Lara Margaret Beaty

Contact Us

Room: M-Building, M-204
Phone: (718) 482-5940
naturalsci@lagcc.cuny.edu

Monday- Thursday  9 a.m.- 5 p.m.

Education

  • Ph.D. in Developmental Psychology, CUNY Graduate Center
  • M.Phil. in Developmental Psychology, CUNY Graduate Center
  • B.A. in Psychology, Columbia University

Areas of Expertise or Research

  • Developmental psychology

About

Dr. Lara Margaret Beaty has worked full time at LaGuardia since 2008 and has been a Program Director since 2016. She earned her M.Phil. and Ph.D. in developmental psychology at the CUNY Graduate Center under the mentorship of Dr. Joseph Glick, and a B.A. in psychology at Columbia University. Her research focuses on student development through work with the Student Experiences Research Group (SERG) and has focused on student development in high school video-production programs, assessment of a math-reform project, and a Holocaust narrative project. Her research has informed her work as Program Director, initiating and supporting initiatives in the college in addition to SERG, such as development of Open Educational Resources, student conferences, a psychology club, and first-year seminars.

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Dr. Beaty has sought to investigate the processes of learning and development by creating academic activities with students, staff, and faculty. SERG has been the main focus of this endeavor as a research project, having involved over 150 students in undergraduate research since 2011. The project has centered around the college retention problem, asking questions such as, “How do student experiences make continuing to graduation difficult?” and “What makes progress more likely?” SERG has shared student work at conferences at LaGuardia, other locations in CUNY, the New England Educational Research Organization, and the Eastern Psychological Association.

Dr. Beaty has presented data created by SERG but has mostly focused on student development within SERG. The project has taken up the challenges of nurturing agency in a student body that tends toward passivity, seeing the ability to make choices as an outcome of development and one that needs support, and viewing contradictions as the force behind developmental process, engaging both dialectics and dialogic processes as essential to higher education.

The challenges of encouraging the participation of a broad spectrum of community college students, not only the best, has guided many decisions, such as seeking flexibility and avoiding institutional structures, allowing students to participate across semesters and as alumni of the college. Questions about learning and development with community college students has led to analysis that seeks the unevenness in development, and the role of trauma and emotional development has increasingly become central SERG activities.

Select publications by Dr. Beaty include:

  • Beaty, L. M. (in preparation). Breaking the boundaries of emotional experiences: Creating a cultural-historical perspective of trauma with the Student Experiences Research Group. For a special issue of Learning, Culture, and Social Interaction.
  • Beaty, L., Blagojevic, B., de Leeuw, N., and Hadani, J. (2021). Binary mindsets in intergroup conflicts and pathways to peace. Peace Review: A Journal of Social Justice, https://doi.org/10.1080/10402659.2021.1953780
  • Beaty, L. M. (2016). Making visible the artifacts of academic culture. In Transit: The LaGuardia Journal on Teaching and Learning, 7, 9-28.
  • Beaty, L. M. (2015). Dialectal and dialogic processes in development: Toward an understanding of community college experiences. Annual Review of Critical Psychology, 12. Available at https://thediscourseunit.files.wordpress.com/2016/05/11beaty.pdf.
  • Beaty, L. M. (2013). Confronting school’s contradictions with video: Youth’s need of agency for ontological development. Outlines: Critical Practice Studies, 14(1), 4-25. Available at http://ojs.statsbiblioteket.dk/index.php/outlines/index

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