Thandeka Chapman, UW-Milwaukee
Enilda Delgado, UW-La Crosse
Raquel Farmer-Hinton, UW-Milwaukee
Cherene Sherrard-Johnson, UW-Madison
Thandeka Chapman, Department of Curriculum and Instruction, UW-Milwaukee - "Small High School Reform: How Milwaukee Reform Teams Are Building New Schools."
In order to better serve the parents and students in Milwaukee Public
Schools (MPS), the district has committed to starting sixty small schools by
2008. MPS currently serves a high school population that is 60% African
American, 5% Asian American, 17% Latino/a, 16% white and 1% Native
American. Among the many calls for reform of urban systems is the call to
dismantle the historical structure of these institutional giants and explore new ways
to provide quality secondary education that meets the requirements of diverse
students. The reforms aimed towards the restructuring of high schools are multifaceted
and include not only a shift from large student populations to smaller
groups and intimate settings, but also new approaches to curriculum and
school planning that are more closely aligned with the needs of urban students.
Overall, small schools appear to foster better student-teacher relationships,
improve school climate, promote higher achievement levels for students of color
and low-income students, increase teacher job satisfaction, and minimize
student truancy (G. Bracey, 2001; Darling- Hammond, Ancess, & Ort, 2002;
Lee, Smerdon, Alfred-Liro, & Brown, 2000; Steifel, Berne, Latarola, &
Fruchter, 2000).
Dr. Chapman's research project will
examine how Milwaukee's small school teams create and implement small school
curricula that reflect the urban student population. She will concentrate on how
the teams' collective vision for the school translates into a learning environment
that takes into account the racial, economic, cultural, and language background
of the student in the urban setting. This study will be used to pilot a
larger project that continues to look at culturally relevant pedagogy in small
schools and its effects on student achievement, retention, and attitudes
towards schooling. It may also serve as a pilot for large, interdisciplinary studies
that focus on the restructuring of Milwaukee's public high schools, closing the
achievement gap, UW-Milwaukee's partnership efforts, the impact of NCLB on
small schools, and the impact of state/local accountability measures.
The overarching research question in this study is: How does a team composed
of teachers, students, parents, community members, and researchers go about creating
a rigorous, comprehensive curriculum for a newly created small school that
meets the needs of their diverse student population?
- How do curricula created by the small schools reflect issues of race, class, gender and social justice?
- How do members of the teams articulate their philosophy of education? And how are those articulations manifested throughout the school curriculum?
- In what ways does the constructed curriculum break from traditional Eurocentric constraints?
- How do the students perceive their new schools as spaces where their racial, cultural, and linguistic identities are more greatly valued?
Enilda Delgado, Department of Sociology/Archaeology, UW-La Crosse - "Familism and its Impact on Latino Child Care Arrangements."
This project will use nationally representative data to develop an empirical
measure of familism and how this concept is associated with childcare decisions among working mothers. Familism,
the idea that the family precedes the individual in importance, has been used
to characterize Latino families and explain social outcome differences
between Latinos and non-Latino families and explain social outcome differences
between Latinos and non-Latino groups. This study will first develop a measure
of familism based on the social variable, cultural characteristics, and employment
factors that have been associated with this concept in previous research, and
second, explore its relationship to the childcare arrangements chosen by Latino
and non-Latino families.
Household size and marital status of
Latinos in the U.S. differ considerably from those of non-Latino whites. Latinos
have larger families and a large percentage of households, especially among
Puerto Ricans, have female heads of household. Latinos also exhibit negative
economic characteristics, including high levels of poverty and low levels of educational
attainment. Amid these characteristics, family scholars and the popular
media often point to the importance placed on the family by Latinos to manage
the challenging conditions in their lives. Familism is often associated with
resilient family networks that provide emotional and social support and tends
to persist with successive generations (Velez-Ibanez, 1996). While familism
and resilient family networks may be utilized among Latinos in order to cope
with marginal employment and economic conditions, few studies empirically
measure or test for familism. Commonly, researchers control for demographic and
economic characteristics such as age, education, employment, and marital status,
while testing for distinct outcomes by race/ethnicity. Any excess difference
between groups that cannot be attributed to the structural control variables is then
assumed to be directly related to cultural and, specifically, "familism" differences.
For example, the strong emphasis on the family over the individual is perceived to
moderate the impact of negative work conditions on the family, thus familism
tends to contribute positively to the overall well-being of Latino families.
This research is significant for various reasons. It will employ nationally
representative data which can be generalized to the U.S. population to clarify the
relative importance of cultural (e.g., familism) attributes compared to structural
attributes that are employed in the creation or reframing of public policy.
Developing a familism index will allow researchers to overcome the cultural bias
that results from assuming cultural explanations without the use of empirical
measures with proper explanatory powers. Exploring the relationship of familism
to child care arrangements chosen by Latino families will allow for the estimation
of the relative importance of structural and cultural characteristics in the
selection of formal or informal early childhood care. The access to resources
and the sensitivity of society to the cultural differences impact familial early
care choices which ultimately affects the formation of human capital with ramifications
for individuals, families and the community at large.
Gary Sandefur, Dean of Letters and Science/Department of Sociology, UW-Madison, will serve as mentor.
Raquel Farmer-Hinton, Department of Educational Policy and Community Studies, UW-Milwaukee - "Owning Options: Examining the Outcomes of a College Preparatory Charter High School."
Dr. Farmer-Hinton will complete the third wave of data analysis of a multiyear case study of a college preparatory
charter school for disadvantaged students.
