Key Initiatives

*Call for Mentees*

The UCEA Graduate Student Council (GSC), in conjunction with the AERA Leadership for School Improvement Special Interest Group (LSI SIG), is seeking mentees for the Researcher Development Program (RDP) 2024-25 cohort. The Researcher Development Program is an initiative aimed at providing graduate students with research-focused mentorship and networking opportunities with faculty members outside their institution.

To sign up as a mentee, please complete this questionnaire using the link provided by Sunday, November 3, 2024.

The UCEA Graduate Student Council (GSC), in conjunction with the AERA Leadership for School Improvement Special Interest Group (LSI SIG), began a new initiative called the Researcher Development Program in 2018. The Researcher Development Program (RDP) seeks to expand access to academic networks that dually support graduate students’ personal and professional well-being and scholarly development.

The RDP fulfills its mission by:

Striving to create accessible, inclusive, and humanizing professional development spaces
Promoting sustained, professionally enriching collaboration between faculty members and graduate students
Providing research, writing, presentation, and publication opportunities aligned with participants’ academic and professional goals
Promoting opportunities for faculty members to hone their mentorship skills.

You can access the Summer/Fall 2022 RDP Newsletter here.

We kick off this academic year with 14 mentors and 17 mentees! Currently, the RDP Planning Committee is supporting mentors and mentees as they begin their semester, setting their goals for the year, and planning how they will develop their final projects. Throughout their experience, we intend to support their relationship building, creativity, and project development. Here we provide a list of the mentor-mentee matches for the 2021-2022 cohort.

Mentor Group	Mentee	Mentee Institution
Craig De Voto, University of Illinois at Chicago	Zainab Qaabidh	North Carolina State University
Jamey Tobery-Nystrom, Frostburg State University Jennifer Bailey, The University of Texas at Tyler	Emily West Geary	University of Vermont
	Meghan Buchanan	Texas State University
Jeong Hoon Choi, SWIFT Education Center, Life Span Institute, University of Kansas Jayson Richardson, University of Denver	Aashna Khurana	Lynch School of Education and Human Development, Boston College
Jim Van Overschelde, Texas State University Zhidong Zhang, The University of Texas--Rio Grande Valley	Kathryn Watson	University of Colorado Colorado Springs
	Sylvia Royster	George Washington University
Joonkil Ahn, University of North Dakota	Congli Zhang	University of Oregon
Khalid Arar, Texas State University Laura Cruz, Penn State	Betty Cowans	Howard University
	Jamal Donaldson Briggs	Southern University and A&M College
	Lyndsie Whitehead	Howard University
	Michelle Taylor	Wayne State University
LeAnne Salazar Montoya, University of Nevada Las Vegas Cailen O’Shea, North Dakota State University	Analisa Martinez-Morris	University of Denver
Max Yurkofsky, Radford University Randy Hetherington, University of Portland	David Trautman	UCSD
Patricia Virella, Montclair State University Catherine Zeisner, Gonzaga University	April Mouton	Texas State University
	Michelle Johnson, MS.	University of Cincinnati
	Naichen Zhao	University of Denver
Pinar Ayyildiz, Ankara Medipol University Türkiye. Martin Scanlan, Boston College	Anglesia Brown	Wayne State University
	Meveryn Chua	School of Education (The College of William and Mary)
Seth Hunter, George Mason	Abby Vining	University of Denver
Vincent Cho, Boston College	Sofia Dueñas	University of Notre Dame

And check out the recent publication by Meredith Wronowski and four mentees, two of whom, Dr. Bryan Duarte and Dr. Margaret Thornton, are now faculty members, and one, Dr. Angelica Witcher, is an administrator at Virginia Tech, and one, Bita Razavi-Maleki, who is a doctoral candidate at UT Austin.

Wronowski, M. L., Thornton, M., Razavi-Maleki, B., Witcher, A. W., & Duarte, B. J. (2022). Beyond Tracking: The Relationship of Opportunity to Learn and Diminished Math Outcomes for U.S. High School Students. Teachers College Record, 124(6), 196–224. https://doi.org/10.1177/01614681221113473

For more information, please contact:

Dr. Christine Nganga, ngangac@gwu.edu

Dr. Kristy Cooper Stein, kcooper@msu.edu