Profile
Melissa Galang Han is a doctoral candidate in the Joint Doctoral Program in Educational Leadership at the University of California, San Diego and California State University, San Marcos. Melissa studies the impact of democratic learning environments on underrepresented elementary student communities. Her dissertation work, Listening to Elementary Student Voice: A Compass for Leadership and Increasing School Connectedness, examines how two third grade democratic classrooms with a high population of Black and Latino students created space for student voice to be heard and enacted in leadership. Melissa invited a focus group of third graders to be co-analyzers in the interpretation of the data collected from interviews and classroom observations. Her research contributes to a growing literature on how school connectedness is affected when elementary students have a substantive voice in the decisions that adults make about their school experiences. Her long-term research goals are to shed light on how educators can strengthen their ability to listen, question, research and collaborate with elementary students so students are treated not only as children but as people whose needs, rights, and experiences are taken seriously. Melissa is a 2014 awardee of the Janet Hageman Chrispeels Doctoral Fellowship in Educational Leadership.
