Position title: Researcher
Dr. Bailey B. Smolarek was an associate researcher at CCWT, with the Wisconsin Center for Education Research at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. In 2016, Bailey earned her PhD in Curriculum and Instruction from the University of Wisconsin-Madison specializing in language and education, education policy studies, and qualitative research. Drawing on critical social theories, Bailey’s scholarship revolved around issues of educational equity from both systemic and localized understandings. Her dissertation used critical policy approaches to ethnographically examine the local enactment of federal and state education policies on Latin@ immigrant youth at a high school in rural Wisconsin. Informed by her prior roles as a middle school Spanish teacher and an adult ESL instructor, Bailey’s research is dedicated to cultivating socially just educational spaces for multilingual and multicultural learners and the educators who serve them.