Posts Tagged: higher education
A Ph.D. in punk? Only at UC Riverside.
Marlen Ríos-Hernández is a proud pioneer of a research technique she refers to as “intellectual dumpster diving.” By that, she means she studies trash — but probably not the kind you'd expect.
A Southern California native, Ríos-Hernández is a doctoral candidate in the ethnic studies department at the University of California, Riverside. Before arriving at UCR, she trained as a musicologist — “basically a music historian,” she explained.
As a researcher of punk music, the “trash” she sifts through is more akin to countercultural relics that have been discarded or ignored by traditional archivists. Through her work, she hopes to shed light on some of punk's early pioneers, many of whom have gone overlooked by mainstream chroniclers of the genre who have historically portrayed it as white and male-dominated.
“Punk has always been diverse,” Ríos-Hernández said. “Women, people of color, and queer-identifying people have been part of punk movements across time, and as a punk fan myself, I think it's important to recognize that representation. My work is a way of asking, ‘Who carries the weight of the things that we love?'”
In particular, her dissertation charts the growth of punk scenes in Los Angeles, Mexico, and Latin America from the late 1970s to the mid-2000s. The latter period, she said, holds personal significance for her because it was when she experienced her own coming of age as a punk fan and activist under the George W. Bush administration.
“There was a huge anti-war movement going on at the time, and my brother had been deployed to Iraq,” Ríos-Hernández said. “I got involved in the punk scene in South Gate with many of my friends who came from similar backgrounds — first-generation students, mixed-status families. Punk helped us during what was an especially difficult and terrifying time to be an immigrant or come from a mixed-status family in America.”
The punk scene quickly became both her preferred creative outlet and port of entry to social justice work. Bands like the Casualties, the Germs, and the Devotchkas were among her original favorites, but it wasn't until she found Alice Bag — a Chicana pillar of the Hollywood punk scene — that Ríos-Hernández's scholarly research began to take shape.
This year, Ríos-Hernández will work to complete her studies at UC Riverside as the recipient of a $20,000 dissertation fellowship from the American Association of University Women. Designed to tackle some of the barriers women face in education, the association's dissertation fellowship program is dual-sided, enabling recipients to pursue both academic work and community projects that empower women and girls.
Along with finishing her dissertation, the fellowship will allow Ríos-Hernández to continue her work as a mentor for other first-generation humanities students who want to pursue graduate school. She also recently started as a staffer at the Chicano Student Programs office, where she serves as its graduate student events and programs coordinator.
As a researcher, she said, one of the highlights of her current work involves leading students from a variety of arts and humanities departments through interactive, punk-inspired lectures. One tackles a dance style called the pogo — think of it as a less aggressive, more equitable predecessor to moshing — which Ríos-Hernández detailed in an essay recently accepted for publication in “The Oxford Handbook of Punk Rock.”
Investigating so-called “trash” like the pogo and its transformation into moshing is part of an effort to encourage students to question why things are remembered the way that they are. And for those who want to continue their education in punk, Ríos-Hernández has plenty of resources to recommend, beginning with Bag's memoir, “Violence Girl,” and the 1981 documentary film “The Decline of Western Civilization.”
“Recordings of many L.A. punk bands are very rare, but what's happening now is that the punk elders who are still with us are putting their recordings on the internet or writing their memoirs,” Ríos-Hernández said. “It's a really vibrant time to be listening to what's coming out about the L.A. punk community.”
The renaissance of sorts has been a boon for her research. Still, Ríos-Hernández admitted, she sometimes feels torn between her more scholarly pursuits and the age-old punk mentality that places a premium on resisting conformity.
“It's been really interesting writing about punk music as a graduate student and trying to make a career out of it, because punk traditionally goes against being part of the system,” she said. “But maybe because I've gotten this far, I feel like I have a responsibility to do this work right — a responsibility both to fans of punk and to the people who made this music in the early days and continue to make it now.”
Likewise, Ríos-Hernández added, she feels a profound responsibility to UC Riverside, the place she affectionately calls “the unsung hero of the UC system.”
“I wouldn't trade my time here for the world,” she said. “I fully intend to come back after I graduate — that's my dream.”
Source: Published originally on news.ucr.edu A Ph.D. in punk? Only at UC Riverside, by Tess Eyrich, October 15th, 2018.
/span>How to best serve Latino students
Dive Brief:
- The University of California has received criticism for not adequately serving Latinos, the state's largest ethnic group, since affirmative action measures were banned from use in admissions decisions in California's public institutions in 1996, The New York Times reports.
