Professional Biography
Dr. Sonia M. Rosen joined the Independent School Teaching Residency team as the Director of Inquiry and Reflective Practice in 2019. In this role, she leads the Reflective Practice strand and serves on the program’s leadership team. Prior to her arrival at Penn GSE, Dr. Rosen was a Visiting Research Scholar in Villanova University’s Department of Education and Counseling and an Assistant Professor of Education at Arcadia University, where she taught courses in teacher education and education studies and served as the Director of Foundations and Education Studies and the Coordinator of the Urban Education Certificate Program. She earned her Ph.D. in Teaching, Learning, and Curriculum from Penn GSE in 2012.
Dr. Rosen draws from extensive professional experience in urban education and the facilitation of youth agency, as well as deep connections to independent schools. She began her career as a secondary English and social studies teacher in New York City and Philadelphia, later teaching adult education at the Community Women’s Education Project. While in graduate school, Dr. Rosen co-edited the Penn GSE Perspectives on Urban Education journal. As she moved on to teach post-secondary courses in foundations, teaching methods, urban education, and action research/teacher inquiry, Dr. Rosen’s community engagement took several forms. As a graduate student researcher, she was part of a team of adults and youth that facilitated youth participatory action research (YPAR) with members of Youth United for Change (YUC) and the Philadelphia Student Union (PSU). From 2013 to 2015 she served as the co-chair of the Urban Research-Based Action Network (Philadelphia chapter), an organization that mobilizes networks of community-engaged scholars to support social change efforts. In 2013, she joined the Philadelphia Student Union Board of Directors, serving on the board’s executive committee from 2014 to 2019 and offering ongoing support for PSU’s youth-led struggles for educational justice. She is also a member of the Caucus of Working Educators.
Dr. Rosen has published articles in the American Educational Research Journal, the International Journal of Leadership in Education, and the National Society for the Study of Education Yearbook, among others. She co-edited the book Contemporary Youth Activism: Advancing Social Justice in the United States (Praeger, 2016) with Dr. Jerusha Conner. In 2018, she was the recipient of the AERA Grassroots Community and Youth Organizing SIG’s Early Career Scholar Award.
An active member of the Arab-American community, Dr. Rosen co-founded an afterschool program for Arab-American youth in which they explored issues of race, class, and immigration status in the context of their racially and ethnically diverse public school. She has collaborated with Al-Bustan Seeds of Culture, an Arab arts education organization, to author curriculum that grapples with anti-Arab racism and xenophobia and has served as a reviewer and adviser for other similar anti-racist curricular projects.
Dr. Rosen’s research centers on youth and teacher activism, posing the question, how do youth and teachers learn to actively influence and shape their environment, and what are the implications for this exercising of agency in the context of a neoliberal policy landscape? Her scholarship has focused on the value of creating authentic opportunities for both young people and teachers to take on agentive roles in schools and across urban districts. In her work on educational policy, Dr. Rosen considers the ways grassroots stakeholders mobilize their identities to contradict neoliberal subjectivities and build collective power.
