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Amid a rise in hostile threats and anti-democratic actions that have interfered with classroom instruction and disrupted school board meetings, a new journal article by researchers at UCLA and UC Riverside highlights the capacity of schools to pursue the democratic purpose of education, yet also cautions that hyper-partisanship and harsh rhetoric pose an increasing threat to civic learning and democracy.

The article, “Do Politics in Our Democracy Prevent Schooling for Our Democracy? Civic Education in Highly Partisan Times,” by Joseph Kahne of UC Riverside and John Rogers and Alexander Kwako of UCLA, was published today in the journal, Democracy and Education.

Drawing on a nationally representative survey of U.S. public high school principals conducted in summer of 2018, the research finds that a high school’s overall support for a mainstream vision of civic education was not related to the partisan leaning of its community. However, high schools in liberal communities were more likely than those in conservative communities to provide support for a critical element of civic education - the discussion of controversial issues.

“In some ways, we are encouraged by the ability of schools to pursue civic learning across deeply blue and deeply red communities.  Partisanship does not prevent education for democracy,” said Rogers, a professor of education at UCLA and the director of the UCLA Institute for Democracy, Education and Access.  “But our research also finds limitations in conservative communities in the discussion of controversial ideas and subjects, a core building block of democratic societies.” 

The study’s authors also worry that amid the heightened intensity of political rhetoric and rising incidents of anti-democratic actions toward schools and school districts in recent months, the threat to democracy may be increasing.

“Education for Democracy is playing out in a rapidly changing and troubling political environment. The events of January 6, 2021, and more recent pitched battles at school board meetings and state capitals have made clear the threat to democracy and civic learning has grown,” said Kahne, the Ted and Jo Dutton Presidential Professor for Education Policy and Politics and Co-Director of the Civic Engagement Research Group at UC Riverside.

“Such hyper-partisanship can lessen support for democratic norms and erode the commitment to educate for democracy. It would hardly be surprising if the widespread contention we are seeing was not making many teachers, principals and school leaders hesitant to engage with varied civic and political content.”

The article underscores the importance of an educational response to the erosion of democracy.  Systemic school district commitment to civic learning and districtwide responses that support civically engaged principals and provide professional development in support of  the non-partisan exploration of controversial issues can be powerful ways to promote democratic aims.

“The findings from our current study suggest that school and district leaders should stand-up for democracy and work to promote the democratic aims of education,” concludes Kahne.  “Our research shows that schools in districts committed to civics, priorities were more than twice as likely to report that teachers got professional development related to the upcoming election.  Such efforts to expand district-wide approaches may indeed be quite valuable.”

In publishing the research, Kahne, Rogers, and Kwako write that public schools have long played a role as “the guardians of democracy.”  They are hopeful that public schools can be a critical asset for democratic sustenance and renewal. Yet, given the events of the current political moment, they note that the future of democratic education and the fate of our democracy are inextricably linked and at risk. 

“We should not take these developments lightly,” they conclude.  “As political scientist’s Steven Levitisky and Daniel Ziblatt have written, the erosion of democratic institutions and democratic norms and commitments is ‘how democracies die.’”

Do Politics in Our Democracy Prevent Schooling for Our Democracy? Civic Education in Highly Partisan Times,” was researched and written by Joseph Kahne, the Ted and Jo Dutton Presidential Professor for Education Policy and Politics and Co-Director of the Civic Engagement Research Group at UC Riverside; John Rogers, Professor of Education and the Director of the Institute for Democracy, Education and Access at UCLA; and Alexander Kwako, a graduate student at UCLA. The analysis is drawn from a national online survey of public high school principals conducted in summer 2018.  The full research article is available online here.

Do Politics in Our Democracy Prevent Schooling for Our Democracy? Civic Education in Highly Partisan Times

Published in the Journal, Democracy and Education, October 15, 2021

Joseph Kahne, UC Riverside, John Rogers, UCLA & Alexander J. Kwako, UCLA

At a time of heated political rhetoric and anti-democratic threats against schools, this study by researchers at UCLA and UC Riverside draws on a nationally representative survey of public high school principals conducted in summer 2018 to examine how political context, district priorities, and principal beliefs and characteristics are related to support for civic education.  The findings reveal reason for both hope and concern. The study finds that a school’s partisan context is unrelated to most supports for democratic education. However, support for the discussion of controversial issues is less common in conservative districts -- raising important questions about a core building block of democratic societies. The study also finds support for civic education at the school level is highest at schools led by principals who are civically active and in districts that are committed to democratic aims. These findings indicate that systemic district commitments can prompt schools to fulfill their historic role and help to strengthen our democratic foundations. At the same time, given the heightened intensity of political rhetoric and rising incidents of anti-democratic actions towards schools and school boards in recent months, promoting district commitments to civic education will be more difficult now then in 2018. For that reason, such efforts will be all the more important.

The study focuses attention on the degree to which high schools support educators to provide seven mainstream and research backed civic education practices:  1) Instruction in Social Science and History; 2) Discussion of Controversial Issues; 3) Service learning; 4) Government simulations; 5) Engagement in school governance; 6) Leadership activities; and 7) Study of Elections. 

It considers whether and to what extent the provision of supports for these civic education practices is related to:  a) The partisan leaning of the school’s community (determined by the presidential vote in 2016); b) The school district’s stated commitment to civic education; c) The high school principal’s personal civic engagement.

Partisan Leaning and Supports for Civic Education

The partisan leaning of a high school's community is unrelated to the degree to which the school provides support for six of the seven mainstream civic education practices: 1) Instruction in Social Science and History; 2) Service learning; 3) Government simulations; 4) Engagement in school governance; 5) Leadership activities; and 6) Study of Elections.  Partisanship does not prevent educating for democracy.

