C&T Presenters
Christopher Carter
Email: ccarter11@ku.edu
An Exploration of Teacher Agency: Key Findings and Next Steps
Teacher agency has emerged as an important construct for understanding how educators navigate accountability-driven educational contexts, yet empirical examinations of agency remain limited, particularly within quantitative research in the United States. Grounded in the ecological model of teacher agency, this study investigated how the iterational, projective, and practical-evaluative dimensions interact to shape the perceived sense of agency among secondary mathematics teachers in U.S. public schools. Using regression analyses with 29 predictor variables, this study represents the first comprehensive quantitative test of the ecological model. The final model accounted for over 40% of the variance in perceived teacher agency and retained nine statistically significant predictors spanning all three dimensions, providing strong empirical support for the ecological and sociocultural conceptualization of teacher agency as context-dependent and relational.
Findings revealed that environmental and relational factors were more strongly associated with teacher agency than individual characteristics. Classroom culture emerged as the strongest positive predictor, suggesting a reciprocal relationship between teacher agency and student-centered, collaborative learning environments. Trust in building principals was also positively associated with agency, highlighting principals’ mediating role between accountability demands and classroom practice. In contrast, professional learning community (PLC) culture and trust in district administrators were negatively associated with teacher agency, indicating that structures intended to support teachers may function more as mechanisms of compliance. Teacher agency was positively correlated with teachers’ intentions to remain in the profession, while pay satisfaction demonstrated a negative relationship, challenging assumptions that compensation alone drives retention.
Future research should extend this work across disciplines, policy contexts, and settings; employ longitudinal and mixed-method designs to capture the dynamic nature of agency; and directly examine relationships between teacher agency, student agency, and student outcomes. Collectively, these findings position teacher agency as a central lever for professional sustainability and educational improvement.
Aadi Sharma
Continuous Professional Development of High School Teachers in Nepal:
Inclusive Models, Motivation, and Impact
Email: asharma07@ku.edu
Continuous professional development for teachers involves designing a strategy or structure. It involves tracking, documenting, and reflecting. This development procedure changes teachers into better teachers and more apt educators. The effects of CPD and what it involves are a great topic of debate and research. A student’s achievements can improve because of the teacher’s participation. Changes occur through the interaction between students and teachers, as well as the development of more complex and coordinated lecture styles and curricula to better suit the needs of students. CPD allows teachers to set smarter professional goals. This paper presents findings from a qualitative study on Continuous Professional Development (CPD) among high school teachers in Nepal. Drawing on interviews with 11 teachers, the study explores how CPD enhances teacher motivation, pedagogical innovation, and professional confidence in contexts where resources are limited but cultural and linguistic diversity is rich. The research highlights how teachers navigate intrinsic and extrinsic motivations, experiment with peer observation, mentoring, and online communities of practice, and adapt global models of training—including deficit, cascade, and community practice models—to local realities.
Beyond documenting teacher growth, the study raises broader questions about faculty evaluation and academic reward systems: How can teaching and community impact be recognized as central to professional identity? It also considers inclusive pedagogy, asking how CPD can be designed to better respond to cultural and linguistic diversity in schools, where teachers are often called to bridge multiple languages, traditions, and expectations in their classrooms. When educators discover new teaching strategies through professional development, they can return to the classroom and make adjustments to their lecture styles and curricula to better meet the needs of their students. Effective educators can enhance teacher knowledge, which results in effective teachers. Effective teachers can have a significant impact on child’s social, emotional, and academic development. Their role is vital in ensuring students achieve the best possible outcomes
For a multicultural, multidisciplinary audience, this presentation reframes CPD as not just a local concern in Nepal but as a global conversation about rethinking how we support and reward teachers in diverse educational systems. The talk will be interactive in design: after sharing key findings, I will invite participants to reflect on their own institutional contexts using two guiding questions—(1) How do our academic reward systems incentivize (or fail to incentivize) inclusive teaching? and (2) What CPD models could better support teachers working in culturally and linguistically diverse classrooms? Short group discussions will allow participants to compare contexts and generate ideas collectively, ensuring the session is dialogic rather than one-directional.
