At the Klingenstein Center, we want to build our community's capacity to employ evidence-informed strategies to bring about a desired educational future to life across the independent and international school ecosystem. To do so, we engage in timely, critical, forward thinking research that is dedicated to informing, impacting, and transforming independent and international school teaching, learning, leading, and governing practices, as well as our schools' cultures, structures, and policies.
Our faculty and research associates—many of whom are Klingenstein Center alumni and research-practitioners working in schools—engage in dynamic research projects that often involve schools as partners in inquiry. Our graduate students engage in research-practice partnerships with their practicum schools. In focusing on independent and international schools in our research, we are tending to an area that is under-researched, but holds great learning and discovery potential that could benefit the educational ecosystems well beyond independent schools.
Publications
Teachers College Record—“Minding the Gap in Education Discourse: Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging in Independent and International Schools”—aims to bring attention to independent and international private schools through the lenses of equity, inclusion, and belonging.
Edited by Dr. Nicole Furlonge, Dr. Kenny Graves, Dr. Thu-Nga Morris, and Dr. Sarah Odell, this special issue includes 22 articles in which scholars and practitioners address gaps in education and education leadership discourse regarding considerations of equity, inclusion, and belonging.
The desire and intention informing this special issue is to recognize the urgent need to shift and activate discourse, share ideas, cultivate dialogue, curate towards thought-partnership, and to raise up some of the work that is happening in this robust field of inquiry.
Read the full issue and individual articles via Sage Journals. If you do not have access to Sage, please contact the Center to request assistance.
Current Projects
- Independent School Archival History Toolkit
What aspects of your school’s history - known or unknown - may be hindering your work as an educational institution? How might your school learn about and tell the stories of former and current students, parents, teachers, and administrators of their schools? How can your school community study its own history to unearth new understandings, repair past harm, and increase equity, justice, and belonging?
The Klingenstein Center is proud to announce the launch of a new initiative: the development of an Independent School Archival History Toolkit. The toolkit will provide independent schools with a framework to conduct archival and oral history research in partnership with students, parents, teachers, administrators, and alumni. The framework will also help schools to organize and share their findings, engage their communities in dialogue, and incorporate new understandings into their school cultures and traditions. Ideally, this toolkit could serve a wide range of schools and projects such as historically and/or predominantly white schools that wish to explore the experiences of students of color, or a previously all-boys school that wishes to understand the experiences of female students as the school became co-ed.
Joining the Center as partners on this project are Dr. Michelle Purdy, associate professor of education at Washington University and author of the award-winning book Transforming the Elite: Black Students and the Desegregation of Private Schools, and Lisa Johnson, on behalf of Private School Village, a non-profit she founded and leads that is dedicated to providing community connection and resources for families of color in private schools. The toolkit will be developed during the 2024-2025 school year and piloted during the 2025-2026 school year with a small group of schools.
This spring and summer, we will convene advisory groups to help inform our work. We are recruiting volunteers who have experience in conducting oral or archival history, particularly in an independent school setting, in engaging alumni and parents in diversity, equity, inclusion, belonging, and social justice work, or in creating community dialog to grapple with how a school can acknowledge and repair past harms. If interested, please email the Center.
- Climate Action in the Curriculum at Independent and International Schools
Dr. Clare Sisisky is leading a study on how independent and international schools are teaching the global competencies that enable and empower students to take climate action. The study is currently recruiting participants.
The study is open to all educators, regardless of grade level or discipline, who teach the skills needed for students to act or prepare to act to mitigate climate change, to adapt to the impact of climate change, and/or to seek greater justice in relation to climate issues. Some examples of these skills might include providing students with the opportunity to learn how to communicate effectively with different audiences about climate issues, to understand multiple perspectives and needs in communities most directly impacted by climate change, to build a connection with the natural world and with people across geographic and cultural differences, to evaluate options and decipher a plan for a climate action-related project, to engage and advocate as global citizens on climate issues, to engage in critical self-reflection, etc.
- BlackAt Social Media
Dr. Nicole Furlonge and Dr. Kenny Graves, assisted by graduate students, are analyzing the content of BlackAt social media accounts that have been created over the last several years to provide teachers and leaders with a data about the range of experiences of BIPOC students in predominantly white independent and international schools.
While the research is ongoing, you can read about their current findings in The Art of Listening: Using the Black@ Instagram Archive to Improve Schools in the Spring 2022 Issue of Independent School Magazine. When the research project concludes, more resources will be shared.
- Impact of Listening Practices on DEIJ Leadership at Independent, Predominantly White Schools
Dr. Nicole Furlonge was awarded a grant through the Teachers College Diversity Research Awards Program to construct a Listening Leadership framework to better understand the use and impact of listening practices for independent PreK-12 school leaders as they develop DEIJ efforts in their schools. Based in the hypothesis that as independent schools engage in DEIJ work, a listening leadership ear—one that is culturally responsive and informed by sense-making and systems thinking practices—might benefit their learning communities and disrupt and repair inequality. This project aims to address the gap in research, literature, and practice regarding the potentially productive intersection between listening, leadership, and DEIJ change work.
- Leading with Love: Creating a Community of Belonging for Black Girls at Hewitt
With support from a Klingenstein Center Seed Grant, Dr. Lauren Bailes (University of Delaware, School of Education and Human Development) and the research team at The Hewitt School in New York City will examine aggregate data from Hewitt's annual YouthTruth survey (a climate perception survey) to better understand the experience of, and create positive change for, Black Hewitt students in the middle and upper school.
Inaugural Dissertation Fellowship
The Klingenstein Center at Teachers College supports research and emerging scholarship concerning independent and international education. Doctoral students in departments and programs at TC make inquiry into this global and complex area of education the focus of or an element of their dissertation. To support such dissertation inquiry, the Klingenstein Center offers for the first time a $10,000 doctoral research fellowship for a Teachers College student whose dissertation focuses in whole or in part on independent and international education. The deadline to apply is May 31. Learn More.
Research in Partner Schools
- Student Practicum Projects: Applied research is a participatory, emergent, inquiry, systems thinking process that drives organizational change. Klingenstein Center Full-Year program graduate students conduct applied research and consulting in partner schools under the supervision of Teachers College professors in their Practicum coursework.
If your school is interested in being a partner school in the 2024-2025 school year, please review the Practicum Program Information and the submit a design brief for consideration. Design proposals are due by September 6, 2024. The opportunity is open to all independent and international schools regardless of location as students can engage in this work remotely.
Resources
- Klingbrief: Published monthly during the academic year, each issue of Klingbrief cuts through the noise to offer a carefully-curated collection of books, articles, podcasts, and other resources of import to independent and international school educators.
- KlingShare: In March 2020, as schools were forced to transition rapidly to online operations, the Klingenstein Center launched KlingChats. These lightly-facilitated sessions convened educators around a common challenge to brainstorm ways to teach, lead and learn in a pandemic world. The outcomes of these conversations were collected into KlingShare documents to provide all educators with access to fresh ideas and solutions.
