Graduate School of Education
Showing 521-540 of 606 Results
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Rebecca Tarlau
Associate Professor in the Graduate School of Education
BioRebecca Tarlau is Associate Professor of Education at Stanford Graduate School of Education. Dr. Tarlau was formerly Associate Professor of Education and of Labor and Employment Relations at the Pennsylvania State University, where she was the co-founder of the Penn State Consortium for Social Movements and Education Research and Practice. Her ethnographic research agenda has four broad areas of focus: (1) theories of the state and state-society relations; (2) social movements and popular education, labor education, and critical pedagogy; (3) Latin American education and development; and (4) teachers’ unions, teacher activism, and teachers’ work.
Dr. Tarlau is the author of the award-winning Occupying School, Occupying Land: How the Landless Workers Movement Transformed Brazilian Education (2019, Oxford University Press, published in Portuguese in 2023 by Expressão Popular), which analyzes how a large grassroots social movement has linked education reform to its vision for agrarian reform by developing pedagogical practices for schools that foster activism, direct democracy, and collective forms of work. Contrary to the belief that social movements cannot engage the state without demobilizing, Tarlau shows how educational institutions can help movements recruit new activists, diversify their membership, increase technical knowledge, and garner political power. Dr. Tarlau’s forthcoming book Teacher Organizing Across the Americas: Diverse Strategies for Transforming Unions, Schools and Societies (Oxford University Press) explores why teachers’ unions in Brazil, Mexico, and the United States have embraced radically different strategies, and the important role of internal oppositional movements in transforming the goals and strategies of labor unions. Currently Dr. Tarlau is involved in a multi-country comparative study analyzing the impact of sustainable agriculture education on agroecological knowledge and landscape change in Latin America. -
Reuben Thiessen
Project Manager - IT, SAL Digital Learning
Current Role at StanfordI'm responsible for supporting technical projects emerging from Stanford Accelerator for Learning initiatives such as AI+Education and Virtual Field Trips. I work closely with the Director of Digital Learning Solutions as well as a team of technologists and researchers, fostering innovative solutions between subject matter experts and a team of support staff.
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Candace Thille
Associate Professor (Teaching) of Education
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsCIF21 DIBBs: Building a Scalable Infrastructure for Data-Driven Discovery and Innovation in Education: Funded by the National Science Foundation.
In collaboration with Carnegie Mellon, MIT, and the University of Memphis, we are creating a community software infrastructure, called LearnSphere, which supports sharing, analysis, and collaboration across a wide variety of educational data. LearnSphere supports researchers as they improve their understanding of human learning. It also helps course developers and instructors improve teaching and learning through data-driven course redesign.
The Learning Engineering Initiative: EdHub. Funded by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative/Silicon Valley Community Foundation.
The EdHub project is a cross-sector initiative, to engineer the creation of a novel research and development hub in the Bay Area that is designed to integrate, by design, ongoing research in the Learning Sciences with ongoing approaches to enduring problems of practice within education.
Adaptable Learning Feedback for Instructors: The Open Analytics Research System (OARS). Funded by the Stanford VPTL Innovation Grant.
The activities and embedded assessments in online courseware provide support to students and generate fine-grained student learning data. The Open Analytic Research System (OARS) collects and models student learning data and and presents information to instructors in a dashboard to guide instruction and class activities.
