed University, UAE
Mariam Alhashmi completed her PhD at the British University in Dubai specializing in Educational Management and Leadership with a focus on the philosophy of Islamic education. Her academic interests include Islamic education, Arabic teaching and learning, personalized learning, learning beyond classrooms, and innovative learning spaces. As a head of the national UAE curriculum for Arabic, Islamic Studies, and Social Studies, Mariam has trained hundreds of teachers and principals in the UAE, Kuwait, KSA, and Kenya.
Although the learning and developmental benefits of imaginary play are widely recognized, most research has been conducted in Western cultural contexts; much less has explored imaginary play in Muslim communities, featuring culturally relevant material and pedagogies. This study inquires into how children engage in imaginary play and how adults support imaginary play in four Muslim communities in Toronto, Beirut, Riyadh, and Abu Dhabi. As a collaborative design experiment (Brown, 1992), we will offer an initial playgroup design and refine it in collaboration with mothers and the children themselves at each site over the course of ten weeks. The playgroup design is organized around a 10-session playgroup program that we collaboratively designed for children under 7 years old, based on traditional stories from Muslim cultural contexts with invitations for imaginary play.
Brown, A. L. (1992). Design experiments: Theoretical and methodological challenges in creating complex interventions in classroom settings. The Journal of the Learning Sciences, 2(2), 141–178. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327809jls0202_2
Claire Alkouatli
Adjunct Research Fellow
University of South Australia
Claire Alkouatli completed a PhD in Human Development, Learning, and Culture at the University of British Columbia and is an Adjunct Research Fellow at the University of South Australia. She is currently engaged in research projects and collaborations in Australia, Canada, England, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE. Her research focuses on the roles of culture, relationships, and pedagogies in human development across the lifespan, including imaginative play, dialogue, inquiry, and challenge.
Although the learning and developmental benefits of imaginary play are widely recognized, most research has been conducted in Western cultural contexts; much less has explored imaginary play in Muslim communities, featuring culturally relevant material and pedagogies. This study inquires into how children engage in imaginary play and how adults support imaginary play in four Muslim communities in Toronto, Beirut, Riyadh, and Abu Dhabi. As a collaborative design experiment (Brown, 1992), we will offer an initial playgroup design and refine it in collaboration with mothers and the children themselves at each site over the course of ten weeks. The playgroup design is organized around a 10-session playgroup program that we collaboratively designed for children under 7 years old, based on traditional stories from Muslim cultural contexts with invitations for imaginary play.
Brown, A. L. (1992). Design experiments: Theoretical and methodological challenges in creating complex interventions in classroom settings. The Journal of the Learning Sciences, 2(2), 141–178. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327809jls0202_2
Jessica Sujata Chandras
Visiting Assistant Professor
Department of Anthropology
Wake Forest University
“Collaborative Education: Finding New Pathways for Learning in Tribal Communities in Western India,” seeks to support practitioners/educators who conduct school in rural areas of Osmanabad, a socially stratified district in Maharashtra, India. The educators/practitioners work for a local NGO that provides educational and social welfare support to the community of Gormati-speaking members of a federally registered tribe. This project implements family perspectives and linguistic analysis in Learning Sciences (LS). The project focuses on language education and asks the question: What scaffolding (pedagogical, socio-cultural, emotional) is required for students from tribal communities in rural India, who experience formal schooling in the dominant language of the region, rather than their own tribal language? The project also brings together an opportunity to share relevant LS research (theories, methods, research processes) between indigenous communities in the United States and tribal communities in India.
Tiffany M. Nyachae
Assistant Professor of Education
Department of Curriculum and Instruction
The Pennsylvania State University, College of Education
Dr. Nyachae earned her Ph.D. in Literacy Education: Curriculum, Instruction, and the Science of Learning at the University at Buffalo (SUNY). Previously, she was a seventh and eighth grade social studies teacher and language arts teacher at a Buffalo-based K-8 urban charter school. There, she helped to create Sisters of Promise, an after-school program for Black girls.
My design-based research study of Social Justice Literacy Workshop (SJLW) will examine the extent to which learning environment design assists literacy development and contextualized social justice learning and action among adolescent students of Color labeled as “struggling” readers and writers in schools. This project will interrogate teacher and student learning through their co-design and redesign of the SJLW learning environment. Employing culturally diverse literature and other texts, SJLW is a dialogic space where literacy support, text creation, and justice-centered learning and action happen concurrently. This project offers more intense cycles of re-design, design assessment, and unlike my previous work, includes students in (re)design processes.
JooYoung Seo
Assistant Professor
School of Information Sciences
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
As an information and learning scientist, Dr. Seo focuses particularly on how to make computational literacy more accessible to people with dis/abilities using multi-modal data representation. He worked on various research and development projects on accessible computing and assistive technologies. His research projects have involved not just web accessibility, but also human-centered design and development studies including inclusive makerspaces, tangible block-based programming, accessible data science, and accessible/reproducible scientific writing tools for people with and without dis/abilities.
This project aims to design and develop an accessible data representation system to engage blind learners in data science literacy movement. Over the past five years, we have witnessed rapidly changing education curricula demanding knowledge on data science and artificial intelligence. While the current trends seem to continue, insufficient attention has been paid to how current data science education can accommodate students with disabilities who are increasingly participating in general education settings. As the majority of data science tools and curricula are designed with visually-oriented modality, blind individuals have faced extra challenges. Given that there are over 63,657 legally blind children, youth, and adult students in the U.S. educational settings, it is imperative for information and learning scientists to address this issue which will otherwise continue excluding this group of people from the future education. Among the five procedures of common data science workflow (i.e., importing; wrangling; transforming; visualizing; and modeling), data visualization is considered as the most challenging point for blind people to interpret. Thus, this research project will focus on that aspect within the one-year timeframe.
Angela Stewart
Postdoctoral Fellow
Human-Computer Interaction Institute
Carnegie Mellon University
Angela received a Bachelor of Software Engineering from Auburn University in 2015 and a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Colorado Boulder in 2020. Angela’s work sits at the intersection of education, artificial intelligence, and HCI. She investigates creation of educational technologies that support the agency of learners and teachers, towards the goal of creating more equitable, inclusive educational spaces.
Angela will investigate the educational impacts of a culturally-responsive social robot that scaffolds reflections on identity and societal power dynamics. She will look at how these robot-scaffolded reflections effect learning computational concepts for Black, Latinx, and Indigenous students.
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