The goal of this individual presentation is to demonstrate how CPD research in Nepal contributes to wider debates in education and pedagogy, while also creating space for international exchange. By emphasizing focus on teacher voices and linking them to global challenges, the session aims to advance conversations on professional development, inclusive teaching, and institutional change that recognizes the full impact of educators’ work.
Peyman Jahanbin
Email: peyman@ku.edu
Beyond Symbolic Recognition:
Examining Access, Fidelity, and Student Outcomes in the Seal of Biliteracy
Originating in California in 2011, the Seal of Biliteracy (SoBL) has rapidly diffused as a K–12 language education credential. After more than a decade of implementation and policy enthusiasm that has extended to all 50 states and the District of Columbia, the research base still offers an uneven picture of what the SoBL reliably produces for students in real-world terms. To date, the SoBL appears to support some instructional and programmatic improvements, but it often functions primarily as symbolic recognition for multilingual students. This is an important start, yet the literature points to persistent limitations in four areas: implementation and fidelity, access and equity, language availability and participation disparities, and educational and career outcomes.
This integrative literature review synthesizes fifteen years of scholarship to examine these gaps and argues that, without stronger policy coherence and more consistent recognition by universities and employers, the SoBL may fall short of its equity goals. The review maps what is currently known about how SoBL programs are implemented, raises critical questions about who benefits and under what conditions, and concludes with directions for research that can better evaluate outcomes and strengthen SoBL models in K–12 contexts.
Charles Pittack
Email: cpittack@ku.edu
From a Logical Point of View: Deriving and Validating an Empathic Ethical Capacity Model (EECM) Framework
Trait‑based teacher dispositions often function as evaluative optics: they reward performative signals while missing whether ethical responsiveness is recognized and taken up in interaction. This talk develops and tests the Empathetic Ethical Capacity Model (EECM), a practice‑proximal alternative grounded in Nussbaum’s narrative imagination and a relational‑expressivist metaethics. From a logical point of view, EECM proceeds by (1) specifying an ontology of empathy as relationally constituted, normatively expressive, and context‑sensitive (RE1–RE3), and (2) deriving a formative measurement claim: empathy is a z‑composite of seven non‑interchangeable contributory capacities with component necessity, non‑substitutability, and joint sufficiency (C‑Nec, C‑NS, C‑JS). These claims are presented as valid arguments (if the premises hold, the conclusion must follow); the baseline study then evaluates the feasibility of soundness by testing whether the model’s pre-specified empirical implications appear in participants’ endorsement → enactment-readiness → modeling-exposure pattern and in the predicted correlational alignment with adjacent capacities.
I report a baseline mixed‑methods study with undergraduates in a multicultural education course (N=37) using Likert scales, open‑ended prompts, and joint displays linking statistics to practice‑proximal excerpts. Results show a strong within‑person endorsement→ enactment‑readiness→ modeled‑exposure gradient (Belief/Ethics > Practice‑proximal > Perceived/Modeling-exposure; Friedman (χ²(2)=53.35, p<.001; Kendall’s W=.785; N=34). The formative empathy index aligns with theorized adjacent capacities: flexibility and creativity (ρ≈.55, .53), challenge‑bias open‑mindedness (ρ≈.54), reflectiveness (ρ≈.39), and communication effectiveness (ρ≈.44). I conclude by showing how these patterns support EECM’s logical derivation as a viable framework and motivates the next validation steps: measuring affordances (time/safety/task‑fit) and coding in‑class markers such as uptake, repair, and stance revision. Implications are discussed for teacher preparation and for ethical theory at metaethical, normative, and applied levels.
Key words: Teacher dispositions; empathy; narrative imagination, mixed methods, Formative measurement; practice-proximal assessment.
