UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — As the Penn State College of Education moves into its next century, a new generation of faculty is working to improve the equity and inclusivity of U.S. education systems. Two of those rising stars, Wilson Okello and Kelly Rosinger, are tackling the issues of centering Black voices in education and making college admissions more equitable, respectively.
Okello, assistant professor of education (higher education) and research associate in the Center for the Study of Higher Education (CSHE), joined the College of Education in fall 2022. He identifies as an artist and interdisciplinary scholar who draws on Black critical theories to advance research on knowledge production and human development theory. As an artist and scholar, Okello deploys critical and creative methods to explore and revitalize the capaciousness of Black interiority. His work not only challenges viewers to move beyond passive observation but also performs an epistemic departure, reshaping how scholars understand and perceive knowledge.
“Exposure to the breadth and depth of Black knowledge traditions set my trajectory,” Okello said. “I started wondering what it would mean to bring Black knowledge traditions, Black studies into education. My work is really an outgrowth of that curiosity.”
Okello was presented with the Early Career Award by the Association for the Study of Higher Education (ASHE) at its 48th Annual Conference Nov. 17 in Minneapolis. Okello was recognized for his “focused research agenda on centering Blackness in student/early adult development, which has yielded publications that are advancing the field, coupled with translating his research to practitioners.”
Okello defines his primary research area, Black critical studies in education, as the “belief that Black writers, thinkers and creatives have shared ideas that are useful for how we think about knowledge production, classroom environments, theory, and how we think about pedagogy.”
In CSHE, one of the nation’s first research centers established specifically to study postsecondary education policy issues, Okello is pioneering a new path in Black studies. In November, he launched the Black Study in Education Lab, which seeks to destabilize existing epistemological protocols and challenging how knowledge is produced and disseminated.
“By harnessing Black study to detect and call forth otherwise possibilities, the lab refuses singularity, and easy solutions to the problem of anti-Blackness, and embraces a dynamic, ever-evolving engagement with Black ideas,” Okello said.
Currently, the lab is exploring how research methodology can be reframed with Black critical theories. A hallmark of the lab is a webinar series in which Okello is “inviting scholars from across the nation to grapple with what it means to center Blackness in educational research.”
“I think a lot about how education might merge critical analysis with imaginative praxis to call forth otherwise ways of knowing, doing, and being in the world,” he said. “I see the Black Study in Education Lab as deeply connected to this work of deep study and creating tools that would bring equitable and just futures into view.”
Okello said his research is largely devoted to examining the condition of Black life as being in an antagonistic relationship with society, and the various ways Black people pursue self-determination. He is author of a recent article published in the Urban Education Journal that offers a critical examination of joy, centrally asking, “What is the sound, look, and feeling of Black Joy?”
“I am working to complicate concepts that we have taken for granted,” Okello said. “To show there are important reasons to critique ideas, ethics and values that we’ve always lifted up and unconsciously depended on. I believe something else — more just equitable and just emerges, is possible, when we look harder into these concepts?”
Like Okello, Rosinger is committed to equalizing educational systems — only from the standpoint of tailoring college admissions policies to promote racial equity. Her research examines the barriers students face going to and through college and how educational policies can be designed to promote racial and economic equity. She is a co-principal investigator on a study funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to examine patterns in admissions and enrollment related to widespread adoption of test-optional admissions policies at selective higher education institutions over the past few years. Rosinger and her colleagues are examining how those policies could support greater racial and economic diversity in college enrollment — an issue that took on greater significance last summer when the U.S. Supreme Court struck down colleges’ use of race-conscious admissions nationwide.
“I think this study really aligns with the College of Education’s mission of thinking through policy design carefully in ways to try to understand how we can make our institutions more inclusive,” Rosinger said.
According to Rosinger, the test-optional movement was initiated by selective liberal arts colleges a couple of decades ago as part of an effort to increase access for low-income and racially minoritized applicants and was ramped up during the COVID-19 pandemic for health and safety reasons. Colleges often implement test-optional admissions because of racial and economic inequities in test scores and because they do not always predict students’ longer-term success beyond other academic measures, she added.
In a recent policy brief, Rosinger and her colleagues draw on detailed information about selective colleges’ admissions testing policies to describe the proliferation of test-optional admissions policies during the COVID-19 pandemic and highlight the variations in how colleges implemented test-optional policies. For colleges with test-optional admissions during the pandemic, the researchers found substantial variation in the type of policy colleges implemented, the extent to which the policy extended to all applicants, and the extent to which the policy extended to other selection processes, such as merit scholarship consideration.
Rosinger’s top recommendation for institutions is to “be very clear about whether they are or aren’t using test scores and what they are using test scores for [admissions, financial aid].”
Rosinger said she thinks test-optional policies are “one tool in our toolkit that can help promote racial equity but it’s not just going to suddenly lift the thumb off the scale.” A recent paper she co-authored published in Sociology of Education focuses on selective college admissions policies more broadly, building on another study in the Journal of Higher Education that examined how other measures for college admission are similarly racialized — e.g. rigor of courses, recommendations from teachers and counselors, and extracurricular activities in which students are able to participate.
“Doing away with standardized tests isn’t just going to automatically level the playing field or remediate past injustice,” Rosinger said. “It’s really going to take a radical rethinking of what admissions is and what metrics we use to include and exclude students from selective colleges.”
In addition to rethinking college admissions policies, Rosinger said she encourages state investment in public colleges and universities — especially Historically Black Colleges and Universities that have been underfunded by state governments — to expand opportunities for high-quality, lower-cost education.