Krystal Villanosa is a learning scientist who studies education practitioners' conceptualizations of equity, focusing on the consequences and material impacts of practitioners' beliefs and attitudes about equity on how they both design and implement programs and policies to remediate educational inequality.
Krystal takes a broad view of who education practitioners are and includes formal and informal educators across primary, secondary, and postsecondary contexts in her work as well as any individual who participates in, or contributes to, education systems such as grantmakers, policymakers, and researchers.
Krystal's scholarly work includes an analysis of the effects of COVID-19 and the Movement for Black Lives on postsecondary grantmakers' sensemaking and funding strategies as well as an examination of how museum practitioners discursively position the minoritized communities they seek to engage. Her applied work includes designing tools to help practitioners assess the presence or absence of equity in their projects, training postsecondary intermediaries to apply equity-oriented principles to the design of their programs, and evaluating education foundations' implementation of equity-centered strategies and initiatives.
Krystal received her PhD in Learning Sciences from the School of Education and Social Policy at Northwestern University.