Of concern, high schools in liberal communities were more likely than those in conservative communities to provide support for one part of the mainstream vision of civic education: discussions of controversial issues. For example, with all controls and independent variables included, a school located in a community where Trump received one-quarter of the vote would, on average, be 19.2% more likely to provide support for controversial issue discussion than one in which Trump received three-quarters of the vote.

Findings from the study suggest institutional efforts by school districts to attend to civic priorities can meaningfully advance efforts to promote the democratic aims of education. Expanding district-wide approaches may be quite valuable.

High schools in districts committed to civic priorities provided significantly more support for a mainstream vision of civic education than other districts. This relationship was large and consistent. Schools in districts committed to civic priorities provided professional development support for an average of 4.21 out of the seven practices compared to 3.00 in districts that were not committed to civics

District commitment to civic education was also positively related to the provision of each individual form of civic education and the relationship was statistically significant for five of the seven practices. For example, schools in districts committed to civics were more than twice as likely to provide professional development tied to the election than schools in districts that were not committed to civics (39.7% compared to 18.5%).

High schools led by principals who were more civically engaged (those who regularly follow the news, talk with friends and family about social issues, and participate in civic organizations) provided more supports for civic education.  Specifically, principals who were one standard deviation more civically engaged than other principals were 14.5% more likely to offer one additional professional development opportunity to teachers.

In tense political times for public schools, new study by researchers at UCLA and UC Riverside raises concerns for civic learning and democracy.

Do Politics in Our Democracy Prevent Schooling for Our Democracy?

Throughout his career, the work of UCLA Professor of Information Studies Ramesh Srinivasan has critiqued and proposed alternatives to a status quo where technology corporations hold unlimited reach into both the public and private lives of their billions of users worldwide, including Amazon, Facebook, and Google.

Now, in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, Srinivasan has called to attention the deluge of disinformation on the internet, with its conspiracy theories, alternative wellness methods, and other content that has the potential to mislead, confuse, and ultimately, endanger users. 

Professor Srinivasan is also a faculty member of UCLA’s Design Media Arts department and the founder and director of the Digital Cultures Lab at UCLA. He has studied the relationships between new (Internet, social media, and AI) technologies and political, economic, and social life in more than 70 countries, and has worked with governments, businesses, activists, and civil society organizations to advise on technological futures. His books include “Beyond the Valley: How Innovators around the World are Overcoming Inequality and Creating the Technologies of Tomorrow,” (MIT Press, 2019), which was named by Forbes as a Top Ten Tech Book in 2019. Other publications include, “Whose Global Village? Rethinking How Technology Impacts Our World” (NYU Press), and “After the Internet” (with Adam Fish), published by Polity Press.

Srinivasan is a regular speaker for TED Talks, and has made routine media appearances on MSNBC, NPR, Al Jazeera, Democracy Now!, CBS, The Young Turks, AtlanticLive, and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, BC. He has contributed op-eds and had his research featured in international publications including the Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, Wired,  The New York Times, Al Jazeera English, The Washington Post, FAZ (Germany), The Financial Times, CNN, Folda Sao Paolo (Brazil), BBC News, the Christian Science Monitor, National Geographic, Quartz, and The Economist.

Srinivasan has worked with governments, businesses, activists, and civil society organizations to advise on technological futures, and served as a national surrogate for Senator Bernie Sanders’ 2020 presidential campaign and as an Innovation policy committee member for President Biden. 

Professor Srinivasan was recently featured in a CBS Originals documentary on this digital pandemic of disinformation, “Conspirituality: How Wellness Became a Gateway for Misinformation.” The Latest had a recent conversation with Srinivasan on the dangers of algorithms and the internet’s ability to show users worldwide, “nightmares we have yet to have.”

How was the pandemic affected by the questioning of science?

Ramesh Srinivasan: The main challenge here is that we as an American public and as a global public no longer have trusted forms of authority, or even trusted places we can go that are devoted to all of us and our interests… to figure out what we can count on. The fact that those sorts of spaces – online or not – are missing, means that everything will be questioned. It turns out that questioning scientific knowledge works very well for these technology companies and their algorithms that prey on people’s suspicions and doubts.

Like I said in the documentary, there are a lot of good reasons for people to ask questions about pharmaceuticals, about vaccines… about whether our pharmaceuticals are treating the symptoms of problems or making us more healthy - wellness versus symptoms. There are a lot of legitimate questions to be asked about how big pharmaceutical companies have exploited publicly-funded research, like NSF and NIH research. There are a lot of legitimate questions to be asked about certain forms of commercial and economic corruption. 

The issue is that our digital environments that we have been forced to rely upon, especially in a pandemic, where we have to socially distance and can’t come together physically… our digital environments are not set up to talk to one another in ways where we can be tolerant and patient and understand one another. They’re designed to divide and conquer us.

And that’s the problem, because if an outrage or anxiety-based model is what works to keep people on your platform forever, it’s disastrous for our social fabric. It’s disastrous for our ability as a public to come together and make decisions, not just around the pandemic. It’s a tried-and-true thing about the human being that we have a sympathetic nervous system that gets activated when we are suspicious or when we feel outraged. But being hyper-activated is not the only way for us to be. It ends up draining us and it makes it very difficult to have calm, rational, tolerant, compassionate dialogue with one another. This is going to have spillover effects because there is no basis for people to have dialogue with one another moving forward. That is what really needs to be transformed and changed. 

How do we get to users believing in random individuals without scientific credentials who are just making videos from home about the pandemic, climate change, or any other serious issues?