Next Generation Courseware Challenge: A Partnership for Iterative Excellence in Online Courseware for College Learners. Funded by The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
The OLI statistics courseware was created as an open educational resource (OER) on, the now proprietary, CMU OLI platform. In moving to Stanford, I moved the courseware to Lagunita, Stanford’s OpenEdx platform so that it would once again be an OER and extended the capabilities of the Lagunita platform to support the OLI statistics course. In collaboration with multiple partner institutions, we have continued to expand and update the courseware and conducted several learning studies. We have conducted studies in "Mindset" with Carol Dweck's (Stanford Psychology) PERTS group. In collaboration with Emma Brunskill (Stanford Computer Science), we are implementing an adaptive problem solver that uses Bayesian optimization algorithms to automatically identify which items to include in a practice set, and how to adaptively select these items in order to maximize student performance on the specified set of learning objectives and skills. Additional RCT studies that we are currently conducting in the OLI statistics courseware at our partner institutions include a study on the impact of prompting and scaffolding learners to make strategic choices about their use of course resources; and a separate study that builds affect detectors into the courseware to test the impact of timing interventions to the affective as well as cognitive state of the learner. -
Adriana J. Umaña-Taylor
Professor of Education
BioAdriana J. Umaña-Taylor, Ph.D. is a Professor of Adolescent Development in the Graduate School of Education. In her work, Dr. Umaña-Taylor seeks to apply developmental science in a manner that reduces disparities in psychological and academic adjustment and, in turn, promotes social justice. Her research is guided by socio-cultural ecological theories of development, developmental prevention science, and risk and resilience frameworks. She has collaborated with school districts and community organizations for over two decades to design and implement longitudinal, school- and community-based studies to better understand the experiences of adolescents and their families. Dr. Umaña-Taylor developed the Identity Project, a school-based curriculum that engages adolescents in the developmental process of ethnic-racial identity formation. Her recent studies test the efficacy and effectiveness of the Identity Project; explore strategies to better prepare educators to engage in conversations about race, ethnicity, and identity with students; examine the role of peer relationships in adolescents’ ethnic-racial identity development; and explore the universality of ethnic-racial-cultural identity as a developmental competency among adolescents in North America, Europe, and the Global South to support building a more global developmental science.
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Brenda Valdes
Ph.D. Student in Education, admitted Autumn 2024
Graduate Program Assistant, Domingue Program
Research Asst - Graduate (Gardner Center), John Gardner Center
Research Assistant, Padilla ProgramCurrent Research and Scholarly InterestsBrenda is a developmental Psychologist specializing in longitudinal quantitative methods to study variation in learning and language development. Her research examines how individual and contextual factors shape students’ developmental trajectories across time, with an emphasis on patterns in academic growth.
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Guadalupe Valdés
Bonnie Katz Tenenbaum Professor of Education, Emerita
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsValdés is the Founder and Executive Director of "English Together" a 501(c)(3) organization. The organization creates rich connections between ordinary speakers of English and low-wage, immigrant workers by preparing volunteers to provide one-on-one “coaching” in workplace English.
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Maria Del Socorro Velazquez
Social Science Research Scholar, Graduate School of Education
BioMaria is Stanford Provostial Fellow/Academic Staff Researcher in the Stanford Graduate School of Education. Her research examines housing, educational opportunity, educational policy, and place. She draws on qualitative methods and uses an interdisciplinary framework to draw attention to the socially constructed nature of inequities in schools and school communities. Relatedly, her work considers the efforts parents, educators, and community members take to contest and disrupt inequities in schools and school communities towards creating transformative opportunities for youth.
Maria’s collaborative research and publications contribute to scholars’ and educational leaders’ understanding of the housing-school nexus, school-prison nexus, and school organizational policies and practices that contribute to categorical inequalities. Maria holds a Ph.D. and an M.A. in Educational Policy Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and a B.A. in Ethnic Studies from the University of California, Berkeley. -
Daniel Verdi
Ph.D. Student in Education, admitted Autumn 2025
BioComputational Social Science • Social Computing • Science of Science • Natural Language Processing • Responsible AI
I apply data science methods, mainly natural language processing (NLP) and social network analysis, to evaluate the communication and governance of science and technology. A focus of my work is how academic knowledge is translated across audiences, amplified or distorted through digital media, and taken up in political debate.
My research is particularly concerned with how algorithmic systems like AI and social media are changing information ecosystems and how their own risks and benefits are transmitted to the public. At the core of my work is a commitment to questions of equity, ethics, and social justice.
Beyond conducting science, I am also passionate about designing tools and events to put it in conversation with communities and create opportunities for marginalized students to engage with research and technology. I’m especially interested in improving digital and AI literacies, as well as in using AI and other technologies in informal education.
Before Stanford, I graduated from the University of Richmond as a Richmond Scholar, the institution's most prestigious and competitive academic award. Additionally, I have conducted research at universities such as Carnegie Mellon, University of Southern Califronia, and University of Copenhagen, and interned at Amazon Alexa AI. I’m also proud to have co-founded one of Brazil's largest high school science fairs, the Brazilian Fair of Young Scientists (FBJC), which has engaged over 2,000 participants and received over 1M website visits.
