By: Alexis Jimenez Maldonado
March 9, 2023
This conversation occurred on March 9, 2023. The transcript of the interview has been edited for clarity.
Tatiana Geron is a PhD candidate at the Harvard Graduate School of Education studying the ethical complexity of teacher decision-making. Her dissertation investigates how teachers resolve ethical dilemmas within the unique temporal, spatial, and social environment of the classroom and interpret their core values in relation to unjust school contexts. Prior to joining the doctoral program, Tatiana taught middle school English Language Arts in Boston and Brooklyn. She holds a BA in Political and Social Thought from the University of Virginia and an MEd from the Boston Teacher Residency at UMass Boston. In 2023-2024 she will be a Visiting Assistant Professor of Education at Colby College.
Alexis Jimenez Maldonado: You joined the Center’s community as an Ethics Pedagogy Fellow in 2020 and you are now a Graduate Fellow. What drew you towards pursuing not one, but two, fellowships with the Center?
Tatiana Geron: I consider myself extremely, extremely lucky to have been part of the work of the Center for so much of my graduate experience. The big thing is that the projects that I've worked on, and based my doctoral work around, have all been connected to initiatives in the Center. So, it's felt very seamless to stay as involved as possible during my PhD. As an Ethics Pedagogy Fellow, I worked on a research practice partnership through the EdEthics initiative, and the data that I gathered from that partnership ended up being the basis for my dissertation, which is what I'm working on as a Graduate Fellow. It's just been a very connected experience and natural to want to come back to the intellectual community of the Center to continue refining this work and play with these ideas and know they're valued in their interdisciplinary nature.
Alexis: Could you describe your fellowship experiences so far?
Tatiana: An amazing part of both my fellowships has been being a part of a community discussing interdisciplinary work in ethics. Doing interdisciplinary work in the academy is really, really hard. The academy, obviously, isn't always set up for people to be working across schools and across disciplinary boundaries. So, it's hard to do that kind of work well. But that’s what I wanted to come to grad school to do-- I was a classroom teacher before I started the PhD and I really wanted to learn how to bridge the education practice that I had experienced, as well as the educational theory that really motivates me, with political philosophy, which was my first love as an undergraduate. Those are two arenas that really don't talk to each other all that much and have very different assumptions. And it can be hard to see, especially being in an education school, what education scholarship takes for granted in terms of its beliefs about justice or ethics or the political world. I've been able to have those beliefs and assumptions really pressed and extended and challenged in really good ways through being a Graduate Fellow. Especially right now, talking to and sharing my work with people in philosophy and government, and in all these other practical ethics fields, too. That, I think, has been at the heart of all my fellowship experiences. I have been able to connect and grow both those parts of my scholarship.
Alexis: How have these fellowships influenced your graduate work?
Tatiana: I came in with an interest in philosophy, but it had been a really long time since I had taken philosophy courses. And I was coming in with my brain much more firing on education cylinders. And so literally the literature that I use now in my work I feel comfortable in because of my experience at the Center. That framing is a really specific way that these fellowships have influenced my graduate work.
But what I also love about the Center is we can have these really theoretical conversations about political theory concepts and then down the hall, somebody's literally talking to a teacher about how to do great democratic pedagogy in their classroom. So, the other side is actually really practical, it’s the practical projects that I was working on as an Ethics Pedagogy Fellow. Working with Jess Minor, working with Meira Levinson on the EdEthics initiative, we partnered with the Chicago Public Schools to run professional developments in educational ethics. I was doing project management and data analysis for that, and with the support of the Center I was able to turn that into my dissertation project. I really benefitted from being part of that research practice partnership. It has been such an amazing anchor in my doctoral work, and really changed my whole trajectory. I wouldn't have been involved in that project without being part of the fellowship, so I’m very grateful for that.
Alexis: You mentioned your work with Meira Levinson and Educational Ethics (EdEthics), could you talk more about that? Specifically, your work with the international professional development and research project on Educational Ethics and the combined research and professional development project in collaboration with the Chicago Public Schools.
Tatiana: These were two projects that really lent themselves to producing work during COVID That first product that you mentioned, the international professional development and research project on EdEthics, was actually asking educators about their experiences with ethical dilemmas during the COVID global school shutdown. I think part of the reason that EdEthics and my work were able to continue during the pandemic was because they're so connected to what teachers were experiencing, in terms of their ethical disequilibrium and challenges during the pandemic. In that project, we partnered with philosophers of education in eleven different countries to lead conversations with teachers in their regions and in their countries about the ethical dilemmas they were experiencing during those COVID shutdowns. It was really a professional development space for teachers to share concerns and connect with each other in that difficult time. We have since analyzed that data to find that a lot of the dilemmas that teachers were talking about, were really extensions or exacerbations of ethical dilemmas that they were experiencing pre-pandemic. For example, the shutdowns revealed the extent of inequities among students in the classroom. We knew teachers were already having to deal with the fact that their students were coming from really unequal economic backgrounds, but the pandemic just put that into such a sharper focus and extended and created almost new dilemmas supporting students through that. I think it's important to articulate some of what teachers were going through.
