The Educational Policy Studies & Practice Department and the College of Education are thrilled to welcome three new colleagues into the Educational Leadership & Policy program (in alphabetical order): Dr. Joonkil Ahn, Dr. Taylor Enoch-Stevens, and Dr. Ruth M. López. These exceptional scholars are incredible assets to the Department, the College, the University of Arizona, and the community as a whole, and will, we know, significantly enhance the work of our department, our students, and the communities we serve. We encourage you to welcome them and to engage them and their work.
Dr. Joonkil Ahn is an Assistant Professor of Educational Leadership & Policy. He earned his Ph.D. in Education Policy, Organization, and Leadership from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and subsequently served as an Assistant Professor at the University of North Dakota. Before entering academia, he was a high school English teacher and a teacher leader in South Korea for 17 years.
Dr. Ahn’s research centers around leadership as an organizational quality and its impact on teachers and students. He problematizes educators’ deficit-based perspectives about students and is interested in revealing specific practices where these perspectives manifest in teaching and leadership. He also problematizes deficit perspectives about teachers and examines leadership roles to facilitate teacher agency and collaboration with colleagues to maximize organizational capacity for enhancing equity. Dr. Ahn is versed in the use of large-scale data sets, network analysis, and advanced statistical methods.
As a course instructor, Dr. Ahn enjoys presenting himself as a facilitator of student learning instead of a distributor of knowledge. Instead of simply assigning and grading student work, he always encourages students to share their early drafts for review so that they can experience growth and strengthen their analyses and arguments.
Dr. Ahn embraces the rich diversity within Educational Leadership & Policy, the Department, and College. He commented, “I am a collaborator. I would love to work with others to celebrate this diversity and show our students how we walk our talk in promoting diversity and equity.”
Dr. Taylor Enoch-Stevens is one of just four University of Arizona President’s Postdoctoral Fellows in the 2023-24 cohort, and the only President’s Postdoctoral Fellow within the College of Education. Dr. Enoch-Stevens earned her Ph.D. from the University of Southern California in Urban Education Policy. She also holds a B.A. in Sociology from Dartmouth College. Prior to earning her Ph.D., she taught 5th grade in Little Rock, Arkansas.
Dr. Enoch-Stevens’ research examines racially equitable policy design and implementation in K-12 education with a focus on resource allocation, as well as the role of institutional agents in shaping racially equitable K-12 environments. Supported by a Mellon Mays Dissertation Grant, she recently studied the reallocation of school district dollars previously used for School Resource Officers (SROs), or school police, in order to determine how funds were reallocated, the conditions shaping those efforts, and the racial equity implications of these policy decisions. Currently, as a President’s Postdoctoral Fellow, Dr. Enoch-Stevens is examining the extent to which race has shaped school funding policies more broadly in order to advance the theoretical conversation on race and school finance. Her work is published in peer-reviewed journals such as Urban Education, Education Evaluation and Policy Analysis, American Behavioral Scientist, and others.
Dr. Ruth M. López is an Associate Professor of Educational Leadership & Policy. She earned her Ph.D. in Educational Foundations, Policy, and Practice at the University of Colorado Boulder, where she was an Ofelia Miramontes Scholar and a recipient of the AERA Minority Dissertation Fellowship. She also holds B.A.s in Mexican American Studies and Spanish at The University of Texas at Austin. She was previously a Senior Research Associate at the Annenberg Institute for School Reform at Brown University and an Assistant Professor at the University of Houston. Prior to earning her Ph.D., she worked as a college outreach counselor in Houston schools and a program coordinator of the Colorado Diversity Initiative at the University of Colorado Boulder. Dr. López is proud of her multiple identities as the daughter of immigrants from El Salvador and Mexico, first-generation college student/graduate, and mother scholar, to name a few. These identities inform her commitment to educational equity and college access.
In her research, Dr. López addresses the social and political contexts that students of color navigate across K-12 schools and their access to higher education. Her research examines: 1) the intersections of education and immigration policies, 2) culturally responsive education and family engagement, and 3) college access for Latinx and immigrant students. From a theoretical and methodological perspective, her work is informed by Critical Race Theory, Chicana Feminist Epistemology, and Critical Discourse Analysis. At the University of Arizona, Dr. López is interested in engaging in more research about immigration policy and its intersections with education.
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