Background
Kari-Lee Grant, PhD is the President and CEO of Center for Research and Equitable Development. She has a Doctor of Philosophy, specializing in Educational Leadership (Concordia University Chicago) and a Certificate of Advanced Study in Educational Leadership and Administration (The College of Saint Rose, Albany, NY). She also has a Master of Arts and a Bachelor of Arts degree (both from Queens College, City University of New York). She has New York State Certifications as a Teacher of English to Speakers of Other Languages, School Attendance Teacher, School Building Leader, and School District Leader as well as a Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in the Workplace Certificate from the University of South Florida Muma College of Business. Dr. Grant developed the CRED4ED™ Framework for Transformative Praxis, which incorporates four components to support culturally responsive-sustaining education initiatives: emancipate, educate, elucidate, and evaluate.
Experience
Dr. Grant is an experienced educator, who has taught at the elementary, middle, high, community college, and college levels. She served as a high school assistant principal/coordinator at Nassau BOCES Regional Summer School and an administrative intern with building-level and district-level school administrators. During her career as a middle school teacher, she served in many roles, including Building Equity Officer and a member of the Excellence through Equity in Education Committee at the school district level. As an adjunct assistant professor of literacy education research classes at the graduate level, Dr. Grant instructed new and veteran teachers of core and non-core area subjects how to conduct action research. She was the faculty advisor of action research projects, which were conducted in Long Island and New York City schools. Dr. Grant has also informally mentored doctoral students.
With an extensive knowledge about the experiences and needs of various groups of students, Dr. Grant has a proven track record of success as a multi-dimensional educator of students including English Language Learners/Multilingual Learners (ELLs/MLLs) who speak over 40 different languages, immigrant students who are not identified as ELLs/MLLs (including students from countries where English is the medium of instruction), students with different abilities, displaced students, students in military families, students with incarcerated parents, students of various religious backgrounds, and students with various gender identities.
Professional Engagements
Dr. Grant engages in several professional organizations geared toward education research and equitable development. At the invitation of the New York Stated Education Department and MetriTech, Inc., she has served on several New York State English as a Second Language Achievement Test (NYSESLAT) committees. Dr. Grant has presented at local, national, and international linguistics and education research conferences. She presented at a Society for Caribbean Linguistics Biennial Conference in Jamaica, a Complicated Conversations Series workshop at Queens College (CUNY), an AERA Annual Meeting in New York City, and a WERA Focal Meeting in Japan. She also served as a session chair for the WERA 2019 Focal Meeting in Japan and a session chair for the 2021 AERA Virtual Annual Meeting. In 2022, she presented at the Long Island Teacher Institute, which is a Long Island Regional Bilingual Education Resource Network (L. I. RBERN) conference. Dr. Grant has peer reviewed journal submissions for the Caribbean Journal of Education (CJE), and she has peer reviewed conference submissions for WERA and AERA.