From South India to Madison, and Back
June 6, 2013
Five years ago a doctoral student arrived on the UW-Madison campus ready to begin work toward a degree in Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis.
This past weekend she donned her gown and mortarboard and received her diploma.
In the meantime Anupama Shekar wrote a dissertation on successful parent and family involvement practices of four higher secondary school headmasters and headmistresses in urban and suburban districts in Tamil Nadu, South India.
At the same time, along with hercolleagues in the WIDA consortium, she helped develop the LADDER professional development program that trains teams of educators to make data-driven decisions about their English language learner students.
Shekar explained her choice of research topic this way: "Few studies had explored the leadership of principals in fostering parent and family involvement in the U.S. and in India. The enormity of the government (public) school system in Tamil Nadu, South India, made for an interesting platform to conduct this research. I was interested in how these school heads fostered meaningful parent involvement initiatives to improve educational outcomes of their students. I realized these practices could be useful to other administrators as well."
As a group, these school heads promoted their visibility as leaders, built personal relationships with parents, promoted student achievement, bolstered the importance of parent participation, reinforced parent connections to teachers, and created opportunities for networking.
Shekar first worked as a reporter for a national English language newspaper. Covering the education beat, she visited schools, interviewed teachers, school heads and government officials, and wrote about education policy issues in public and private schools. Her stories celebrated the victories and discussed ways to mend deficiencies.
One day she realized that she could write newspaper stories for decades, and still not see the kinds of changes she wanted to see in Indian public schools. She wanted to quit journalism to help make a difference in the lives of students from low-income communities.
She decided to study education leadership and policy, and to attend the best graduate program available to her. She chose the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
With dissertation in hand, she will now continue with the WIDA project in WCER for another year in a postdoctoral position.
"Findings from research should ultimately benefit educators and influence policy in some way," she said. "I hope to be able to share the case studies of these successful leadership practices around parent and family involvement through journal articles and a book (possibly translated into Tamil, the native language of Tamil Nadu). This in turn could be useful for a public school system in Tamil Nadu, which serves approximately 6 million children from low-income communities."
