Josephine H. Pham, Assistant Professor of Critical Studies in Education at the University of California, Santa Cruz, has been awarded the prestigious National Academy of Education Spencer Postdoctoral Fellowship. This fellowship, awarded to early-career scholars, provides significant funding, professional development, and mentorship opportunities from leading scholars in education.
Selected as one of only 25 awardees, Pham is set to embark on an enriching, inter-generational professional learning experience aimed at advancing her research on race, embodiment, and the day-to-day practices of teachers of color.
Pham’s research employs an interdisciplinary approach, drawing on educational anthropology and learning sciences to explore the micro-interactional processes that foster racially transformative classrooms and schools. Her work is deeply influenced by her own experiences as the daughter of Vietnamese refugees, a former classroom teacher, and a teacher educator.
During the year-long fellowship, Pham will build on her dissertation work, which examined how teachers of color transform their communities through their everyday practices. An unexpected outcome of this work was the mutual healing experience that emerged from studying these day-to-day interactions.
The fellowship offers Pham the opportunity to expand her research through multiple mini-projects, including a pilot study on how teachers of color are navigating the current educational landscape, particularly in the context of California’s new ethnic studies high school requirement. She aims to explore the lived and felt dimensions of ethnic studies, civic sense-making, and racial literacies in classrooms, with a focus on how these experiences shape teaching practices.
As she moves forward in her fellowship, Pham will explore new methodological approaches, including the use of multimodality and the arts. Collaborating with artists, she has begun developing new research products in the form of comics and visual arts to make her research more accessible and engaging. She hopes to develop art-based pedagogical tools that not only affirm and support teachers of color in their practices but also serve as research-based resources for teacher learning and professional development.
Viewing her research as a relational endeavor, Pham emphasizes the collective nature of her work and the crucial role that teachers of color play as knowledge holders and public scholars.