Then the research practice partnership in collaboration with Chicago Public Schools (CPS)-- we were actually approached by the then-director of the Social Science and Civic Engagement department at CPS. She'd been using Meira’s work on normative case studies already as a way of building educators’ capacities for having civic conversations with each other. First in her professional developments through her department, and then through a big civic engagement initiative among teachers and students in the district. They reached out to the EdEthics team to see if we could run some PDs together, do a more sustained project. That's gone through a bunch of iterations since then, which has been really, really cool to connect with practitioners and districts and ask, ‘what do they need?’ and what can the ethics team provide?
The cornerstone project that I worked on as a project manager was using a multimedia case in educational ethics in a professional development for 150 CPS educators to work through a normative case study and then discuss it with their colleagues, as a way to build their capacity for discussing tough ethical dilemmas together. This can be hard to build that trust and do, but teachers really valued the experience. It's been an amazing way to have a window into this world of how do teachers ethically reason? And how do they work through these structural dilemmas? That's what I'm trying to think through now for my dissertation, which is challenging and fascinating.
Alexis: You’ve worked extensively with EdEthics. Could you share more about your progression within that initiative as a teaching fellow, a project manager and a content creator for multimedia cases?
Tatiana: I really came to the Harvard Graduate School of Education to work on EdEthics. As a classroom teacher, I felt like I didn't really have the knowledge of how to resolve the kind of ethical dilemmas that I was facing in the classroom. I heard Meira give a talk at the Northeast Philosophy of Education Society about her vision for this new field of educational ethics and the initiative at HGSE. Basically, the light bulb went off and I knew this was what I wanted to do. So that's how I came into it. I really just wanted to learn as much as possible. It was almost very selfish, like in order to be able to better describe what I had experienced. And so, from the beginning, that meant helping to develop normative case studies using details from my own experiences from the classroom. In the beginning, it was a really amazing way for me to process my own experiences in the classroom and see how they could be used in an academic context. Things snowballed from there.
I wanted to get more and more involved in that kind of work from the ground up to kind of see how these initiatives are built. Then it became about the nitty gritty of project management or helping to put together a research study and writing an IRB, or organizing our research materials, all of those integrated things. But I think you're absolutely right, in that it did kind of feel like progressing through a job, which is a little bit how I approached the PhD, generally. I think having been in the workforce prior to my PhD, that felt pretty natural. And also bringing in my teaching experience to start to teach about these concepts. What has been really exciting about moving through that progression is being able to rise up from that organizational, management stuff to now thinking okay, what are the theories that will help to advance this field? Or what are the ways of communicating about this that would be especially helpful to practitioners? How can we continue to build the field so that people in all sorts of disciplines are excited about it, practitioners and policymakers and scholars?
I feel very lucky to have had a really cohesive doctoral experience in this way. I think that in the beginning, it felt haphazard-- like, oh, I'll just do this project. Or I'll see if I can get involved in that or where this takes me. And then you start to see a narrative build and carry through to the dissertation. I feel lucky that it cohered into something that feels meaningful to me now and connects to what felt meaningful from the beginning.
Alexis: Your research studies the ethical complexity of teacher decision-making. Could you talk about how those academic interests connect to the mission and work of the Center?
Tatiana: Teaching is an ethical profession, but it's often just seen as a technical one. Or the ethical dimensions of teaching are thought of in very basic terms-- one teacher interacting with one student, or making tradeoffs between two students with competing needs, by distributing their attention a certain way. But the classroom is a much more dynamic, interdependent place than that, and that makes ethical decision-making very complex. We need to pay attention to how teachers’ ethical decision-making is so connected to and shaped by the environment in which it happens. It's shaped by the classroom environment; it's shaped by the way the K-12 education system is structured in the United States. And though that environment constrains, it also creates new possibilities for how teachers can make ethical decisions and live out their values in the classroom. That's a very practical application of ethics. It’s inspiring to see and know that the Center is a place where that kind of work is valued. When I think about the mission of the Center, I think about bridging theory and practice to help make the world a more ethical place. The work at the Center has been a really helpful model for how to balance theory and practice, particularly in education.
