We have never been building a life. We have been releasing it to the wind.
This short-form prose appears in Medium’s The Shortform.
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A surprising thing happens when one of your worst fears comes true…
This creative nonfiction essay about grief, loss, and hope was published in Medium’s Age of Empathy.
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About 40,000 U.S. veterans are diagnosed with cancer each year, according to a U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) study published in 2012. For the nearly one in four U.S. military veterans who live in rural areas, getting access to timely, quality cancer care may require journeys of 100 miles or more past fields of corn, cattle or cotton. And those trips to the doctor may require time off from work and seeking assistance from caregivers and others.
In this article for Gene.com, Danielle reports on how Genentech and the VA are collaborating to improve cancer care and access to clinical trials for veterans. Read the article.
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Dr. Ericka Weathers of Penn State is unearthing the consequences of persistent segregation in schools and its impact on school funding. Weathers noted that racial segregation is found to be higher between districts in a state than within districts. Thus, differences in resources and spending practices between districts have consequences for inequalities. Danielle explores Weathers’ research for Harvard’s Strategic Data Project.
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Anti-Black bias is an important focal point in the discussion of the root causes of educational inequality. Much of the emerging bias research focuses on how teachers interact with students of color. Yet less is known about how anti-black bias plays out at a larger scale within a community. Do rates of community bias translate into achievement disparities between Black and White students? Danielle explores the research that Dr. Francis A. Pearman, Assistant Professor of Education in Stanford University’s Graduate School of Education, presented to the SDP network.
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“Achievement gap discourse (AGD)” has driven conversations about race in education for the past several decades and has drawn criticism for its central metaphor. While a desire to understand and address educational inequality spawned conversations of the so-called achievement gap, scholars like pedagogical theorist and teacher educator Gloria Ladson-Billings point out that AGD “constructs students as defective and lacking” and “admonishes them to catch up.” Thus, even before seeking solutions to address racial bias in schools, many are left wondering how to discuss the issue in the first place. Danielle explores USC researcher David Quinn’s experimental evidence that news stories about the “achievement gap” contribute to stereotypes regarding academics and race.
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Use of force is a well-established part of American law enforcement. Roughly a thousand individuals are killed by police each year, a statistic with major ramifications for not only the individuals killed and their families but also for the students in the surrounding communities. Attitudes toward and trust in police fracture in response to police violence, and in the U.S., these fractures often occur along racial lines, disproportionately affecting Black and Hispanic students both in and out of the classroom. Danielle explores this story for Harvard’s Strategic Data Project.
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The need for data scientists in the U.S. is growing, yet groups like the Latinx population are vastly untapped when training and building the next generation of skilled workers. According to Google’s 2019 diversity report, for example, only 5.7% of their total workforce identifies as Latinx, and only 5.3% of their new hires in tech jobs went to Latinx workers. This trend mirrors a larger trend in the U.S. STEM workforce, as Hispanic workers hold only 7% of STEM jobs yet make up 16% of the workforce. Absent wider programming specifically targeting STEM, some K-12 teachers are getting creative when developing opportunities in data science for Latinx students. Danielle explores this story for Harvard CEPR’s Strategic Data Project.
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The PIER Fellowship at Harvard University’s Center for Education Policy Research is yielding far-reaching impact — and changing the way education policy leaders are trained. In this impact story, Danielle explores how three PIER fellows are impacting on Head Start, universal preschool, teacher retention, and adult education.
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In December 2018, Betsy DeVos rescinded Obama-era guidance intended to reduce racial discrimination in school discipline. At a time when black high school students are twice as likely to get suspended than their white counterparts, this move has been shrouded in controversy. Yet amidst harsh social realities and divided political opinions, researchers like Dr. Akisha Jones Sarfo are working to bring an evidence-based voice to the table. Danielle explores Jones Sarfo’s story for Harvard CEPR’s Strategic Data Project.
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I had powered through the thicket only to arrive at a starting line, not a finish line. Had I found the starting line initially, I could have been much further down the path, and sooner. But the struggle wasn’t for naught; it gave me material that helped me relate to the reader. Read how a story about the Tibetan Sky Burial led me to the braided essay structure.
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Every writer needs a solid research process. In this article, originally published by Medium’s The Writer’s Collective, Danielle outlines how she translates her research into a usable system.
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“But what they don’t tell you about the dream is how much it resembles an actual dream, constantly skipping from snapshot to snapshot. It adorns itself with the highlights while downplaying the elongated spaces in between. The spaces that real life calls home…” Danielle explores the challenges and beauty of modern-day family life in this creative nonfiction piece, published by Medium’s P.S. I Love You.
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March season was in full swing. The most recent high-profile march at the time of publication, the March for Science, touted science as a “pillar of human freedom and prosperity.” Yet the same could be said for higher education in general, as Danielle explored in this blog post written for Helix Education.
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In a medium in which clicks equal money, many marketers got really good at writing headlines that elicited a click from even the most reluctant of viewer. Yet the power of clickbait speaks to some profound underlying truths about what people want and need when entering the realm of digital communication. Danielle drew from her research in behavioral economics and behavior change communications in this piece, published in the Call-to-Action blog run by Inside Higher Ed.
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Online learning's growth shows no signs of slowing. The Online Learning Consortium estimated that 85 percent of Americans enrolled in postsecondary institutions have at least one trait of a nontraditional learner. In this article, ghostwritten for Helix Education’s Amy Hale and Emily Wood, LeCourt explores the shifting pedagogical paradigm for Inside Higher Ed’s Inside Digital Learning blog.
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To excel in today’s increasingly competitive environment, higher education institutions must embrace a new enrollment mindset—a mindset that envisions the goal and knows how to get there. Yet embracing this mindset requires enrollment officers to challenge some underlying assumptions of elite performance, myths about what it takes to rise to the top. In this eCampus News article, Danielle explored the new insights about peak performance and expertise to guide higher ed leaders to greater enrollment success.
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A self-proclaimed “reformed dataphobe,” Danielle now champions the idea of big data in higher ed while also challenging the industry to set the ethical standard for data analytics. This op-ed, written on behalf of Helix Education, was the first placement for the company in a major high education publication.
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We are now fully immersed in an attention economy, and to survive in a marketplace where attention is currency, messages simply HAVE to draw attention. Unfortunately, recent research about human behavior has revealed that the amount of time you have to actually capture someone’s attention is extremely narrow—only about 200 milliseconds or so. So how on earth can you cut through the noise and draw attention in such a short amount of time? In this article, ghostwritten for Helix Education’s Seth Odell, Danielle explains how institutions can step out of their comfort zone with visually arresting design.
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The idea of outsourcing is not without controversy in higher ed, yet the practice has proven time and again to be a mechanism of growth. By outsourcing time/resource intensive activities like marketing, enrollment/retention services, and data analytics, institutions are poised to more fully pursue their missions. This article, ghostwritten for Helix Education’s CAO Cherron Hoppes, argues that the case for outsourcing in higher ed is missional.
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