Srinivasan: The reason why that happens is because we just blindly turn to our algorithmic social media feeds to curate the world for us. There is so much information online. We are all overwhelmed with information and we are all multitasking because our phones basically are always on, and induce us to do lots of things at the same time.  It’s become much harder to pay attention, so to make sense of the world, we are blindly trusting these “personalization technologies.” And they claim, by their branding language, to be personalized for us. But personalized on what basis?

Is the basis just to outrage us and keep our attention, which can turn into addiction? Or is the basis one that is not only serving the interests of a corporation but also serving the interests of the wider world and society and the health of its people that live within it? 

That corporation still exists in a world where people can get sick, in a world where we are having record numbers of wildfires and hurricanes and droughts, icecaps melting? I don’t think their intention is to divide us, but I think they realize that this is a tried-and-true way of getting people’s attention, which is again, hyping up people’s nervous systems and making them on-edge, anxious, defensive, reading [only] titles, not stories, like clickbait. They are living within a world that is being torn apart from within, and they’re prospering off of that division.

This is a function of what’s happened with the internet more widely, where not only has the amount of information exploded on us so that we turn to these corporate platforms to make sense of it all, but it’s also a function of a larger dynamic that has occurred in this country. The public and the investments of the public are the baseline – they’re the foundation by which all this corporate and commercial wealth has been able to come about. 

A lot of Google’s algorithms were in part initially funded by grants for research. The internet itself was funded by United States taxpayers, and there’s no Facebook without the internet. So, the public should be owed not only a debt of gratitude, but should really be respected. It’s public investments that build roads, that build bridges, and that built the internet. 

All of these companies, the biggest and wealthiest companies ever, only exist because of public investments, so they need to be accountable to the public and also serve the public’s interests. These Amazon vehicles are all over the place, I see them all the time in my neighborhood. They use the roads that we all pay for, but… Amazon didn’t pay any taxes last year. We have been betrayed by these technology companies that are resting upon public investments, yet dividing the public.

The Wall Street Journal has done some really good investigative reporting, about Facebook in particular. They released, for example, that internal research was done by Facebook concluding that younger people who use Instagram tend to be depressed – that there’s an onset of depression and other anxiety-related disorders that occur through the use of Instagram. And [Facebook] did nothing about it – they buried the research.

So, [technology corporations] are aware of how bad for our personal and collective psychology the status quo is. Yet, they’re not doing anything about it, and that’s because they’re doing so well. They have so many billions of users, constantly on these [platforms]. I’m looking right now at a billboard on Sunset Boulevard for Oculus, another interface by which Facebook will be gathering biometric information - where do your eyes go, and other sorts of biological information.

The goal is to grab data from us at all times, in all places, in every way possible - without telling us what’s being gathered, for how long by whom – and to feed that back into arousal and outrage-optimized content. But they’re not socially or globally responsible to the people that are facing so much risk and pain.

How would a Digital Bill of Rights address this?

Srinivasan: There are two or three pieces of legislation that representatives in the House have put out, but they’re very, very small-scale things. They’re trying to carve into some of this immunity that technology companies have from publishing stuff that is untrue on their platforms - it’s called Section 230. But that’s the way Congress works.

My Digital Bill of Rights is extremely expansive. It deals with economic issues, surveillance and privacy issues, and disinformation and artificial intelligence issues. It’s really trying to function across the board [and] transform all things digital and data-oriented to be balanced – definitely to serve business and commercial interests, but not at the cost of everything else.

They’ve designed some brilliant technologies, every one of the big tech companies. I give them a lot of credit for it. But let’s think about a design model that is great for them and not destructive of everything else. 

In the CBS documentary, you describe how tech companies exploit users’ fears through “tailored, targeted algorithms. How would you make users more aware of the fact that their own fears and prejudices are regurgitated to them online? 

Srinivasan: The thing is, we’re not only being fed back our own prejudices, but we’re being fed fears that may not have even entered our sub-conscious. For example, I’ve been getting targeted ads related to cancer. I don’t have any symptoms of cancer. I don’t know where it comes from. It’s also maybe my age, and the fact that I’m pretty health-conscious in my 40s. 

We’re not just getting feedback based on our fears or biases or prejudices. We’re actually being fed nightmares we have yet to have. Imagine the rabbit hole of hysteria that can come out of that. This isn’t some manager or editor on YouTube or Twitter, saying, “Let’s feed Ramesh this sort of thing.” These are computational algorithms that are recognizing that [this personalized] content can arouse people and get them all revved up and agitated. 

The Wall Street Journal reporting on Facebook was helpful because it actually uncovered that Facebook recognized that negative content would create more engagement. So, let’s look at that in relation to the gaslighting that’s going on, or in regard to our ex-president, who specialized in epithets and insults. There’s a reason why, until he got deplatformed, that he was the central figure on Twitter – it’s not accidental. It’s true of anyone. The easiest way to go viral is to be hateful. You want to follow the obscene, or the salacious, or the hateful. That’s not me saying that – it’s what the Wall Street Journal uncovered. 

I believe that these kinds of realizations shouldn’t inspire dismay. They should inspire determination to get us on a better path. Otherwise, this is going to keep happening again and again and again – every climate crisis, every pandemic, every scandal.

I just want to say that we can do better. I think we will do better, and I think it’s going to take all of us being aware – recognizing that the stuff that comes our way online is not to be blindly believed or trusted. See it as part of a targeted machine that is a cash cow for these companies. See it for what it is. Ultimately, they should be disclosing to us what they know about us and what is influencing what we see and give us greater power over changing that entire experience. 

