Professional Development Academies in Education

Professional Development Programs in Information Studies

UCLA’s School of Education & Information Studies is home to two departments. Each is a leader in their field, helping to pioneer what's next in the Education and Information worlds.

UCLA Ed&IS faculty are at the forefront of their fields, addressing issues of equality, access and social justice in the fields of education and information. Their scholarship has an international reputation for excellence and commitment to addressing the most critical issues facing our society.

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Department of Education 2023 Information Sessions

Department of Information Studies Programs

Department of Information Studies 2023 Information Sessions

Learn more about the undergraduate and graduate academic programs we offer, when program information sessions are being offered and how to apply.

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The UCLA School of Education and Information Studies will host two leadership academies for k-12 and university educational leaders in 2023.

The University Women’s Leadership Academy is designed to assist mid-career professionals to expand their leadership capacities and value to their universities. The program re-imagines the roles and impact of women in their current and future university positions. Instruction is led by expert practitioners in human resources, student services, negotiation, mentoring, problem solving, and collaborating for change. The academy assists women to support each other. 

“I gained so much new knowledge about varying aspects of leadership and the value of networking. The timing and pacing of the academy were just right, said one participant in last year’s program “The Academy definitely met my expectations and I learned equally as much from my wonderful peers.”  

The Women’s University Leadership program begins Saturday, January 28. The program consists of five Saturday morning sessions and seven sessions on Thursday evenings. All sessions are online. More information is available at www.bit.ly/3BpyQLQ.

The UCLA Women’s School Leadership Academy champions women’s leadership and provides leaders with the knowledge and tools they need to increase their impact on K - 12 education. Participants in the six-month program expand their voice and vision and build their capacity as leaders  through course work emphasizing decision-making and problem-solving. Career-building, coaching, mentoring, collaborating for change are critical processes in the program. Equity, access, and inclusion are emphasized through leadership practices. Participants in the academy learn from each other and from expert K - 12 practitioners playing leading roles in education. 

“I learned a lot, great information,” said a participant in the 2022 K-12 program.  “The presentations were so unique, real and had inspiring stories. And I enjoyed the cohort of women I worked with – a wonderful group.” 

“This was a great professional community,” said another participant.  “It was wonderful to develop relations and engage in conversation over time especially as we progressed through the school year.”

The UCLA Women’s School Leadership Academy begins Saturday, January 7 with the first of two in person intensive sessions. There are also ten online sessions on Tuesday nights beginning in January and running through May, to be followed by another in person intensive session in June. For more information and application materials visit https://bit.ly/3CB6E9k

 “We have had very positive feedback from the women who have participated in both of these programs,” said Linda Rose, the director of both of the academy programs.  "These efforts engage women in positive learning  experiences that boost their knowledge, confidence and leadership skills I encourage women  looking to increase the impact of their leadership to apply.” 

The deadline for applications for both academy programs is November 1. 

UCLA Women’s Leadership Academies Set for 2023

The UCLA Department of Information Studies has expanded its ability to prepare students in its Master of Library and Information Science program for practical work in media archiving and preservation through completion of its new IS Media Preservation Lab, which formally opened in Winter 2022. Part of the department’s larger IS Library facilities, the lab is housed in the SEIS Building in North Campus. It was created through a $300,000 gift from The Ahmanson Foundation to support the Center for Preservation of Audiovisual Heritage, which now operates out of the lab.

This past spring, the lab successfully supported an initial round of CPAH projects aimed at preserving media materials in community-held collections. “We're focused on preserving community-held media collections that document the cultural and historical diversity of the SoCal region,” says IS faculty member Shawn VanCour, who supervised the lab’s construction and directed the first round of preservation projects using the new space. Students in the department’s MLIS program digitally preserved materials in collections of several community-based archives and other local arts and cultural organizations, gaining hands-on skills using the lab’s equipment and helping local organizations make content housed on obsolete and vulnerable audiovisual formats accessible to their intended users. 

“We're pursuing a curriculum-based model for media preservation [for] students who are training in the Media Archival Studies area of our MLIS program,” VanCour explained. “Once they hit an appropriate point in their training, they are cleared to work with community-held collections in the context of their courses [and] for faculty-supervised independent studies and practicum exercises.” 

Formerly a smaller suite in the main room of the IS Library, the Media Preservation Lab moved to a larger, adjacent room renovated through a gift from the late Professor Robert M. Hayes, who from 1974 to 1989 served as dean of the then-UCLA Graduate School of Library and Information Science. This expanded space has provided room for the lab’s Ahmanson-funded equipment purchases, as well as several recent donations such as a vintage open-reel videotape machine, received from Corday Productions, that was used in production of NBC’s long-running soap opera, "Days of our Lives." 

“Preservation spaces like this include a mix of hard-to-find obsolete playback technologies and state-of-the-art digital technologies used to transfer and restore media content to something approximating its original state,” says VanCour. 

Purchases made with the gift from The Ahmanson Foundation include several high-end items, such as a Prism audio converter, a Timestep preamp for deriving material off of vinyl records and other grooved media, and a custom-built Kinetta archival film scanner that enables work with a variety of delicate and damaged film formats.

“There are very few places that have this kind of equipment,” Professor VanCour notes. “So, for students to walk out of our program saying, “I was trained on a Prism,” or “I know how to use a Kinetta,” those are not skills that most people have straight out of grad school, and it gives our MLIS students a competitive edge.” 

