Dr. Chi Nguyen is an interdisciplinary educational sociologist. Her research focuses on educational equity, social justice, and diversity in K-12 and higher education.
Her Ph.D. is in Educational Leadership and Comparative & International Education (dual-title degree) from The Pennsylvania State University. She earned a master’s degree in Education, Culture, and Society from the University of Pennsylvania and a bachelor’s degree in International Studies from Hanoi University.
Having a social justice-driven research agenda, Dr. Nguyen explores issues related to social justice leadership, both inside and outside the school—in particular, school leaders and nonprofit/community organizers—in order to develop new ways of thinking about the causes of, and solutions to, educational inequity in the United States and globally. Using ethnography, document analysis, quantitative inquiry, and mixed methods, her work investigates how educational opportunity has been distributed in different societies, racial and ethnic groups, income levels, and geographical locations. Comparing the practices of social justice leadership across cultural, national, and institutional settings, her research contributes to a more comprehensive understanding of inequity and the interventions made by educational leaders to close the achievement gap for underprivileged students.
Her recent studies investigate the impact of educational and immigrant policies on immigrant students in the United States and explore the postsecondary educational aspirations of high school students in rural and urban Vietnam.
