Jane Wyche-Jonas is a humanities specialist at Environmental Charter Schools (ECS). ECS is a network comprised of two middle schools and two high schools serving students in the south Los Angeles and South Bay communities. Jane supports sites on moving forward literacy initiatives through teacher collaboration, instructional coaching, and leadership development.
Jane enrolled in the program because she felt that she was at a pivotal moment in her career—she needed to reflect on how her strengths and interests served education so that she could consider future roles that would allow her to have the greatest impact over time. She saw LMU’s Ed.D. Program as a learning space—for her to access resources to examine her own critical consciousness, to add to her existing research, to collaborate with other educators, and to grow as a transformational leader.
Jane’s dissertation is titled, "Good Intentions Are Not Enough: An Examination of Service-Learning on a Public Charter High School Campus". In order to gain a holistic understanding of the service-learning program, including past and present decision-making processes, an exploration of the experiences of multiple stakeholders (former and current staff, alumni focus groups, and community partners) was conducted. This included an examination of the logics at play, such as structural design, decision-making processes, and power dynamics. In addition, she utilized a decolonizing lens to examine her own positionality through autoethnographic data.
Freire describes praxis as "reflection and action upon the world in order to transform it.” According to Jane, LMU’s Ed.D. Program provided her the opportunity to do just that. Her time in the program gave her the space to grapple with her own thinking and reflect on her practice, while also equipping her with the tools and collaborators to take action on her campus and in her community.