Students in Janet Ceja's fall film preservation class receive training in methods for proper film handling and inspection, in preparation for project work with collection materials from the Palms Spring-based organization, Deserted Films. Photo by Janet Ceja

A number of IS classes have used the new lab space since its opening in February. Students in a digital preservation course taught by Professor Anne Gilliland used some of the specialized digital forensics software on the lab’s computers; IS lecturer Dino Everett’s students got a demonstration of its video transfer suite as part of their course in moving image technology; and students in classes taught by VanCour and Professor Michelle Caswell participated in CPAH pilot projects preserving materials from community-held collections. 

“Professor Caswell is a co-founder of the South Asian American Digital Archive (SAADA)," says VanCour, “and recruited this organization as a participant in her spring course on community-based archives, where students assist different archives with active projects. Students were processing a SAADA collection that included materials from ArtWallah, a South Asian American arts festival that ran through the early 2000s in Los Angeles and included everything from poetry and musical performances to painting and sculpture. A student in her class [preserved] 17 MiniDV tapes from that collection, which documented the entire festival for 2002.” 

Roughly 20 hours of content were transferred from these tapes, which SAADA plans to make available to users through its online archive.

VanCour’s own course was in audio archiving and was designed as the primary pilot, with the entire class based around training students in the new lab space with the goal of digitizing materials in community-held collections for final projects. 

“The first part of the class was exposing students to the different formats that they would be working with over the course of the quarter, so they got practice handling and assessing those media, then they did some practice transfer exercises, using our lab equipment so they would know how to operate all of the machines [and] properly digitize these materials,” says Professor VanCour. “Once they finished that training and demonstrated their competence in these areas, they received clearance to work with the community-provided collections.”

The class partnered with three local organizations, who each selected priority content from their collections for students to digitize. The June L. Mazer Lesbian Archives provided several oral histories and musical performances from the 1960s through the 1980s on cassette tapes and reel-to-reel tapes, as well as a rare vinyl record from their collections. The Skid Row History Museum & Archive provided recordings from the early 2000s of activist theater performances by the LA Poverty Department on Digital Audio Tape. In addition, KPCC-FM selected several episodes of its local news and public affairs program, "Air Talk with Larry Mantle," with original airdates from 2002–2005, housed on DATs, MiniDiscs, and CDs. 

Over 40 hours of content were successfully preserved by students, which will be used by the participating organizations in current projects and made available to other users of their collections now that they are in an accessible, digital form. 

“Some of these media don’t hold up well over time,” says VanCour, noting that the Digital Audio Tapes were in some cases quickly deteriorating, jeopardizing the contents. “It’s a good thing we got to these now, while they were still playable.” 

The homemade CDs provided by KPCC, he added, are also a vulnerable format, “which is something people don’t think about since they aren’t as old as some other media. But they were made with dyes that deteriorate very quickly; and, even if they’re intact, discs from 20 years ago don’t always mount properly on modern drives.” 

Professor VanCour reported that the contents of all provided discs were successfully retrieved, and after performing a number of needed repairs to some of the older analog tapes, these, too, were all successfully transferred and returned to the partner organizations along with their digital copies.

Chloe Reyes, a MLIS student who works as the department’s lab assistant and serves as technical coordinator for CPAH projects, says that with the IS Media Preservation Lab, “… the possibilities are so endless.” Reyes, who earned a prior degree in film production at CalArts, has been teaching film classes at the Echo Park Film Center for ten years and also worked as a projectionist, coming to the MLIS program with a depth of prior professional skills already in hand. She assisted VanCour with the initial construction of the lab and, as he puts it, “put a lot of this stuff together with her own two hands.” 

Chloe Reyes, a MLIS student and technical coordinator for the Center for Preservation of Audiovisual Heritage, operates the lab's Kinetta archival film scanner, a high-resolution, tension-based optical scanner that supports work with a variety of small and large-gauge film formats. 

“I really, really have enjoyed my time in the MLIS program,” says Reyes. “The Community Archive Lab that Michelle Caswell started got me interested in the program, and this media lab was opening up just in time.” 

Reyes took the initial post as a project assistant to work on lab construction, and then, “Once the installation [work] was done, I stayed on, and I’ve been building documentation and organizing technical workshops for students to learn the different stations, as well as coordinating technology needs for project work with community archives.” 

In addition to the pilot projects in VanCour’s and Caswell’s classes, Reyes noted that the lab also did a side project this spring, assisting producers of the independently produced "This Way Out," a self-described “international LGBTQ radio magazine” distributed to community radio stations across the U.S. and abroad. Over a hundred episodes were archived on Jaz disks, a short-lived format that was a descendant of Iomega’s Zip drive and cannot be read by contemporary computers. The lab was able to access the contents of a dozen provided disks using its specialized forensics software, and the producers are now working with state and federal organizations on possibilities for making this content publicly accessible.

Since the spring, MLIS students have continued making regular use of the lab facilities. 

“A lot of people have been coming in over the summer and wanting to learn the Kinetta,” says Reyes. “It’s been really great having students come in and practice, and learning from each other.” 

Reyes has also been assisting IS lecturer Janet Ceja, Ph.D., with preparing a fall course in film preservation that is making active use of lab facilities. As the next installment in CPAH’s projects, this course was designed by Ceja following the same curriculum-based model pursued for the department’s spring classes, with students digitizing materials for final projects from community-held collections. For this course, Ceja has partnered with Deserted Films in Palm Springs, which has a number of Southern California-themed home movies that students will transfer on the Kinetta. These films will be publicly screened by the organization once the transfers are completed.

