Penn GSE News
GSE Announces First Round of Institutional Grants for Faculty Research on the Study of Race in Education
More than a generation after the end of the modem civil rights movement, social critics, reformers and scholars remain concerned over the seemingly intractable racial divisions that mark American society.
By all too many measures, minority children lag behind their white counterparts - in education, for example, half as many black students are placed in gifted programs as whites, African-American and Latino fourth-graders are approximately two years behind white peers in reading and math, and twice as many white students are earning BA degrees.
To help ensure that the Penn GSE's research addresses the intersection of race and education, Dean Susan Fuhrman recently announced a Faculty Research Fund for the Study of Race in Education. The School is dedicating seed funding ($100,000 per year for the next three years) to collaborative faculty research projects that focus on teaching, learning, and the context of schooling for African-American and Latino students in American urban schools or institutions of higher education. Teams of Penn GSE faculty were invited to apply for grant funding in February and a selection committee of scholars external to GSE made the first annual awards in early April.
This year's grantees are Dr. Stanton Wortham (with Drs. Kathy Howard, Nancy Hornberger, and Vivian Gadsden) for "Imagining New Americans: Schooling Immigrant Mexican Youth in the Latino Diaspora," and Dr. Marybeth Gasman (with Drs. Laura Perna and Susan Yoon) for "Increasing the Representation of African-American Women in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math Education: The Role of Historically Black Colleges and Universities." Grantees will begin their research projects this summer and will present reports on the ongoing research in open colloquia at GSE next year.
"GSE faculty, students and staff share an intensifying concern about race-based issues in American schooling," says Fuhrman. "This grant fund is one way that we can inform the issues and debates with high-quality research and foster increased dialogue across our school. The idea is to give promising lines of inquiry a sound starting point."
Contact: Tom Kecskemethy, 215-898-9642, thomask@gse.upenn.edu
By all too many measures, minority children lag behind their white counterparts - in education, for example, half as many black students are placed in gifted programs as whites, African-American and Latino fourth-graders are approximately two years behind white peers in reading and math, and twice as many white students are earning BA degrees.
To help ensure that the Penn GSE's research addresses the intersection of race and education, Dean Susan Fuhrman recently announced a Faculty Research Fund for the Study of Race in Education. The School is dedicating seed funding ($100,000 per year for the next three years) to collaborative faculty research projects that focus on teaching, learning, and the context of schooling for African-American and Latino students in American urban schools or institutions of higher education. Teams of Penn GSE faculty were invited to apply for grant funding in February and a selection committee of scholars external to GSE made the first annual awards in early April.
This year's grantees are Dr. Stanton Wortham (with Drs. Kathy Howard, Nancy Hornberger, and Vivian Gadsden) for "Imagining New Americans: Schooling Immigrant Mexican Youth in the Latino Diaspora," and Dr. Marybeth Gasman (with Drs. Laura Perna and Susan Yoon) for "Increasing the Representation of African-American Women in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math Education: The Role of Historically Black Colleges and Universities." Grantees will begin their research projects this summer and will present reports on the ongoing research in open colloquia at GSE next year.
"GSE faculty, students and staff share an intensifying concern about race-based issues in American schooling," says Fuhrman. "This grant fund is one way that we can inform the issues and debates with high-quality research and foster increased dialogue across our school. The idea is to give promising lines of inquiry a sound starting point."
Contact: Tom Kecskemethy, 215-898-9642, thomask@gse.upenn.edu