Alexis: You are currently completing a dissertation on “Opening the Black Box of Teacher Ethical Decision-Making: Three Papers in Educational Ethics.” This project draws from a dataset that you and Professor Levinson have collected through a partnership with the Chicago Public Schools (CPS). Could you talk more about your dissertation process and the data collection you’ve been doing?
Tatiana: The way I've been thinking about the process of the dissertation and data collection and analysis is as a practice of “empirically based philosophy.” This is a phrase coined by a couple of amazing philosophers of education, Terri Wilson and Doris Santoro, for doing philosophy that draws on original social science and empirical research. This is gaining a lot of ground in the education space and in the political philosophy space. Somebody recently explained it as a paradigm shift to me, and I don't know if I'd go that far, but, coming as a practitioner to this work, it’s been the way I wanted to look at the questions that I'm asking. I study a lot of qualitative and critical qualitative methods at HGSE, thinking about how to do really deep listening with practitioners, thinking through how to set up strong research-practice partnerships where practitioners feel really respected and really listened to. I think that that leads to better research.
It really comes out of a desire to listen to teachers about the ethical experiences that they have in their classrooms and create research that can be responsive and useful to them. I want their voices to be listened to in policy contexts and in more academic contexts where they're not always heard. That's the motivation around the kind of data collection I do.
The flip side of that is doing the analysis-- being philosophically driven and using the tools and literature from that world. So, the process for me has been really trying to bridge those methodologies in order to answer the questions that I have about teacher practice and ethics.
Alexis: What’s next on the horizon?
Tatiana: A couple of weeks ago, I could not have answered this question. So good timing! Next year, I'm going to be a visiting assistant professor of education at Colby College in Waterville, Maine. I am really excited about that! My heart is very full because of the support that I've had during my dissertation and mentorship from the amazing team at the Center.
Alexis: You recently had a baby, congratulations! How is Baby Geron?
Tatiana: Oh, God, she's so good! Her name is Aya and she's great! She's smiling and starting to laugh. She's a happy baby and very chatty already. We're in for it. She’s actually my second kiddo. I have a two-year-old as well, who is also very chatty.
Coincidentally, both my children were born while I was a fellow at the Center. When my older daughter, Remy, was born, I was an Ethics Pedagogy Fellow. And Aya was born this past year. It has just been the most supportive community to have this experience in. It's meant that I haven't always been able to be as involved in the daily life of the Center and take part in all of the Center events that I would have loved to do under different circumstances, but how supportive everyone has been has meant that I have been able to grow into this new role as a parent while also being able to continue doing the work that I love while parenting. That is not something that many women in the workforce in American society get to say. It has been a very empowering experience. And it says a lot about the Center, in terms of walking the talk of creating a more just political society, that I can say that about my experience, I think. I'll always remember the early years of Aya and Remy growing up alongside my time at the Center and I'm very grateful for that too. It’s nice to reflect on that.
Alexis: What do you do in your spare time, do you have any hobbies?
Tatiana: Right now, things are a little quiet, but my favorite thing to do is get outside with my family. Before kids were around that was a lot of backpacking, fly fishing, hiking, and camping. Now we're learning how to do those with kids in tow. We will be taking them camping this summer, so that's going to be an adventure!
Alexis: You and your partner sound very adventurous! Is he in academia too? Or is he some type of park ranger? What's the situation here that you are always outdoors?
Tatiana: Actually, he's exactly in the middle of those things! He’s in academia, but he studies urban forestry. You hit the nail on the head. He studies street trees and how they mitigate climate change and environmental injustice. He's a lot cooler than me.
Alexis: Do you have a podcast that you are listening to or a show that you are watching?
Tatiana: I have one academic one to share first. I just started listening to this podcast called Have You Heard. It's with Jack Schneider, an education scholar, and Jennifer Berkshire, an education reporter. They do really easily digestible deep dives into policy issues and current events in education. That's been really great. I also just started the newest season of Formula 1: Drive to Survive on Netflix. It's a Netflix documentary about Formula 1 racecar driving and it's in its fourth or fifth season. It makes Formula 1 into this dramatic reality show, full of very intriguing personalities. I didn’t know anything about Formula 1 or didn't until I started watching this and now, I’m so into it. Apparently, it's been a gateway for an entirely new American audience for Formula 1.
Alexis: What are you looking forward to in the next few months?
Tatiana: Graduating, spending the summer with my family and starting at Colby! There's a lot of really exciting stuff to look forward to. But it’s bittersweet-- I will really miss being around the Center!