About

Lora Bartlett is the Department Chair and an Associate Professor in the Social Sciences Division at UC Santa Cruz, specializing in education, labor and social movements, immigration, and sociology. Her research aims to advance knowledge related to teachers’ professional commitment, conceptions of teacher professionalism, and the composition of the teacher workforce. She is particularly interested in schools as workplaces for teachers and the reciprocal relationship between educational policy and teachers’ orientations to their work. Her work seeks to unpack notions of teachers’ work held by individuals, professional communities, organizations, and policymakers, and to understand the consequences of these competing conceptions for creating and maintaining a professional workforce. Dr. Bartlett holds a Ph.D. in Education from UC Berkeley, an M.Ed. in Curriculum & Instruction with a focus on Secondary English from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and a B.A. in English Literature from the same university. Her scholarly contributions include books such as 'Going the Distance: The Teaching Profession in a Post-COVID World' and 'Migrant Teachers: How U.S. Schools import Labor.' She has received numerous awards and honors for her research, including recognition from the American Educational Research Association, the National Science Foundation, and the UCSC Excellence in Teaching Award. Her work has been featured in various publications, articles, and public discussions, especially focusing on the impact of COVID-19 on teachers’ work, teacher retention, and educational equity.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Computer Science
• Engineering
• Medicine
• Pedagogy
• Geography
• Psychology
• Social Science
• Mathematics education

Selected publications

• System Responses to Crisis: Lessons for Educational Leadership From the COVID-19 Pandemic

  2025-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• The Globalization of the Teacher Workforce

  2025-08-27

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  International teacher recruitment and migration disrupts notions of teachers as rooted in local communities and motivated largely by intrinsic rewards. Extrinsic rewards are foregrounded and the scope of the labor market expands as more economically powerful nations address staffing shortfalls via international recruitment from less economically powerful countries. This chapter maps teacher migration pathways, attending to rationales for international recruitment, detailing teacher motivations to migrate, and analyzing how globalization is shaped by and reshaping conceptions of the teaching profession. It situates this globalization of the teacher workforce in a sociohistorical context of labor market boundaries and teaching as feminized and low status labor, drawing on labor queue theory as a frame for understanding the orientation to the global market. It concludes by identifying future areas for research on teacher migration and its relationship to larger issues of teacher supply, occupational working conditions, and workforce sustainability.

  PublisherDOI

• System Responses to Crisis: Lessons for Educational Leadership from the COVID-19 Pandemic

  2025-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Specifying Hybrid Models of Teachers’ Work During COVID-19

  Educational Researcher · 2022 · 35 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Mathematics education
  • Computer Science

  The term “hybrid” emerged as a common descriptor of pandemic-modified schooling configurations. Yet this umbrella term insufficiently captures the variations among hybrid models, particularly as it pertains to the structure of teacher workdays and related workload demands. Drawing on qualitative research documenting K–12 U.S. teachers’ experience teaching during COVID-19, this brief introduces and explicates three terms specifying structural hybrid models—parallel, alternating, and blended—and their implications for teachers’ work. Differentiating among the models facilitates future analysis of the implications of hybrid schooling for teacher and student experience. Initial analysis indicates teachers experienced one model, blended hybrid, as more challenging than others. This teacher perception highlights the need to discern among the three hybrid models more closely when analyzing schools’ responses to the pandemic. Differentiating among hybrid models may prompt future analysis of hybrid schooling for teacher workload and student learning.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Teachers' work in the context of COVID-19

  Elsevier eBooks · 2022 · 2 citations

  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Pedagogy
  PublisherDOI

• New or Review: Understanding Variations in U.S. Teacher Curriculum Coverage During COVID-19 and the Implications for Equity

  Proceedings of the 2021 AERA Annual Meeting · 2021-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Not Remotely Familiar: How COVID-19 is Reshaping Teachers’ Work and the Implications for Teacher Education

  Northwest Journal of Teacher Education · 2020 · 11 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Pedagogy

  The COVID-19 pandemic forced the teacher workforce into distance teaching essentially overnight. This educational migration, necessitated by the public health emergency, has dramatically altered and diversified the realities of teachers’ working lives and the conditions in which they teach. This changing environment has important implications for teacher education. This paper presents five assumptions about teacher education and the uncertain work of preparing culturally responsive and social –justice oriented teachers for a rapidly evolving teaching environment. We seek to animate questions and concerns about teacher education in the context of COVID-19 and the implications for social justice teacher preparation.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The Lived Experience of Practical Nursing Faculty Who Have Transitioned to a Concept-Based Curriculum as Required by the North Carolina Nursing Curriculum Revision Project

  Scholars Crossing (Liberty University) · 2019-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  The purpose of this hermeneutic phenomenological qualitative study was to understand the lived experience of practical nursing (PN) faculty who have transitioned from a systems-based curriculum to a concept-based curriculum (CBC) as required by the North Carolina nursing revision project. In recent years, nursing education transformation has been a topic of interest among government organizations, the healthcare system, nursing leaders and organizations, and faculty of nursing programs. However, literature specifically on how faculty perceive and transition into these new innovative methods of teaching is minimal. The participants in the study were PN faculty employed by North Carolina community colleges and members of the North Carolina Council of Practical Nurse Educators (NCCPNE). The design used van Manens’s hermeneutic phenomenological approach to gain an understanding of the lived experiences of nurse faculty who have transitioned from a systems-based curriculum to a CBC. Additionally, Schlossberg’s transition theory was used to describe the experience of nurse faculty during the transition to a CBC. Data collection included individual interviews, a focus group interview, and self-reflective journaling. Data analysis consisted of reading and re-reading each of the transcripts and journal documents to discover the codes, themes, and categories. The results of this research emerged from the experiences of 12 PN faculty who transitioned to a CBC. The primary factor that facilitated the transition was support from peers and coworkers. Faculty often depended on others who had experienced the transition for affirmation and coworkers for involvement and support in the process.

  Publisher

• Seeking to Stay

  2019-04-11

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  This qualitative longitudinal research follows thirty science and math teachers across five cohorts from their preparation program into the early career years to better understand the conditions of professional retention and attrition. Findings indicate that these teachers exhibit little agency or discernment in the job search process and typically accept the first position offered with little to no information about the school, students, colleagues, or teaching assignment. This decision has profound consequences for teacher turnover. Retention differences exist between teachers who choose their schools with robust information and those with very limited information. Furthermore, how and why teachers choose schools have profound consequences for their professional success and their persistence in high-need schools. This research study contends that professional retention of math and science teachers in high-need schools starts with teacher articulation of workplace priorities and is coupled with a rich information hiring process.

  PublisherDOI

• Taking What They Can Get: Job Search and School Selection among Beginning Math and Science Teachers.

  AERA Online Paper Repository · 2017-04-29

  articleSenior author
  Publisher

Frequent coauthors

• Alisun Thompson

  University of Puget Sound

  4 shared

• Judith Warren Little

  University of California, Berkeley

  4 shared

• Lina Darwich

  Lewis & Clark College

  2 shared

• Lisa Johnson

  Brigham Young University

  1 shared

• Emily Sugarman

  1 shared

• Lisa S. Johnson

  1 shared

• Ilana Seidel Horn

  Vanderbilt University

  1 shared

• Riley Collins

  University of California, Santa Cruz

  1 shared

Awards & honors

• Recognized for Outstanding Research on Teachers & Teaching a…
• Educator's Room 2025 Top International Educator Award
• Sloan Center for Work and Family Post doctoral Fellow
• Atlantic Public Policy Fellow
• Labor Employment Research Fund Grant