The Education Now Lab is a community-engaged research+practice lab that engages in and produces a range of scholarship (e.g., public, academic, new media) alongside community members.

The Lab launched in 2020 by Dr. Anna Smith and doctoral students in Illinois State University’s School of Teaching and Learning course Critical Perspectives on Technology-Based Learning. Throughout the course—at the time what we thought was the height of the COVID pandemic—we took an inquiry-based approach to course readings and activities with this essential question in mind:

How can we support our local schools and communities through critical public scholarship on technology in education?

Doctoral students queried local schools and communities to find mutually beneficial topics of interest, researched the subject with a critical lens, and produced a range of outputs from infographics sent via social media to drafts of podcast episodes.

Their public scholarship has inspired the trajectory of the Lab today!

Born Accessible Paradigm

The Education Now Lab takes up a born accessible paradigm (Capiel, 2014; Shaheen, 2022) to our technology and media co-design methods and distribution. To disrupt the historic exclusion of disabled and Deaf people from the research enterprise (Dolmage, 2017), we prioritize inclusive research and design practices, processes, and products, and work to innovate accessible multimodal co-design methods capable of engaging diverse minds and bodies. We will not only produce digitally accessible scholarship and resources, we will advance a born accessible research paradigm, thus building ISU’s reputation as a champion for equity, diversity, inclusion, and accessibility.

Community-led Co-design

Our community and school- instigated approaches to prototyping and field-testing co-design research and co-authoring creative scholarship promise to advance systems-minded, human experience design by not only sharing authority and centering the expertise of community partners but also by co-developing and co-authoring multi-faceted scholarship with shared knowledge that can both catalyze local educational approaches (Ghiso & Campano, 2024), and also reach and influence multiple parties with invested interest in education (Shah, 2020).

Social Science Communication

Our approach to using collaborative creative technologies (art, immersive tech, etc.) for wide & varied dissemination of co-produced education research has the potential to lead in the advancement of a field of social science communication. Exacerbated by a rapidly developing media communication landscape, a specialized challenge in the social sciences are widespread misgivings, disinformation, and politicized discourse on a range of topics disconnected and at times against co-produced research. The Education Now Lab is well-suited to lead in informing the development of such a field.

Meet the Team

(click on the image to know more about them!)

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Affiliated Faculty

Dr. Anna Smith

Initiating Member, Education Now Lab

Associate Professor, School of Teaching and Learning, Illinois State University

Dr. S. Gavin Weiser

Associate Professor, Department of Educational Administration and Foundations and Coordinator of the College Student Personnel Administration Master’s program, Illinois State University

Dr. Kristin Carlson

Associate Professor, School of Creative Technologies, Illinois State University

Dr. Natalie L. Shaheen

Associate Professor, Department of Special Education and the School of Teaching and Learning, Illinois State University

Public Scholarship Initiative Team

Viraj Patel

Ed.D. candidate, School of Teaching and Learning at Illinois State University

Lead Editorial Assistant, Literary Research: Theory, Method & Practice