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Abby Rolly ’23

Major: English (secondary education certification)
Project: Schooling, Justice, and the Future: Arts-Based Research for Educational Change
Advisor: Tristan Gleason, associate professor of education

An eye-opening experience in a real classroom inspired Abby Rolly ’23 to take on educational research. While participating in a field experience course, Rolly witnessed firsthand the dynamics of an actual classroom and discovered a mismatch between the educational principles she’d learned and the actual way that the classroom was managed.

“I identified a disconnection between the pedagogical theories we were exploring in class and the methods being used in live instruction,” Rolly says, an insight that she took to her advisor, Tristan Gleason, associate professor of education.

Rolly’s discussions with Gleason sparked their idea for her SOAR research. In order to examine how educational theories translate to the classroom, Rolly and Gleason would interview educators of different backgrounds, extract data from these narratives, and compare that data.

“We hope to identify how similarities and differences among personal experiences can help us deconstruct and reconstruct new, alternate visions of how the educational profession can better address the needs of our students in the future,” Rolly explains.

Rolly’s largest challenge turned out to be an excess of people willing to contribute interviews. Originally, she planned to dedicate the final five weeks of her research to developing alternatives to current practices within the education system, but she decided instead to continue collecting narratives. Rolly ended up with 28 transcribed interviews, which provide a glimpse into the experience of educators in the public education system. She plans to continue analyzing these interviews, in addition to collecting another set of interviews that feature a more diverse array of experiences.

“Academic research is much more than what we traditionally have seen it to be,” Rolly shares. “I now have a better understanding of how my investigative nature can be applied to contribute to my academic fields of English and educational studies.”

She recommends SOAR research to other students, including those not involved in STEM or research-driven fields. “I encourage other students, particularly those who focus their studies on branches of the humanities, to take advantage of the SOAR program,” Rolly says. “By increasing our participation, we can begin to rethink how academic research can positively contribute to our fields of study.”

Rolly and Gleason presented their research at the American Educational Studies Association (AESA) annual conference in Pittsburgh in November of 2022.