Meet the team!
Our team is made of a group of researchers and community partners from four different University of California community-engaged projects. Each of these partnerships work to address the climate crisis and position education as a way to create more environmentally just futures. For more information on our individual projects, please see the “UC projects” page.
Faculty
Symone Gyles
University of California, Irvine
Assistant Professor, Science Education
Symone Gyles is an Assistant Professor of Education at the University of California, Irvine. Dr. Gyles’s research investigates the design, implementation and impact of community-based, culturally responsive and justice-centered science curriculum and instruction to understand and support students’ community-based knowledge around climate justice and environmental justice. Her work seeks integrate heterogeneous ways of thinking, knowing, and doing in science to value the lived experiences of students, families and communities. Across her research projects, she seeks to develop students’ critical science agency to imagine and engage in community change through science education.
Hosun Kang
University of California, Irvine
Professor, Science Education
Hosun Kang is Professor in the School of Education at the University of California Irvine. Her research focuses on transforming science teaching and learning in schools to foster a more just, sustainable, and thriving future through long-term partnerships with schools and communities. She collaborates closely with teachers, students, scientists and community members to co-design and implement innovative science curricula and assessments that expand the possibilities of science learning. Her work examines professional learning of justice-centered science instruction that promotes students’ civic engagement, the development of STEM identities among minoritized students, transdisciplinary and justice centered teaching of climate and environmental issues, culturally sustaining approaches to classroom assessment, and professional learning for social transformation.
Chris Jadallah
University of California, Los Angeles
Assistant Professor, Environmental Justice
Chris Jadallah is an Assistant Professor of Environmental Justice in Education at the UCLA School of Education and Information Studies. His research examines the social, political, and relational contours of teaching and learning with youth and communities as they participate in land-based projects toward the goal of socio-ecological revitalization. He is an affiliate faculty member at the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability and Center for Community Engagement. Chris earned his Ph.D. at UC Davis and his B.S. at UC Berkeley.
Emily Reigh
University of California, Santa Cruz
Assistant Professor, Science Education
Emily Reigh is an Assistant Professor Science Education ath the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her research explores how teachers integrate social and environmental justice issues into their teaching in ways that engage not only science disciplinary practices, but other ways of knowing like storytelling, visual arts, and historicization. She engages in co-design with diverse parters, including teachers from across disciplines, scientists, and community-based environmental justice activists, to develop curricular resources that support students in taking transformative action in their own communities.
Julie Bianchini
University of California, Santa Barbara
Professor, Science Education
Julie Bianchini is a professor of science education and the faculty director of the CalTeach initiative in the Department of Education at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her research attends to equity and diversity in the teaching and learning of science at the secondary level. She examines the education of prospective, preservice, and practicing science and mathematics teachers; effective instruction for multilingual learners; reform-based instruction for students of diverse races, cultures, gender identities, and languages; and ways to integrate climate change education, sustainability goals, and engineering design into teacher education programs and K-12 classrooms.
Danielle Harlow
University of California, Santa Barbara
Professor, STEM Education
Hosun Kang is Professor in the School of Education at the University of California Irvine. Her research focuses on transforming science teaching and learning in schools to foster a more just, sustainable, and thriving future through long-term partnerships with schools and communities. She collaborates closely with teachers, students, scientists and community members to co-design and implement innovative science curricula and assessments that expand the possibilities of science learning. Her work examines professional learning of justice-centered science instruction that promotes students’ civic engagement, the development of STEM identities among minoritized students, transdisciplinary and justice centered teaching of climate and environmental issues, culturally sustaining approaches to classroom assessment, and professional learning for social transformation.
Graduate Students
Minjung Shin
University of California, Irvine
PhD Student, Education
Minjung (Minny) Shin is a Ph.D. student in the School of Education at UCI specializing in Teaching, Learning, and Educational Improvement. Her research interests are investigating the design and impact of research practice partnerships as well as climate justice education. She also aspires to center students’ learning and experiences to improve educational experiences for youth.
Lauren Daus
University of California, Los Angeles
PhD Candidate, Education
Lauren Daus is a PhD candidate in the School of Education and Information Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). She is a former high school Ethnic Studies teacher and is currently a field supervisor to teacher candidates in UCLA’s Ethnic Studies Pathway. Her research looks at how Ethnic Studies Teachers of Color experience, conceptualize, and navigate grief alongside the youth they serve.
Michelle Hernandez Romero
University of California, Los Angeles
PhD Student, Education
Michelle is a PhD student in the School of Education and Information Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). She studies the intersections of learning in and with community, cultural strengths, science education, and Land-based education. She is passionate about advocating for institutions to provide quality education for immigrant students through building and sustaining strong, long-lasting school-community bridges that honor the knowledges of immigrant communities.
Samuel Burmester
University of California, Santa Cruz
PhD Student, Education
Samuel Burmester is a Ph.D. student in Education at the University of California, Santa Cruz, a former secondary English teacher, and a current supervisor of pre-service Ethnic Studies teacher candidates. He studies how teachers and communities work within and against institutional demands to center locally and culturally situated ways of knowing and being—drawing on traditions of Ethnic Studies and community histories and wisdoms including histories of organizing and resistance—and how students, teachers, and communities engage these knowledges in schools and civic spaces to shape more liberatory, transformative, and place-conscious educational and social futures.
Amanda Gonzaga
University of California, Santa Cruz
PhD Student, Education
Amanda Gonzaga is a Ph.D. student in the Education program at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She was a former middle school science and English-language development teacher. Her research interests revolve around innovating environmental science instruction and accessability through outdoor experiential and community-based learning.
Devon Azzam
University of California, Santa Barbara
PhD Student, Education
Devon Azzam serves as Assistant Director of Outreach for the Gevirtz School of Education at the University of California, Santa Barbara. In this role, Devon focuses on building collaborations between local schools, nonprofits and the university around climate action, green space equity and nature connection. Devon is also a doctoral candidate in the Gevirtz School of Education with a research focus on green schoolyards and outdoor learning.
Community Partners
Black Thumb Farm
University of California, Los Angeles
Black Thumb Farm is a community-based organization in the San Fernando Valley that provides Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) youth with leadership skills, mentorship, and healthy, quality produce through hands-on training and experience in farming and gardening. They grow teens’ connection to the natural world, nourish their passions, and empower them to advocate for a sustainable future for themselves and their communities as they seed our way toward food sovereignty.
Regeneración
University of California, Santa Cruz
Regeneración is a community-based climate justice organization that works with frontline commnunities, including agricultural workers, in the Pajaro Valley. was founded on the principle that climate change is a social justice issue with local impacts and must be engaged with on a local level in order to build resilient communities.
Campus Canopy
University of California, Santa Barbara
Campus Canopy is a community group fiscally sponsored by the Santa Barbara Education Foundation that reclaims landscapes in underserved public schools in the Santa Barbara area in order to bring shade, native plants, soil health, and wildlife habitat to school campuses.