Early Childhood Research for Educational Equity: Family-School-Systems Connections

About Christine M. McWayneVivian L. Gadsden

Christine M. McWayne Professor in the Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Study and Human Development at Tufts University is an applied developmental psychologist and a community-based educational researcher whose work has centered on fostering better understandings of the early social and learning successes of young children growing up in urban poverty as well as on understanding how to better support and connect the adult contributors to children's early developmenttheir parents and teachers.Underpinning her research with these adults are attempts to flip the script so to speak and create the space for practitioners and family members supporting children's development to tell us what they know what they do and how they do it so that their experiential knowledge can inform our scientific knowledge base. Dr. McWayne has served as Principal Investigator (PI) on several grants including from the National Institutes of Health the Administration for Children and Families within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services the National Science Foundation the Heising-Simons Foundation and the Brady Education Foundation. She has served as a consultant on numerous local state and federal working groups and expert convenings on topics such as: dual language learners' school readiness assessment family engagement parenting and Head Start programming. Dr. McWayne has also served on the editorial boards of Early Childhood Research Quarterly the National Head Start Associationâs Dialog and as Associate Editor for the Educational Researcher Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology and Journal of School Psychology. She received her Ph.D. in School Community and Clinical-Child Psychology from the University of Pennsylvania. Jason T. Downer Ph.D. is a senior research scientist at the University of Virginia's Center for Advanced Study of Teaching and Learning in Charlottesville. He is a clinicalcommunity psychologist whose work focuses on the identification and understanding of contextual and relational contributors to young at-risk children's early achievement and social competence. Specifically Dr. Downer is interested in the role of fathers in children's early learning as well as the development of observational methods to capture valid reliable estimates of teacherchild interactions in prekindergarten through elementary classrooms. Dr. Downer also has a keen interest in translating research-to-practice through school-based classroom-focused interventions.