Cross-Faculty Insights in Early Years Research

Dr. Iris Berger has been involved in the field of early childhood education as a classroom teacher, researcher, community organizer, policy consultant, and university lecturer since the mid 1990s. Her passion for early childhood education as a distinct and ever-engaging realm of/for research-pedagogy began when she worked with two, three and four-year-olds in the model classrooms at the UBC Child Study Centre under the auspices of the Faculty of Education. At the centre of her professional and academic inquiry lies the abiding notion that matters pertaining to education and childhood are entangled with question of ethics and politics. To this end, Dr. Berger has developed a special interest in rethinking leadership in early childhood education and in making the complexity of the pedagogical relations in the early years visible through practices such as pedagogical documentation.

Dr. Laurie Ford is interested in how families, schools, and communities work together to support children and youth. She has a strong interest in the needs of young children and their families has several programmatic research interests and a history of funded research described in greater detail elsewhere on this website. Research interests include: understanding child, family, school, and neighborhood/community factors that promote early school readiness and success; the developmental (cognitive, social, emotional and behavioral) assessment of young children; community-based (health, mental health, school) services for preschool and school-age children and their families; family-school-professional relationships; and student, family, and educator engagement in student learning.

Dr. Mona Gleason’s research has long focused on the history of children and childhood, including young children. She is currently working on a Spencer Foundation Grant that explores how children living in very remote areas of the province were schooled via correspondence education in the interwar decades of this century.

Dr. Harper B. Keenan is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Curriculum and Pedagogy, where he serves as the Robert Quartermain Assistant Professor of Gender & Sexuality in Education. Before arriving at UBC, Dr. Keenan was a postdoctoral fellow at the Stanford Graduate School of Education, where he also earned his PhD in Curriculum and Teacher Education in 2019. Dr. Keenan completed his undergraduate studies at The New School in New York City, and earned a Master’s Degree from the Bank Street College of Education. He is a proud former New York City elementary school teacher.

Broadly, Dr. Keenan’s research analyzes how adults teach children to make sense of the social world. Much of his work investigates the management, or scripting, of children’s knowledge, and ways that educators and their students might work together to interrupt that process and imagine something different. Dr. Keenan is interested in those social issues that many adults find difficult to talk about with children – things like racism, gender, sexuality, and violence. He is perhaps best known for his 2017 article in the Harvard Educational Review, “Unscripting Curriculum: Toward a Critical Trans Pedagogy.”

Today, Dr. Keenan’s research projects center around two themes: 1.) the history and contemporary interaction of colonialism, racism, and gender in schools and 2.) the continued development of critical queer and trans pedagogies.

Dr. Keenan’s work has appeared in a variety of scholarly journals and popular press outlets, including the Harvard Educational Review, Teacher’s College Record, Curriculum Inquiry, Gender and Education, Theory & Research in Social Education, Slate, The Huffington Post, The Feminist Wire, and multiple edited volumes.

Dr. Kristiina Kumpulainen is a Professor and Head of the Department of Language and Literacy Education in the Faculty of Education, University of British Columbia. She received her PhD in education from the University of Exeter, UK. Prior to joining UBC, Dr. Kumpulainen has served as Associate Dean, Academic and Faculty Development at Simon Fraser University, Canada and Associate Dean, Research at University of Helsinki, Finland. She has also worked for the Finnish National Agency for Education, and as a Visiting Professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, University of Warwick, UK, and University of British Columbia.

Dr. Kumpulainen’s research scholarship is grounded on relational and cultural-historical inquiries into communication, learning and education to better understand how social, historical, political, cultural and material contexts open and/or disclose educational opportunities for diverse learners. Her research has generated knowledge on how knowledges, agency and identities are valued and negotiated across space and time. Her research has also illuminated how digitalization is transforming young people’s communication and learning in formal education and informal settings, such as in museums, science centers, libraries, outdoors, and homes as well as in digital and immersive worlds. She has actively engaged in interdisciplinary research with academic, industry and community partners to co-develop playful, imaginative and participatory pedagogies and curricula for early childhood, K-12, and teacher education that affirm human, linguistic, and epistemological diversity and equity. She has researched and developed pedagogies for Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Mathematics (STEAM) learning, multiliteracies, health literacies and for children’s ecological literacies and climate change education. She has also developed methods for visual, participatory, and multimodal research, and researching with children and teachers, increasing knowledge of democratic and ethical forms of inquiry.

Dr. Kumpulainen is the Co-Editor of Elsevier’s journal Learning, Culture and Interaction.

Dr. Melanie Nelson is a proud Samahquam (St’at’imc) woman presently residing and working on the unceded lands of the Musqueam People. It is also noted that traditional Tsleil-Waututh territory encompasses Vancouver, extending into the US, including UBC, and traditional Squamish territory extends into much of what is now called UBC.

As an Assistant Professor in the School and Applied Child Psychology program, her work challenges clinicians and the profession of psychology to adopt a more responsive approach when working with Indigenous populations. Dr. Nelson’s research focuses on the experiences of Indigenous caregivers within Western systems, including the assessment and diagnosis process, despite the absence of the construct of disability in traditional thought. Additionally, she investigates how Indigenous youth identify and access support for mental health and wellness in schools and their communities.

Dr. Harini Rajogopal's research explores the ways in which young English language learners, often immigrants and refugees, in elementary school make meaning through modes such as photography, art, play, conversations, and reading and writing in various contexts. She pays attention to the varied communicative repertoires, socio-emotional aspects, and identities that surface without depending solely on the children’s competence in English and how these impact their literacies learning. Importantly, she is interested in how these capacities may be valued in classrooms and what opportunities this valuing might offer for teaching and learning. Working collaboratively with the children and the teacher, her research seeks ways to bring multilingual, multimodal approaches to literacies in the classroom through an inquiry project.

In the context of the new BC curriculum and bridging to India’s under-resourced English education context, she hopes her research contributes to reflective and innovative pedagogy and policies that enable respectful engagement with children’s cultural and linguistic identities.