My name is Rebecca (Becca) Rosen. I am a Ph.D. candidate at the Warner School of Education and Human Development at the University of Rochester, which is located in Rochester, New York.

Before I came to the Warner School of Education, I worked as an educator and teacher educator at the Guggenheim Museum and The National September 11 Memorial Museum. I received my bachelor’s degree from Bates College in Lewiston, ME where I majored  in Art & Visual Culture and completed a minor in Educational Studies.

This research is being conducted for my Ph.D. dissertation study. My research focuses on how secondary social studies teachers make decisions when teaching about difficult historical content. Specifically, I am interested in better understanding how emotions (both students’ and teachers’) interact with teachers’ decision-making processes when teaching about difficult historical content.

I am a member of the American Educational Research Association (AERA) and the National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS) College and University Faculty Assembly (CUFA). At the Warner School of Education, I am a committee member of the Doctoral Student Peer Support Association (DSPSA).

My graduate advisor is Dr. Kevin Meuwissen. Dr. Meuwissen is the Chair of the Teaching and Curriculum Program and the Director of Secondary Social Studies Teacher Preparation at the Warner School of Education. His research and teaching focus on how young people learn about politics and on helping social studies teachers develop pedagogical agency as they interact with political, cultural, and school-institutional influences on their practices.

Since joining the Warner School in 2009, Dr. Meuwissen has participated in curriculum development and professional learning projects related to historical investigation and political thinking at local, regional, state, and national levels, including the C3 Teachers inquiries and several U.S. Department of Education Teaching American History grant programs. In recent design-based research sponsored by the Spencer Foundation, Dr. Meuwissen co-designed and co-taught a unit of study focused on how people use socially and culturally motivated “shortcuts” to engage in political reasoning, discourse, and activity. That research drew upon novel elicitation tasks encouraging teenagers to think aloud, and together, about the links between identity and partisanship and the nature and consequences of ideological polarization when discussing complex, controversial issues.

Dr. Meuwissen is a member of the American Educational Research Association (AERA); the National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS) College and University Faculty Assembly (CUFA); and the New York State Council for the Social Studies (NYSCSS). He is an editorial board member for Theory & Research in Social Education and a past winner of the NCSS Exemplary Research Award.


If you would like to participate in the first phase of the study, please click on this link to the survey.