The Weekly Recap
News and Updates from Across BU Wheelock SPACE This Week
Welcome to this week’s recap! This week we share information about faculty engagement and academic conferences, highlight recently published research, and provide information about upcoming events.
Faculty Engagement
Massachusetts Early Childhood Policy Research Summit: On Wednesday, BU Wheelock co-sponsored the Massachusetts Early Childhood Policy Research Summit, alongside the Wellesley Centers for Women and Northeastern University’s School of Public Policy and Urban Affairs. The event brought together more than 20 participants from across Boston University, and poster presentations featured work from the Center on the Ecology of Early Development (CEED), the Wheelock Educational Policy Center (WEPC), the Institute for Early Childhood Well-Being, Children’s HealthWatch, and the BU School of Social Work.
Academic Conferences
Community Engagement in Higher Education: The SPACE Office team—Mary Churchill (Assoc. Dean, SPACE), Irene Dennison (Assoc. Director, SPACE), Cara Mattaliano (Asst. Director, SPACE), and honorary SPACE member Jalene Tamerat (Senior Lecturer, BU Wheelock)—attended Campus Compact’s 2025 conference, Compact25, in Atlanta, Georgia. Compact25 is the largest and most inclusive national conference focused on the role of higher education in building healthy communities and fostering a just and equitable democracy. Sessions explored topics such as civic learning and democratic engagement, publicly engaged scholarship, community-engaged partnerships, and institutional action. More than 700 community engagement professionals across sectors in higher education attended the conference, which featured remarks from John B. King (Chancellor, State University of New York [SUNY]), Mary Grant (President, MassArt), Yolanda Watson Spiva (President, Complete College America), and Rashawn Davis (Executive Director, The Andrew Goodman Foundation), among others.
Campus Compact Conference Presentations: The SPACE team presented twice at Compact25:
Strategic Communications: Mary and Cara presented Amplifying Visibility, Reach, and Impact: A Community-Engaged Communications Strategy at BU Wheelock to an audience of over 50 community engagement leaders. During their presentation, they highlighted their strategic approach to communications work rooted in BU Wheelock’s strategic plan. They also shared tools designed to elevate the visibility of the college’s research and community engagement efforts while fostering reciprocal, mutually beneficial partnerships.
Strategy in Service to Boston Public Schools: Jalene and Irene presented on the Dr. Carol Johnson District Leadership Fellowship, detailing its origins, development, and implementation. In their session, Strategy in Service to Boston Public Schools, they showcased this innovative, co-created approach to collaboration between BU Wheelock and Boston Public Schools leaders, presenting a powerful model for university–district partnerships that drive meaningful, lasting impact.
Research That Matters
Phonological Processing an ASL: Tracking effects of age of sign language acquisition and phonology in American Sign Language sentence processing (co-authored by Assoc. Professor Amy Lieberman)
Processing sign language engages phonological features of signs, and research shows that the age at which someone learns sign language and the way signs are related phonologically can influence how individual signs are processed. However, we don’t yet know how these factors impact understanding at the sentence level. This study uses eye-tracking to examine phonological priming in American Sign Language (ASL) sentences, exploring how different types and degrees of phonological similarity between signs affect comprehension. The findings highlight that early and late (after the age of five) signers process phonological information differently, and researchers should carefully account for phonological relatedness when studying sign language processing across diverse language backgrounds.
Upcoming Events
April 11 - BARI Conference 2025. Mary Churchill (Assoc. Dean, SPACE) and Hardin Coleman (Professor and Dean Emeritus, BU Wheelock) are speaking at the Boston Area Research Initiative (BARI) 2025 Conference: Greater Boston’s Annual Insight-to-Impact Summit. Hosted with Roxbury Community College’s Center for Economic and Social Justice (CESJ), the BARI Conference’s goal is to gather community leaders, practitioners, researchers, and policymakers to share how they advance data-driven research and policy in Greater Boston. Register here.
📅 Date: April 11th, 2025
🕒 Time: 9:00 AM - 6:00 PM EST
📍Location: Roxbury Community CollegeApril 15-17 - The Leadership Exchange Conference. Join the inaugural Leadership Exchange Conference to discuss education’s role in preparing future leaders and share innovative models for youth and leadership development. Leading experts from BU, Harvard and Wellesley colleges will be in conversation with local and Brazilian leaders and tackle tough questions at the intersection between education, business and law. Register here.
📅 Date: April 15th-17th, 2025
📍Location: Boston University, George Sherman Student UnionApril 17 - How Advocacy Works: Advancing Early Education and Care in the Commonwealth. How Advocacy Works, a new webinar from the BU Wheelock SPACE Office, will spotlight strategic and effective advocacy efforts that advance equitable policy in education and human development. Join us for the opening webinar of this series, where a distinguished panel of early childhood education leaders will explore key strategies—including advocacy, research, community organizing, and strategic communication—that they use to drive meaningful change in the Commonwealth. The panel will feature Amy O'Leary, Executive Director of Strategies for Children, kate warren barnes, Head of Massachusetts Strategy & Partnerships at Jumpstart for Young Children, and Felicia Billy, Director of BU’s Children’s Center. The conversation will be moderated by Kyle DeMeo Cook, Research Assistant Professor at the Center on the Ecology of Early Development (CEED) at BU Wheelock.
📅 Date: Thursday, April 17th
🕒 Time: 12:00 PM - 12:45 PM EST
📍 Location: Webinar, Register here.