Center for Research on Teacher Development and Professional Practice | | Summer/Fall 2026 Newsletter | | |
Dear Center colleagues and friends,
Welcome to the 2026–2027 academic year! As Director of the Center for Research on Teacher Development and Professional Practice (CRT), I am excited to kick off another year of impactful research, collaboration, and community engagement.
With the support of School of Education Dean Washington, we are also thrilled to launch two new funding opportunities to support our community:
We look forward to an inspiring and collaborative year ahead!
Hosun Kang, Ph.D.
Center Director
| | The Education Center for Research on Teacher Development and Professional Practice (CRT) in the School of Education at the University of California, Irvine fosters collaborations among faculty, students, and practitioners on projects focused on a variety of aspects of teacher development and learning and on the study of teaching and teacher professional practice and of the systems in which these are embedded (including school and district leadership). | | 2026-27 CRT Leadership Team | |
Graduate Student Mini-Grant Program
The CRT is launching a new mini-grant program to support graduate student research related to teaching, teacher education, and professional practice. The program will provide funding for pilot studies, ongoing research, dissertation-related work, and partnership-based projects. Up to three $2,000 mini-grants will be awarded. Applications are due October 5, 2026.
Learn more
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Teacher Education & Research Partnership
The CRT is launching a new initiative to foster partnerships between education researchers and teacher educators across the School of Education. Partnerships will bring together at least one teacher educator and one senate faculty member or graduate student to integrate research and clinical practice in mutually beneficial ways. Up to five partnerships will receive $1,000 each. Applications are due October 30, 2026.
Learn more
| | New Grants and Fellowships | | From left: Symone Gyles and Asli Sezen-Barrie | | |
Assistant Professor
- National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship Relational Ecologies: Examining Community-Based Science Learning in a Community School
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Rooted in Story, Rewoven for Change: AI-Supported Youth Narratives and Engineering Design for Sustainable Fashion Futures (2026-2027). Funded by the UCI Climate Collaboration.
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Asli Sezen-Barrie
Professor and Stacey Nicholas Endowed Chair of Climate and Environmental Education
- Waste to Wisdom: School Composting for a Circular Future. Funded by the Honda Foundation. 2026-2027 PI, with Co-PI Kylie Peppler.
- Fashioning a Sustainable Future: A Binational Maker- and Challenge-Based Approach to Education for Sustainability and Circular Economy Innovation (2026-2027). Funded by the University of California Alianza MX. Co-PI, with Kylie Peppler, Jorge Membrillo-Hernández, and Mariajulia Martínez-Acosta.
| | Accomplishments: Center and Affiliated Faculty | | | | |
Tara Barnhart (left) for earning tenure
Asli Sezen-Barrie for being named a 2026 NARST Fellow.
NARST Fellows are accomplished scholars whose scholarship, service, and leadership activities contribute to and advance the NARST community and the field of science education.
| | Accomplishments: Graduate Students and Postdocs | | | | |
Patricia Fuentes Acevedo for joining the University of Massachusetts Amherst as an Assistant Professor of Mathematics Education. Patricia also received the UCI Latinx Excellence Award last Spring.
“The CRT was one of the most important communities for me during my years at UCI because it provided opportunities to push my thinking, connect with teacher educators and researchers in the US and internationally, and receive valuable feedback on my in-progress work," Fuentes Acevedo said. "The support of the CRT faculty and peers has been key to my accomplishments, and I look forward to continuing to foster collaborations and friendships over the years!”
| | Christina Kimmerling (left) for joining the Orange County Department of Education as a consultant, and becoming a Research Associate at UCI, after receiving her Ph.D. at UCI. | | Kelley Riffenburgh for joining the University of Washington in St. Louis as a postdoc through the Saint Louis Translational Fellowships in Education program, after receiving her PhD at UCI. | | Yuxi Huang for joining the University of Houston, Department of Curriculum & Instruction, as an Assistant Professor of Science Education, after having completed a postdoc at UCI. | | |
Evelyn Young (left) and Stacy Yung, Coordinators of the MAT Program, received a $100,000 award from the Sun Family Foundation to support ongoing professional development for mentor teachers and supervisors. The funding will provide valuable opportunities to strengthen the support and guidance provided to MAT candidates throughout their teacher preparation.
The grant proposal, Classroom-to-Career Pipeline: Sustaining Transformative Educators Across the Professional Continuum, seeks to invest in the capital of mentor teachers and supervisors and grow the talent and agency of transformative educators in a sustainable manner. The goals of the project are: 1) provide training to increase mentor teachers' capacity to teach from a culturally, linguistically, historically, and environmentally responsive lens; 2) create space for ongoing supervisor inquiry in professional learning communities; and 3) collaborate with district partners to create an equity-centered ecosystem for educators across their professional journey.
| | 2026 Winter/Spring Colloquium Series, Writing Retreat, and Social Events | | |
The Center has hosted five colloquia from February to May in 2026. The speakers were Dr. Jody Guarino and Myuriel von Aspen at UCI, Dr. Lynsey Gibbons at the University of Delaware, Christina Kimmerling at UCI, Dr. Kathlene Campbell at the National Center for Teacher Residencies, Dr. Doron Zinger at CSU Dominguez Hills, Dr. Susan Toma-Berge, Stacy Yung, and Dr. Ellie Marsh at UCI, Dr. Gaye Ceyhan at Boğaziçi University, Chris Jadallah at UCLA, Emily V. Reich at UC Santa Cruz, Symone Gyles at UCI, Devon Azzam at UC Santa Barbara, Lauren Daus at UCLA, Sam Burmester at UC Santa Cruz, Minjung Shin at UCI, Amanda Gonzaga at UC Santa Cruz, Danielle Harlow at UC Santa Barbara, Julie A. Bianchini at UC Santa Barbara, and Hosun Kang at UCI.