- The university system's newest campus, UC Merced, most closely resembles the diversity of California with an undergraduate Latino population of 53%. UCLA and UC Berkeley, the system's flagship campuses, serve Latino populations of 21% and 13%, respectively.
- While Merced lacks traditional markers of academic excellence including star faculty members, better than average admissions test scores and a high graduation rate, Latino students are attracted to Merced because professors and administrators have created programs and services that directly cater to them. This includes parent workshops in Spanish during student orientation, culturally appropriate celebrations, availability of cultural foods and more.
Dive Insight:
Studies show that the growing racial disparities in higher education occur amongst not only student populations, but faculty members and administration as well. This may have serious implications on the success of racial and ethnic minorities who may also be first-generation college students or come from low-income families.
Current research on the success of African American college students points to elements like the development of relationships with faculty members, involvement in minority student organizations and management of relationships with family and friends back home as essential parts of a plan to attract and retain a diverse student body.
Changes in student demographics are expected to continue to have a direct impact on retention in higher education during the next few years. Texas A&M University – San Antonio is an example of an institution that has a multi-year rebranding project centered on ensuring that the campus is a welcoming environment to the city's large military population and underserved minorities.
Ivy Tech Community College in Indiana published the results of a 2016 study of the 21st Century Scholar initiative to improve student success outcomes across its 32 campuses. The program administered by The Indiana Commission for Higher Education reported results of an increase in first-year persistence of 8.8 percentage points, up from a historical average between 36.9% and 45.7%. The scholars who participated in the program were Pell eligible and first-generation college students. Participants received executive-style coaching to support them not only in academics, but in other areas of life that may have been hindering their success.
Source: Published originally on www.educationdive.com, How to best serve Latino students, by Halona Black, August 2nd, 2018.
UCR Identified as National Leader for Latino Student Success
RIVERSIDE, Calif. — The University of California, Riverside has been listed among ten top-performing colleges nationally for Latino student success according to findings released today in Washington, D.C.
The Education Trust, a non-profit think tank based in Washington D.C., looked at 613 public and private four-year colleges nationwide and singled out ten campuses nationwide as models for promoting Latino student success. Rather than ranking schools strictly on national averages, The Education Trust compared institutions of similar size, SAT scores, and number of Pell Grant recipients and then highlighted those campuses with significantly higher than average graduation rates among Latino students. The findings are published in, “A Look at Latino Student Success: Identifying Top- and Bottom-Performing Institutions.
UCR is widely respected as a national model for student success across ethnic and economic categories. According to the most recent national data, the six-year graduation rate for Latino students in the U.S. is 54 percent. The rate at UCR is nearly 20 percentage points higher at 73 percent.
In addition to performing higher than national averages, UCR is one of few institutions nationwide to have eliminated achievement gaps across ethnic groups and income levels. In 2016, the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities honored UCR with the prestigious “Project Degree Completion Award” for innovation in improving student success.
“Being named a top-performing institution is a testament not only to our students but also to the faculty and staff across campus dedicated to helping our students succeed,” said UCR Chancellor Kim A. Wilcox. “The disparities in student success are a national crisis in higher education in the U.S. The Education Trust's analysis is critical in identifying the schools like UCR that are moving the needle on graduation rates so that our successes can be emulated across the country.”
In March, The Education Trust released a similar report covering African American student success. UCR was one of just three schools to be named top-performing institutions in both reports.
Founded in the early 1990s, The Education Trust is a national non-profit advocacy organization that promotes academic achievement for students at all levels of the education system, particularly for students of color and low-income students.
Source: Published originally on ucrtoday.ucr.edu, UCR Identified as National Leader for Latino Student Success, by John Replogle, December 14, 2017.
CCNY-UTEP partner to produce next generation Latino professors
Harlem-based City College, which is designated a Hispanic Serving Institution of Higher Education by the U.S. Department of Education, will receive $2.315 million of the funding and UTEP $1.3 million.
Under the administration of CCNY's NOAA CREST, the two institutions will collaborate to develop, implement and study a model for training and transitioning Hispanic environmental sciences and engineering (ESE) doctoral students to STEM instructional faculty positions at community colleges and other institutions. Candidates must have completed all coursework and be dissertating, as they transition.
Participants will primarily include Hispanic doctoral students of Caribbean or Mexican origin, who are advanced level doctoral candidates majoring in ESE fields. These include civil, electrical, mechanical or biomedical engineering; earth and atmospheric sciences; ecology and evolutionary biology, among other disciplines.