For Professor Srinivasan's latest media on the October 4 Facebook outage, visit these links.

Scholar of digital culture discusses the loss of trust and fair discourse among internet users on global issues.

Ramesh Srinivasan: Disinformation’s Divisive Effect on Society

Applications for the 2022 Women’s School Leadership Academy (WSLA) and the 2022 University Women’s Leadership Academy for Mid-Career Women are now being accepted. The application deadline is Nov. 1, 2021. The academies are designed to provide leadership professionals in K-12 and universities with the tools, support, and mentoring needed to increase their impact on their institutions and enhance their own career trajectories.

The UCLA Women’s School Leadership Academy is committed to championing women’s leadership in K-12 schools, and districts. The five-month program helps participants to realize their own voices and to shape their own stories. Leadership capacities that are emphasized include problem-solving, mentoring and sponsoring, career building, coaching, and collaborating for change.

UCLA WSLA participants learn from each other and from instructors who are expert practitioner leaders in K-12 schooling. The program embraces social justice and is designed for experienced leaders. 

The program’s four through lines are 360 degree leadership, communicating for impact, navigating public and private lives, and promoting equity, diversity, and inclusion. The through lines are informed by four themes of leading as a woman in times of calm and crisis; making decisions considering multiple social, cultural and political perspectives; women supporting women for professional growth; and navigating professional and private lives.

The WSLA will consist of two in-person Saturday sessions at UCLA (COVID-19 conditions permitting) on January 8 and June 18 from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. In addition, ten virtual meetings will take place from 6:30-9 p.m., Tuesday evenings, on January 11 and 25; February 8 and 22; March 8 and 22; April 5 and 26; and May 3 and 17.

For application materials for the UCLA Women’s School Leadership Academy, visit this link. 

The UCLA University Women’s Leadership Academy is designed to assist mid-careerprofessionals who want to expand their leadership and value to universities. The program re-imagines the roles and impact of women in their current and future university positions. Activities and instruction are led by experts from varied types of universities in areas that include human resources, academic personnel, business, student services, information technology, and operations. Content also focuses on soft leadership skills. Some of these include facilitating meetings, career-building, negotiation, mentoring, problem solving, and collaborating for change. The academy promotes interaction between participants. 

Among the objectives of the University Women's Leadership Academy are enhancing the value of university women’s voices and contributions; engaging women in sustaining institutional change; expanding women’s capacity to lead; enlarging women’s ability to navigate the overt and covert university; encouraging professional options in wide-ranging roles across the university; embracing equity, diversity, and inclusion across the university; and elevating women’s confidence in their own abilities.

The virtual sessions will be held on six Saturday mornings, from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. on January 22, February 5, March 5, April 2, May 7, and June 25; and on six Thursday evenings, from 6-8:30 p.m. on January 27, February 24, March 24, April 28, May 26, and June 16.

For application materials for the University Women’s Leadership Academy, visit this link. 

For more information on the Women’s School Leadership Academy or the University Women’s Leadership Academy, Linda Rose, Ph.D., director, at lrose@g.ucla.edu.

Deadline to apply for the Women’s School Leadership Academy and the University Women’s Leadership Academy is Nov. 1.

UCLA Academies Will Prepare Innovative and Courageous Leaders for K-12, Universities

Community schools are designed to empower students and their families by encouraging them to be deeply involved with every part of their school. Collaboration is key to success and shared leadership among the school community helps students come to power over their future despite being from a disadvantaged background. Bautista described recruiting and retaining quality teachers as “one of the highest leverage points for the success of our school.” He received his teacher and principal training at the UCLA School of Education, which focuses on preparing social justice educators to teach in an urban setting.

Bautista invites candidates from the UCLA Teacher Education Program (TEP) program to observe classes and do their student teaching at Mendez and often makes job offers to promising candidates before they have finished their preparation.

Mendez High School’s equity-focused practices have made possible an impressive shift in the academic outcomes of students in Boyle Heights. From making computer science education initiatives to equipping students with necessary furniture and online textbook subscriptions during the pandemic, everything Mendez does is rooted in treating the community like family and acknowledging that relationships undergird every aspect of education. 

Bautista ties the work to expand course access back to the school’s deep commitment to addressing inequities and advancing social and racial justice. “Two groups who are often left out of access to computer science education … are women and students of color,” Bautista shared. “And research shows that many times its students of color who are denied access to the more rigorous classes, which include AP classes.… When students of color are given the opportunity to take these AP classes, they tend to do very well.” Under the Computer Science for All initiative, which is enacted in partnership with the University of California Los Angeles Computer Science Equity Project, each student takes an Introduction to Computer Science course and has access to higher-level computer science courses, including game design and AP Computer Science. The AP for All initiative requires that all students, including those with special needs, take at least one AP course during their high school careers, and it provides supports for them to tackle this challenge. This often sets students on a trajectory to take multiple AP courses.

To read more about the work that Bautista does and the impact of community schooling, visit The Learning Policy Institute profile on the school and his work. This article is excerpted from the profile by Charlie Thompson.
 
Download the brief by Charlie Thompson: Felicitas & Gonzalo Mendez High School: A Community School That Honors Its Neighborhood’s Legacy of Educational Justice

UCLA Ed&IS alumnus Mauro Bautista, who received his teacher and principal training at UCLA School of Education and Information Studies, serves as a Principal for Felicitas & Gonzalo Mendez High School — a community school located in East Los Angeles. 

Alumni Profile: Mauro Bautista

Eddie R. Cole, an associate professor at the UCLA School of Education and Information Studies, has been named the recipient of the Association for the Study of Higher Education’s 2021 Outstanding Book Award for his book, “The Campus Color Line: College Presidents and the  Struggle for Black Freedom.”