Alp Çiftçi
Resident Evil of the Digital Age:
A critical-theoretical analysis of Neurodivergent Vulnerability in the Attention Economy
Email: alpc@ku.edu
This paper develops a critical framework relevant to education, learning, and cognition under digital capitalism. Drawing on Frankfurt School critical theory, it analyzes the attention economy as a contemporary form of domination structured through algorithmic rationality, behavioral extraction, and infrastructural control. Extending classical critiques of instrumental reason, the culture industry, and system rationalization, the paper examines how digitally mediated environments reorganize perception, engagement, and participation by shaping attention at the level of environmental precondition rather than individual choice.
The paper advances neurodivergence as an analytic lens for examining how these infrastructures produce differentiated forms of vulnerability. Rather than treating neurodivergence as an individual deficit or clinical category, the analysis situates cognitive difference within broader political-economic arrangements that privilege normative attentional capacities while rendering others disproportionately susceptible to interruption, salience modulation, and behavioral steering. By integrating critical theory with scholarship in cognitive neuroscience and disability studies, the paper argues that digital domination operates not only through ideology or discourse, but through the infrastructural shaping of attention itself.
This work contributes to education research at the level of foundations by reframing questions of equity, belonging, and participation around structurally distributed cognitive vulnerability. It challenges universal models of the learner by demonstrating how digitally mediated conditions presuppose normative cognitive capacities and reorganize participation accordingly.
Rachel Kook
Email: kookrh@ku.edu
A Systematic Review of Literature on Self-Efficacy in Foreign Language Learning
This systematic literature review examines methodological trends and empirical findings in language learning self-efficacy research, specifically focusing on Languages Other Than English (LOTE) at the tertiary level. While English-centric research has long shaped motivational assumptions, this study addresses the need to understand self-efficacy in LOTE contexts, where learners are often driven by cultural or personal interests rather than the instrumental goals typical of English as a global lingua franca. Grounded in sociocognitive theory, the conceptual framework emphasizes that self-efficacy is a context-dependent, task-specific belief shaped by mastery experiences and sociocultural environments. Following PRISMA 2020 guidelines, the review synthesized 14 empirical studies published between 2014 and 2025, a period chosen to align with the emergence of Positive Psychology in Second Language Acquisition.
Qualitative synthesis revealed that research is heavily concentrated on specific languages, with Turkish being the most investigated due to established scales, followed by Spanish and Chinese, while U.S.-based LOTE studies remain notably scarce. In terms of skill domains, writing self-efficacy received the most frequent attention, whereas listening remains significantly under-explored. Methodologically, quantitative survey designs dominate the field, however, while anxiety is consistently measured using standardized instruments, self-efficacy tools remain fragmented and context-specific, limiting cross-study comparability. Findings across the reviewed literature consistently show strong associations between high self-efficacy, lower foreign language anxiety, and increased proficiency. Despite the theoretical alignment between self-efficacy and learner strengths, no reviewed studies explicitly utilized a Positive Psychology framework, highlighting a major conceptual gap. This review underscores the importance of addressing unspoken narratives in LOTE research to foster more equitable and culturally responsive language education that treats these languages as sites of identity formation and positive transformation.
Maddy Clay
Email: madison.clay@ku.edu
Artificial Intelligence & Cyberbullying
Artificial Intelligence has taken over many conversations in society, especially in the realm of education. While there have been many discussions surrounding ethical implications of AI when it comes to academic integrity, there has been a seemingly large gap in addressing other ethical issues of AI. Those are the larger ethical implications of the use of AI to cause harm. While cyberbullying has long been a conversation within these spaces with educators, parents, administrators, and students, in the growing generative technologies that are now publicly available these policies should be revisited. There is a need to raise awareness of the ways in which cyberbullying utilizes AI and creates larger gaps of societal injustices. Educators at all levels should be addressing these injustices within their training of faculty and in discussions with their students as ethical implications of AI go far beyond policies of academic integrity.