VanCour says that the experience that students gain in these courses will be invaluable as they enter the information professions. 

“Students come out of these classes knowing what to look and listen for when assessing these materials, getting deeply familiar with the peculiarities of each of format, and they gain proficiency using all this specialized equipment and software,” he says. 

Students from UCLA’s program may go on to work in more specialized media archives, but Professor VanCour says their skills are also in demand across a growing range of other library and archiving contexts.  

“There are very few collections these days that do not have media in them, but there are very few iSchools that are actually teaching students how to work with these formats, which is a problem because so much of the materials that Library and Information Science professionals encounter in their jobs now involves these different kinds of media assets,” he says.

VanCour says that UCLA has the only ALA-accredited MLIS program with a specialization dedicated to media archival studies, and is one of the only universities in the country with a fully equipped media preservation lab for instructional use. 

“There are not many places where students can get these kinds of opportunities, so it's a real point of distinction for our program that we are able to offer this, and in a way that directly benefits our community, as well,” he says. “This spring was a real test for the Center for Preservation of Audiovisual Heritage to show that this curriculum-based model of community media preservation was actually viable, and that we could deliver digitized content to the participating archives. I’m happy to say it was a success, and it’s positioned us well to continue this model into current academic year and beyond.”

VanCour is at now work on a new book on the professionalization of television work in the United States, during the medium’s post-war expansion period of the 1940s and 1950s. 

“When television started taking off after the Second World War, you needed a whole new workforce to fuel that medium’s expansion and create all of the new programming content,” says VanCour. “The book traces the development of that workforce and its associated forms of expert knowledge, delineating a professionalization process that began with reskilling of workers imported from adjacent entertainment industries such as radio, film, and theater, then culminated in the rise of professional degree programs at state universities like UCLA.” 

The integration of professional degree programs like television production into the structures of higher education systems was not without its challenges, says VanCour. 

“It’s always been a fraught process," he says. "But these programs play an important role in our society, and offering professional degrees at the university level gives degree-holders a level of education and a level of credibility, competency, and accountability that has been, historically speaking, essential for the success of a number of fields – including the LIS professions.”

Professor Shawn VanCour leads state-of-the-art lab where students gain hands-on training and participate in projects to preserve community media histories. 

UCLA IS Media Preservation Lab Restores Community Archives

Philip Goodrich, a graduate student in the Student Affairs Program, has published an opinion piece for Inside Higher Education on the complicated task of preserving free speech on college campuses. Discussing this task with student leaders across the nation, he has discovered how student governments perceive and experience this challenge. 

“For student government leaders, it is clear that, as one of my respondents put it, ‘campus free expression is complicated and messy,’” writes Goodrich. “These findings do not and cannot represent the feelings and beliefs of all student government officers; however, they do provide a useful foundation for understanding the ways in which these leaders perceive and experience campus free expression.”

In discussion with student leaders, Goodrich found that:

    Student government leaders have different definitions of what campus free expression means to them. One respondent emphasized the importance of free expression as it pertains to the academic mission of their university, arguing “that students have the right to be who they are and who they feel on campus” and also should be “guaranteed those same rights in the classroom.”

Student government leaders have engaged with a wide range of issues, as free expression manifests itself in many unique ways.


Student government leaders support the idea of campus free expression but disagree on the practicalities, due to the need to consider cases where free expression harms certain students or populations.


Student government leaders view free expression as both compatible and in contention with diversity, equity and inclusion, acknowledging as one student leader noted, “one can’t really exist without the other.”


Student government leaders understand they have a responsibility as elected officers to represent all students, not just one particular point of view.

Student governments should be educated and trained, and in turn educate and train their future officers, on the complexities of campus free expression. 


Student governments should develop a framework and collective understanding for expression on campus, setting expectations when it comes to speech and expression. 


Student governments should publicly commit themselves to the values of free expression and diversity, equity and inclusion. 


Student governments should provide structured spaces to promote free expression, viewpoint diversity and civil discourse, such as open forums on relevant societal issues or events. 


Student governments should model the behavior they wish to see on their campus, setting the bar for campus expression and conduct.

Goodrich has served two terms as the president of the Chapman University Student Government Association and was an intern for the Bipartisan Policy Center’s Campus Free Expression Project.

To read Goodrich’s opinion piece, visit the Inside Higher Education website.

MSA student offers recommendations for how student government leaders can take the lead, set an example.

Philip Goodrich: Navigating Free Expression on Campuses

Thuy Vo Dang will join the faculty of the UCLA Department of Information Studies, beginning in October. In this new role, she will train future educators, curators, librarians, archivists, and memory-keepers and advance her research on the Vietnamese diaspora and refugee archival praxis. 

Previously, Vo Dang served as curator for the Southeast Asian Archive and research librarian for Asian American Studies at UCI Libraries. Her work advances community-centered archives practice, a means and method of bringing social justice into the creation and stewardship of historical records for minoritized communities. 

Vo Dang’s work shows her commitment to collaboration and community-building, including her co-authorship of “Vietnamese in Orange County” and “A People’s Guide to Orange County,” an alternative history and tour guide of Orange County that documents sites of oppression, resistance, and transformation. The latter book is part of the series, “A People’s Guide,” published by the University of California Press. 

