Conference Presentations
Larson, J., Atkins, G., & Golden, R. (2019, April). “You can’t teach it”: When urban youth lead their learning. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association. Toronto, Ontario.
Larson, J., Rees, J., & Anderson, J. (2019, April). Focusing on literacy: Multidisciplinary approach to reform in one urban high school. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association. Toronto, Ontario.
Action Strategies for Youth and Males of Color in Teaching and Learning
Nelms, S. (2018). Panelist at Boys and Men of Color Education Summit. Rochester City School District, City of Rochester, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY.
The Rochester Men and Boys Summit was a one-day program designed to 1) highlight the critical educational supports needed by; 2) provide opportunities for the positive representation required to improve the self-esteem of; and 3) establish the frameworks for mentorship and engagement necessary for young boys and men of color to achieve the highest levels of personal and professional success. Panelists discussed solutions to the critical need for improved educational opportunities for boys and men of color in Upstate New York.
The importance of community schools in transforming urban education through partnerships with universities, local foundations, and community organizations: The EPO model and how it began revamping East.
Nelms, S. (2018). The importance of community schools in transforming urban education through partnerships with universities, local foundations, and community organizations. Presented at Better Schools, Better Neighborhoods. Community Action Organization of Western, NY, Buffalo, NY
Noguera, P. (2017, June). Breaking the cycle of poverty: Bridging the gap by expanding opportunities. Presented at Excellence through equity: Creating schools that serve all children well. Center for Urban Education Success, Rochester, NY.
During a two-day symposium hosted by the Center for Urban Education Success, Dr. Pedro Noguera delivered a keynote address that focused on the how and why educators, community leaders, and policymakers must understand and address the deleterious effects of poverty when aiming to improve education for our nation’s must vulnerable students, often concentrated in urban areas. He proposed that the most successful way to improve achievement is through an equitable approach to schooling.
Noguera, P. (2017, June). Excellence through equity: Creating conditions for great teaching and learning. Keynote address presented at Excellence through equity: Creating schools that serve all children well. Center for Urban Education Success, Rochester, NY.
During the Center for Urban Education Success’s two-day symposium, Dr. Pedro Noguera gave a presentation at a professional learning workshop to a group of 270 teachers, staff and University of Rochester Warner School of Education faculty and students. His focus for the talk was how to approach teaching and learning with equity as a priority, especially in schools that serve children in urban areas. He encouraged practitioners to promote student agency and engagement when designing curricula and instruction. His presentation was followed by small group breakout sessions where participants grappled with some of the themes of Dr. Noguera’s work.
Larson, J., DeAngelis, K., & Nelms, S. (2017, May). Doing justice: The role of distributed leadership in transforming urban schooling. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association. San Antonio, TX.
The purpose of this paper is to explore initial opportunities and challenges associated with the implementation of distributed leadership as one of multiple changes in a unique University/school partnership’s comprehensive reform initiative. Data are drawn from a long-term ethnography and mixed methods social design experiment of this initiative, including survey and school data. We have identified generative frictions related to distributed leadership that the paper will discuss: 1) empowerment/compliance; resistance/all in, which further includes multiple other generative frictions such as: a) taking responsibility/assigning blame; b) old culture/new culture; c) new ideas/status quo; d) trusting relationships/betrayal; e) experiential knowledge/unknown knowledge. Implementation of distributed leadership occurred in everyday interactions as these frictions were negotiated. Read the conference paper.
Larson, J., Fitta, J., Domiano, E., & Bethmann, C. (2017, May). Learning from each other: Justice work with 9th grade English I students. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association. San Antonio, TX.
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Larson, J., Fitta, J., Domiano, E., & Bethmann, C. (2016, December). Learning from each other: Justice work with 9th grade English I students. Paper presented at the annual conference of the Literacy Research Association. Nashville, TN.
The purpose of this paper is to explore how critical literacy informed the teaching and learning of teacher-students and students-teachers (Freire, 1971) in a 9th grade English I class. Data are drawn from a larger, ongoing ethnography of a novel partnership between an urban high school labeled as “persistently failing” and a research university that has been approved as an Educational Partnership Organization (EPO). Using an analytics of power lens, we found that power produced generative frictions that animated culture change in general and changes in power relations in this classroom in particular. This study contributes to research on critical literacy by illustrating how critical literacy can be implemented under intense scrutiny and constraining curricular mandates. Read the conference paper.
Larson, J. (2017, May). What we don’t say out loud: Opportunities and challenges of participatory ethnography in urban schools. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association. San Antonio, TX.
