Three peer-reviewed journals have recently published research articles from Penn State’s Hammel Family Human Rights Initiative. The articles illustrate how the initiative’s programs help K-12 educators address difficult issues such as racism.
The three magazines that published the articles of the initiative are School-university partnerships, Professional Research Magazine and Teacher training magazine. JTE, as it is known, is widely considered the highest-ranked research journal in the field of teacher education. Some of the scholars who independently reviewed the articles described the initiative’s nonpartisan, research-based approach, which combines practitioners’ research with trauma-informed and asset-based practices, as novel, innovative, and widely needed.
“We spend a lot of energy and time doing rigorous research on our work for a number of reasons,” said Boaz Dvir, director of the initiative and associate professor in the Donald P. Bellisario College of Communications. “These include improving our programs, strengthening our approach, collaborating with partners and participants, and sharing our findings with the world so that others can challenge and/or adopt our approach.”
The initiative partners with educational entities such as school districts to offer customized professional learning opportunities to K-12 educators in Pennsylvania and across the country. Program participants identify difficult issues in their curriculum or environment, ask compelling questions about these issues, seek out credible sources, collect and analyze data, investigate their findings with colleagues and initiative facilitators, and design and implement implementation plans in the curriculum. classroom or school.
The initiative offers asynchronous and self-paced online programs, workshops and modules, lasting one year and one semester.
To examine the initiative’s annual program, researchers interviewed participating teachers, generated field notes, collected program artifacts, reviewed teachers’ lesson plans, and conducted classroom observations.
The core research team included Dvir; Initiative-affiliated faculty member Logan Rutten, assistant professor at the University of North Dakota; and Danielle Butville, deputy director of the initiative. The team collaborated with educators from Pennsylvania’s Red Lion Area School District (Wendy Smith, a veteran fifth-grade teacher, and Eric Wilson, who at the time was serving as the district’s director of instruction) to co-author two of the publications.
All three journals offer open access, so readers can download articles for free. To the extent possible, the initiative aims to publish its research in such accessible spaces.
“These articles create a distinctive niche in research on teacher professional learning,” Rutten said. “At a time when many teachers are seeking support to address the difficult issues they face in their curriculum and in their school communities, our research clearly illustrates how research-based approaches can offer a hopeful path forward” .
The initiative team continues to examine several key aspects of its work.
“In our current and future research, we are studying the impact of our programs on K-12 teachers’ collective efficacy and student learning experiences, as well as our learning as facilitators and teacher educators,” Butville said.
Based at Penn State’s Bellisario College, the Hammel Family Human Rights Initiative and the Holocaust, Genocide and Human Rights Education Initiative offer intensive professional learning programs throughout Pennsylvania and across the country to support educators in their instruction on a variety of difficult topics.