Carolyn Sattin-Bajaj of UC Santa Barbara’s Gevirtz School has authored one of the chapters in the new book Parenting in the Pandemic: The Collision of School, Work, and Life at Home (Information Age Publishing 2021), edited by Rebecca Lowenhaupt of Boston College and George Theoharis of Syracuse University. Satin-Bajaj’s chapter is titled “The Challenges and Gifts of Being a Parent and an Academic in a Pandemic.” In the chapter she describes her family’s experiences navigating the transition to schooling at home and how the educational demands of virtual schooling during the pandemic caused her to shift the focus on her scholarly work and consider different ways she could try to meaningfully contribute to her children’s learning and broader societal efforts to understand and minimize the consequences of the educational (and other) disruptions.
“In this powerful collection of essays, we have a rare window into how the personal and professional worlds of academics collided during the COVID-19 pandemic,” Matthew Kraft, Associate Professor of Education and Economics at Brown University, writes about Parenting in the Pandemic. “What emerges from these reflections is an intimate portrait of the longstanding tensions in our lives as public intellectuals and parents that have long burned as embers, but are now set ablaze by the public health, economic, and educational crisis we have lived through during the last year. Reading these essays will help us to see questions of education policy and practice in a new, more personal light.”
Carolyn Sattin-Bajaj is an Associate Professor in the Department of Education at the Gevirtz School. Her research focuses on issues of educational access and equity for immigrant-origin youth and other historically underserved student populations. Her work includes exploratory qualitative studies of immigrant and homeless families’ school choice behaviors; experimental research to develop and test interventions to reduce educational inequities; and studies of school leaders’ responses to xenophobia in schools and society and their sense of preparedness to address the consequences of immigration enforcement and racism for their school communities.
Sattin-Bajaj’s work has been funded by the William T. Grant Foundation, the Spencer Foundation, the Smith-Richardson Foundation, the Heckscher Foundation for Children, the New York Community Trust, and the American Educational Research Association. Carolyn is author of Unaccompanied Minors: Immigrant Youth, School Choice, and the Pursuit of Equity (Harvard Education Press, 2014), Matching Students to Opportunity: Expanding College Choice, Access and Quality (co-editor with Andrew Kelly and Jessica Howell, Harvard Education Press, 2016), Blueprint for School System Transformation: A Vision for Comprehensive Reform in Milwaukee and Beyond (co-editor with Frederick M. Hess, Rowman & Littlefield, 2013) and Educating the Whole Child for the Whole World: The Ross School Model and Education for the Global Era (co-editor with Marcelo M. Suárez-Orozco, New York University Press, 2010). Sattin-Bajaj earned a Ph.D. and M.A. in international education from New York University. Prior to earning her doctorate, she worked on secondary school reform at the New York City Department of Education.