For her TC dissertation, Tran Nguyen Templeton (Ed.D. ’18) equipped 11 preschoolers with digital cameras, believing that “people being studied should have an equal hand in designing research about them — and who knows better about childhood than young children?”  

At age 3, Templeton escaped with her family from South Vietnam in a shrimp boat. In public school in Houston, she recalls, “no one was asking me what I felt.” Even after winning a first-grade writing award, she was placed in a remedial English as a Second Language class.  

She’s since helped found a special education school in Guatemala and won a $20,000 American Educational Research Association minority dissertation fellowship. As a tenure-track Assistant Professor at the University of North Texas this fall, Templeton hopes to “change the way we teach children by giving them more agency in what they learn and how they learn.” — Robert Florida