Graduate Student

Abby Slovick

Abby Slovick (she/her) is a doctoral student in the Policy, Politics, and Leadership cluster in the School of Education. Her research interests encompass a variety of topics including technology in education, district governance, and democratic education.

Abby’s current research projects include tracing Transitional Kindergarten (TK) growth and implementation in California; observing how San Francisco Bay Area school boards construct resources and the evidence they employ to justify those resources; and understanding how students navigated preparing for the virtual California Bar...

Yi Zhou

Yi (Joe) Zhou is an international student from China. He is a PhD student in the Learning Sciences and Human Development cluster at UC Berkeley's School of Education, advised by Professor Elliot Turiel. Yi is hugely interested in the broad topic of morality, and enjoys reading ethical theories and moral psychology. His own research is in the field of moral development.

He is currently looking at individuals' judgments about the desirability of doing the morally right thing and their practical decisions in social situations involving conflict between morality and self-interest. He is...

Yared Portillo

Yared is a PhD student in the Learning Sciences and Human Development cluster at UC Berkeley’s School of Education with a focus on Language, Literacy, and Culture. Before graduate school, Yared was a community organizer and educator in South Philadelphia where she worked with the Latinx immigrant community. She has also been working as a community-based music educator for nearly 10 years, currently facilitating son jarocho workshops in Sacramento, Calif.

Yared’s research focuses on studying the processes of collective meaning making that takes place in learning and teaching fandango...

Franklin B. Mejía

Franklin B. Mejía received a BA and a Masters in Education at the University of California, San Diego and is currently a 4th year graduate student in the School of Education at the University of California, Berkeley. Currently, he is finalizing his third prequalifying paper and is studying for his oral qualifying examination to advance to candidacy. His areas of expertise include talent development, cultural identities, Latinx education, teacher effectiveness, and Latinx legal court cases involving school segregation/desegregation efforts.

Allison Bradford

Allison Bradford is a doctoral student in the Learning Sciences and Human Development Cluster within the School of Education. She received her BS in Physics from the University of Maryland, and was a high school math and science teacher before attending graduate school.

She currently engages in design-based research in partnership with teachers from several Bay Area school districts. Her current research is centered on teacher customization of middle school science curriculum in response to their students’ ideas and learning needs. Her studies focus on teacher...

Ashley Zhou

Ashley Zhou is a PhD student in the Joint Doctoral Program in Special Education at the UC Berkeley School of Education and San Francisco State University. Originally from New Jersey, she completed her undergraduate thesis on Asian American women’s mental health and affective responses to racialization under Vivian Huang. She served on the board of the Taskforce for Asian American Progressive Advocacy and Studies and graduated magna cum laude from Harvard College with a BA in Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality and a minor in economics in 2017.

Following...

Allison Firestone

Allison Firestone is a doctoral candidate in the School of Education. Her research focuses broadly on equity-centered preservice teacher education, with an emphasis on building future teachers' capacity to enact a critically inclusive practice. Her dissertation is a mixed methods experiment that examined the impact of integrating inquiry groups into student teaching coursework. Her findings indicate how participation impacted preservice teachers’ knowledge and enactment of inclusive practices, and the participatory experiences that led to changes in novice teachers' practice.

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Viviane Chang

Viviane is currently a doctoral student in School Psychology at the University of California, Berkeley working under the supervision of Dr. Elliot Turiel. She is also a nationally certified school psychologist and a registered psychological assistant. Her decision to enter school psychology started off from a simple thought that she wanted to make schools a safe harbor for children where they feel loved and welcomed, are supported to learn the skills needed to make healthy choices for themselves, to better cope with life challenges, and to care for one another’s well­-being.

Viviane...

Cristina Méndez

Cristina S. Méndez is a PhD student in the Critical Studies of Race, Class and Gender. She is also pursuing a designated emphasis in Indigenous Language Revitalization. Her research interests span disciplines, drawing on sociology, ethnic studies, migration studies, among others. Through her research and other collaborations, Cristina is committed to centering Indigenous, feminist, and decolonial epistemologies and methodologies.

Currently, Cristina is engaged in an ethnographic and community-based research design project with Maya Mam activists and a UC Berkeley doctoral candidate...

Jacqueline Anton

Jacqueline Anton is a student in the Joint Doctoral Program in Special Education. Her research addresses embodied mathematics interventions for students with moderate/ extensive support needs. She is also interested in inclusive mathematics pedagogy and teacher education. Her work is inspired by her pervious experience as both a general and special education Math teacher.

Specializations and Interests

Mathematics Education, Teacher Education, Inclusive Pedagogy, Disability Studies