New Editor Team to Take Helm of ER
New Editor Team to Take Helm of ER
 
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June 2019

AERA has named June Ahn (University of California, Irvine), Thurston Domina (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill), Andrew McEachin (RAND Corporation), Dana Thompson Dorsey (University of Pittsburgh), and Sarah Woulfin (University of Connecticut) as coeditors of Educational Researcher (ER) for the 2020–2022 volume years.

The team was appointed by 2019–2020 AERA President Vanessa Siddle Walker. This appointment culminated an extensive search driven by the AERA Journal Publications Committee, which is charged with making editorial recommendations to the president. The incoming editor team will begin receiving new manuscripts on July 1, 2019. They succeed coeditors Carolyn D. Herrington (Florida State University) and Jason Grissom (Vanderbilt University), whose term ends in December.

ER is AERA’s premier journal, reaching widely across education research and aligned fields by publishing original research from multiple disciplines, theoretical orientations, and methodologies. ER aims to make major programmatic research and new findings of general significance to the education research community broadly accessible.

As they stated in their original proposal, the incoming team seeks to “solidify the journal’s position as the go-to venue on issues that are timely and relevant to a broad range of educational stakeholders, policymakers, and practitioners across the United States and around the world.” Their goals include enhancing ER’s relevance and methodological/content diversity, as well as disseminating content to new audiences through multiple media. The coeditors “hope to position ER as a central participant in the urgent discussions surrounding education, equity, and democracy in this social and cultural moment."

June Ahn is an associate professor of learning sciences and research-practice partnerships at the University of California, Irvine. He conducts research on the design, implementation, and evaluation of learning technologies. Ahn focuses on understanding sociotechnical systems—how social, cultural, and institutional factors intersect with the affordances of new technologies—to create enhanced and equitable learning opportunities for all learners. This work often results in partnering with local education organizations to design new learning environments and develop research-practice partnerships and networked improvement communities, and creating new technologies that directly address issues of teaching, learning, and organizational change within those contexts. This research agenda has been supported by over $11 million in funding from the National Science Foundation, Institute of Education Sciences, and private foundations. Ahn has authored 62 publications across a diverse range of fields, including education, learning sciences, information sciences, and computer science.

Thurston Domina is a professor of educational policy and sociology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He works in partnership with educational practitioners to better understand the relationship between education and social inequality in the contemporary United States. Domina’s work focuses in two areas. First, he seeks to understand how schools sort students into different learning environments, how this sorting process shapes students’ life chances, and how educational policies and educator practices can expand opportunities for all. Second, he studies the interaction between families and schools in an attempt to understand processes through which out-of-school factors influence the distribution of educational opportunity.

Andrew McEachin is a policy researcher at the RAND Corporation and a core faculty member at the Pardee RAND Graduate School. The unifying goal of his research is to generate rigorous policy-relevant evidence to help educators and policymakers in their efforts to raise student achievement and narrow achievement gaps. His research agenda focuses on the determinants of persistent achievement gaps as well as evaluating the effect of popular responses by policymakers and educators to reduce these gaps. Examples of these include standards-based accountability, school choice initiatives, student discipline policies, and curricular intensification. He is currently on the editorial boards of AERJ and EEPA, and an associate editor of Education Finance and Policy.

 

Dana Thompson Dorsey is an associate professor, and the associate director of research and development, for the Center for Urban Education at the University of Pittsburgh. Thompson Dorsey critically examines education laws, policies, and practices and their influence on P–20 educational equity, access, and opportunity for students of color and historically marginalized groups. Her research has focused on issues related to school segregation, race-based admissions in higher education, education deregulation, and culturally responsive school policies. Epistemologically, she aligns with the critical tradition and constructivist approach to research, and often uses a critical race theory lens in her work. She is published in leading education journals, including Teachers College Record, Educational Administration Quarterly, and Educational Policy, and she has received grant funding from the Spencer Foundation and the Gates Foundation.

Sarah Woulfin is an associate professor in the University of Connecticut’s Department of Educational Leadership. She studies the relationship between education policy and equitable instruction. Woulfin’s commitment to raising the quality of instruction motivates her research on how policy influences—and is influenced by—administrators, coaches, and teachers. Using lenses from organizational sociology, she investigates how policies and organizational conditions influence the work of teachers, coaches, principals, and district administrators in reform. Her work has been published in American Educational Research Journal, Educational Administration Quarterly, Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, and Educational Researcher, among other outlets. She has received grant funding for research on coaching from the Spencer Foundation and for redesigning the University of Connecticut’s principal preparation program from the Wallace Foundation. She is an associate editor for Elementary School Journal and a member of the editorial review board for Reading Research Quarterly.