Meet the Team

Kara Ieva, Ph.D. - Principal Investigator 

Dr. Kara Ieva is currently a Professor in the Counseling in Educational Settings program at Rowan University. In addition to her current position in Counselor Education, her educational career spans over 20 years as a former Spanish teacher and professional school counselor. She received her Bachelor of Arts degree in Spanish Secondary Education and Master’s of Education in Secondary Education Curriculum and Administration from Towson University. Additionally, she earned her Master’s of Education in School Counseling from Loyola College in Maryland and her PhD in Counselor Education for the University of Central Florida. Kara’s areas of research interest include promoting equity and wellness in education for children and adolescents of marginalized populations: in the areas of college and career readiness, social/emotional development, and group counseling. She provides professional development to K-12 school counselors, teachers, and administrators on how to embed social/emotional development into curricula and strategies for cultivating an emotionally safe and welcoming mental health and neurodiverse culture in schools. She created and facilitates the New Jersey School and SAC Counselor Online Collective, which started out of necessity during the multiple pandemics, and current today, offered supervision /peer consultation to all the counselors in the state. Kara holds multiple leadership positions for national and state professional counseling organizations. She serves on the editorial review board for Professional School Counselor Journal published by the American School Counselor Association (ASCA). Dr. Ieva’s scholarship includes multiple peer review articles, book chapters, newsletter and magazine articles, and technical writing/ evaluation reports. Further, she serves as the former PI and current Director of Academic and Student Services for the Rowan University's pre-college access programs that aid first generation and under-resourced college students in post-secondary preparation in Science, Technology, Engineering and Education, Arts, and Mathematics (Aim High; STE2AM). Lastly, she serves as the evaluator on multiple Foundation and National Science Foundation (NSF) grants, and the Co-PI for an NSF Grant, Broadening participation in STEM through Virtual Reality Career Exploration: Introducing Underrepresented Students to High Need STEM Careers. Her grants to date total $1,844,236.

Cathy Brant, Ph.D. - Co-Principal Investigator

Cathy A.R. Brant (she, her, hers) joined the College of Education in 2020 and is an Associate Professor of Equity in Teacher Education. She holds a Ph.D. (Teaching and Learning) from The Ohio State University, a M.Ed. (Elementary/Early Childhood Education) from Rutgers University, and a B.A. (Sociology) from Douglass College at Rutgers University.

Dr. Brant, former New Jersey elementary teacher, teaches social studies methods in the elementary education program..  Dr. Brant has published her research in The Journal of Social Studies Research, Social Studies and the Young Learner, The Educational Forum, and Action in Teacher Education. She has presented her work at national conferences including the National Council for the Social Studies-College & University Faculty Assembly (NCSS/CUFA), the National Association for Professional Development Schools (NAPDS), the American Education Research Association (AERA) and the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education (AACTE).

Dr. Brant has also co-edited two books on social studies education and LGBTQ+ topics in education. Her current research interests include integrating social studies and English/Language Arts in K-6 schools with high-quality multicultural literature, school-university partnerships, and LGBTQ topics in P-12 schools.

Beth Wassell, Ed.D. - Co-Principal Investigator

Dr. Beth Wassell is a Professor in the Department of Content Area Teacher Education. She teaches a variety of undergraduate and graduate courses related to language teaching and culturally and linguistically responsive education.

Her research emphasizes the voices of students, teachers, and families and draws on critical and sociocultural frameworks to examine individuals’ agency in reshaping the structures of teaching and teacher education in P-12 settings. Her recent projects have focused on the classroom and schooling experiences of students in urban schools, particularly emergent bilingual students, and on world language education for social justice. She uses a range of qualitative methods that privilege the voices of youth, families, and educators, and views data collection and analysis as an iterative process whereby participants can collectively generate solutions to significant issues in classrooms and schools. She is a 2019 Fulbright Core Scholar to Spain.

Dr. Wassell has published articles in journals such as Teaching and Teacher Education, Urban Education, TESOL Journal, Education and Urban Society, the Journal of Technology and Teacher Education, and Teacher Education and Practice. She is co-author of Words & Actions: Teaching World Languages through the Lens of Social Justice.  She also regularly provides consulting and professional development to public school districts.

Dr. Wassell received an Ed.D. in Teaching, Learning and Curriculum from the University of Pennsylvania, an M.A. in Spanish from the University of Central Florida, a graduate certificate in TESOL from the Pennsylvania State University, and a B.A. from Rowan University in Spanish and Secondary Education. Prior to coming to Rowan, Dr. Wassell taught Spanish as a world language at the high school level in Florida and New Jersey and English as an Additional Language to adults in Philadelphia, PA.