With her research and teaching expertise in archival studies, oral history, the Southeast Asian diaspora, and Asian American communities, Vo Dang brings an interdisciplinary approach to building out digital humanities and archival documentation projects in collaboration with educators and community-based organizations. Recognized by OC Weekly as “The Studs Terkel of Little Saigon” in 2013, she continues to provide consultation and training on oral history techniques to diverse groups in academia and beyond. In 2020, she worked with a team in the UCI Libraries to develop an Oral History Toolkit, a free resource that empowers community members to document their own stories. 

Vo Dang has a Ph.D. and M.A. in ethnic studies from UC San Diego and a B.A. in English and Asian American Studies from Scripps College. A longtime advocate for the arts, she serves on the board of directors for Arts Orange County and the Vietnamese American Arts & Letters Association, both based in Orange County, California. 

What inspired your interest in diversifying libraries and archives?

I'm not formally trained in libraries or information science. My Ph.D. Is in ethnic studies, and as an undergrad, I was an English and Asian American studies major, so I was trained in the humanities. Then, I came into graduate school and retrained myself as a social scientist and oral historian. So, my interdisciplinary background is actually what I bring to the field of information studies. 

To go back even further, I was a a child refugee who came from Vietnam in the early 1980s with my family. I didn't speak any English, [it is] my second language. I had to learn how to advocate for my family and my parents in particular, translating and navigating U.S. institutions for them. It's this early consciousness that I had as a child in a refugee family that inspires my interest in building out historical records that better represent marginalized perspectives. This sense of social justice fuels my work.

How did you get involved in the project to write "A People’s Guide to Orange County"?

"A People’s Guide to Orange County" came out in January of this year. I came to the project with Elaine Lewinnek and Gustavo Arellano, because we really believe that a different story needed to be told about Orange County. 

In the 2016 presidential election, the county finally turned blue after nearly 100 years. It's been known as a very conservative part of Southern California. [This was] a conservative county in a progressive state, and all of these really important debates were happening right here in my backyard around immigration, housing, desegregation, and race relations. We felt like using the format of a People's Guide could really make academic work more accessible – it’s sort of this crossover. If Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States” met Lonely Planet, it would produce something like this.

I also have some articles that are in the works, a couple of new publications based on my work with Photovoice, which is a methodology developed in public health, to capture and document experiences of the marginalized perspectives within our communities. I worked with students at UC Irvine, and some faculty here to train our students to capture the experiences of Asian American and Pacific Islanders during COVID. 

During this time period, we saw an increase in anti-Asian violence and hate. It was really important for us to capture how our elders were living through this moment, know how our communities are resilient, and how they navigated all of these really difficult issues in the world. Through photography we were able to do this, and there's an article that just came out in a health journal, and then one in AAPI Nexus, which is a UCLA publication. 

Related to "A People's Guide to Orange County," we're exploring different ways to bring it into K-12 curriculum, because with the mandate for ethnic studies in California, every student will be required to take an ethnic studies course for graduation by 2025. 

There is a lot of demand for this sort of content that teaches history through the perspectives of power and power relations. We’ve been working with local educators to develop an educator's guide to Orange County, a free curriculum package. 

We’ve also been working with KCET on a series of stories that could put it out in the mainstream media, and we are in early talks about a video series based on the book. This moment is so exciting, to bring in ideas about archival stewardship and primary source materials into a conversation about how students can learn about the past.

What do you look forward to most as you join the UCLA Department of Information Studies?

This is such a great opportunity to join the two areas of my work, to bring together the practitioner's approach to information studies, particularly archival studies, with my ongoing research interest in communities that have been marginalized within the historical record. 

I should put a plug in for the UCLA Asian American Studies Center. I was a postdoc there in 2009. I also got to teach for the department as a lecturer for a year. UCLA students were just incredible. They also taught me a lot and really pushed my thinking about the course material, so I’m excited to return to the UCLA classroom.

One of the the collaborative projects that I'm working on with the Center is this massive project that they've undertaken called the AAPI Digital Textbook. This project just got state funding, and it'll be beta tested in fall of 2023. The idea is that it's going to give free and open- source content for students from ninth grade through early college. I’m leading the Vietnamese American chapter. There are scholars from all over the country working on this, and the UCLA Asian American Studies Center is taking the lead.

We need more cultural heritage stewards that come from minoritized communities. I identify that way, and I have been mentoring students for a lot of years who identify that way. They have much more pressing areas of work that they want to go into, where they can earn an income to support their families. Many of them are first-generation college students. And so, part of the mission that I see in joining the IS faculty at UCLA is to help diversify the profession, to bring more BIPOC students into the field. 

In libraries, archives and museums, [the workforce is] still predominantly White. To attract BIPOC students, it is so important to understand that we need people in mentorship roles who look like them or represent the concerns and issues that they care about.

For more about Professor Vo Dang, visit her website.

To read ,“Through Our Eyes, Hear Our Stories: A Virtual Photovoice Project to Document and Archive Asian American and Pacific Islander Community Experiences During COVID-19," visit the Sage Publications website.

To read, “Conflict and Care: Vietnamese American Women and the Dynamics of Social Justice Work,” written for Amerasia Journal, visit the Taylor & Francis website.

Curator of the UC Irvine Libraries Southeast Asian Archive brings interdisciplinary skills in the humanities to diversify the library and archive workforce.

