The Weekly Recap
News and Updates from Across BU Wheelock SPACE This Week
Welcome to this week’s recap! This week we share community updates, provide details on faculty engagement, and highlight recently published research.
New Announcements
Legislative Education Hearing: The Massachusetts Joint Committee on Education kicked off its first hearing of the legislative session. Held in a hybrid format at the State House and online, the public hearing focused on bills related to extracurricular programming, English Language Learners and bilingual education, and student learning outcomes. The Committee welcomed both written and oral testimony from advocates, educators, and community members across the Commonwealth. The next hearing will take place on May 12 at 1:00 PM and will focus on bills related to school buildings, school finance, and technology and data. Learn more and stream the hearing here.
Out and About
BPS Haitian Heritage Month Celebration: Irene Dennison (Asst. Director, SPACE) attended the BPS Haitian Heritage Month Celebration, which included songs performed by students from the Mattahunt Elementary School, a presentation on Haitian art by Steve Desrosiers, Region 6 Supervisor of Attendance, and remarks by Joelle Gamere, Chief of the Office of Multicultural and Multilingual Education, and Superintendent Mary Skipper. At the event, Superintendent Skipper shared: “Our diversity is what makes us special, and we are strengthened in our resolve to serve every student who walks through our doors... we are lucky to have a mayor and state leadership who support that.”
RCC Early College Showcase: Mary Churchill (Assoc. Dean, BU Wheelock) and Yasko Kanno (Professor, BU Wheelock) joined a celebration honoring the students and faculty involved in the Boston Public Schools and Roxbury Community College Early College program. The event showcased the innovative work and impactful contributions stemming from this partnership, which is expanding early college opportunities for multilingual learners across the city.
MA Nonprofit Survey Results: Mary Churchill (Assoc. Dean, BU Wheelock), Raul Fernandez (Senior Lecturer, BU Wheelock), Irene Dennison (Assoc. Director, SPACE), and Cara Mattaliano (Asst. Director, SPACE) attended The Shifting Federal Landscape: Massachusetts Nonprofits Raise the Alarm, hosted by The Boston Foundation. The convening featured the release of a survey, which The MassINC Polling Group conducted for the Massachusetts Nonprofit Network and the Boston Foundation, highlighting how local nonprofits perceive the new administration’s policies and their potential effects on vulnerable communities and organizational sustainability.
Faculty Engagement
The Conversation on Higher Education: Mary Churchill (Assoc. Dean, BU Wheelock) joined higher education thought leaders at the Coolidge Corner Theater in Brookline, MA, for a dynamic launch event and discussion of The Conversation on Higher Education, hosted by The Conversation U.S. and Johns Hopkins University Press. Churchill, editor of the volume, was joined by panelists Pam Eddinger (President, Bunker Hill Community College), Tim Poynton (Assoc. Professor and Graduate Program Director for School Counseling, UMass Boston), and Erica Jacqueline Licht (Research Projects Director at the Institutional Antiracism & Accountability Project and Instructor at Harvard Extension School). The event, moderated by Beth Daley (Executive Editor, The Conversation U.S.), explored critical issues shaping the future of higher education and the role of public scholarship in driving change.
Nuestros Niños: The Nuestros Niños Professional Development Program—an initiative of the City of Boston’s Office of Early Childhood, led by Kristin McSwain, in partnership with the Institute for Early Childhood Wellbeing at BU Wheelock, led by Dina Castro—celebrated its first graduating cohort with a research poster presentation and credential ceremony. The graduates, early educators from Boston Public Schools and ABCD Head Start, completed specialized coursework on teaching young bilingual children and shared insights from their classroom-based inquiry projects.
Research That Matters
Literacy Instruction: Teachers' perspectives on the structure of reading intervention classes in secondary schools: A meta-synthesis of qualitative research (co-authored by Assoc. Professor Kate Frankel)
How do teachers enact and experience literacy instruction across educational contexts? In this qualitative meta-synthesis of 33 articles published between 2000 and 2022, researchers report on the perspectives of middle and high school educators who teach reading intervention classes. Findings indicate that the interconnected infrastructure of curriculum, professional development, and leadership impacts educators' experiences, and that educators typically have limited voice in the structural decisions made beyond the classroom that impact them. Findings also highlight the need to examine how systems and structures interact with sociocultural factors to impact educators' experiences in their classrooms with implications for theory, research, policy, and practice.
Sign Language Learners and Visual Modality: The visual modality serves ‘double duty’ for sign language learners: A commentary on Karadöller, Sümer, and Özyürek (authored by Assoc. Professor Amy Lieberman)
In a recent contribution, Karadöller and colleagues highlight how a multimodal perspective—one that considers multiple channels of communication, such as gestures, facial expressions, and visual or auditory cues—offers a richer understanding of language acquisition. Building on this idea, Amy Lieberman emphasizes two key aspects of early communication—pointing and joint attention—that support language development. These typically occur within a multimodal setting, but are achieved primarily in a single modality by deaf children acquiring sign language. In both examples, Lieberman describes how the visual modality serves ‘double duty’ for sign language learners: pointing takes on both a gestural and linguistic function, while joint attention is shaped around alternating attention to perceive both linguistic and non-linguistic input visually. These examples demonstrate how sign language acquisition reveals the adaptability of early communication and underscores the importance of including sign languages in broader theories of language development.
TESE Editorial Vision: Teacher Education and Special Education Editorial Vision (co-authored by Assoc. Professor Elizabeth Bettini)
Elizabeth Bettini, Wendy Rodgers, and LaRon A. Scott are the new editors of Teacher Education and Special Education (TESE), a leading journal addressing critical issues in the special education workforce. In this article, they share their editorial vision and highlight the journal's pivotal role in educational research, particularly given the current landscape and the severity of challenges facing the special education workforce. The editors outline four key goals for their tenure: advancing intersectional equity, strengthening interdisciplinary connections with fields like education policy, enhancing TESE’s influence on policy, and improving the author experience by building an Associate Editor team.
Upcoming Events
May 20 - A Mapping of Workforce Assets and Needs. The Boston Foundation, the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, and Boston University invite you to the release of A Mapping of Workforce Assets and Needs: Massachusetts IECMH. This new research highlights both strengths and barriers within the early relational health workforce, providing a foundation to inform policy and advocacy aimed at strengthening workforce infrastructure. The presentation will feature Alicia Mendez and Ruth Paris from Boston University’s Institute for Early Childhood Wellbeing, Aditi Subramaniam from the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, and Jenny Zhang from Boston University. Register here.
📅 Date: May 20th, 2025
🕒 Time: 9:30 AM - 11:00 AM
📍Edgerley Center for Civic Leadership at The Boston Foundation, 75 Arlington Street, 3rd Floor, Boston, MAMay 14 - Sport Neuropsychology webinar with Edson Filho. Join the ANT Neuro Educational Webinar Series—hosted by ANT Neuro, a leader in advanced neurodiagnostic and neuroimaging technology—for a session on Sport Neuropsychology. Edson Filho, Associate Professor at BU Wheelock, will share insights from his work in performance psychology, including methods for enhancing skilled performance and achieving peak states in sport settings. Register here.
📅 Date: May 14th, 2025
🕒 Time: 7:00 AM - 8:00 AM📍Webinar (Register here)