Dr. Tiffany M. Nyachae

Tiffany M. Nyachae is an Assistant Professor of Education and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies for the College of Education at Penn State and a 2023 National Academy of Education (NAEd)/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellow. As a Black Feminist pedagogue and a transdisciplinary, community-engaged scholar, Dr. Nyachae’s lived experiences and complicated historical connection to this land foreground her justice work in various contexts for the purposes of reimagining schools, our world and overall social transformation. Specifically, she employs critically conscious and humanizing research approaches to qualitative studies guided by various justice-oriented theories of race, Black girlhood, Black woman knowing/being/experiences, space, and becoming. Informed by her experiences as a middle school teacher, Dr. Nyachae's research portfolio includes: (a) ethnographic and multiple case studies on supporting urban teachers committed to social justice through “race space” critical professional development; (b) design-based research studies of learning, learning environments, and literacy development in social justice literacy workshops for youth of Color; and (c) content and critical discourse analyses of extracurricular programs and curriculum for Black girls.

Her publications have appeared in journals such as Curriculum Inquiry, Urban Education, Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, and Gender and Education. Additionally, she is the recipient of the 2022 Outstanding Junior Researcher Award through The Pennsylvania State University College of Education; the 2021 More Just World Award for an article in Volume 70 of Literacy Research: Theory, Method, and Practice; and the 2020 Best Paper Award through the Literacy Research Association.

Dr. Nyachae earned her Ph.D. in Literacy Education: Curriculum, Instruction, and the Science of Learning at the University at Buffalo (SUNY). Currently, she teaches undergraduate courses on literacy and graduate courses on critically conscious and humanizing research, Ethnic Studies, and the learning sciences. Additionally, she completed fellowships in the International Society of the Learning Sciences (ISLS) Emerging Scholars Program (2022 cohort); STAR (Scholars of Color Transitioning into Academic Research Institutions) Mentoring Program through the Literacy Research Association (LRA) (2019-2021 cohort); and Cultivating New Voices (CNV) Among Scholars of Color Fellow through the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) (2018-2020 cohort).

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