ECOLOGICAL LEARNING PARTNERS

About Sarika S. Gupta, Ph.D., M.Ed.

I am an applied researcher, teacher educator, and learning ecologist. My work is grounded in a longstanding interest in how practitioners understand their experiences, how they develop knowledge through practice, and how the relationships and conditions surrounding them shape their work. Through Ecological Learning Partners, I bring reflective inquiry and contemplative mapping into partnerships with practitioners, learning communities, and education leaders.

I began my career as a research assistant at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) and then moved into the classroom to teach preschoolers with and without disabilities. With families and specialists, I designed learning experiences around each child's developmental and learning needs and each family's priorities. I saw how much our implementation depended on the conditions and relationships surrounding us, and I became increasingly interested in methodologies that invited practitioners and families to share their lived experiences.

My dissertation work, later published in The Qualitative Report, and my study of critical self-reflection in The New Educator grew from that interest. I wanted to understand what practitioners experienced and how creating space for reflection could make visible the knowledge they were using. That interest continued through my work in teacher preparation, where I taught courses, supervised clinical experiences, and worked with teacher candidates to examine their assumptions, decisions, and developing practices. It also shaped my applied research on preschool inclusion, educator wellbeing, teacher-child relationships, and the organizational conditions that influence how programs serve children and families.

Yogasana deepened that inquiry by challenging me to examine my own role in the experiences and environments I was studying. Through Iyengar yoga and pranayama, I became more attentive to how I was situated in the contexts I sought to understand and how my own experiences shaped what I noticed. This brought another dimension to reflective inquiry: examining the position of the person doing the observing, not only the experiences and environments being observed.

Over time, these strands of inquiry informed my development of contemplative mapping and a self-to-system approach to reflective inquiry. Using life mapping, situational mapping, and practice mapping, I work with practitioners to document and examine experience in context. We look at the relationships, histories, decisions, assumptions, and everyday conditions shaping practice, tracing connections between individual experience and the wider organizational and systemic settings in which it takes place. My approach draws on positionality-focused inquiry, ecological mapping, qualitative and mixed-methods research, participatory design, and critical self-reflection. It begins with the knowledge and strengths practitioners and programs already hold, while making room to question established patterns and consider how practice might change.

I have pursued this work across universities, early childhood programs, and public education agencies. My faculty and research appointments have included the University of Maryland, George Mason University, George Washington University, Johns Hopkins University, Hunter College, and Bank Street College of Education. In these settings, I taught and supported the preparation of early childhood and special education teachers, led and contributed to research-practice partnerships, and conducted research and evaluation with public agencies and program leaders. Projects have examined preschool inclusion and program ecologies, equitable referral practices, teacher wellbeing, teacher-child relationships, and the conditions that support implementation. I also edited First Steps to Preschool Inclusion: How to Jumpstart Your Programwide Plan and have published scholarship and practitioner writing on critical reflection, teacher preparation, inclusion, and participatory design.

My education includes a B.Sc. in Early Childhood Education, an M.Ed. in Early Childhood Special Education, and a Ph.D. in Special Education from the University of Maryland, College Park. I also completed a postdoctoral fellowship in Early Childhood Special Education Leadership and Policy at the University of Colorado Denver and am currently pursuing an M.S. in Data Science at CUNY School of Professional Studies.

Through Ecological Learning Partners, I continue to develop this work with learning communities and the institutions that support them. I use contemplative mapping to support practitioners in studying their experiences, examining how their positions and relationships shape practice, and connecting what they learn to the organizational conditions around them. The aim is to deepen understanding of practice from the inside out, while keeping in view the larger contexts in which that practice takes place.