Previous GRAs: Future Drs. Ruby Bafu and Curtis O’Dwyer

Despite being a core context for graduate student learning and socialization, doctoral-level coursework remains undertheorized in higher education literature. Classrooms are important because they operate as sites where students develop enduring frames to support racial meaning-making, or “the interpretation of racial differences” (Omi & Winant, 1994, p. 10). Scholars have documented how adherence to Eurocentric epistemologies and whitewashed curriculum impoverishes knowledge production and entrenches a hegemonic university. Yet, few scholars have empirically studied how racial meanings are (re)produced through faculty’s use of various racialized tools and artifacts (e.g., syllabi, course curriculum, knowledge from their disciplinary contexts, their own subjectivity) in classroom practice and its implications for learning and socialization in doctoral education.

This project is a comparative case study of how faculty and students collectively engage to (re)produce, resist, or reimagine racial meanings in three doctoral-level courses at an R-1, historically white institution: a sociology course on race, racism, and resistance in Latin America, a political science course on international law and politics, and a foundations course in the learning sciences. Using nine interviews with instructors, six interviews and four focus groups with students, and 64 hours of classroom observations across one academic term, this study analyzes the racialized dimensions of faculty-student interactions, pedagogical forms of mediation, and curricular design to uncover how racial meaning-making mediates learning in doctoral education. Across the cases, I uncovered a) how race can become salient to classroom interaction in a variety of disciplines and around a variety of formal learning goals, b) how racialization of curriculum and pedagogy is not a question, but a given, and c) how a professor’s actions mediate racial meaning-making. Overall, this project provides a novel perspective to a growing literature on teaching and learning in doctoral coursework and graduate student socialization, with a particular commitment to antiracist and equity-minded pedagogical praxis.

Collaboration with Drs. Heather N. McCambly (University of Pittsburgh) and Román Liera (Montclair State University)

This project examines how faculty cluster hiring does or does not act as a catalyst toward systemic change to faculty diversity at the department and college levels, with particular attention to disciplinary variation across STEM and non-STEM disciplines.

Collaboration with Dr. Roman Liera, Montclair State University

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Co-PI: Future Dr. Martha Kakooza, Morgan State University

Personal statements are an important site of study for scholars interested in destabilizing inequity in higher education, given their use in holistic admissions processes. Many empirical studies focus on personal statements’ linguistic and rhetorical form, function, and organization. Yet scholars often elude the ways structures of oppression, like misogynoir, become salient for those who write and evaluate personal statements. Through in-depth analyses of 56 personal statements and 19 semi-structured narrative interviews, this project animates how Black women and femmes (BWFs) interpret and respond to racialized and gendered discourses about their merit in constructing personal statements during the Ph.D. admissions process.

Previous GRAs: Dr. Symone Campbell and Future Drs. Akua Nkansah-Amankra, Asya Spears, Esteban Alcala, and Ruby Bafu

Drawing inspiration from scholarship on critical digital literacies, equity-mindedness, and educational technology in postsecondary teaching and learning, we developed the Equity-First Framework for Digital Courseware (EFF; Rodgers, 2022). The EFF details six dimensions that are central to cultivating expansive, equity-minded learning in online modalities: (a) interactivity and relationality, (b) individuality and differentiation, (c) critical consciousness-raising, (d) culturally responsive and student-centered pedagogy, (e) data-driven decision making, and (f) accessibility and full participation. Through this work, we offer tangible tools to interrogate, un/learn, and reimagine all that learning in the digital space must become to transform online learning environments into sites of self-determination, agency, and empowerment for students of color and poverty-affected students.

This project was generously supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.