Thuy Vo Dang Joins UCLA’s Department of Information Studies

Anna Markowitz, assistant professor in the UCLA Department of Education, has been named a UCLA Society of Hellman Fellow. The award supports the research and creative activities of assistant professors in the UCLA College of Letters and Science and the UCLA Professional Schools, promoting career advancement and enhancing the professors’ progress toward tenure.

Markowitz, whose research interests include early education and teacher wellbeing, will conduct a study titled, “Rebuilding Child Care After COVID: Understanding Teacher Wellbeing, Teacher Turnover, and Pathways to Recovery,” based on her findings both pre- and post-pandemic. The study builds on Markowitz’s already extensive work on the challenges faced by early educators and the prevalence of teacher turnover in early childhood education. In addition, she will, for the first time, connect these challenges to policy relevant outcomes and policy solutions. 

Through her extensive research with early educators in Louisiana, Markowitz will use data gathered from 2018 through 2022 to document changes in emotional and financial wellbeing among child care teachers during COVID-19; to estimate the strength of the relationship between wellbeing and teacher turnover; and to understand the efficacy of a compensation policy put into place by the Louisiana Department of Education during the summer of 2021. 

Markowitz hopes that the data analyses will not only provide a more complete picture of child care teacher wellbeing in the aftermath of COVID-19, but also inform policy efforts to mitigate the negative impacts of the pandemic, including a massive exodus from the profession. However, she is quick to note that the field had its challenges from the start, with a workforce that has historically been paid very low wages and received few benefits - if any, despite the enormous responsibilities of the job - and that policy changes to support these educators cannot bring the system back to a pre-COVID status quo. 

What are some the challenges faced by child care teachers and early childhood workers in the wake of the pandemic?

I really wanted to think about what do we know actually about well-being in the wake of COVID and what can we do to solve the problems. It’s a workforce that's almost entirely women. It’s also one of the most diverse workforces in the United States. Historically, the workforce has been paid very low wages. They received very little professional support, and often have access to no benefits, which most people think just come with the job. 

When COVID happened, for a lot of folks it was this real breaking point: “My wages are low, my risk is super-high, and I now have lots of other things that I need to take care of. My own kiddos are at home.” We saw this massive loss of early educators. It’s become this crisis. 

Child care is essential so that families can go to work, but it's also really for those kiddos that every day are learning and growing. This is a time when children are developing extremely rapidly and gaining foundational skills that will serve them for the rest of their lives. Many children in the United States learn to talk while they are attending child care. People across the nation had been reaching out to researchers saying, “What do we do to solve this child care problem?” That’s what I'm interested in figuring out. 

For me as a developmental psychologist, the focus on [teachers’] well-being makes a lot of sense. Well- being is going to be integral, not just to keeping those teachers in the classroom, but to the kinds of experiences that children are going to be having while they’re there. 

Do these teachers work in rural or urban communities?

It’s a mix of urban and rural. One community is very rural, one is just outside of New Orleans, and one is New Orleans. But I think one really interesting thing about childcare is how the problem has been fairly universal. 

I think one thing that's really interesting in the United States is that child care really forms the backbone of our whole economy. A lot of times, we think of programs for the care of young children as something for families who have low incomes, but it's actually a huge problem across the income spectrum. 

I was part of a team at UCLA that did some research about how UCLA faculty, staff, and students were doing with paying for child care, and we found that an overwhelming majority of our respondents were paying far more for care than is the recommended level by the U.S. Administration for Children and Families. This is a problem everywhere, and anywhere we can get some purchase on the problem is actually going to be relevant. Of course, the more a family is struggling financially, the bigger the issue. And, it’s often the case that even when families pay a lot for high quality care, the educator in the room is not earning a commensurate wage. 

Who else is part of the whole ecosystem of childcare professionals that are included in the study?

Our data includes the leaders of child care centers, the lead teachers in the classrooms, and the teacher assistant teachers.  And then, there are very often a group of folks that do work that are called floaters. For child care centers, maintaining the right teacher-child ratio is essential for the safety and well-being of children and for maintaining a license. Basically, floaters have the job of popping in from room to room to ensure that the rooms are in ratio when kids filter in and out, depending on what their parents’ work schedules are, things like that.

What is the educational level of most of these child care professionals?

It varies. In terms of the degree that you have in order to work in childcare in Louisiana, it is a high school diploma, and so there's a lot of variability. Nationally, about 35 percent of women working in early education have a BA or higher, but among child care teachers, it’s much lower.

For a lot of these women, [a degree is not] required for them to enter their role. A lot of them pursue additional education in order to maintain their ability to stay in child care, but achieving a bachelor's degree is cost prohibitive. We also have lead teachers in our sample that make $7.25 an hour. Our average wage for child care teachers is under $20,000 a year.

They don't have the money to go to get a bachelor's degree and there's not a guarantee that they are suddenly going to have enough money once they get that bachelor's degree in order to pay off any [student] loans. So, they're doing this incredibly hard job. They are doing it with alacrity and care, but have no incentive to get a bachelor's degree. Like I said, many of them [are] working on developing their skills, but that bachelor's degree is out of reach, both being able to pay for it now and in terms of thinking this is going to pay them dividends later. 

In fact, a major concern nationally is that if a bunch of child care teachers got their bachelor's degrees, they would leave the field and get higher-paid work. There’s also a concern that requiring BAs would lead to a whitening of the workforce, and that we’d lose the diversity that is such a strength in this workforce, particularly for the diverse young children of the United States. For many women who do this work, though, it's like [with] teachers: they see it as their calling. They see it as the work that they’re here to do. 