The Association for the Study of Higher Education (ASHE) is a scholarly society with 2,000 members dedicated to higher education as a field of study. The association, “values rigorous scholarly approaches to the study of higher education and practical applications of systemic inquiry.” The ASHE Outstanding Book Award recognizes a book that makes a significant contribution to the study of higher education. 

Cole’s book, “The Campus Color Line,” published by Princeton University Press, illuminates the role college presidents have played amid the battles for civil rights and Black freedom.  The book explores the history of the Black Freedom Movement through the lens of the efforts of college presidents as they dealt with desegregation, equal educational and employment opportunity, housing discrimination, and other critical issues intertwined with higher education.

In an earlier interview, Cole described the book as, “history ripe for the present. It takes a national view of the Black Freedom Movement as seen through the actions of college presidents, and the world we’re in right now.” 

Cole said he hopes the book will add to the understanding of “the role that institutions of higher education—particularly college presidents—have played in molding policies and practices with racial implications… and how they have also proactively shaped how higher education has addressed questions around race.” His book research has also been recently highlighted in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and BBC News.

Eddie R. Cole is an associate professor of higher education and organizational change at the UCLA School of Education and Information Studies. In January 2021, he was named by Education Week as one of “the top university-based scholars in the U.S. who did the most last year to shape educational practice and policy.” 

Professor Cole received the 2018 Early Career Award from the Association for the Study of Higher Education. He was also named a 2017 Mellon Emerging Faculty Leader Award from the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, which recognized him as a professor poised “to play a significant role in shaping American higher education.” In 2015, he was a recipient of a National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship, one of the most prestigious awards for scholars working in critical areas of education research.

Award honors Cole’s book, “The Campus Color Line: College Presidents and the Struggle for Black Freedom.”

Eddie R. Cole Named Recipient of the 2021 Outstanding Book Award by the Association for the Study of Higher Education

UCLA Distinguished Professor of Information Studies Johanna Drucker was honored with the 2021 Steven Heller Award for Cultural Commentary from the American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA) in a virtual ceremony on Sept. 22. The award is named for Heller, a former New York Times art director, instructor at the School of Visual Arts, and a prolific author of anthologies, criticism, and other publications on graphic design.

“I am very honored by this award, and particularly honored by the association with Steve Heller,” said Professor Drucker in her acceptance remarks. “When I started working in this field several decades ago, he was already publishing prolifically. I thought, ‘Wow.’ Then, later, I got to meet him and appreciate his generosity of spirit as well as his erudition. ‘Wow again.’ The award marks for me the distance I’ve come since the 1970s, when as a typographer among poets I was chastised for suggesting that the look of language was part of its meaning.”

Drucker, who is the inaugural Bernard and Martin Breslauer Professor of Bibliography in the UCLA Department of Information Studies, has focused much of her work on that very concept, as well as the history of the book, artists’ books, visual images and their relationship to knowledge, and frameworks for digital humanities tools and platforms across a wide range of disciplines.

“Visual language is everywhere around us—on streets, surfaces, screens,” Drucker noted in her remarks. “Anyone who glibly imagines ‘print’ has disappeared has not looked in their grocery bag lately, even if digital technologies have proliferated the formats and sites in which language is present in our world. Design has a direct impact on daily life—as I was keenly aware trying to decipher what felt like a deliberately poor format on the California recall ballot, or, more positively, appreciating the impact made when Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez turned around at the Met Gala last week. 

“These examples make clear that we have to create the contexts of reception, as well as conditions of production, in our work. A greater challenge is to expose the lifecycles of production within the systems of global industries of extraction, exploitation, human rights abuse, and ecological costs with which we are all complicit. Our habitual practices are not sustainable in their current form. Much work lies ahead.”

Professor Drucker’s most recent books include “The Digital Humanities Coursebook: An Introduction to Digital Methods for Research and Scholarship,” (2021, Routledge) and “Iliazd: A Meta-Biography of a Modernist” (2020, Johns Hopkins University Press). Her other publications include “Graphic Design History: A Critical Guide,” with Emily McVarish (Pearson Prentice Hall, 2008); “SpecLab: Projects in Digital Aesthetics and Speculative Computing” (Chicago, 2009); "What Is?: Nine Epistemological Essays" (Cuneiform Press, 2013); and “In Graphesis: Visual Forms of Knowledge Production” (Harvard University Press, 2014). She is a frequent contributor to the Los Angeles Review of Books, and Riot Material.

Drucker’s own artwork can be found in museum and library collections at the Getty Center for the Humanities, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Marvin and Ruth Sackner Archive of Visual and Concrete Poetry, the New York Public Library, and the Houghton Library at Harvard, among many others. In 2012, a comprehensive retrospective of her books, graphic art, and visual projects titled, "Druckworks: 40 Years of Books and Projects," opened at Columbia College and traveled throughout the country for two years.

For a Q&A with Professor Drucker, visit this link.

UCLA’s inaugural Breslauer Professor of Bibliography lauded for her work in the look of language and how it adds to its meaning.

Johanna Drucker Wins AIGA Steven Heller Award for Cultural Commentary

Professor Safiya Noble, director of an interdisciplinary research center at UCLA focused on the intersection of human rights, social justice, democracy, and technology — was announced today as a recipient of a prestigious MacArthur Fellowship from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

In 2019, Noble, an associate professor of gender studies and African American studies, co-founded the UCLA Center for Critical Internet Inquiry, with Sarah T. Roberts, associate professor of gender studies and information studies.

