Alli Brandon ’27 is using her personal experience, and Elon education, to help educators better work with students experiencing homelessness in North Carolina.
It wasn’t until Alli Brandon ’27 took a sociology course on homelessness during her first year at Elon that she realized she had experienced homelessness herself, something that is now shaping her undergraduate Teaching Fellows research.
“The class told us about ‘doubled-up homelessness,’ where you’re living with family or others, and you’re living under a roof, but it’s not your home. I had no idea that was a thing,” said Brandon, an elementary education major from Hastings, Michigan.
Now, Brandon is working with Jill McSweeney, assistant director of the Center for the Advancement of Teaching and Learning, and assistant professor of wellness, on a project examining the ways that North Carolina elementary school teachers and homeless liaisons are collaborating to help students experiencing homelessness.
According to Brandon, each North Carolina school district has a homeless education liaison responsible for managing resources, funding and teacher training. Brandon and McSweeney are working with the North Carolina Homeless Education Program to survey and interview teachers across the state to improve the training educators receive on supporting students experiencing homelessness.
“A liaison can be the best liaison in the whole world, and they can’t be with every student in the district supporting their needs every day and seeing their day-to-day life like a teacher does,” Brandon said. “But in North Carolina and nationwide, most teachers are never trained by their liaison just because there’s not enough time. They have no idea about all the funding that is available to them, and instead they’re spending hundreds of dollars every year out of their own pocket to buy food, clothing and hygiene products.”
Brandon will be presenting her work at the Summer Undergraduate Research Experience (SURE) presentations on July 23 in the Snow Family Grand Atrium. Students apply to the annual research symposium, which usually takes place during the summer before the junior or senior year. It is one of several opportunities for students to showcase undergraduate research, a cornerstone of the Elon education and one of the five Elon Experiences. Students are also able to present scholarly work at the Spring Undergraduate Research Forum.
Working with McSweeney, Brandon says, has been a transformative experience. McSweeney’s research area focuses on college student experiences on campus and in the classroom, along with a broad focus on teaching and learning. But Brandon says, despite not focusing specifically on K-12 education, McSweeney was excited to work with her.
“I cannot imagine what my undergraduate experience would be like if Jill McSweeney was not my mentor,” Brandon said. “She taught me how to do research because Teaching Fellows are not only expected to do research, but our course schedules are so rigorous that we can’t take a methods course. So, she was helping me with my research, teaching me how to do research, and what research methods were, and also showing me how to navigate higher education as a system.”
As Brandon prepares to graduate next spring, she hopes to continue her education at Elon through the Teach for Alamance program. The Elon scholarship program provides full tuition remission and a small stipend to teacher-candidate graduates of the Dr. Jo Watts Williams School of Education who wish to enroll in Elon’s Master of Education program. This project, she hopes, will also help her future colleagues in the Alamance-Burlington School System.
“I wanted to make sure that I was doing research that would have an impact that reached the people that it was about and not just the academic community,” Brandon said. “I know that I can’t redesign legal systems, and I can’t fix all of the state’s problems that are causing homelessness to happen. I wanted to see what the most is that I could do with undergraduate research to make sure that more students are supported.”