The project will be led by CCNY faculty Jorge E. Gonzalez, Fred Moshary, Joseph Barba, Kyle McDonald and Ellen E. Smiley. UTEP experts include: Miguel Velez-Reyes, Craig Tweedie, and Ivonne Santiago.
The CCNY-UTEP partnership is in response to the NSF's Alliances for Graduate Education and the Professoriate (AGEP) program solicitation. AGEP seeks to advance knowledge about models to improve pathways to the professoriate and success of historically underrepresented minority (URM) graduate students, postdoctoral fellows and faculty in specific STEM disciplines and/or STEM education research fields.
There are three community college partners in the Hispanic AGEP Alliance: LaGuardia Community College, Queensborough Community College and El Paso Community College in El Paso, TX.
The NSF grant to CCNY and UTEP brings up to $23 million in awards to City College since last fall for training underrepresented minority scientists and engineers. Last September CCNY won a $15.5 million NOAA grant to produce mostly minority STEM scientists.
In addition, $5.2 million was received from the U.S. Department of Education in October to promote STEM education, particularly among underrepresented groups.
Source: Published originally on www.eurekalert.org, CCNY-UTEP partner to produce next generation Latino professors, City College of New York by Jay Mwamba, May 26th, 2017.
California needs new push to prepare Latino students for college and careers
The need to support Latino students has never been more critical.
As families struggle, so do students. Our negative and uncertain times strike directly at children's ability to focus on academics and forces them to face enormous social and emotional pressures — at times without hope.
Across the United States and in our home state of California, leaders from district superintendents to elected and civic leaders must step up to support the many students and families who are suffering from increased intimidation, hostility, and even violence brought on by our changing political climate. We must be champions of the idea that all students have a legal right to an education, regardless of any differences.
As executive director of the California Latino Superintendents Association, I am all too familiar with the urgency of increasing the number of Latino students who graduate from high school ready for college and careers. Latino students have lower graduation rates, higher high school drop-out rates, and few transition to our UC system. Thirty percent of Latinos drop out of high school and only 29 percent of Latino graduates complete college preparatory classes.
The challenges Latino students face are entrenched, systemic, and begin early in students' academic lives: Latino youth are less likely than other children to enroll in preschool (43 percent of Latino children ages 3-5 are not enrolled in prekindergarten programs). Thirty-eight percent of Latino children in California live in poverty – a far larger percentage than their non-Latino peers – and 56 percent of kindergartners held back in 2009 were Latino.
To change these entrenched inequalities, we need more Latino and Latina superintendents to lead our school districts. There is a growing understanding that leaders of the same background and race as their students can foster increased engagement, confidence, trust, relationships, and comfort. They understand their community, the barriers Latinos face, and many of the supports they need. Advocates of increased diversity do not argue that every student needs to be taught or led by a leader of his or her same race, but all leaders must be culturally proficient.
Regardless of their race or ethnic background, superintendents across our state are courageously providing protections and reflecting on the rights of the students they are obligated to serve. I have seen today's superintendents develop and issue to their communities “fact sheets” pertaining to undocumented students' and families' rights. Their efforts have also extended to providing clarity on staff rights and obligations. Very often, this is in connection to possible actions by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents and other government authorities.
Superintendents have also created “parents' rights” notifications and summaries that inform parents of items and issues connected to emergency cards, emergency information, and privacy rights. Lastly, a high number of school boards, in conjunction with their superintendents, have declared their school districts “sanctuaries” or “safe havens” by adopting policies to protect students to the extent they are able under the law, so students can focus on school, thereby removing much of the anxiety that can distort a student's academic progress.
To provide the ongoing support that our students deserve, we are committed as an organization to working cooperatively with stakeholders across California to strengthen the legislative, community and academic foundation for all students, but especially Latino students. An important step will be our “One Voice Assembly” in Sacramento today to promote success in college and careers. The assembly is designed to surface fresh thinking and actionable solutions to the college-readiness crisis among Latino students.
The inequalities are simply too great – and too important – to ignore. Our future as a state and a country relies on the success and enfranchisement of all our students, regardless of their race, background, religion or socioeconomic status. As with everything our organization does, we are striving to advance and maximize equitable paths and opportunities for the students that we serve. In this challenging time, we owe it to our students to do everything in our power to help them reach their educational goals.
Source: Published originally on EdSource, California needs new push to prepare Latino students for college and careers, by David Verdugo, CALSA, April 19, 2017.