Research Interest

My research interests have been shaped by my experiences teaching and working in community, PK-12, and higher education contexts.  My approach to the study of education and leadership include incorporating theories shaping critical inquiry, participatory action research, Black Feminist thought, and narrative storytelling.  I am especially interested in studying the relationship between race, gender, policy, and leadership, particularly as situated in the lived experiences and narratives of Black students, educators, families, and communities.  Current critical inquiries that I am engaging include EquityMatterz, a Black educator research initiative funded by The Spencer Foundation, the Novo Foundation funded Code Switch project, a school-community-university, youth participatory action research initiative turned nonprofit, formed to interrogate the school-to-prison pipeline and disrupt Black girl school push-out, and a non-funded multicultural curriculum transformation inquiry engaged with collaborating scholar, Dr. Cynthia Zwicky, to examine how to effectively prepare culturally humble and responsive teachers and educational leaders. Click on the links embedded within to learn more about these lines of inquiry.  Read about additional ongoing and completed research projects in the descriptions offered below.
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​Current Research Projects

Racing Leadership
In this long-term study, the focus is on educational leadership development for social justice.  In-service teachers who are seeking a K-12 administrative license, and who are enrolled in a masters level program comprise participants and case studies in this research examination that documents the ways in which critical pedagogy employed with a social justice orientation impacts the critical consciousness and social justice leadership development of emerging school leaders. 

This project includes analysis of the development of participant critical consciousness, including examining racialized, classed, and gendered processes and their manifestations through the intersections of work, family, school, and leadership responsibilities. This research also explores the ways that emerging leaders take up opportunities for school, societal and cultural transformation. School leaders are the second most important factor in PK-12 student success, and social justice leadership has emerged as a viable option to help school leaders address the diversity challenges of 21st century education, yet few studies in educational leadership position school communities in the U.S. to engage an effective social justice leadership praxis.  By engaging this study, I hope to explore what theories, lessons, and practices educational projects like this reveal.  I also seek to learn from the practices and reflections of my students, emerging leaders for social justice.

Walls, T. (2017, In Progress). Racing transformational leadership/transforming leadership through race. 

Seeds of Justice
This research is framed in critical autoethnographic inquiry and participatory action research.  Employing critical professional development (CPD) (Kohli, Picower, Martinez, and Ortiz, 2015), it is designed to provide teachers and educational leaders of color committed to racial justice with a bridge to close the gap between theory and praxis, by equipping them with tools to engage in problem-posing around their racialized and gendered experiences in PK-12 education and its relationship to the national teacher of color shortage crisis.
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The purpose of the research is to provoke reflective analysis on, and answers to three critically themed questions: “Why do so few people want to teach anymore?” “What have we done to teaching to make it so unattractive?” and “What (or who) caused this, and what can we do to fix it?”  It aims to engage teachers in critical inquiry, reflection, and dialog (Freire, 1970) in order to problematize the national teacher, and teacher of color shortage.  Drawing on critical race theory (CRT) diverse PK-16+ teachers critically examine their gendered and racialized teaching experiences, and reflect on these experiences, including considering how school reform initiatives such as merit based evaluations (Smith, 2014), high stakes testing (Au, 2010) and no tolerance policies (Skiba et. al, 2012) impact their retention and effectiveness within the field, and/or whether or not these experiences exacerbate the problem of the national teacher crisis.  ​

Walls, T., Cornejo, M.N., Park, S., Plachowski, T., and Reid, E. (2018).  Sowing seeds of justice: feminists’ reflections on building a social justice movement in the southwest. In Grant, M. C. (Ed). Equity, equality and reform in contemporary public education.