Recognition to teachHOUSTON Postdoctoral Fellow from Two National Organizations

Karla Adelina Garza, a postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of Mathematics-teachHOUSTON, has been honored with two outstanding dissertation awards.

The first outstanding dissertation award came in April 2024 from the Narrative Research SIG of the American Educational Research Association (AERA). The second award was the John Laska Outstanding Dissertation Award for Teaching from the American Association on Teaching and Curriculum (AATC), which she received in October 2024.

Dr. Garza’s original research, titled Migrant Students Following the Crops, Teachers Following Their Students: A Narrative Inquiry Into Two Migrant Children Who Became Teachers, focused on Hispanic teachers from Eagle Pass, Texas, who followed local border town community migrant students for an eight-week summer program. As migrants themselves, the teachers traveled with local migrant children from Texas to Princeville, Illinois (near Chicago), and back to the border town annually, following the migrant path of crop harvesting throughout the country.

Data collected for her study included archival documents (photos, ship manifest lists, birth certificates, etc.) and multiple interviews with two teachers who met and married while teaching and migrating with the local migrant community. A compelling twist to the dissertation was that the two teachers were Dr. Garza’s Grade 5 teachers in Eagle Pass, where she learned alongside many migrant students during the school year. The impetus to this fascinating examination of an often-unheard culture was Dr. Garza remembering her puzzlement about the ongoing disappearance of her teachers and classmates from her Eagle Pass community during the summer months.

This fall, Dr. Garza, who earned three Texas A&M University degrees (’06, ’07, ’23), gave an invited talk to Ph.D. students in the Department of Teaching, Learning and Culture at TAMU. As an example of exemplary research, students in the class came to understand the importance of original topics and ‘finding the gap’ in the literature. The TAMU Ph.D. students were also personally inspired to hear about the obstacles Dr. Garza overcame as she broke new research ground resulting in two major awards for her dissertation study.

Her research has a broad methodological impact on the field because it merges narrative inquiry, the study of lived experiences from the perspectives of the participants, with testimonios, a method that gives authority to the self-identity to Latinx individuals and communities within academia. The narratives or testimonios of the participants, told in their own words, were interpreted and re-told by Dr. Garza.