Welcome!

Educational Policy Studies & Practice

Leslie D. Gonzales

Department Head, Educational Policy Studies & Practice

The Department of Educational Policy Studies & Practice (EPSP) includes two programs: Educational Leadership & Policy (EDL) and the Center for the Study of Higher Education (HED). The EPSP department combines the K-12 focus with postsecondary education to create a P-20 perspective that taps into the dominant discourse of education and policymakers today.

Our directors

Dr. Leslie D. Gonzales is the director of the Center for the Study of Higher Education program and Dr. Mel Bertrand is the director of Educational Leadership & Policy program.

Benefits of the combined unit

The programs in both units, the Center for the Study of Higher Education and Educational Leadership & Policy, center on equity, inclusion, and social justice. Both units prepare students as scholars, practitioners, and activists consistent with each unit’s professional career paths and state certification standards leading to licensure. However, together, the units offer expertise across multiple PK-20 educational contexts.

A key departmental strength concentrates on how organizations, institutions (both formal and informal), official practices, and educational professions affect outcomes across local, national, and international contexts and how these entities are affected by societal, economic, historical, and political pressures.

Our graduate degrees

EPSP prepares graduate students at the doctorate and master's levels. Graduate programs in EDL include an Ed.D. (fully online), Ph.D., and M.Ed. The M.A. degree has a focus on policy. The M.Ed. degree is a standards-driven curriculum leading to both a degree and state certification for the principalship. Graduate programs in HED include Ph.D. and M.A. degrees.

Lunch & Learn

Lunch & Learn, which we plan to resume at least once per semester once we’re back again face-to-face, is to facilitate further communication among faculty and students about a range of programmatic, professional, and academic issues, as well as to enhance community among our students. We encourage you to come with questions, thoughts, and suggestions for us, and we may have some for you as well.

FACULTY SPOTLIGHT

Dr. Joonkil Ahn

Meet Dr. Joonkil Ahn, an Assistant Professor of Educational Leadership and Policy (EDLP).

Using both quantitative and qualitative approaches, Joonkil’s research examines the ways in which leadership can be cultivated at an organizational level to promote teamwork and equity. Specifically, Joonkil’s first research strand concerns the measurement of educational practices that are often not directly observable. His highly cited article (Ahn et al., 2021) uses a four-fold cross-validation multilevel factor analysis and establishes a leadership for learning measurement model, testing the extent to which individual and collective faculty as well as principals (dis)agree in perceiving leadership practices. Using this measurement model, his recent work (Ahn & Bowers, 2023) further investigates the degree to which teacher beliefs (i.e., self-efficacy) mediate leadership practice's impact on equitable teaching practices. Within this research strand, he is currently working on the development of a measurement scale of deficit-laden educational practices to advance this project for an extramural grant submission.

Using qualitative approaches, Joonkil also explores how principal leadership and teacher professional learning communities (PLCs) advance equity in school. A recent study published in AERA Open (Flores & Ahn, 2024) explores how principals demonstrate their commitment to equity by advocating for student voice. Another study, currently under revision in the Journal of Educational Change, investigates equity-related challenges educators face in a middle school’s PLC. In times when PLCs are often regarded by teachers as an additional meeting or even a waste of time, another study of his explores how a school district sustained its PLC to be accepted by the staff as a prevailing organizational culture, using an organizational learning theory lens and data from 19 building- and district-level leaders.

Joonkil also provides the field with critical and integrative syntheses of research literature. Using a novel approach that combines meta-analysis and network analysis, Joonkil and colleagues (Ahn et al., 2023) published a literature review on the Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS) for the first time since TALIS became available in 2009. In another review study on TALIS (Wang & Ahn, 2023), he points out problematic issues with construct content validity used in TALIS literature. In an additional review study, currently under revision in the Review of Educational Research, Joonkil and colleagues use critical race methodology and elicit how the research on principal preparation has employed methods that demonstrate critical engagement with race and racism. To learn more about Joonkil’s research, check out his Google Scholar profile

PAST SPOTLIGHTS