New Faces at the Gardner Center
We’re pleased to introduce three new members of the Gardner Center team, and re-introduce Kristin Geiser, a research associate who we are thrilled to welcome back. They each answered a few questions to help you get to know them better.
Welcome to the Gardner Center! You’ve spent many years doing education policy research, so our focus is very familiar to you. Is there anything that makes the Gardner Center different from other research centers you’ve been associated with?
Soung Bae: What I appreciate about how the Gardner Center conducts research is two-fold.
First is the focus on conducting research in collaboration with partners. This gives voice to people who may not always be asked what they think may be a viable solution or what they hope to understand or learn from the research. In addition, it helps to ensure that the research is done with them rather than to them.
Second is the focus on long-term commitments with our research partners. The life of a research project is often constrained by the timeline dictated by the terms of a grant, with a year being most typical. This sets up the research to take on an efficiency or dip-stick approach, where the research is only able to capture a snapshot view of the problem in question. In contrast, the Gardner Center research projects tend to be more multi-year, which facilitates the development of long-term collaborations. This, in turn, opens the door for employing an iterative process for ongoing learning.
How do you expect to learn and grow as a youth development researcher?
Soung Bae: To date, my research has focused on K-12 teachers, school systems, and policymaking. I am looking forward to broadening the scope of ecosystems that influence how youth learn and develop. For example, the Gardner Center engages in a variety of research that covers the lifespan from early childhood to post-secondary and in collaboration with health care systems, community colleges, and community-based organizations. Moreover, I am excited to learn from my colleagues at the Gardner Center and our community partners who have been engaged in this type of work for a long time and are leaders in the field.
Congratulations on your PhD! We’re thrilled you chose to join the Gardner Center. Tell us what you’re hoping to accomplish in your first years on the job.
Brandon Balzer Carr: Sweeping structural change: absolute educational equity, total adoption of evidence based practice, and complete dismantling of social and economic inequality! More modestly, I hope to spend my first few years doing a lot of learning from a diverse group of researchers and the communities that they serve. I hope to sink my roots into the California context to understand and make a difference in the place that I have lived my entire life.
How will you apply your scholarship to the youth development research you’ll be involved with at the Gardner Center?
Brandon Balzer Carr: First, my lines of inquiry looking at educational outcomes in postsecondary schooling show that simply getting into college is not the finish line for students’ academic journeys. I hope to inform our understanding of college readiness and higher education to ensure that the youth we serve not only get into college but also graduate from college.
Second, I look forward to bringing a social psychological perspective to the Gardner Center. My training in psychometrics positions me well to inform survey design and scale development, as well as latent variable analysis and structural equation modeling. I am excited to bring an education psychology lens to consider stereotype threat, sense of belonging, growth mindsets, and other psychological factors important for youth development.
Third and finally, I am eager to bring my theoretical knowledge and lived experience to bear in thinking about how to best support gender and sexual minority youth. The age ranges we work with are typically some of the most difficult parts of an LGBTQ person’s life. But, protective factors that can be intervened on — community integration, family acceptance, queer role models — are invaluable in mitigating the minority stressors that LGBTQ youth face.
You were a researcher at the Gardner Center from 2008–2014, and we are so happy to welcome you back! Does anything strike you as different about the Center right off the bat?
Kristin Geiser: Location! The Gardner Center has changed locations three times since I first joined.
What are you most looking forward to on your second tour of duty?
Kristin Geiser: One of the things I have always loved about the Gardner Center is that we are invited to conduct research in partnership with people who care deeply about the well-being of young people and their families.
Our partners often reach out to us when they are curious about how they can more effectively improve youth experiences and outcomes. This curiosity tends to be linked to pragmatic considerations such as policy development or decision-making regarding program planning or scaling.
What I appreciate about the Gardner Center is that we recognize that this curiosity is also rooted in a deeper longing. For example, partners who are committed to improving early childhood education outcomes in under-resourced communities, supporting adolescent mental health and well-being, or increasing the number of low-income students who graduate from college long to create settings and systems that honor the dignity of every human being. And so, they come to us with questions about how to better support the development of every young person, including and especially those who are least served. And we respond by drawing upon the wisdom in both research and practice to offer a way forward.
It is a privilege to be invited into such spaces. It is an additional privilege to do so alongside colleagues at the Gardner Center and the broader Stanford community who bring not only a wide range of methodological and disciplinary expertise, but who also bring a unique posture — an ethic of care — to this work.
So glad to be back!
You are an experienced IT professional with a passion for education research. We’re lucky to have you as our newest data manager. What excites you about the move from business to academia?
Charlotte Woo: What excites me most is the opportunity to be part of a research team that advances knowledge in youth development theories and practices. My professional career thus far has relied on advocating and implementing technology invented and perfected by someone else. While it is fine to continue on that stable path, particularly when most of my friends and neighbors are doing that, I saw the excitement and potential rewards of investigating the phenomena and problems in youth education and wellness, and contributing to their explanations and resolutions.
The other thing that keeps me excited is the “license to learn.” Gone are the days when I had to carve out time from my 6-or 7-meeting-a-day schedule to learn and get trained. I yearned for a workplace where learning and education is front and center of everything.
A career in education research allows me to practice what I preach, and to pay attention to things that matter. One of the skills I try to build in my children is the desire and ability to research things that they are curious about or do not understand. Since I started my new position at the Gardner Center, I demonstrated to them how I have learned Stata, and have become knowledgeable about state-level school testing and local school districts. I told my children, “if I can learn this much, you can and should learn much, much more!”
How have you engaged so far with the Gardner Center’s focus on building the data use capacity of our community partners?
Charlotte Woo: I have taken a three-pronged approach: relationship building, integrating capacity building into the data collection process, and sharing/promoting data management standards. This includes finding opportunities for in-person meetings, understanding how data is being used (or not used) currently by the districts, as well as educating districts on how and why we collect and use certain data elements.