How do factors like food insecurity and lack of access to health care for themselves impact child care teachers on the job?

Among the early educators, we will be looking at food insecurity, economic well-being and emotional well-being. This is about the educators themselves and establishing a link between how they are faring, and both the quality of the relationships they're able to have in the classroom and their likelihood of staying in the classroom. We’re thinking about outcomes in terms of stability at the child care center level and what children are experiencing day to day. 

It’s worth noting that in our data pre-COVID, about 60 percent of child care teachers were food insecure, which is an incredibly high rate. Forty percent say that they struggled to pay their medical bills - most are not receiving any kind of health benefits from their sites. Employer- provided health care is very expensive for child care centers and they don't have the money to provide it. And about 25 percent of those early educators are depressed. That was all pre-COVID. 

We know that particularly on the emotional well-being side, COVID has exacerbated things. It’s this question of what are we looking at now, in 2022, and what is that going to mean for children and families.

This is part of what people are talking about – what can we do post-COVID? In some ways, is COVID going to be an impetus to solve a problem that has long existed and can it really make a change for a field that has been underserved and undervalued.

When I’ve talked about kind of the importance of having changed data and sort of arguing against going back to business as usual, it's for reasons, like this. These statistics I’m citing here are from our 2018 data. This is pre-COVID. This isn’t like it was a functioning system, and then COVID happened and it's been disrupted and we could just prop it back up.

It was struggling before, and you know only existed on the back of folks that cared about their communities, cared about children, and were willing to do this. But that's no way to run a functioning system that's going to remain stable and do what's best for children and families and communities.

Do you have classroom experience yourself?

I originally was an eighth grade teacher, and I think one thing about being a developmental psychologist is you are always [thinking], “Oh, If only we could have provided more for these kids when they were a little younger, if we could have done more, if we could have provided a more robust system then.” You think a lot about kids’ earliest experiences, because as a developmentalist and psychologist, you think about how powerful they were.

Over the course of graduate school, I sort of got sucked in by the potential for early education. The other thing for me was that the more that I learned about what young children's experiences were, the way that inequality was born - really from the time that children were very, very young - really struck me, and the way it was bound up with what we provide their families and the adults who work and spend time with them. That became a place where I thought “Oh, this is, something I want to understand better, and something I want to do something about.”

One thing that's true about the child care workforce, I think I said earlier, it's one of the most diverse workforces in the country. We have extremely dedicated and compassionate Black and Brown women doing this work and we're paying them a poverty wage.  

Calling attention to the fact that these women at the backbone of what we do as a country and that we're not treating them with respect is something that I’ve also gotten really passionate about, because I look at their job and [think], that's a lot harder than even what I did as an eighth-grade teacher. It just became a real passion point for me. And then I’ve been fortunate in my work in Louisiana, to get to spend time in centers, and with directors, and talking to teachers and getting a better feel for the work that way as well. It is foundational to the development of young children at a time when they're growing and learning so much.

For Professor Markowitz’s recent comments on the pandemic’s impact on kindergarten enrollment California, visit the Los Angeles Times.

Assistant professor of education will lead a project on economic, health, and psychological inequities faced by childcare center teachers and workers.  

Anna Markowitz Honored with UCLA’s Society of Hellman Fellowship

UCLA Associate Professor Eddie R. Cole is working on a promising project, Black Ideas, a new book examining the history of American higher education as told through the Black intellectuals who shaped it. We checked in with Professor Cole for a preview. 

This sounds like a pretty great project. Can you tell me a little bit about what it's all about?

First, put simply, it is a history of higher education as told through the perspective of the Black intellectuals who shape it. Often, when we think about the history of higher education, we think in terms of major institutions: 1636—when Harvard was founded; when the first research universities came along; when did we get women's colleges or teachers colleges. We tend to talk about this history in terms of institutional type, but there are people inside of institutions.

And one thing that I've learned from my first book (The Campus Color Line: College Presidents and the Struggle for Black Freedom) is that you have to be attentive to the social history, not just institutional histories, because that's put people at the center of higher education history. In doing so, I wanted to tell the history of American higher education through the perspective of the Black people who shaped it. This includes Black professors, Black administrators, and Black students who, in different eras, were part of pivotal moments in the development of US higher education.  Black people and their thoughts about higher education were shaping those conversations.

What are the insights and lessons you hope a book like this may offer?

That's a great question. Many of these Black ideas from Black people over the past two centuries are really ideas about some of the issues that we're still dealing with today. Look at big topic higher education issues—accreditation practices, affirmative action, college cost and student debt. These are what I would consider big, mainstream topics that anybody in higher education can say they're familiar with.

But we don't often think about how long these issues have been around, much less alternative solutions that people have put forth in the past about these same issues. And sometimes we're stuck on the result of an idea and not necessarily the originator of the idea, as in the case with affirmative action. My hope is that people will read this book, stop and pause a bit, and think about what alternative paths we've had in the past or even the brilliance behind some of the makings of where we are today. Or maybe even better, what we can imagine a future to be if we did stop and pause and take in some of this full breadth of ideas.

Let's talk a little bit about that. What do you really hope that this work will help people to understand? 

I hope the book re-tells American history in higher education, but more than that, I hope people come to understand how a lot of people have been deeply invested in the idea of democracy, in the idea of equality, and that the fight for those things has been around for centuries. It's not just the richest, wealthiest names that we usually think about when it comes to the development of our colleges and universities. 

