Natalie Davis
Assistant Professor - Creative and Innovative Education (MACIE) Early Childhood and Elementary Education- Education
Ph.D. in Educational Studies-Educational Foundations and Policy, University of Michigan-Ann Arbor
M.A.T. in Elementary Education, Dominican University
B.A. in Secondary Science Education and Psychology, Columbia University
- Specializations
Educational ethnography
Critical childhood studies
Sociocultural perspectives on learning
Political education
- Biography
Natalie Davis (Natalie R. Davis) is an assistant professor in the Department of Early Childhood and Elementary Education and for the M.A. program in Creative and Innovative Education (MACIE). Davis is a 2021 NAEd/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellow and a former postdoctoral research fellow in Learning Sciences at Northwestern University, where she employed micro-ethnographic and interactional methods to study children’s thinking and self-determination in a tinkering after-school program. Broadly, her research explores the relationship between teaching and learning, cultural ecologies and the sociopolitical development of children from non-dominant communities, with emphasis on the educational experiences and “freedom dreams” of urban-based Black children. Her work also considers the challenges and possibilities of political education in elementary classrooms and the extent to which learning environments nourish children’s imaginative spirits.
Davis has collaborated with museums, makerspaces, nonprofit youth-serving organizations and schools to design curriculum and conduct professional development workshops on topics related to creativity, science learning and the enactment of critical pedagogies. She is a recipient of the NAEd/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellowship, AERA-Division G Distinguished Dissertation and Dimond Dissertation awards. Her work has been disseminated in academic journals such as Cognition & Instruction and via public outlets such as Michigan Talk Radio and Youth Today. Davis received her Ph.D. in Educational Foundations from the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor. Prior to graduate school, she taught third grade in an African-centered school.
- Publications
Davis, N. R., Marchand, A. D., Moore, S. S., Greene, D., & Colby, A. (2021). “We who believe in freedom: Freedom Schools as a critical context for the positive, sociopolitical development of Black youth.” Race Ethnicity and Education, 1-20.
Vossoughi, S., Davis, N. R., Jackson, A., Echevarria, R., Muñoz, A., & Escudé, M. (2021). “Beyond the binary of adult versus child-centered learning: pedagogies of joint activity in the context of making.” Cognition and Instruction, 39(3), 211-241.
Davis, N. R., Vossoughi, S., & Smith, J. F. (2020). “Learning from below: A micro-ethnographic account of children’s self-determination as sociopolitical and intellectual action.” Learning, Culture and Social Interaction, 24, 100373.
Davis, N.R. and Schaeffer, J. (2019). “Troubling Troubled Waters in Elementary Science Education: Politics, Ethics and Black Children’s Conceptions of Water [Justice] in the Era of Flint, Cognition & Instruction,” 3-25.
Bellino, M.J. and Davis, N.R. (2019). “Citizens Now: Commentary on School Walkouts and Civil Disobedience.” In Levinson, M. and Fay, J., Democratic Discord in Schools: Cases and Commentaries in Educational Ethics. Harvard Education Press, 57-62.
Davis, N. R., Monroe, X. J., and Drake, T. M. (2018). “The One Voice Project: A Case of Complexity in Community-Driven Education Reform.” Journal of Cases in Educational Leadership, 21(1), 53-65.
Davis, N. R., Ingber, J., and McLaughlin, C. A. (2014). “Leveraging Complex Understandings of Urban Education for Transformative Science Pedagogy.” Cultural Studies of Science Education, 1-10.