PhD candidates LaShanda Harbin and Marino Miranda Noriega have received dissertation fellowships from the National Academy of Education (NAEd) and Spencer Foundation.
The competitive NAEd/Spencer Dissertation Fellowship aims to encourage early-career scholars from a range of disciplines to pursue research that can improve education. Competitive applicants are those who bring fresh, constructive perspectives to the practice of education anywhere in the world. In addition to a stipend, the award supports fellows’ professional development through mentoring at retreats led by senior scholars.
LaShanda Harbin
PhD candidate, Educational Policy Studies
LaShanda Harbin is a PhD candidate in Educational Policy Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. LaShanda has supported youth-led advocacy work through the Wisconsin Center for Education Research (WCER)’s Clinical Program. She has also supported evaluation work at the Wisconsin Evaluation Collaborative (WEC). LaShanda, who was a Morgridge Center Fellow during the 2023-2024 school year, is using the funds she received as a fellow to compensate her participants.
Born and raised on the South Side of Chicago, LaShanda has spent the last decade working in various K-12 educational contexts. Her independent research focuses on improving educational safety for Black queer and transgender youth. Beyond her independent research, LaShanda enjoys youth-centered applied research and evaluation. She is also very committed to mentoring and empowering youth as they work to address educational and social issues that matter most to them. Across all aspects of her work, LaShanda is committed to uplifting the voices of multiply marginalized communities. Before coming to the University of Wisconsin–Madison, LaShanda earned a master’s degree in Urban Education Policy from Brown University and a bachelor’s degree in Africana Studies (African American Studies concentration) and Education from Bowdoin College.
About LaShanda’s research: Uplifting Black Queer Youth Voices and Dreams in Education Safety Discourses
“The safety of Black queer youth within and beyond K-12 educational spaces is affected by various factors, ranging from systemic racism to dynamics within Black communities. This qualitative multimethod study centers Black queer youth voices to learn about the complex dynamics that affect safety for Black queer students, with a particular focus on K-12 school experiences. Data collection in this study consists of two strands, or parts. In Strand 1, I interview self-identified Black queer and transgender young adults to learn about their safety experiences in Black communities and within educational systems. In Strand 2, a small group of participants collaborate in a series of six workshops that center Robin D.G. Kelley’s concept of freedom dreaming. These workshops are designed to focus particularly on the dreams these participants have for safer educational systems for all Black queer and transgender youth. By the end of the workshops, participants will have created a guide for educational stakeholders to learn about Black queer youths’ safety needs, their dreams, and ways to make those dreams come true through policy. This study contextually and theoretically centers Blackness in ways that are not always present in research about Black queer students. Education researchers and other stakeholders will better understand how Black queer youths’ lived experiences within Black communities can inform education policy, which may help them imagine innovative solutions to better protect Black queer youth in schools.”
Marino Miranda Noriega
PhD candidate, Curriculum and Instruction
Marino Miranda Noriega is a PhD Candidate in Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Wisconsin–Madison with a minor in History. He is part of the Curriculum and Global Studies Area, a research group interested in the politics of knowledge within curriculum and education policy production. For three years, Marino has coordinated the Latin American Colloquium, a space sponsored by the Latin American, Caribbean, and Iberian Studies Program for graduate students and faculty to present and discuss research related to this region. Also, while at UW–Madison, he has been part of Madi-son, a cultural collective facilitating and promoting the Son Jarocho tradition from his native state of Veracruz. Composed by Latinx and Latin-American members from the Madison area, they regularly perform at schools and organize fandangos, the events where Jarocho music, dance, and poetry are shared.
His research draws from historical methods to examine how educational reform creates populations and subjects in need of education, focusing on the first half of the 20th century in Mexico. A central theme in this research is to examine how social scientific and psychological discourses utilize technologies such as censuses, archives, maps, or tests to create objects of educational interventions, following the historical emergence of issues like illiteracy, secular education, and rural underdevelopment. His doctoral project analyzes how the drive for a secular education in Revolutionary Mexico objectivized Catholicism as both a source of Western reason and universality and, simultaneously, as a colonial remnant antithetical to the establishment of modern schooling. His research is published in Peadagogica Historica and Written Communication, and his public scholarship has been featured in magazines such as Nexos and Revista Común. Before joining the University of Wisconsin–Madison, he worked at the Institute for Social Research at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) as a researcher in the online encyclopedia conceptos.sociales.unam.mx. He holds a master’s degree in Education Research from the Centro de Investigación y Estudios Avanzados (Cinvestav) and a bachelor’s degree in Sociology from UNAM.
About Marino’s research: Mission and Revolution. The Contentious Meanings of Catholicism, Secular Education, and Peasant Religiosity in Mexico’s Post-revolutionary Educational Reform (1910-1940)
“My dissertation examines how promoters of secular education in the Mexican Rural School project reflected, debated, and problematized Catholicism as a fundamental influence shaping the lives of peasants and Indigenous peoples. After the 1910 Revolution, the Education Ministry believed that the Rural School could integrate the populations that, according to its top officials, had been excluded from the realm of “culture” in an environment defined by isolation and religious superstition. I focus on how secularization became a discourse that emerged through the detailed observation, theorization, and objectivization of indigenous Catholicism as an obstacle to educational progress. Through archival research, the project analyzes how scientific and humanistic disciplines in the early 20th Century defined and discussed the effects of Catholicism, local religion, and superstition in shaping peasant subjectivity. I take the cases of historians who reconstructed early colonial missionaries as exemplar figures of an integrationist Catholic educational philosophy to emulate; educational comparativists that thought of Catholicism as a defining feature of Mexican educational potential though its differences with other world religions; psychologists theorizing superstition as a mental state imprinted in peasants by the slowness of the rural environment; and finally, ethnomusicologists and arts educators that abstracted the religious aspects of rural life from a secularized notion of peasant culture to incorporate in the national curriculum. This studies primary contribution is showing how an essentialist notion of secularization can function as a means of othering, through its articulation with categories of race, class, or ability.”