Krista D. Glazewski: ‘I See Myself Carrying Forward the Great Work That’s Already Happening’

Krista D. Glazewski will join the NC State College of Education during the 2023-24 academic year as the executive director of the Friday Institute for Educational Innovation and the associate dean of translational research in the college. 

A former middle school teacher, her partnership work has spanned multiple regions in the U.S. to investigate how and under what conditions teachers might adopt and adapt new practices. The integration of these ideas has resulted in numerous contributions, and is distinguished by over 70 publications and $10 million in external funding primarily from the National Science Foundation, US Department of Education and the Department of Defense. 

Learn more about Glazewski below: 

Why did you choose a career in education?

My background is as a teacher and I really wanted to be a teacher because I saw myself as both the kind of person who could communicate well and teach well. I see education as such a beneficial force in my own life and experienced such great educators, in my own schooling and in my own life, and it was something I naturally gravitated to as something I could actually see myself as. 

I taught middle school in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in the Nineties, and I taught ESL, I taught language arts, I taught social studies and I even taught science. I loved teaching in the middle grades. I loved the experience of having lots of different things that I taught in different content areas, because I loved the variety, and I found myself just falling in love with public education. 

What inspired you to pursue a doctoral degree?

In the later Nineties is when we started to see computers showing up in schools. We saw them first in our media centers in our libraries and then we started seeing computers showing up for use in classrooms with teachers. I was in a master’s degree program and, at the same time, I was learning about technology in the classroom and what we could do. I was teaching ESL and I didn’t have access to a ton of great language resources at the time that would really enrich kid’s lives and help them to become proficient in all the ways that they need to communicate. So, I started using computers in my own classroom with my ESL students and I fell in love with the possibilities of what that was opening up. 

We were still calling it the World Wide Web and there was a new, enriching kind of world opening that I saw enabled for my students and then for me too, because my teaching practice changed with the introduction of microcomputers. Because I’m also a lifelong learner, I still kept going to school and I asked my professors what I could do and they said, “keep going,” so I did. 

What are your research interests?

I think because I’ve always worked across disciplines, I’ve always been drawn to the kind of thinking and reasoning that we foster in classrooms when we are drawing from interdisciplinary work and problem solving and ideas. I was drawn, naturally, to interdisciplinary or cross-disciplinary work and connecting that complex problem solving as a way to bring multiple streams of disciplinary practice together, because most of the problems in our world are complex and they’re not solved with a single-lens view. 

So, I started trying to do things in my classroom teaching, when I was a teacher, and I continued the work in my graduate study, learning more about formalized methods of complex problem solving, like problem-based learning and case-based learning and inquiry-based learning. That’s the pedagogical approach that I’ve always leveraged in connection to the use of technology and emerging technologies in the classroom  because, when you’re trying to do ambitious kinds of teaching practices like that, you need access to rich resources that are really going to work for you in the classroom. The pedagogical approaches really go hand-in-hand with how we can think about use of emerging and advanced technologies in the classroom. 

What is translational research and what does it mean to you to engage in translational research?

I would say that translational research has been a hallmark of my own research work. I’ve always, across my career, engaged in partnership work with teachers and in classrooms from my early graduate research work through my dissertation, until today. Everything I talk about and publish about has been in partnership with teachers in the classroom. Translational research is really getting at the idea that the research work that happens in our buildings and in our settings at the university can be applied and can be understood to have practice implications in the classroom and vice-versa. When we take what happens in the classroom and we understand a problem of practice systematically and deeply through our research methods, it informs what we’re able to do in our research work. Really, it’s this interplay between how things can be understood through our own research work at the university and how we can put that into practice in informal settings, classroom settings, any kind of place where learning happens, and make sure that interplay is both understood as well as communicated well for a variety of audiences. So, I think another key to this is to understand that some of our research work is going to be for an audience of other researchers and some of our research is going to have public-facing communication. 

Some of our research needs to be co-designed and worked out with teachers because we want to understand, specific to their contexts, what their needs are and how something may or may not work in their own context. Sometimes we’re also talking about informal environments as well, because learning doesn’t just happen in classrooms. Learning can happen in clubs and camps and after-school programs and in lots of different contexts and lots of different settings. This translational research work really is key to helping formalize a thing that we all know to be innate and naturally true, that there’s an interplay between what happens in our research work, how it can be applied and made actionable in formal or informal settings and how that can inform further research work. 

What is one moment or project in your academic career that you are particularly proud of?

I’m going to say this moment—the moment of being appointed as the director of the Friday Institute. This is a pinnacle achievement for me. I never dreamed when I was teaching middle school in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in the Nineties, that I could take what I love and do it at scale. This is a chance to see what I care about and have been loving and doing for three decades now and put into practice and see impacts at scale. It’s a little bit on the nose, but this is really the moment I’m most proud of. There’s only one Friday Institute, and I’ve known of the Friday Institute well before ever stepping foot on this campus and it’s a dream come true. There’s only one job like this, and I’m so lucky to be here. 

What do you hope to accomplish through your role as associate dean in the College of Education? 

I see myself carrying forward the great work that’s already happening, building on the established networks here, supporting the networks and the collaborations and the partnerships that already exist. I’m so honored to be able to do that. I also see the importance of cultivating new partnerships, new networks, new relationships and bringing together current faculty expertise, the current graduate student expertise, building on all the areas of excellence that already exist and really paying attention to and tuning into the local school district, state and national priorities. At the intersection of all of those things, being part of creating new opportunities, new areas of excellence, new partnerships that didn’t exist before, so this is very much a role of facilitating and cultivating. We have some formal methods that that happens through, such as the Catalyst Grants and the faculty fellows and the convenings that we may do, but we also have some informal mechanisms that we’re thinking about running. 

What do you believe makes someone an extraordinary educator?

An extraordinary educator is someone who is incredibly curious about everything in their world, someone who is willing to take risks and not afraid to take risks in their educational practice, someone who is committed to creating pathways and opening up opportunities for a diverse range of learners, someone who has a passion for seeing learning happen in all of its various forms and being a part of that process and who feels honored by getting to be a part of that process.

This post was originally published in College of Education News.