Alyssa Hadley Dunn, Ph.D.
Director of Teacher Education, Associate Professor of Curriculum and Instruction | University of Connecticut
Storrs, CT, UNITED STATES
Dr. Dunn focuses her teaching, research, and service on urban education for social and racial justice.
Biography
Dr. Alyssa Hadley Dunn is the Director of Teacher Education for the Neag School of Education and an Associate Professor of Curriculum and Instruction. A former high school English teacher, Dunn now focuses her teaching, research, and service on urban education for social and racial justice. She studies how to best prepare and support teachers to work in urban schools and how to teach for justice and equity amidst school policies and reforms that negatively impact teachers’ working conditions and students’ learning conditions.
Prior to coming to UConn, she was an associate professor at Michigan State University and an assistant professor at Georgia State University. She is the author of three award-winning books: Teaching on Days After: Educating for Equity in the Wake of Injustice (Teachers College Press, 2021); Teachers Without Borders?: The Hidden Consequences of International Teachers in U.S. Schools (Teachers College Press, 2013); and Urban Teaching in America (Sage Publications, 2011) . She has published dozens of articles in journals such as the American Educational Research Journal, Journal of Teacher Education, Teachers College Record, Urban Education, and Teaching and Teacher Education.
A committed public scholar, she has been a contributor to the Huffington Post and National Public Radio. Among other awards, Dunn is the winner of the Critical Educators for Social Justice Revolutionary Mentor Award from the American Educational Research Association and Michigan State University’s Teacher-Scholar of the Year Award.
Areas of Expertise (6)
Teacher Education
Sociocultural and Political Contexts of Education
Teacher Preparation
Racial and Social Justice
Educational Equity
Urban Education
Education (3)
Boston College: B.A.
Emory University: M.A.
Emory University: Ph.D. 2011
Accomplishments (2)
Critical Educators for Social Justice Revolutionary Mentor Award, American Educational Research Association (professional)
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Teacher-Scholar of the Year Award, Michigan State University (professional)
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Links (3)
Media
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Media Appearances (7)
Are K-12 class sizes growing in CT? Amid teacher shortage, some worry about packed rooms
CT Insider online
2023-09-17
Alyssa Hadley Dunn, director of teacher education at the University of Connecticut, said school districts should generally aim to keep classes as small as possible. "We have decades of research that shows small class sizes matter," she said. "It matters for teachers, it matters for students, it matters for families, it matters for academic outcomes and socio-emotional learning outcomes."
Elementary School. High School. Now College. Michigan State Students Are No Strangers to Mass Shootings.
New York Times print
2023-02-14
Alyssa Hadley Dunn, an education professor at Michigan State until a month ago, said she had taught another student who had also survived the Sandy Hook shooting. That student had written something for Dr. Dunn’s book on how educators should handle the days after tragedies on campus. “The people that I teach have not only lived through active shooter drills and actual mass shootings, but we somehow have to prepare them to be the adults in the room when more inevitable school shootings happen,” Dr. Dunn, who is now director of teacher education and an associate professor of curriculum and instruction at the University of Connecticut, said in a phone interview, her voice breaking.
‘We Have a National Crisis’: How Michigan State Responded to a Mass Shooting
The Chronicle of Higher Education online
2023-02-14
Alyssa Hadley Dunn is director of teacher education and an associate professor of curriculum and instruction at the University of Connecticut’s Neag School of Education, but just a month ago she was teaching at Michigan State. Her research has focused on how inequity and trauma can affect learning, and she wrote a book, Teaching on Days After, designed for educators grappling with how to deal with tragedies or upsetting world events. “What they really too often remember is silence,” Dunn said of students who experience trauma. “We can’t keep doing that to our students. We can’t have their memories 30 years from now be of silence. They have to be of support.”
I'm a teacher educator, and my work has never felt so hopeless
Salon online
2022-08-20
And still, we try. Where I can, I've found myself — like so many other teachers — leaning on crowdsourced materials to address the emotional fallout that follows news of a school shooting. The book "Teaching on Days After: Educating for Equity in the Wake of Injustice," written by Michigan State University researcher and teacher Alyssa Hadley Dunn, is one of the few comprehensive texts that exist on how to navigate these crises in their wake. The companion Facebook group — consisting of nearly 20,000 educators, parents and other stakeholders — also provides a wealth of crowdsourced options that teachers can use in their classrooms. This subtext, too, is clear: We are largely on our own in navigating this difficult reality.
