Nastasia Lawton-Sticklor

Nastasia joined Hiatt Center for Urban Education in 2013. Her research focuses on social, personal, and intellectual factors that can influence how students construct academic identities, particularly within the contexts of families and their historical relationships with schooling institutions, social and racial identities, and societal assumptions about students and schools.

Nastasia’s current projects include work through Hiatt’s partnership with Claremont Academy, exploring school change. She specifically works with students through conversations about how they approach and understand learning in school, how they perceive school change, and how they construct identities in the context of their school, social and family lives. She is also beginning work with families in Worcester to better understand how they build their identities and relationships within their neighborhoods and with schooling institutions. This work employs methodologies that elicit participation from community members taking part in the research such as photoethnography and group conversations and activities.

Before joining the Hiatt Center, Nastasia worked as a support person at Boston Day and Evening Academy, a Horace Mann Charter school in Roxbury, MA, whose mission is to serve students for whom traditional schools have not worked. She holds a PhD from Simmons College, and is also a graduate of Clark University, where she received a BA in Spanish and an MAT from the Adams Institute for Urban Teaching and School Practice.