Nicholas LaGrassa

PhD Candidate

Nick is an education researcher, former public school teacher, and Ph.D. candidate whose work asks how schools can become more humanizing, creative, and liberatory places for young people. Their research grows out of early observations of socioeconomic inequity in public education and later experiences teaching science in systematically underresourced public schools, where relationships with students deepened their commitments to justice, care, and social change. These experiences shaped their belief that schools can either reproduce inequity or become spaces where students are recognized as full, capable, imaginative participants in their communities and world.

Their current research focuses on humanizing computer science education for elementary-aged learners. Through a long-term research-practice partnership with a local school district, Nick designs and studies creative computing experiences in which 5th grade students use code to make personally meaningful sound and music projects. Rather than treating computing as a technical skill or workforce pathway, their work explores how computing can serve as a medium for self-expression, reflection, connection, critique, and possibility.

More broadly, Nick hopes their work contributes to research on liberatory learning environments: classrooms where students’ lives are not treated as distractions from learning, but as central to what learning is for. Across their teaching, research, and partnership work, they are guided by commitments to dignity, creativity, community, justice, play, criticality, and hope.

Outside of research, they are grounded by the communities they are part of, including chosen family, the queer community, board game groups, climbing community, grassroots political and mutual aid networks, and the communities of imagination they find in speculative fiction and fantasy. These spaces shape the way they think about care, play, reflection, interdependence, and the possibility of more just futures.

Contact

Email:

nicholaslagrassa2023 at u.northwestern.edu