This paper explores the complexities of participatory ethnography when that research is committed to equal power relations, co-authorship, and co-production. Data for this paper are drawn from a larger, ongoing participatory ethnography of a unique University/school partnership. Results of the analyses found that power produced generative frictions that animated changes in understanding of the research and simultaneously produced resistance to the research. This paper contributes to recent moves in educational research toward public scholarship and engaged research that works alongside participants. The paper discusses how such research might be done by describing the generative frictions that were produced in participatory ethnography in an urban high school under intense scrutiny by the state department of education and the general public.
Collaborating for Equity: Comprehensive School Reform in an Innovative University/School Partnership
Larson, J. & Nelms, S. (May, 2017). Collaborating for equity: Comprehensive school reform in an innovative University/school partnership. In symposium “Partnerships for school reform in urban education: Models, Dynamics, and Challenges” presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association. San Antonio, TX.
This symposium engages the 2017 AERA conference theme of “Knowledge to Action: Achieving the Promise of Equal Educational Opportunity” by sharing research on four high-schools whose creation or reform aims to narrow the achievement gap for socially marginalized youth in inner-city contexts. The session takes up the call for using “relevance to practice as a criterion for rigor” in educational research (Guttierez & Penuel, 2014) by exploring and assessing concrete educational interventions. All four sites – the UCLA Community School; East High in Rochester, New York; James Lyng High School in Montreal, Quebec; and the High School for Recording Arts in St. Paul, Minnesota – are supported by, or built around, partnerships with universities and/or community organizations. Read the conference paper.
Larson, J. & Gallego Greenwich, J. (2017, February) “So what is it you do here?” Unpacking participatory ethnography in urban schools. Paper presented at the 38th Annual Ethnography in Education Forum. Philadelphia, PA.
This is a “work-in-progress” paper presented to experienced ethnographers. We will describe the processes of attempting to conduct participatory ethnography at East, focusing specifically on the complex roles we negotiated during the study.
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Larson, J. (2017, February). Literacy and activism. Invited speaker at the annual conference of the National Council of Teachers of English Assembly for Research. San Francisco, CA.
Basile, A., Hart, D., & Larson, J. (2016, November). Implementing writing workshop at the secondary level: Ideals, Realities, & Flexibility. Presented at the annual meeting of the New York State Reading Association. Rochester, NY.
In this presentation, we described the EPO and the process involved in deciding to use Atwell’s Workshop curriculum for literacy classes in grades 6-9. Participants did a gallery walk of artifacts from two classrooms. Basile and Hart shared goals, challenges, and changes they made to a standing room only audience.
Uebbing, S., & Nelms, S. (2016, November). Lessons learned from university K-12 school partnerships: The East EPO. Invited presentation at the annual meeting of the Association of American Universities, Schools of Education’s Deans. Washington, D.C.
Larson, J. (2016). Publicly engaged scholars and literacy research. Study group invited scholar at the annual conference of the Literacy Research Association. Nashville, TN.
Larson, J., Fitta, J., & Morris, T. (2016, May). Expanding teachers’ classroom discourse repertoires. Paper presented at the Working Conference On Discourse Analysis in Educational Research. Columbus, Ohio.
This presentation focused on classroom discourse structures and the work we did to shift from teacher-led to more conversational and collaborative discourse in English classrooms at East.
Larson, J., DeAngelis, K., Nelms, S., Blocker, M., Davis, K., Wilson, C., Wilson, J., Castro, Z., Sanchez, G., Kwanza, H., & Young, J. (2016, April). Living Public Scholarship: Insights From a University-School Partnership. Presidential Session at annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, Washington D.C.
Using an interactive format, this session reported on the partnership between East High, an urban high school labeled as “persistently struggling” and the University of Rochester, approved as an “Educational Partnership Organization.” University researchers, the district’s superintendent, a principal, a teacher, and students addressed the challenges of conducting research alongside community engaged in a comprehensive school reform effort that, in effect, is changing everything. Presenters addressed the opportunities and challenges of bring together two discourse communities who often do not know how to speak to each other to produce knowledge that reflects both scholarly and local perspectives on the struggle to transform an urban high school.
Larson, J. & Hart, D. (2016, March). Writing towards diverse democracies through public scholarship. Writing and Literacies Podcast #2. Podcast retrieved from https://soundcloud.com/writing-and-literacies
Larson, J. (2015, December). What’s literacy got to do with it? Imagining how one urban high school can be transformed. Paper presented at the annual conference of the Literacy Research Association. San Diego, CA.