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Nanette Shaw
A $500,000 grant awarded to the CUNY Graduate Center from the Spencer Foundation will fund a special interdisciplinary project in educational studies aimed at issues of social justice and social development. Coupled with funds from The Graduate Center, the grant will support student fellowships and scholarships as well as a general seminar and a series of special seminars with educators and researchers. The project will be based in the Social Personality subprogram of The Graduate Center's Ph.D. Program in Psychology, but will also support students who research education issues in the Educational/Developmental/Environmental Psychology subprograms, as well as the Ph.D. Programs in Anthropology, Political Science, Sociology, and Urban Education. Psychology Professors Colette Daiute and Michelle Fine are Principal Investigators of the grant, which is being coordinated by the Youth Studies group of the Center for Human Environments. The three-year project will provide students with a series of renewable awards. Each year, five level-one students will be offered fellowships of between $5,000 and $10,000 plus in-state tuition. Three other students will be offered scholarships of up to $10,000 for dissertation work, including feasibility studies, second examinations, dissertation proposals, and/or dissertation research and writing. Students interested in the program should contact Professor Fine or Professor Daiute via e-mail: mfine@gc.cuny.edu or cdaiute@gc.cuny.edu. Titled "Social Justice and Social Development: An Interdisciplinary Concentration in Educational Studies," the project will draw upon a multiracial, multiethnic, multilingual community of scholars. The Graduate Center is uniquely positioned to explore the possibilities of education, Professor Fine said, since it can draw upon a wide range of local K-12 educators, advocacy organizations, and foundation program officers to participate in and lead seminars. The project will encourage the investigation of education with an eye toward reform in the areas of racial disparities, finance inequities, post-graduation outcomes for urban youth, the impact of standardized testing, and the unintended consequences of violence-prevention programs. A key feature of the project will be the critical study of when and how educational research affects court decisions, public policy, community organizing, equitable curriculum development, assessment, and teacher development. "We will offer what The Graduate Center does best: social analysis that combines responsible critique and engaged policy recommendations," Professor Fine said. The project will integrate studies of social justice and social development in the issues that confront urban schools, educators, and youth. The prospectus defines social justice studies as work that examines the distribution of educational opportunities and processes with an aim to "improve the conditions and opportunities of oppressed people." A social justice study might examine inequity in school financing, questions of access to education, curriculum development and multiculturalism, or educator and youth organizing. Social development studies, according to the prospectus, extend sociocultural theories to the development of social institutions and their relationship to the intellectual, social, and political development of children and families. Social development studies include research on youth violence that considers the history of discrimination or the design of educational systems based on "children's agency and community more than on their perceived 'lack' of capacity," according to the prospectus. Traditionally the Spencer Foundation has funded research grants to individuals in Education departments and schools, but The Graduate Center has been honored with funding for students in other disciplines. "This grant recognizes the contribution of the social sciences to educational studies," Professor Fine said. As one of the first grants from the Spencer Foundation to create a discipline-based program, she said, the foundation has marked The Graduate Center as a groundbreaking institution. According to Susan Dauber, program officer of the Foundation's Discipline Based Studies program, The Graduate Center received one of the first pilot grants in this program because of "an exceptionally enthusiastic and well-qualified faculty, very engaging and able graduate students, and a promising training plan." The Spencer Foundation recently has broadened its scope to students in disciplinary programs "because not all educational research or training of educational researchers is conducted in schools or departments of education," Dauber said. The Spencer Foundation, with headquarters in Chicago, was established by the late Lyle M. Spencer, an educational publisher. Since its endowment in 1968, the foundation has made grants of more than $250 million to advocate the improvement of education throughout the world by means of sponsored research, fellowships, and training programs. In recent years, the Foundation has awarded $9 million annually as major grants, and another $3 million in small grants. It also awards about 35 dissertation fellowships per year, and funds fellowships run by other organizations. The Graduate Center is the doctorate-granting institution of The City University of New York, the largest urban university in the U.S. The only consortium of its kind in the nation, The Graduate Center draws its faculty of more than 1,600 members mainly from the CUNY senior colleges and cultural and scientific institutions throughout New York City. Established in 1961, The Graduate Center has grown to an enrollment of about 3,500 students in 31 doctoral programs and six master's degree programs in the humanities, social sciences, and sciences. The Graduate Center also houses 29 research centers and institutes and administers the CUNY Baccalaureate Program. According to a recent National Research Council report, more than a third of The Graduate Center's rated programs rank among the nation's top 20 at public and private institutions, nearly a quarter are among the top ten when compared to publicly supported institutions alone, and more than half are among the top five programs at publicly supported institutions in the northeast. |