Each autumn, we look forward to officially welcoming new faculty to the College of Education and Human Ecology.
With their added support, we will continue to enhance the human experience. Their fresh perspectives and focused research will make meaningful contributions to our departments.
Please join us in welcoming them and learning more about them.
Department of Educational Studies
Noelle Witherspoon Arnold, associate professor of educational leadership
Arnold’s timely research focuses on topics pertinent to current events, such as issues of social justice, racial and social disparities, and alternative methods to examine and define educator leadership. Instead of focusing on the technocratic perspective of educator leadership like many in her field, Arnold’s work provides empirical counternarratives and theoretical considerations that offer a more balanced perspective on leadership identity, development and socialization. At the University of Missouri-Columbia, Arnold served as an associate professor in educational leadership and policy analysis, a member of the MU Statewide Cooperative EdD Steering Committee and the coordinator for the university’s pre-K- through 12 educational leadership program. She brings her extensive practitioner knowledge, as a former principal and specialist for the Alabama State Department of Education, to EHE as the director of the EdD pre-K through 12 school leader program.
Department of Human Sciences
Lauren Eden Jones, assistant professor of consumer and family financial services
Jones wants to understand how public policies impact the most vulnerable, disadvantaged and at-risk populations. The surprising findings from her National Bureau of Economic Research working paper garnered media attention. She found that when low-income families received increased childcare support from Canada’s National Child Benefit Initiative, their spending on alcohol and tobacco decreased and the amount of spending on educational resources, such as tuition and computer supplies, increased. Jones received a PhD in Policy Analysis and Management from Cornell University in 2014 and an MS in Environmental, Agricultural and Development Economics from Ohio State in 2009.
Department of Teaching and Learning
Kathryn Nelson, assistant professor of reading and literacy education, Mansfield regional campus
Nelson’s experience as an inner-city school teacher in Washington, D.C., and New Orleans has been invaluable to her literacy instruction research. Her current research addresses how critical literacy pedagogy benefits students’ reading comprehension. She recently worked on an IES grant exploring professional development to help educators promote critical thinking and argument literacy in discussion-based pedagogy in fifth grade classrooms. Nelson received her PhD in Reading and Literacy in Early and Middle Childhood Education and her MA in Reading Education from Ohio State. She earned her BS in Education from Miami University of Ohio.
Michiko Hikida, assistant professor of elementary language arts
Drawing from her teaching experience, Hikida works to ensure that all children, including those identified as struggling, are recognized for the cultural, linguistic and literacy insights they bring to classrooms. Extending research on the interactional co-construction of identity, her dissertation research documented how students of color, also labeled struggling or learning disabled, constructed their reading identities in interactions with others. A new framework, Critical Disability Studies, which considers the experiences of those marginalized along lines of race and ability, also informs her work. Hikida received a PhD in Language and Literacy Studies from the University of Texas at Austin.
