Disentangling SEL: Advocating for Black Sociality, Questioning White Teachers' Emotionality

This article disentangles social and emotional learning (SEL) into its 2 constitutive parts--sociality and emotionality through a backward mapping of the School Development Program (SDP) developed by James Comer. This article argues that Comer's school-level intervention is a process model for how to achieve SEL outcomes given its intentionality toward making schooling a homeplace and its capacity to buildout conditions of Black sociality. The SDP also challenges how teacher preparation programs perpetuates harm to students of color by codifying white emotionality. This harm suggests a need to reimagine teacher preparation. This article thus concludes by recommending that teacher preparation programs should study more models and processes like the SDP and confront color-evasiveness.

Disability Resource Professionals' Perceived Challenges in Minority-Serving Institutions During COVID-19: Recommendations for Supporting Students With Disabilities

The COVID-19 pandemic impacted all components of higher education, with current inequities within the campus setting exacerbated, creating larger disparities between individuals with and without readily available access to needed resources. Utilizing data collected from a national survey, this article highlights the perceptions and experiences of disability resource professionals (DRPs) employed at minority-serving institutions (MSIs) on how students with disabilities fared during the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as potential recommendations for supporting students with disabilities at MSIs for the future. The experiences of DRPs working at MSIs during the COVID-19 pandemic reveal challenges for students with disabilities that may complicate or significantly impact their academic experience within the MSI setting.

Estimating Changes to Student Learning in Illinois Following Extended School Building Closures Due to the COVID-19 Pandemic. REL 2022-131

The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted the education of students in Illinois and around the nation. Leaders at the Illinois State Board of Education and in Illinois public school districts want to better understand how student learning changed during the pandemic. This study examines data from 17 Illinois districts over five years, including four years prior to the pandemic, to measure how student learning changed in fall 2020 relative to fall terms prior to the pandemic. The study demonstrates how learning changed in both mathematics and reading for students in grades 3-8, as well as how these changes varied across student characteristics and district size. The study found that students in grades 4-8 scored lower than expected in mathematics following the onset of the pandemic, after adjusting for other factors. The magnitude varied by grade level. Larger estimated changes in learning occurred in grades 6-8 than in grades 4 and 5. Students in grades 3-8 did not experience any statistically significant changes in learning in reading. A further analysis of learning in mathematics showed that changes in learning varied across students with different characteristics but were unrelated to district size. The study findings should be interpreted with caution, especially when generalizing to the population of Illinois districts and students. The study includes a small number of districts, and the students in these districts differ from the statewide population of students.

Identifying Institutional Best Practices: Supporting Undocumented Student Success in a Time of COVID-19

Due to the sensitive nature of identifying undocumented status, it is difficult to examine the impact of immigration status in the context of higher education and factors crucial to postsecondary and career success. What we do know is that prior to Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) and Temporary Protected Status (TPS), and for students ineligible for these programs, the biggest structural barriers hindering college success were centered around prohibitive laws restricting access to critical financial resources such as federally-funded supports or any form of work study. Additional research is necessary to address the impact of relatively new and crucial supports in facilitating college success among undocumented youth -- especially during a period of uncertainty for programs like DACA,TPS, and the unprecedented impact of COVID-19. TheDream.US is an organization that partners with colleges in 19 states and Washington D.C. to provide approximately 6,500 undocumented students with private scholarships and tailored programming to complete an associate and/or bachelor's degree. This best practices paper draws from TheDream.US's latest survey data of 2,681 undocumented students to identify their specific needs for college completion and career readiness, and institutional supports for equitable access to social mobility.

Redefining Roles: Female Scholars' Reflections and Recommendations for Coping during the COVID-19 Pandemic

The objective of this article is to amplify the stories of female doctoral students and their passage through role conflicting periods of uncertainty and trauma. Specifically, this article highlights how the COVID-19 pandemic and racial unrest in the U.S. have impacted women pursuing doctorates in education. In addition to sharing personal reflections and experiences, the authors have outlined resources and recommendations for those who support doctoral students. Through the diverse perspectives of five students and one faculty member in the EdD in Higher Education Leadership program at Regis College, this article explores the lived experiences of second-year doctoral students during an incredible period of uncertainty. Douglas T. Hall's model of coping serves to frame content around the many conflicting roles these students have been navigating and found to be exacerbated during the year 2020. This article seeks to empower leaders to re-envision approaches to support doctoral students through future crises and periods of uncertainty.