Noble’s scholarship focuses on digital media and its impact on society, as well as how digital technology and artificial intelligence converge with questions of race, gender, culture and power. She is the author of the bestselling book “Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism,” which examines racist and sexist bias in the algorithms used by commercial search engines.

“Noble’s work deepens our understanding of the technologies that shape the modern world and facilitates critical conversations regarding their potential harms,” the MacArthur Foundation said in a statement.                

The MacArthur Fellowship is a $625,000, no-strings-attached award to people the foundation deems “extraordinarily talented and creative individuals.” Fellows are chosen based on three criteria: exceptional creativity, promise for important future advances based on a track record of accomplishments, and potential for the fellowship to facilitate subsequent creative work. Noble is one of 25 individuals the foundation selected for fellowships in 2021.

In addition to recognizing and supporting exceptional creativity, the fellowship is intended to inspire people to pursue their own creative interests.

For Noble, who is also affiliated faculty in UCLA’s School of Education and Information Studies, that means launching her nonprofit EquityEngine.org, a leadership and empowerment initiative for women of color.

“The MacArthur Fellowship will have a transformative impact on the work I do to abolish the harmful and discriminatory effects of digital technologies,” Noble said. “It’s a great and unexpected honor, and I’m grateful to the selection committee and all my colleagues who made this possible. I plan to use this award to accelerate and amplify the work of other Black women and women of color.”

In addition to her research, Noble works with engineers, executives, artists and policymakers to think through the broader ramifications of how technology is built, deployed and used in unfair ways. She challenges them to examine the harms algorithmic architectures cause and shows the necessity of addressing the civil and human rights that are violated through their technologies.

With Noble’s award, seven current faculty in the social sciences are MacArthur Fellows, including historian Kelly Lytle- Hernández (2019), anthropologist Jason De León (2017), linguistic anthropologist Elinor Ochs (1998), sociologist Rogers Brubaker (1994), anthropologist Sherry Ortner (1990) and geographer Jared Diamond (1985).

“As social scientists, it is increasingly important for us to interrogate the power that technology holds over our social structures, cultures, behavior and potential for progress,” said Darnell Hunt, dean of the division of social sciences in the UCLA College. “Safyia’s work has done just that. We are deeply gratified and proud that the MacArthur Foundation has recognized Safiya for her ongoing commitment to engaging community, inspiring action and her efforts to build a more equitable world for all.”

Along with Roberts, Noble also serves as co-faculty director of the interdisciplinary Minderoo Initiative for Technology and Power held within the Center for Critical Internet Inquiry.

“This recognition of Dr. Noble by MacArthur Foundation is so timely, and rightly recognizes her indefatigable efforts, her incredible scope of vision, and her ability to hold fast to her convictions in the name of justice and equity, often years before the rest of the world catches up,” Roberts said. “Time and again, I have watched her fearlessly, boldly and assuredly lead the vanguard, push the boundaries of the possible, demand and then pave the way for something better. This world is a better place for the work of Safiya Noble. I am so proud to see her recognized as the iconoclastic genius that she is.”

Noble joins 13 other UCLA faculty as MacArthur fellows in total, a list that also includes mathematician Terence Tao, director Peter Sellars, astrophysicist Andrea Ghez and historian of religion Gregory Schopen.

Click here for the full story in Newsroom.

Photo: John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation

Noble, who joins 13 other UCLA ‘genius grant’ recipients, is set to launch a nonprofit that encourages women leaders.

UCLA internet studies and race scholar Safiya Noble awarded MacArthur Fellowship

Across academia, among philanthropists, and in the conversations of educators and advocates, one often hears lofty ideas and idealistic plans for “fixing schools” or “ reforming education.” They are often accompanied by calls for addressing the achievement gap of low-income, mostly Black and Brown students, to somehow address what is perceived as deficits in their thinking and learning.  

Lofty ideas and plans are sometimes quite good, and offered with the best of intentions. But the reality is the real work of helping students learn and thrive falls to the educators who go to work every day in schools serving increasingly vulnerable students.  The teachers and principals who show up before the bell rings and stay after the school day ends,  the ones who hear the stories, see the tears and struggles, and applaud the successes.  The ones who see and understand the real and difficult challenges that place learning at risk, but that also can see the assets and strengths among the students, families and community that are too often ignored.  It is to these community educators, who are dedicated to the school communities they serve, that the heavy lifting of increasing learning, opportunity and justice falls. And they need real and meaningful training and support to meet that challenge.

Two educators at UCLA, Annamarie Francois and Karen Hunter Quartz, are shining a light on strategies to help K-12 teachers and leaders succeed in a new book that makes the case for the development and support of social justice educators. 

Drawing on the experience of Francois, Quartz, and their colleagues and partners at UCLA Center X, the book, “Preparing and Sustaining Social Justice Educators,” illuminates the need for and challenge of developing and supporting educators who are not only committed to racial and social justice for their students, but those with the deep knowledge and skills needed for high-quality instruction and learning, and the perspective and resilience to disrupt educational inequality in pursuit of opportunity and justice.

Beginning with the aftermath of the not-guilty verdict in the 1992 trial of four Los Angeles Police officers who viciously beat Rodney King, a Black man, the book traces the transformation of a very traditional UCLA teaching program into a groundbreaking effort to prepare and support teachers and school leaders to further learning and opportunities in low-income urban communities through the pursuit of social justice. That effort has come to be known as UCLA Center X. 

It is not a tale though of a program rising phoenix  like from the ashes to save poor students and fix schools. Rather, it is about the development of a vision, the learning and collaboration, the successes and failures, the strategies and practices, the effort and diligence that has gone into a 30-year effort to build a “beloved community” that supports and sustains educators as they transform our public schools to create a more just, equitable, and humane society. And it is about the work and challenges that lie ahead. 

