Rethinking “Damage-Centered” Research and Individual Solutions: Cultural Humility as a Framework to Increase Student Diversity in Undergraduate STEM Departments

This study examines data from a participatory research action study on the experiences of underrepresented students in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) fields at a small liberal arts college in the United States. Our analysis aims to move away from the framework that students needed to be taught how to cope with and overcome the challenges they faced in their STEM experiences, including racism and sexism. Instead, we propose a stronger focus on how to end racist, sexist, and other forms of discrimination. We draw on the concept of “cultural humility” as a concrete framework that professors, departments, and institutions can use to approach their work of changing practices, policies, and systems. Results discuss specific strategies that educators and institutions can use to promote a cultural humility framework as one way to create anti-oppressive and equitable classrooms, departments, and institutions

Bending time: lessons from critical, community-engaged, liberatory research

In this article, we use the framework of chronopolitics and racialized time to explore our experiences as professors of color at predominantly white institutions who strive to do emancipatory, community-driven research. Our shared work as organizers for Education for Liberation Minnesota (EdLibMN), a grassroots organization working to bring together various constituencies in Minnesota to organize for educational justice, led us to think together about chronopolitics as a framework to understand how our scholarly commitments to social transformation and liberatory education impact our labor and teaching practices at our institutions. This framework allows us to examine our relationships with communities in our individual research and advocacy contexts as well as in our shared work as organizers for EdLibMN. In particular, we explore how the urgency and timeline of our community-based advocacy work and the rhythms and improvisation of participatory action research are juxtaposed with the surveillance and evaluation of our labor and the urgency of “tenure clocks” at our institutions. We end by discussing our own transformational learning through our collaborations with community researchers and organizers. We speculate about the possibilities of bending time–the chronopolitics of collective struggle and joy–that allows us to focus on building relationships as a central tenet of emancipatory research practices and to ensure our own health and wellbeing as scholar-activists of color

Indian American Adolescents: Racial Identity and Scholastic Achievement

The author examines to broad issues: racial identity and scholastic achievement, focusing on the experiences of Indian American adolescents and theories about minority schooling and differential group achievement levels. The author delves into the intersection of these issues and what they reveal about identity development and schooling. The author discovered that these students thought racial identity and education were determined by the immediate social context in which they found themselves in. This social context includes not only the racial demographics of their neighborhoods and schools, but their more immediate social settings. Methodology includes a literature review and interviews of Indian American adolescents

Difference matters: Race, immigration and national identity at a diverse, urban public high school

Based on two years of ethnographic research during 2005 and 2007, this dissertation examines how the intersections of racial identities and discourses, immigration patterns and enduring narratives of American meritocracy inform the everyday interactions of students and teachers at a diverse, urban, public high school in the United States. The study was conducted at a time when questions about immigration reform and national identity were being hotly debated across the country and when questions about whether all Americans have equal access to the rights and privileges of citizenship took center stage (at least, momentarily) during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in the Gulf Coast region. Located in an urban school district in the eastern part of the U.S., the high school had a multiracial student body and a large immigrant student population that reflects the current demographics of public schools nationally, where approximately 40% of students are non-White and 20% are from immigrant families. This made it an ideal location to examine how public schools are operating as sites of nation-building at the intersection between processes of racialization and historically significant patterns of immigration in which new immigrants are largely non-White. Rather than considering such processes as separate phenomena, as most existing studies do, I explore the dynamic intersections between racialization, immigration and national identity, all of which pose important challenges for American public education and society. Moving beyond studies that concentrate on one ethnic or racial group, this study focuses on social interactions among those students marked as “White,” U.S.-born racial minorities, and new immigrant students from various national backgrounds and between these “diverse” students and their mostly U.S.-born, White teachers

Difference matters: Race, immigration and national identity at a diverse, urban public high school

Based on two years of ethnographic research during 2005 and 2007, this dissertation examines how the intersections of racial identities and discourses, immigration patterns and enduring narratives of American meritocracy inform the everyday interactions of students and teachers at a diverse, urban, public high school in the United States. The study was conducted at a time when questions about immigration reform and national identity were being hotly debated across the country and when questions about whether all Americans have equal access to the rights and privileges of citizenship took center stage (at least, momentarily) during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in the Gulf Coast region. Located in an urban school district in the eastern part of the U.S., the high school had a multiracial student body and a large immigrant student population that reflects the current demographics of public schools nationally, where approximately 40% of students are non-White and 20% are from immigrant families. This made it an ideal location to examine how public schools are operating as sites of nation-building at the intersection between processes of racialization and historically significant patterns of immigration in which new immigrants are largely non-White. Rather than considering such processes as separate phenomena, as most existing studies do, I explore the dynamic intersections between racialization, immigration and national identity, all of which pose important challenges for American public education and society. Moving beyond studies that concentrate on one ethnic or racial group, this study focuses on social interactions among those students marked as “White,” U.S.-born racial minorities, and new immigrant students from various national backgrounds and between these “diverse” students and their mostly U.S.-born, White teachers