These profiles provide insight into why our research affiliates
study poverty, and the efforts they make in contributing to
tested and effective interventions.
I’m interested in understanding how structural adversities impact
the educational achievement and wellbeing of marginalized
children. I also focus on how school policies, practices, and
programs can support the wellbeing of vulnerable youth
populations, including children in the foster care system and
those facing schooling-related challenges like chronic
absenteeism and bullying.
I am primarily interested in the connections between
schooling and social inequality. In addition to the
Department of Sociology, I am also on the faculty of the Graduate
Group in Education.
A major question that motivates Erin’s research is how inequality
is generated and/or changed through migration and the policies
that regulate migration. Erin has studied:
Children’s development of self-regulation and behavior problems,
how they relate to parents’ mental health and parenting, and
their contributions to mental illness in childhood and
adolescence.
In the classroom at Kit Carson Middle School in Sacramento,
Michal Kurlaender sits at one of four small desks pushed to face
each other. The walls are papered in yellow, red and bright blue,
and wavy corrugated borders frame a flutter of papers under the
banner “AMAZING.”
Kurlaender is interviewing a teacher as part of her evaluation of
the school’s teacher development program to improve students’
college readiness skills. The sudden, grating buzz of the class
bell startles everyone. Kurlaender smiles. “It’s nicer when it’s
the music instead,” she says.
In his lab by the freeway in Davis, Ross Thompson, a
developmental psychologist, pulls a plush monkey puppet onto each
hand and stands behind a cardboard “stage.” A red curtain hangs
across a cutout in the front.
“We would normally have animated voices and all the rest,” he
says. “If you do this in a way that is within the child’s
capabilities, you will find that they have a much richer sense of
themselves psychologically than we give them credit for.”
During Ariel Kalil’s visit in April as a Center for Poverty
Research Visiting Faculty Scholar, snatches of conversation could
be heard from her temporary office. One student asked about how
to make his work more relevant to public policy. Another talked
about what it was like being a first-generation college student.
“I guess in some part they wanted to find out more about the path
that I had taken, because it is a bit unusual,” says Kalil.