“Center X is one of many beloved communities of educators across the globe. As a movement, we share the values of inclusion, respect, and love,” Francois and Quartz write. “We unite around a common set of beliefs about the importance of culture, identity, and justice. We also unite in political struggle. We ask for trouble.” 

Francois and Quartz are joined by 27 other educators and researchers affiliated with UCLA to tell the story of Center X and make the case for social justice education. Together they share the experience of Center X in hopes that it ignites the imagination about what is possible.  

The first sets the vision for UCLA Center X and the work that has gone into “making the rhetoric real.” This section establishes the guiding principles, from a commitment to an agenda of social justice, to a constant focus on self-renewal. It also reframes teacher education as a transformative response to racial injustice, and highlights efforts to understand and advance the measurement of teaching quality in ways that deepen teacher learning.  

The section begins with an article written 25 years ago by UCLA Presidential Emeritus Professor Jeannie Oakes, often referred to as the mother of Center X, in which she sets forth a vision and the elements of a new effort to transform the UCLA Teacher Education Program into one committed to social and educational justice for low-income children of color in Los Angeles.  They are, she admits, asking for a whole lot of trouble.  But Oakes also makes clear their commitment to “the view,  however idealistic—that schools and teaching for low-income racially, culturally, and linguistically diverse children can change.”  And she lays out the key elements of how that can happen, outlining a new vision for a culture of teacher preparation and role for teachers as caring advocates, reflective practitioners,  community builders and change agents. 

Francois then joins with Jarod Kawasaki, an assistant professor at California State University, Dominguez Hills, and a former faculty member in the UCLA Teacher Education Program, to delve into how UCLA Center X organizes teacher preparation to support the development of community teachers.  

In the opening chapter, Oakes calls for teacher preparation programs to develop teachers with the “commitment, capacity, and resilience” to fundamentally change the systemically oppressive structures and cultures within schools. Francois and Kawasaki write that they see this mandate as “a fundamental responsibility of a community teacher, one that explicitly seeks to dismantle and disrupt systems of oppression through transformative pedagogies, deep relationships with students and their families, and collective action for and with the most vulnerable communities.“

The second part of the book explores how Center X develops and sustains community teachers through professional learning. This section highlights coaching that reframes the achievement gap to be seen as an equity gap, seeking to change perspectives and practices that may be culturally oppressive and exacerbate inequalities, and the provision of “cradle to grave” professional development focused on furthering equity and social justice. It also looks at the role of research-practice partnerships in establishing a common vision of public schooling and transformative relationships,  and takes a deep dive into strategies that have enhanced and sustained instructional practices that increase student learning and engagement.  The section closes with a close look at the formation and role of the Principal Leadership Program (PLI) at Center X, the process of preparing educational leaders for justice and the need for continued support and inquiry of school leaders. 

“To educate our most vulnerable children, it is imperative that we re-think how we support new teachers coming into the field and shift the way we think about coaching for all teachers,” writes Tonikiaa Orange and Jo Ann Isken of UCLA Center X.

“Preparing teachers for social justice is not enough,” added Jody Priselac and Megan L. Franke, of the UCLA School of Education and Information Studies.  Franke, chair of the UCLA Department of Education, and Priselac, associate dean of community programs, write,  “Idealistic, well-prepared, and justice-oriented novices far too often find themselves assigned to urban schools where pedagogies of poverty are the norm. Creating ongoing opportunities for professional learning becomes essential for supporting urban teachers and their students. The challenge, is to create ongoing learning for teacher education students that centers social justice and a view of learning that is transformative.”

The final section of the book explores the role of Center X in transforming schools. The book highlights the ideas, research, and strategies and practices developed through school-university partnerships that have inspired and furthered the work of groundbreaking community schools affiliated with UCLA, and in turn, how the collaborations with these schools and educators have inspired and enhanced the work of Center X and others at UCLA.  

One chapter highlights the partnership with Roosevelt High School and how the University has supported the social justice mission and work at the historic Eastside institution. Another tells the story of the development of UCLA Community School in Los Angeles’s Koreatown, where students, parents and educators are engaged in a learning experience that is furthering knowledge and opportunity, and have created a democratic culture where teachers want to work and stay. The section closes with a look at the challenge and successes  of working in partnership with parents, community members and educators to transform a historic but long neglected school in South Los Angeles, now known as the Mann UCLA Community School. 

In the chapter on UCLA Community School, Quartz and  Community School colleagues Leyda Garcia, Queena Kim and Marisa Saunders describe how the school has strived to develop a workplace culture that supports teachers’ collective agency to make a difference in the local community—alongside parents, students, university partners, and many others. The culture is defined by respectful, supported, and productive collaboration to solve problems, such as how to educate in two languages, evaluate teachers, or mainstream students with disabilities.  It is also a school culture that is deeply democratic and reflexive, where it is routine to ask, “Does this advance social justice?” 

As noted, the development of UCLA Center X was sparked by the fires lit in frustration at the injustice of the ruling in the police beating of Rodney King. This new book, “Preparing and Sustaining Social Justice Educators,” is being published a little more than a year after the killing of George Floyd shocked the nation and led to protest in cities across the United States and the globe. It is abundantly clear that racism, inequity and injustice remain. The authors of the book are well aware of this stark reality, but in the story of UCLA Center X, they lay out a strategy for continuing the fight, for learning, collaboration, renewal, and enduring effort in a quest for social justice. As Oakes notes in the book’s closing, “Center X has not made the world safe, healthy, and decent; but it continues to teach and nurture those who would make it so.” They are, in the words of the late John Lewis, asking for good trouble.

