Brooklyn College Study

The Brooklyn College study (2012 onwards) was a collaborative effort that examines emotions and the teaching and learning of science education. The research squad is relatively large, involving Konstantinos Alexakos and me as principal investigators, visiting scholars from Brazil, Canada, and New Zealand, and numerous graduate students from Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center.

Research foci include:
Facial expression of emotion; prosodic expression of emotion; physiological expression of emotion; emotional climate; cogenerative dialogue; coteaching; teacher as researcher; authentic inquiry; multilevel inquiry; multilogical inquiry; mindfulness in education; meditation as an intervention to ameliorate emotion; heuristics as tools for enhancing teaching and learning; & toolkits for wellness and ameliorating emotions.

Doctoral student researchers involved in the Brooklyn College study:
Olga Calderon, Malgorzata Powietrzynska, Andre Poole, Hiro Komatsubara, & Leah Pride.

Master’s student researchers undertaking research in the Brooklyn College study:
Parvathy Nair, Derya Gunaydin, Sandra Ospina, Agnieszka Pierwola, & Aimee Tabrizi.

Alexakos photo

Other researchers involved in the project:
Natasha Dachos: initiated breathing meditation and provided insights into mindfulness in science education.
Dorota Koczewska: undertook oximeter studies. breathing meditation, and examined special education as a social category that was connected to expression of emotion.
Victor Rodriguez: handled the coordination of video recording, oximeter data collection, clicker data for emotional climate, and ongoing field notes. Importantly he synchronized the time stamps for all data resources.
Rey Llena: Studied emotional climate and especially the use of clickers to obtain in the moment assessments of students’ perceptions of the emotional climate.
Karim Gangji: Undertook collaborative work on developing and field-testing various heuristics developed and used in the BC study. Karim did these studies at Queens College in a physics class for prospective elementary teachers.
Ferzileta Gjika: Undertook analyses of breathing meditation.
Rafael Rosado: Studied coteaching practices of the students in the classes involved in this Brooklyn College study.