Postdoctoral Fellow at Loyola University, Maryland
About
Dr. Wozolek is currently an inclusive excellence post-doctoral research fellow at the Loyola University Maryland. She earned her PhD from the School of Teaching, Learning and Curriculum Studies at Kent State University. Her work considers questions of social justice, qualitative research methods, and teaching practices that focus on the examination of race, gender and sexual orientation in schools. Dr. Wozolek is the recipient of the 2012 James T. Sears Award for her paper The Nested Nature of M/othering: Complicating Curriculum Conversations and a 2016 Outstanding Dissertation Recognition Award from Division B (Curriculum Studies) of the American Educational Research Association for her doctoral dissertation, The Presence of Absence: The Negotiation of Space and Place for Students of color at a Predominantly White Suburban High School. Her dissertation was also shortlisted for the Outstanding Dissertation Award for AERA’s 2017 Division G (Social Contexts) and the 2016 AERA Arts Based Educational Research (ABER) special interest group.
As a doctoral candidate, Dr. Wozolek was inducted into Alpha Kappa Mu Honors Society, a national honors society that recognizes outstanding academic achievement of women and men of color in doctoral work across disciplines. She was also recognized locally at Kent State University through the Latino Networking Caucus and received the 2015 Outstanding Graduate Student Award. In 2016, she became a member of the University of Michigan’s National Center for Institutional Diversity. In 2018 she was an inductee into Kent State University’s Education, Health, and Human Services Hall of Fame for her local and national work in socially, economically, politically, and culturally disenfranchised communities.
In addition to her publications, extensive list of conference presentations, and numerous invited talks at both the community and institutional levels, Dr. Wozolek is on the executive committee for the American Educational Studies Association (AESA). In 2017 and 2018, Dr. Wozolek was invited by the American Educational Research Association’s Division B to run a pre-conference seminars that focused on the Black Lives Matter movement as it relates to questions of education and on disruptive qualitative methodologies. She is also currently a section co-chair for the programming committee for the American Educational Research Association.
Dr. Wozolek taught world languages to high school students for a decade across K-12 levels in urban, suburban, and rural contexts. In addition to her teaching and service on local and state levels, she also started and ran multiple Genders and Sexualities Alliances. Using this experience, Dr. Wozolek currently leads professional development for K-12 educators that focuses on anti-racist, anti-homophobic/transphobic practices, and on social justice more generally.
Current Work:
In addition to editing the inaugural issue of the International Journal of Curriculum and Social Justice, Dr. Wozolek's notable past publications include an article on what she calls the "school-to-coffin pipeline" in a special issue of Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies. Recent publications include an artlce in The Journal of LGBT Youth on gaslighting as it relates to queerness, an article in a special issue of Educational Studies on an empirical study that theorizes suicide as a sounded event, and an article in The Urban Review on Afrofuturisms and education. Forthcoming publications include an entry in the Oxford Encyclopedia of Educational Research that focuses on the implications of queer theory on qualitative research and book chapter on racism-as-affect in a book on sensuous curriculum. Dr. Wozolek is also the editor of the forthcoming book from SUNY Press: Black Lives Matter in US Schools: Race, Resistance, and Education and she is working on an edited forum in GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies. Dr. Wozolek is also the Social Justice Editor of the forthcoming book Emancipating Education: Considerations of Deferred Dreams and Visions for Change.
Dr. Wozolek is engaged in multiple grant-funded research projects. The first is with the Baltimore City Police Department where she is evaluating the effectiveness of the Juvenile Diversion Project. The second is funded through the Ann E. Casey Foundation and is an evaluation of institutional-community partnerships in Baltimore. The third project is a private research study that thinks with queer students of color in an urban school about questions of identity through a sound mapping and STEM project that connects students with a National Geographic School in Madagascar.
Research Area Keyword(s):
- Race
- Queer theory
- Curriculum, teaching and learning