Often, there are people in small corners of the nation that have had big ideas that really picked up steam and then their ideas have outraced them as an individual. We have this legacy of their thoughts about the direction of higher education, but we don't necessarily know about the individuals behind these ideas, and how they even came to develop those thoughts. I hope it will really push us in so many ways to think about the beauty of learning and the power of education in the smallest, most hidden places.

There is lots of discussion and concern these days about the divisions across America, and real pushback on teaching about race and teaching about the history of racism in the United States. Do you think this book will be an asset for conversations about that and a resource for educators? What role can this book play in this rather depressing debate?

Yes, this book can play a role. It'll be a part of a larger effort that you see so many scholars pushing on why telling the full truth about America's racial history is so important. Because in reality, when we don't know the full breadth of history, we don't even have a full sense of our present. And whenever we have schools that limit and restrict what students learn about the past—the good, the bad, or the ugly—we do them a grave disservice in terms of moving forward as being full citizens within this nation.

Part of being a knowledgeable citizen and an engaged citizen is to know the history, whether it's good or bad. Because that way, when you know the worst parts of history or even the best parts of history, you get a better picture in being able to understand how your voting matters today, how your engagement within the local economy matters today, how your support of local education matters today. These are really big things that individuals have power in shaping, but you can't fully shape and engage the present if you don't know where you've come from.

Black Ideas is to be published by Princeton University Press.

Eddie R. Cole and Black Ideas in the History of Higher Education

A new survey of more than 4,600 current teachers in California finds that while teachers enter the profession to help students and make a difference, many teachers today are feeling acute levels of stress and job dissatisfaction and are considering leaving the profession. As California grapples with an ongoing teacher shortage the findings underscore significant challenges to teacher retention and the recruitment and preparation of aspiring teachers, especially teachers of color. 

Published by the UCLA Center for the Transformation of Schools (CTS) and the California Teachers Association (CTA), the report, "Voices from the Classroom: Developing a Strategy for Teacher Retention and Recruitment," details results from a quantitative survey conducted by Hart Research Associates of 4,632 current TK-12th grade teachers in California.. The report also includes insights from in-depth interviews with former and aspiring teachers who have taught or plan to teach in California.

The survey results reveal alarming findings related to job satisfaction and future outlook, teacher retention, and the need to address diversity & inclusion within the school work environment.  

While many current California teachers find their work rewarding and fulfilling, they also feel exhausted and stressed. Teachers were more likely to choose words like “Exhausting” (68%), “Stressful” (61%), “Frustrating” (49%), and “Overwhelming” (51%) to describe how they felt about their current position as a teacher over words like “Rewarding” (34%), “Fulfilling” (29%), “Enjoyable” (22%), and “Empowering” (14%). The majority of respondents expressed low levels of satisfaction with key aspects of their job. 

Four in ten teachers surveyed said they have considered leaving the profession. Twenty percent (1 in 5) said they will probably or definitely leave the profession within the next three years.  Twenty-five percent of Black Teachers say so, more than any other ethnic group. 

Burnout from stress (57%) was the top listed reason for leaving the profession. Political and ideological attacks on teachers rank as the second highest reason (40%). Other reasons include workload, low pay, student apathy and behavioral issues, and lack of support from district administrators. 

“We’ve reached a tipping point. Teachers are continuously being asked to do more with less,“ said Tyrone Howard, UCLA professor of education and Co-Faculty Director of UCLA’s Center for the Transformation of Schools. “It’s an unfair ask. Our teachers deserve more than what we are giving them.”

Diversity & Inclusion Within the School Work Environment

Many current teachers of color, especially Black teachers said they have experienced discrimination and do not feel comfortable expressing themselves at their school site.  Aspiring and former teachers who are people of color share that feeling comfortable and a part of their school community was directly tied to whether their students and their families, peers, and leadership had similar racial/ethnic backgrounds to their own. While more than half of white teachers expressed high satisfaction that their work environment is free of discrimination and prejudice, the percentage falls below 50 percent for teachers of color. Just 36 percent of Black teachers said that was the case at their school. Additionally, more than six out of ten Black teachers (62%) and half of Asian-American/Pacific Islander (54%)  teachers surveyed said they have experienced racial discrimination in their current position. 

Less than half of teachers strongly agreed that the environment at their school is supportive of different cultures (41%) and different identities (36%). Only 31% believe that their fellow teachers demonstrate a genuine commitment to cultivating diversity. Four in ten LGBTQ+ teachers reported discrimination based on their sexual orientation in their current teaching position. 

“If we want to attract and retain a diverse teacher workforce, our schools and working environments have to do better at accommodating diversity,” said Kai Mathews, CA Educator Diversity Project Director for the UCLA Center for the Transformation of Schools and researcher on the project. “We have a tendency to think that diversity begins and ends with the demographics of a population, but we know that diversity efforts either succeed or fail based on the accessibility and inclusivity of an organization's culture.

“It seems like we are trying to gather people and bring them to schools and call it diversity, without preparing schools to welcome diversity.  Even if we had a big influx of teachers of color, if we can’t provide them with a workplace environment where they feel welcome, where they feel connected and their culture is valued and respected, it’s only going to get harder to recruit and retain the teachers we need.

“And If a quarter of Black teachers are saying they are planning to leave in three-years, we cannot and should not discount how they are feeling about their racialized experiences and how those feelings may shape their decision to leave the profession,” Mathews said. 