The school seeks to develop educationally and socioeconomically disadvantaged
students into college-bound students. On average, 66 percent of the school's graduates
are accepted to four-year colleges and universities yet, upon enrolling in the
charter school, only 16 percent of these graduates read at or above national
norms. Further, less than 20 percent of the graduating classes had parents who
graduated from a four-year college or University, which, Farmer-Hinton points
out, can limit the transfer of explicit information for students' college planning
efforts (Hossler, Schmit & Vesper, 1999; McDonough, 1997; Schneider & Stevenson,
1999). According to national trends, these students should have faced difficulties
in the college planning process as atrisk students from poor and minority backgrounds tend to do
(Horn & Maw, 1995; Kaufman & Chen, 1999). However,
this school's college preparatory climate explicitly nurtured these students
along the pathway to college. This project will examine the impact of staff-student
engagement in college preparatory resources and activities, as well as staff
members' expectations for student participation in higher education on students'
postsecondary plans. During Farmer-Hinton's award period, she will analyze
interview and focus group transcripts in addition to quantitative data from the student
surveys. She will assess the influence of the school's preparatory activities
on the postsecondary plans of the seniors, controlling for grade point average, ACT
score, graduation year, gender, guardianship,parent/guardian educational attainment,
parent/guardian employment status, and peer educational plans. Key findings
from this case study have already highlighted the positive impact of one counselor's
personalized effort (e.g., mentoring, hands-on assistance) toward disadvantaged
students' college preparation and planning. Another article from this
case study highlighted the school's organizational characteristics that actually
limited staff capacity to form productive relationships with their students. Future
work will document the available resources to meet students' college planning
needs and the transmission of staff expectations toward student participation
in higher education.
Serving as mentor will be Mellisa Roderick, The School of Social Service Administration,
The University of Chicago.
Cherene Sherrard-Johnson, Department of English, UW-Madison - "The Mulatta Mystique: Iconography of the New Negro Woman in Harlem Renaissance Culture."
Dr. Sherrard-Johnson's book will bring to the forefront the artistic and intellectual
exchange between visual artists and writers of the Harlem Renaissance
(1917-1935) by focusing on narrative and visual "portraits" of the mulatta as a passing
figure and representative trope of the New Negro movement. It will address
two intertwined topics. First, it will investigate visual art's influence - painting,
photography and sculpture - on the language, themes, characters and structure of
several Harlem Renaissance novels. Historically, studies of the era have focused
on the intersection between music, specifically jazz and the blues, and poetry,
avoiding the equally pertinent traffic between fiction and visual art. This exploration
places paintings, cover art and illustrations from Eugene Delacroix to Aaron
Douglas in conversation with novelists. Second, it will examine how modernist
and primitivist aspects of the Harlem Renaissance inform visual and literary
representations of black womanhood. Sherrard-Johnson suggests that the depiction
of women as mixed-race madonnas, teachers or socialites, featured in New
York periodicals, enforced a sexist standard of behavior and vocation denoted by
a colorist conception of beauty and femininity. In this study, she will consider a
range of visual/literary interactions including: writing techniques imbued with
elements of photography, a literary recapitulation of a modern art icon, and characterizations
of black female painters. This project will contribute a new dimension
to interdisciplinary studies of the era by demonstrating how intrinsic the visual
component was to New Negro aesthetics and the international marketing of the
Harlem Renaissance.
One of the unique aspects of this
project is the identification of "mulatta iconography" as a set of visually evocative
images and narrative maneuvers that enable exploration of the conflicted position
of the black woman as both artist and "race woman." Mulatta iconography
consists of depictions of women in film, portrait art, periodicals and popular culture
that exhibit varying degrees of racial mixing. These images derive from the
tragic mulatto trope in nineteenth century American literature and are dependent on
a common, traceable visual grammar. This project identifies and explains the
tensions present in the genesis, promotion and criticism of the iconic status of
the mulatta in early twentieth century African American literature and visual
culture. It is not enough to dismiss the mulatta as a obvious aping of Eurocentric
beauty and womanhood, says Sherrard-Johnson, nor is it appropriate to unequivocally herald the mulatto/a as
Charles Chesnutt's "new people," the transcendent and boundary crossing
"future" of the race. In seeking to complicate and perhaps resolve the tensions
surrounding mulatta iconography and its persistence in black literature and culture,
she confronts her own ambivalence regarding the reification or demonizing
of the mulatta, and the discomfort she has with popular culture's ahistorical fascination
with contemporary "multiracial" icons. On considering the mulatto/a
Hortense Spillers writes: But to reify 'mulatto/a' as an actual race being, whatever
that might entail - as one fears is beginning to happen on the scene of the
new pluralism - would amplify the 'race' question, reinforce it as a implement
of political power, revivify the 'black'/'white' divide, and essentially
reinstall a sometimes ambiguous color consciousness that the late twentieth century
purports to have left behind. This study makes a similar distinction
between actual mixed-race human beings and the construction of the mulatta as a
iconic figure. The project primarily analyzes the creation of the mulatto in writing
and visual art; however, as a black feminist theorist, implicit in Sherrard-
Johnson's work is a concern with the effects of the persistence of mulatta
iconography as it functions in the political and social spheres of black life and culture.
Dr. Sherrard-Johnson's mentor will be Nellie McKay, Department of Afro-American Studies/English, UW-Madison.
Back to top
Back to current and former recipients