View flyer
| | We also hosted a Spring Writing Retreat (above) in collaboration with Connected Learning Lab (CLL) and an End-of-Year Party to celebrate Center members’ accomplishments. | | 2026 Fall Colloquium Speakers: Mark Your Calendars! | | |
October 19, 2026
Dr. Thomas Philip, UC Berkeley
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November 2, 2026
Dr. Emily Penner, UC Irvine
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November 30, 2026
Evelyn Young & Stacy Yung, UC Irvine
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Gyles, S., & Hannegan-Martinez, S. (2026). Trauma-informed praxis as a building block of justice-centered science. Teachers College Record: The Voice of Scholarship in Education, 127(11-12), 3–27. https://doi.org/10.1177/01614681251408915
Sezen-Barrie, A., Stapleton, M., & Kang, H. (2026). Making climate justice count: Teaching with data stories for action. Harvard Education Press.
Richland, L. E., Yu, S., Karyagdi, B., Zhao, H., Doroudi, S., Wong, J. T., Rhodes, K. T., & Rose, E. L. (in press). Developing a generative AI chatbot to support students’ higher-order thinking in STEM education. Journal of Microbiology and Biology Education.
Scheiner, T., Santagata, R., van Es, E. (2026). Teacher noticing as a dynamic system: A complexity-informed multi-perspective approach. Learning in Context, 4, 100031, 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lecon.2026.100031
Zinger, D., & Ghebreab, N. (in press). What does a STEM school leader for all look like? STEM teachers’ expectations. Science Scope.
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Bisht, A., Gyles, S., Santagata, R., Huang, Y., Kang, H., Williams, T., Long, J. J., & Ludovise, S. (2026). Speculative futuring for understanding river socio-ecology. In B. K. Litts, D. DeLiema, C. Lee, S. Krist, A. Mawasi, L. Martin, & K. Kumpulainen (Eds.), Proceedings of the 20th International Conference of the Learning Sciences - ICLS 2026 (pp. 2884–2886). International Society of the Learning Sciences.
Cassone McGowan, V., Gyles, S., Starks, E., & Tzou, C. (2026). Weaving webs of nature-culture relations across disciplines through a Histories of Places framework. In B. K. Litts, D. DeLiema, C. Lee, S. Krist, A. Mawasi, L. Martin, & K. Kumpulainen (Eds.), Proceedings of the 20th International Conference of the Learning Sciences - ICLS 2026 (pp. 2391–2392). International Society of the Learning Sciences.
Fuentes Acevedo, P., Kimmerling, C., Santagata, R., Pantano, A., & Pelayo, R. (2026). Noticing in college mathematics: Development of noticing discourse in a video-based professional development. In B. K. Litts, D. DeLiema, C. Lee, S. Krist, A. Mawasi, L. Martin, & K. Kumpulainen (Eds.), Proceedings of the 20th International Conference of the Learning Sciences - ICLS 2026 (pp. 2322–2323). International Society of the Learning Sciences.
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Invited Presentation by Dr. Rossella Santagata, “Fostering Expansive Noticing Practices through Video-Based Professional Development in College Mathematics.” ZDM – Mathematics Education webinar on Innovative Approaches to Research in Mathematics Teacher Noticing (facilitated by Sherin, van Es, Scheiner, & Kaiser), March 25, 2026.
Invited Talk by Dr. Asli Sezen-Barrie, “Transformative Climate and Environmental Education for a Just Future.” Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA, May 2026.
Keynote by Dr. Symone Gyles, “Community-Based Science Learning Toward More Thriving Climate Futures.” UCI Science Project – Cultivating Change: Environmental Literacy Educators’ Conference, September 2026.
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Baek, C., Nguyen, V., Gyles, S., Montes-Perales, K., & Warschauer, M. (2026, April 8–12). Teachers’ perspectives on the assets students bring to learning computational thinking and community-based environmental literacy [Roundtable presentation]. In Teaching for justice: Centering identity, voice, and real-world relevance in diverse classrooms. American Educational Research Association Annual Meeting, Los Angeles, CA, United States.
Bisht, A., & Santagata, R. (2026, April 19–22). Student’s development of care and reciprocity for socio-ecological contexts: Co-designing an environmental engineering curriculum. NARST Annual International Conference, Seattle, WA, United States.
Bisht, A., Gyles, S., Huang, Y., Santagata, R., Williams, T., Kang, H., Long, J., & Ludovise, S. (2026, June 15–19). Students’ sensemaking of community concerns through speculative design. Annual Meeting of the International Society of the Learning Sciences, Irvine, CA, United States.
| | UROP Symposium Presentations | | |
Li, I., Nakagawa, N., Kwun, N., Shin, M., & Kang, H. (2026, May 15). Narrating vs. enacting transdisciplinary learning [Poster presentation]. 2026 UC Irvine Undergraduate Research Symposium, Irvine, CA, United States.
Shchehlik, L., Zuo, E., Gyles, S., Baek, C., & Saito Stehberger, D. (2026, May 15). Evaluating students’ experiences in an integrated computer science & environmental literacy curriculum [Poster presentation]. 2026 UC Irvine Undergraduate Research Symposium, Irvine, CA, United States.
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