Aspiring teachers provided insights on teacher preparation programs, including the importance of real-time teaching experiences and concerns about the workload and required state teacher assessments. Compensating student teachers was suggested by a significant number of the aspiring teachers and is viewed as a very important policy change that will help alleviate financial stress at an important time in the teacher preparation process. Eighteen out of 25 aspiring teachers stated that financial costs influenced their ability to finish the teacher preparation program.

Practices and Policies to Improve Teacher Retention

More than 88% of teachers identified better pay as the top priority state and local officials should prioritize in order to improve teacher retention, followed by smaller class sizes, stronger discipline policies for students who behave disruptively, better staffing,  a more manageable workload and more support services for students. The majority (80%) of teachers surveyed said it is difficult to find affordable housing near their place of employment, while 68% said it is difficult for them to keep up with basic expenses and the cost of living, and to save for retirement. Former teachers expressed concerns regarding classroom and relationship management and indicated a desire for more professional opportunities for teachers (especially those who are newer to the field) to learn relationship-based skill sets to manage interactions with students and other teachers, administrators and parents. 

Voices from the Classroom: Developing a Strategy for Teacher Retention and Recruitment is a project of the UCLA Center for the Transformation of Schools and the California Teachers Association. Funding for the research has been provided by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the William & Flora Hewlett Foundation. The report, including an executive summary, can be found online at https://transformschools.ucla.edu/voices-from-the-classroom/ 

Survey of more than 4,600 CA educators published by UCLA Center for the Transformation of Schools and California Teachers Association underscores challenges to California’s teaching workforce. Data highlights need to address issues of diversity and inclusion to attract and retain teachers of color. 

New Survey Finds Major Barriers for Building and Sustaining Teaching Profession in CA

The UCLA Center for the Transformation of Schools (CTS) and the California Teachers Association (CTA), will present the findings of a new survey of more than 4,600 teachers in California, Tuesday, September 27.

Conducted on behalf of CTS and CTA by Hart Research,  the survey, "Voices From the Classroom," details significant levels of stress and dissatisfaction with job conditions among teachers, and highlights concerns about diversity and inclusion in schools. The survey findings illuminate the implications for development and retention of the state’s teaching workforce. 

Representatives of CTS and CTA will discuss the survey findings in  a webinar Tuesday at 12.30 p.m.  Advance registration for the webinar is available at https://us06web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_PTN3wTFBQJmp13LFGtshKA

The survey report will be available online on Tuesday, September 27 at  http://transformschools.ucla.edu/voices-from-the-classroom/. 

UCLA CTS, CTA to Publish New Survey of 4,600 teachers in California

Jenny Le, a second-year MLIS student in the UCLA Department of Information Studies, has been honored with a Spectrum Scholarship by the American Library Association. Through the award, the ALA seeks to broaden the participation of new generations of racially and ethnically diverse librarians in order to provide leadership and the transformation of libraries and library services.

The $5,000 award provides financial support, including funds to attend the ALA’s annual conference in 2023, as well as networking opportunities among the community of previous Spectrum Scholars. Pamela Rodriguez Cervantes, also a MLIS student at UCLA IS, has also received the Spectrum Scholarship.

Le, who immigrated to the United States at age five and grew up in a Vietnamese community in Garden Grove, California. After achieving her undergraduate degree in art history from UC Riverside, she began to work at a public library in nearby Huntington Beach. 

“I was eager to work for a library and explore what that would be like,” says Le. “The community there was very supportive of me. I told them I wanted to pursue librarianship and the librarians would give me advice on grad school and what it would be like to be a public librarian.”

Le’s work including circulations duties and engaging with the community in the library’s programs. But when the COVID-19 pandemic began in early 2020, her branch closed temporarily.

“Luckily, I had six months of working before the pandemic, and once the pandemic was here, I came really worried [that] I was going to lose my job,” recalls Le. “But I think that's where I realized the library is the place to be because I felt protected by the public library. Even though my position was entry level they still ensured that we were somehow getting paid and finding other venues for us to work.”

While the branch was closed, Le and her colleagues established a call center to answer COVID-related questions for the local community. Eventually after five months, the branch reopened to provide curbside pickup for patrons who had held their materials online. Le realized the difference between the Huntington Beach branch, which is funded by the city, and her own branch in Garden Grove, which was part of the Orange County library system. 

“The Garden Grove library – which is part of the Orange County Public Library – implemented curbside service much later than Huntington Beach,” says Le. “They are actually two different library systems. Huntington Beach is very well funded.”

Le, who grew up using her local library extensively, notes the importance of the institution, particularly for immigrant populations.

“I come from a working-class family and my parents don't speak English,” says Le. “Reading was somewhere I could escape but also, expand my imagination and understand what's going on in the world.

“Access to books was [only] from libraries, so I did use them, and I’m very grateful for them. But as I grew older, I also recognized that the libraries that I had access to were also limited.”

Le now works at the Arts Library, a branch of the UCLA Library as a student research assistant. She hopes to bring her awareness of the importance of public libraries to diverse populations to her current experience in an academic library.

“The trajectory of where I am in terms of the type of libraries I’m working at, has shifted…  but I’m still focused on bridging that inequity, even within the academic library,” says Le. “I realized that as an academic librarian I can reach out to first-generation students or non-traditional students. I have co-led teaching sessions for transfer students. Even in this shift from public libraries to academic libraries, I still have these values that I want to adhere to and bring into practice.”

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