Research Agenda

My research agenda sits at the intersection of community-university relationships/partnerships and college access. My work seeks to understand how universities can build partnerships with their nearby communities to improve college going rates for underrepresented minority students. As a high school math teacher working to support Students of Color to and through college, I came to believe that system level changes are necessary to meaningfully increase college going rates and that colleges themselves should take an active role in their communities to address college going disparities. I am also interested in the role space plays in educational inequalities.

Methodologically I am a pragmatist - my research aims to address important problems and foster change. My methods are driven by the questions my collaborators and I seek to answer and have included qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods approaches. Theoretically I have most frequently utilized on critical race theory and Black feminist thought to understand the role systemic racism has on educational systems (See Winfield & Davis, 2020 and Winfield et al., 2022). This includes my dissertation which uses intersectionality to study dual enrollment. I believe these critical theoretical perspectives are essential today when scholarship on race and racism is threatened and demonized by politicians and the general public.

My research currently has two main areas of focus: community-university relationships and college access. I look forward to integrating these domains more closely in future research.

Community-University Relationships

As a doctoral student, I have worked to understand the promises and failures of community-university partnerships with predominantly Black, low-income communities. This includes the following scholarship:

Winfield, J. D. & Davis, J. E. (2020). The role of race in urban community-university relationships: Moving from interest convergence to critical literacy. Journal of Critical Scholarship on Higher Education and Student Affairs, 5(3), 16-32. https://ecommons.luc.edu/jcshesa/vol5/iss3/5 Research Page

Winfield, J. D., Fiorot, S., Pressimone Beckowski, C., & Davis, J. E. (2022). Valuing the aspirations of the community: The origins of a community-university partnership. Journal of Community Engagement and Scholarship, 14(2), Article 14. https://doi.org/10.54656/jces.v14i2.39 Research Page

Winfield, J. D. & Davis, J. E. (2021, April 8-12). Anti-Black settler colonialism and university-community relations: A case study of Temple University [Paper presentation]. American Educational Research Association Annual Meeting, Online. Conference Paper Presentation

Winfield, J. D., Pressimone Beckowski, C., Fiorot, S., Daniels, D., & Davis, J.E. (in review). “They call me the other parent”: Othermothering in a community-led after-school program for Black youth. (Paper available upon request)

College Access & Success

I began my career as an educator to support students on their journey to and through college. This emerging area of my research includes my dissertation that uses critical race theory to examine access to and benefits of dual enrollment.

Johnson, J. M. & Winfield, J. D. (2022). Institutionalizing success: Practices and policies at HBCUs that promote student development and degree attainment. The Journal of Higher Education. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1080/00221546.2022.2082759 Research Page

Johnson, J. M., Winfield, J. D., Rush, A., & Fiorot, S. (Revise & Resubmit). Mattering in college: Perceptions of belonging among Black alumnae of historically Black colleges and universities.

Winfield, J. D. (2022, November 16-19). Who offers dual enrollment? A racialized organizations perspective. [Paper Presentation]. Association for the Study of Higher Education Annual Conference, Las Vegas, NV.

Other Research Threads

As a graduate student I’ve also worked on other education research projects.

The Education Workforce

Educator working conditions are student learning conditions. I’ve been a part of two projects that examine these working conditions.

Winfield, J. D. & Paris, J. H. (2022). A mixed method analysis of burnout and turnover intentions among higher education professionals during COVID-19. Journal of Education Human Resources. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.3138/jehr-2021-0048 Research Page

Winfield, J. D., Pivovarova, M., & Powers, J. M. (in review). Arizona’s chronic teacher turnover: An analysis of school level factors. (Available upon request)

Colleges as Organizations

I have also studied colleges as organizations by examining their public commitments to student success and their built environments.

Pressimone Beckowski, C. M. & Winfield, J. D. (2021). Towards a culture of student success: An analysis of mission statements from first-generation serving institutions. Journal of First-generation Student Success, 1(2),73-91. https://doi.org/10.1080/26906015.2021.1930291 Research Page

Winfield, J. D., Pressimone Beckowski, C. (2020, November 18-21). Self-ascribed purposes in for-profit college mission statements: A content analysis [Paper presentation]. Association for the Study of Higher Education Annual Conference, Online. (Paper available upon request)

Winfield, J. D. (2022, November 16-19). Greener pastures: The racialized landscapes of urban colleges and universities. [Paper Presentation]. Association for the Study of Higher Education Annual Conference, Las Vegas, NV.

Image Credit

The cover image for this project was created with Nicola Rennie’s aRt package available here.