Simona Goldin, PhD, spent most of the 1990s working at New York City’s Coalition for the Homeless. That early career experience in policy, direct service, and supporting young people who lacked sufficient access to their social and civil right of a quality education sowed the seeds for her work going forward.

Goldin—research associate professor at EPIC (Education Policy Initiative at Carolina) and the Department of Public Policy and a faculty fellow at the UNC Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute (FPG)—says that her work at the Coalition cemented her understanding that while brilliance is equally distributed across race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status, opportunity and access are not. The desire to rectify that discrepancy informs her research and teaching career as she explores what she describes as the fundamental tension between promises made and promises broken.

Her work addressing the social injustice of how racism stands in the way of access for young children and their families takes shape in a variety of ways. This includes exploring the type of education provided to teacher candidates and learning how to support these candidates in seeing the brilliance in young people and their communities, which, she says, is often right in front of them but is invisible.

Goldin notes that people want to be teachers because they believe in children, have typically had good school experiences, and want to be part of creating those kinds of opportunities for others. “Historically we haven't done a great job in preparing students to spread educational opportunities equitably,” she says. “And so even though I never had a student come to me and say, ‘Teach me how to reproduce inequality,’ when we look at the outcomes of schooling, we know that outcomes are deeply unequal.”

She wants her students to understand histories of disinvestment when they see cracked sidewalks in a student’s neighborhood. “I help people have a more wide-angled view and then understand the world, and schooling, with that lens,” she says. Her recent work has focused on how to engage in systemically trauma-informed practice so that this tool can be used in reparative ways.

She is currently the co-principal investigator, along with FPG Faculty Fellow Iheoma Iruka, PhD, and PI Cassandra Davis, PhD, on “Weathering the storm in Freedmen’s Towns: An exploration of residents’ cultural resilience through defiance." This one-year pilot project, which has been awarded a $300,000 grant from the Department of Homeland Security, is led by Cassandra Davis, PhD, an assistant professor in UNC’s Department of Public Policy. Through a literature review, the researchers hope to better understand the tapestry of Freedmen’s Towns—spaces where formerly enslaved Black people built communities, often on inhospitable land prone to flooding, storms, and hurricanes—and their intersection with weathering disasters.

“We want to bring an assets-based lens and strengths-based frame to provide a much fuller history of how people not just survived, but thrived,” says Goldin.

Goldin explains that the term “weathering” is used by scholars to evoke the experiences of people of color and those who have been historically marginalized who weather multiple storms, both literally and figuratively. She and her colleagues are exploring the strengths, resilience, and defiance—which they use in a positive way—as well as the inheritances of the physical space. “We want to bring an assets-based lens and strengths-based frame to provide a much fuller history of how people not just survived, but thrived,” says Goldin. “These communities have rich cultural traditions, deep support for children's academic and spiritual learning and growth, and deep commitments to philanthropy and to thriving. We will engage in deeply collaborative ways with communities in Freedmen’s Towns to better understand this history as well as current life.”

Goldin, who thinks of herself as a teacher first, says she looks forward to the teaching that results from this research. That teaching will take the form of writing about what she has learned, bringing this learning into policy spaces, and sharing it at the university to better educate her students. She says that it has been exciting to teach at UNC—which she joined in 2020, after more than a decade at the University of Michigan—about schooling in a multicultural society and issues of racial justice in schools.

She is inspired by the students in her classes, including the first year students she taught last year. Six of those undergraduates collaborated with her on a research project about race and racism in U.S. public schools, which they presented at UNC’s Spring 2023 Universities Studying Slavery Conference. Two of the students spent this past summer on a research fellowship with Goldin; their submission was recently accepted to the National Association of Multicultural Education conference where the three of them will present in November.

Goldin says that being tapped as an FPG faculty fellow has enabled her to expand her scholarly community. Recently, FPG colleague Diana Fishbein, PhD, invited Goldin and two colleagues—Debi Khasnabis, PhD, from the University of Michigan and Addison Duane, PhD, from the University of California, Berkeley—to give a talk. The session, “From trauma-informed to racially just and systemic: Seeing children for their truths,” was attended by more than 100 people from throughout the country and the world. Goldin is grateful to Fishbein for providing the opportunity to have robust conversations with others thinking about trauma-informed practice from a different disciplinary area than Goldin’s.

She says that she has her best ideas when she is thinking with others and notes that the cross-disciplinary nature of FPG is a great resource for that kind of collaboration and invention. Citing her Freedman’s Towns project colleagues, she says that while she, Davis, and Iruka share similar deep commitments to addressing issues of equity, they have a wide array of disciplinary backgrounds and expertise. “That diversity of thought and experience is what makes something great,” she says. “Brilliance bubbles out of that.”

She and Iruka have been tapped to co-chair, “Cultural resilience and wealth of marginalized and minoritized communities,” a catalyst planning group of FPG Next, a three-year plan recently launched by FPG Interim Director Brian Boyd, PhD. FPG Next is exploring new strategic initiatives, how the Institute can best engage in the state, and community connections within and outside the UNC community.

Goldin eagerly anticipates being forward thinking about resilience and wealth. “Being able to spend the next year thinking about this and designing a roadmap collaboratively for what research could look like in this space is really exciting,” she says.