This article highlights recent winners of the Information Age Publishing NASUP Student Research Award.
The article is written in an informative, narrative style.
Winners from 2024, Bailey Scoggin and Olivia Carlson, share information about their action research titled Kicking It Off Right with PDS Partnerships – Creating a Preservice Teacher Trauma-Informed Bootcamp.
This article draws additional attention to this exemplary partnership work and may inspire future nominations.
The Information Age Publishing NASUP Student Research Award recognizes student research presented at the NASUP annual conference. Student members attend the conference and disseminate their action research in the form of a PowerPoint presentation. The required slides include an introduction to the research problem and research question, a description of the context in which the research was completed, a description of the research design and data sources, the analysis of the data and the findings and implications. In addition, the merits of the effectiveness of the student presentations are evaluated.
The 2024 conference yielded two winners, co-researchers/co-presenters Bailey Scoggin and Olivia Carlson, Elemenary Education majors from Emporia State University, in Emporia, Kansas. Bailey and Olivia shared their action research project entitled Kicking It Off Right with PDS Partnerships – Creating a Preservice Teacher Trauma-Informed Bootcamp. These two researchers collaborated with their Professional Development School (PDS) partnerships to develop a transformative BootCamp to provide training in trauma-informed instruction to the preservice teachers at Emporia State with the goal of empowering these future educators with the necessary skills and knowledge to address elementary students’ social and emotional needs. Bailey and Olivia shared their responses to questions posed by the NASUP Awards Committee to be shared in this article.
What is the significance of school–university partnerships in your work?
During our junior year at Emporia State University (ESU), we began a research project we believed could significantly benefit fellow educators. Having studied trauma-informed education through our coursework at ESU, we aimed to create a way for all education majors to begin learning about trauma-informed practices. At the same time, we aimed to strengthen our relationship with local PDS schools by partnering with them in our research. This collaboration not only enhanced our connection with these schools but also provided us with invaluable, firsthand insights into the current challenges and realities they face. These challenges that they shared allowed us to choose timely and relevant topics that would be discussed at the boot camp and see areas where pre-service teachers could grow before beginning their first year of teaching.
Working within our PDS partnership, we recognized the importance of trauma-informed education, so we decided to host the Trauma-Informed Boot Camp, where administrators and teachers from our partner schools came on a Saturday to teach our university students about neuroscience and trauma in our brains. Our work with hosting a boot camp helped highlight the significance and prevalence of the problem within the schools and the importance of addressing interns lack of knowledge of trauma and how it impacts our students’ brains in school. Our research showed how prevalent trauma experiences can be in our schools and made us realize this is information all teachers, preservice and inservice, need to learn. During our boot camp, we emphasized the opportunity for positive change and improvement in teacher training programs. Addressing current inadequacies that center around the knowledge of trauma and how it affects students' brains increases the potential for educators to enhance student well-being, academic success, and overall classroom environments. This boot camp showed us the importance of prioritizing trauma-informed instruction to better equip educators and ultimately create more supportive and effective learning environments for all students. This would not have been possible without our PDS partners, who attended and presented at our boot camp and gave us valuable insight into what schools are currently doing and areas they think our university program could grow in how we prepare teachers. They were also very willing to answer any follow-up questions our students had and were available for interviews conducted as part of our action research data for our presentation at NASUP. Through our work with our PDS partners, we are making more educators aware of the importance of trauma and how to address it in the classroom.
How does receiving the NASUP award impact your work with school–university partnerships?
Receiving the Student Action Research Award from NASUP has impacted our partnerships because our PDS principals and leadership are excited to see that we are taking the statistics, data and information our PDS partners came to share with us and presenting it at a national conference. This educates even more teachers to make improvements in trauma-informed education all across the United States. Our partners love coming to share their knowledge and research with us because they know we will do something meaningful with it. It also showed them how much we valued their input and time at our boot camp and how we took the knowledge they brought to us and shared it with other educators.
What advice would you provide others that are doing similar work to enhance school–university partnerships?
A piece of advice we would share is to work to build strong relationships with the PDS partners. These relationships we have with our PDS partners allowed us to collaborate in this boot camp effort. Establishing a strong relationship has also allowed us to continue collaborating with them now and for future years to come. Another piece of advice we would share is for all parties involved in PDS partnerships to be open to hearing what other parties have to share. We learned a lot from our PDS partners at the boot camp, and they also mentioned how much they learned from the university students as well. They valued our input as much as we valued theirs in our mutually beneficial PDS partnership.