Why Teachers Are Dropping Out
The Nation online
2022-02-21
Still, there are lots of reasons to fear that the worst may be yet to come. Alyssa Hadley Dunn, an associate professor of teacher education at Michigan State University, argues that the data fails to capture the depths of a crisis in motion: The teacher who just announced his departure on TikTok or who decided to quit over winter break won’t show up in large-scale data sets until next year.
‘Classrooms Are Political’
Education Week online
2020-10-11
Alyssa Hadley Dunn, an assistant professor of teacher education at Michigan State University, believes education, at its core, is inherently political. Dunn argues that a strict adherence to “neutrality"—meaning not expressing your views to students and avoiding political topics—is a tactic that can actually marginalize many students. Dunn states that neutrality is itself a political choice and is one that bolsters the status quo. What results is a classroom that potentially ignores the fears, interests, and concerns of many students.
When Traumatic Events Occur, Teachers Face Student Concerns
WDET online
2020-02-06
Alyssa Dunn is an assistant professor at Michigan State University. Her project, Teaching on Days After, looks at how teachers respond to big events in the news or in the community. “We found that a lot of teachers were enacting what we call the pedagogy of political trauma, because that’s what they felt the students were experiencing: trauma.”
Articles (5)
“Why did we never learn this?”: preparing educators to teach for justice and equity on days after
International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education2024 This research explores teachers’ development of their understandings of teaching for justice and equity on days after critical current events, traumas, and tragedies. In particular, I ask: How, if at all, are teachers prepared to engage in Days After Pedagogy? How do their preparation experiences influence their feelings about utilizing Days After Pedagogy in their classrooms? Grounded in the theory of Days After Pedagogy and grounded in the literature on social justice teacher preparation, this qualitative study of more than 50 social justice oriented pre- and in-service teachers around the U.S. reveals four key findings about teachers’ (lack of) preparation to engage in DAP and the implications of this for equitable education in current and future classrooms.
Exploring the role of evidence-based educational resources and brokering in the wake of political trauma
Evidence & Policy2024 Background The research-practice gap has not been explored within civics education, and in particular the role of evidence-based civics curriculum in times of political trauma. Such research is critical in equipping educators with evidence-based resources to help mitigate political trauma experienced by students. Here, we explore the types of resources teachers access as well as the role of Brokers, Intermediaries and Boundary Spanners (BIBS) in connecting teachers to such sources after the historic 6 January 2021 US Capitol insurrection.
The Show Must (Not) Go On: Student Second Responders on Days After
International Journal of Education & the Arts2024 In the wake of collective trauma and tragedy, artists may be called upon as “second responders” to facilitate healing and grief for a community. In this article, we explain the artists-as-second-responders discourse, including the messaging of artists feeling useful, art as diversion, and art as healing. Then, using an example of student-artists compelled to make sure “the show must go on” at Michigan State University in the days after a mass school shooting, we critique the second-responder discourse by arguing that such messaging may cause more harm to artists and facilitate problematic escapism. We also challenge the “call to serve” and offer recommendations for how, on days after, institutions can respond in more trauma-informed and supportive ways. In doing so, we argue that, in fact, the show must not always go on.
Teacher Self-Care Mandates as Institutional Gaslighting in a Neoliberal System
Educational Researcher2023 In this manuscript, I argue that narratives of self-care for educators in the midst of pandemic teaching are a form of gaslighting, supported and exacerbated by a neoliberal school system that reinforces individualist, White-normed conceptions of teaching and learning. To make this argument, I use several excerpts from practicing teachers’ writing to illustrate the deep sense of frustration and betrayal that teachers felt when inundated with self-care messages without regard for more systemic support and change.
The Day After: An Ethnodrama About Teachers’ Decision-Making Amid Silencing School Policies
Qualitative Inquiry2023 This ethnodrama, based on hundreds of interviews with educators around the United States, takes readers into a school on the day after a national tragedy. Grounded in the theory of Days After Pedagogy, the characters portray the nuances and complexities of educators’ decision-making on days after, especially when working amid silencing school policies. A post-script includes theory, methods, and implications.
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