UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Tiffany M. Nyachae, assistant professor of education and women’s, gender and sexuality studies in the Penn State College of Education, has been named a National Academy of Education (NAEd)/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellow for 2023.
The NAEd/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellowship Program supports 25 early career scholars working in critical areas of education research. These $70,000 fellowships support non-residential postdoctoral proposals that make significant scholarly contributions to the field of education. The program also develops the careers of its recipients through professional development activities involving National Academy of Education members.
Nyachae was chosen from a pool of nearly 200 applicants and is excited for the opportunity to complete research she likely would never have had time to without the fellowship.
“This fellowship invests in future educational scholars, giving you the time and the funds to have a year to work on your project, getting away from everything else and spending a year just solely focusing on one project,” Nyachae explained. “I’m really excited to meet my cohort and I really hope we will find authentic collaborations and build together — that’s my dream; I’m always trying to build with folks.”
Nyachae has spent years studying Black girlhood, including the effects of a program for Black girls in grades 5 through 8 that she helped create during her time as a classroom teacher in Buffalo, New York, more than a decade ago.
In her previously published research, Nyachae had reviewed the Sisters of Promise program, but was missing the direct commentary of the students who had participated due to a lack of time needed to conduct interviews and visit with them. With this fellowship, Nyachae said she looks forward to the opportunity to finally address this limitation.
“If I was just doing surveys — and I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with that — I wouldn’t need time off,” she said. “But I have to be there, I have to go to Buffalo, we have to walk around the school, I have to interview them and then I have to do certain parts and stages of the research, have time to analyze all of that before moving to the next stage of the research.
“In my previous work, I didn’t have the actual participants as part of the study, it was just me reviewing program materials and analyzing them,” Nyachae continued. “Now I’m going to have them, the actual participants. I even said in an Urban Education publication that one limitation I had was that I wasn’t able to have the girls’ voices and I hope to one day be able to. Well, now I’ll be able to do it!”
It also provides Nyachae with an opportunity to change the way research involving marginalized communities is done and how the researchers are viewed by those participating in the studies.
“We do our little studies, we do our little programs, the funding is over, and we’re done and these girls never see us again,” Nyachae said of how similar studies have gone. “We can’t do everything, but how do we come back and show up for these communities? A lot of people build their whole careers off of research involving some of the most vulnerable and marginalized communities. Then we leave and most of them never hear from us again, never see us again and that’s it. So, I also think that I’m excited to be able to reconnect with them and to see what our relationship could be now and how it’s going to push me as I continue to move forward in my work with Black girls and Black girlhood.”
She credits not only her letter writers and the feedback she received from previous NAEd/Spencer Fellows and the selection committee, but the support from her faculty mentor at Penn State, Scott McDonald, professor of science education and director of the Krause Innovation Studio, for helping her be selected as a fellow.
“He was like ‘Tiffany, you should do a pilot study because it’s going to help you figure out your methods,’” Nyachae said. “He’s very humble. He doesn’t want me to shout him out. But I’m always going to shout out to Dr. Scott McDonald.
“I was glad he suggested that I conduct a pilot study because I was able to sort out my methods,” she continued. “This is what usually happens. People have a really, really good idea and then the methods aren’t really fully fleshed out where people can see how you’re really going to do this project. That was very important.”
Nyachae said she also hopes to be able to take something very specialized — like her research into Black girlhood — yet present it in a way that anyone can understand what she is discussing, even if that person has not been studying this topic or has had any personal life experience with it.
Applying for and receiving this fellowship, Nyachae said, helped her figure out how to better achieve that goal.
“They [NAE members] want to invest in people, so you have to get really clear about who you are,” she said. “How do you communicate to somebody who doesn’t study Black girlhood? You might have somebody who studies technology in education. They still have to understand you. They still have to get you and you have to write about it in a way where people can still understand it even if they don’t do anything related to what you do. It’s a genre.”
As she embarks on this year-long fellowship, she knows when she returns to the College of Education, she will be better for it. Nyachae hopes to set an example that the world of research and academia can be a wonderful place for everyone.
“I just want to come back being clearer about my scholarship and using this position to support the doctoral students that we have, their careers and help them to craft a career that if you want to be in the academy, it can be joyous and you can do the work that you love,” Nyachae said. “Being in the academy doesn’t have to be a cold, competitive, cutthroat experience. It can be joyous. You can surround yourself with good people and you can do the work in your community that matters. You don’t have to be stuck in an ivory tower.
“And I hope to be an example of that to scholars like me who never thought they would become a professor,” she continued. “This was not in the plans for me, and I want them to know you can be who you are even if you don’t look like a typical whatever, but you can be who you are, you can do work that matters to you, and you can have a joyous experience.”