Preparing and Sustaining Social Justice Educators, is edited by Annamarie Francois and Karen Hunter Quartz.  Published by Harvard Education Press, September 2021. Contributors: Melissa S. Arias • Heather F. Clark • Carla Estes • Megan L. Franke • Leyda Garcia • Ben Gertner • Emma Hipólito • Jo Ann Isken • Lynn Kim-John • Carrie Usui Johnson • Orlando Johnson • Jarod Kawasaki • Queena Kim • Jon Kovach • Ung-Sang Lee Imelda L. Nava • Jeannie Oakes • Tonikiaa Orange • Nancy Parachini • Jaime J. Park Leticia Perez • Jody Z. Priselac • John Rogers • William A. Sandoval • Marisa Saunders • Christine Shen 

New book, “Preparing and Sustaining Social Justice Educators,” details UCLA Center X efforts to transform teacher preparation, educator support, and schools through focus on social justice

Making the Case for Social Justice Educators in America’s Schools

In the foreword to Lindsay Pérez Huber’s recent book, “Why They Hate Us: How Racist Rhetoric Impacts Education,” (with co-editor Susana M. Muñoz, 2021, Teachers College Press), UCLA Professor of Education Daniel G. Solórzano, writes that the collection of essays,  “… place immigrant and undocumented students and communities at the center of the story. These nine essays are excellent examples of anti-racist-nativist research and testimonios to the strength and power of the undocumented community and provide a roadmap toward truth, resistance, and triumph.”

As an associate professor in the Social and Cultural Analysis of Education master’s program at California State University, Long Beach, Pérez Huber (’10, Ph.D., Social Sciences and Comparative Education, Ethnic Studies Specialization) draws upon her research through interdisciplinary perspectives to analyze racial inequities in education, the structural causes of those inequities, and how they mediate educational trajectories and outcomes of students of color.

Pérez Huber is the co-author of “Racial Microaggressions: Using Critical Race Theory to Respond to Everyday Racism,” with Solórzano, her mentor and former professor. She is also a visiting scholar at the UCLA Center for Critical Race Studies.

The Latest had a conversation with Pérez Huber on the political and social forces that shaped her book.

What are some of the main impacts behind racist rhetoric in schools?

Lindsay Pérez Huber: The idea for this book started back in 2015, with hearing the racist rhetoric that was coming out of the Trump campaign in ways that were different, I think, than we had heard in other recent historical moments. This started with the targeting of undocumented Mexican immigrants as criminals, really racist, nasty things, in his presidential bid about Mexican immigrants in particular. Then, hearing about how this was playing out in schools and in higher education. This rhetoric has led to very violent acts that had been committed both [against] undocumented Latino communities, but also U.S.-born Latinos who were racialized as immigrants.

Before the book was even really started, I noticed things happening in higher ed. As a faculty member, I would hear what students were experiencing in terms of comments that were being made [against them], reading newspaper articles about walls being built out of cardboard at different college campuses across the U.S. And in schools, students were also experiencing that racist rhetoric, in their classrooms and on their campuses. So, when I thought about what I wanted this book to be, I wanted it to be a book that would cut across both sectors of K-12 and higher ed, because I knew that students were experiencing the consequences of this rhetoric across the pipeline.

I’ve co-edited the book with Susana Muñoz, a faculty member at Colorado State University at Fort Collins. We invited contributors that would speak to their research at both levels of education. One of our contributors, Dr. John Rogers, is a UCLA Education faculty member in Urban Schooling, who contributed a chapter with Michael Ishimoto (’18, Ph.D., Education), on the racist rhetoric in high schools from the perspective of principals and high school teachers. Another contributor, Silvia Rodriguez Vega, talks about the impact of racist rhetoric on younger elementary students in fifth and sixth grade. And then, contributor Tanya Gaxiola-Serrano, also a UCLA Education Ph.D., discusses the impact upon students who live right across the border in Tijuana and come across to attend community college in San Diego.

We have a chapter on how Black Muslim students experienced the negative consequences of racist rhetoric as well, and so I feel like we we really were able to capture how this is impacting a range of students, both in K-12 schools and in higher education.

How does the historical sweep of the book illustrate far reaching issues that predate the Trump presidency?

Pérez Huber: That’s exactly what what I do in the introductory chapter. It’s called, “Racist Rhetoric in the U.S. -  A Brief History from the Southern Strategy to Make America Great Again.” In that chapter, I argue how racist ideologies have created articulatory practices of racist nativism, discourses that are shaped by racist nativist perceptions that have historically targeted immigrants of color, and how those discourses have directly impacted and influenced behaviors that lead towards anti-immigrant sentiment.

We’ve seen that throughout history, and what it does is it opens the discursive doors of public discourse to engage in more overt and violent practices of racism against communities of color. In that chapter, I quote comedian Dave Chappelle who I saw doing an interview with CNN correspondent Christiane Amanpour. They were talking about being a comedian in the Trump era. Christiane had asked Dave… if being a comedian in the Trump era was a “good” thing because of all the material Trump gives them, and [Chapelle’s] response was that he wouldn’t even name the era after [Trump] because it gave him too much credit. In other words, Trump didn’t make the wave of racism – he was surfing it. 

I start there and then I talk about the history of U.S. presidential candidates and other politicians, for example, our former governor in California, Pete Wilson, who used racism and ideologies of White supremacy to gain voter support. I discuss George Bush, with his famous Willie Horton ad. Barry Goldwater and George Wallace both did this in their 1964 campaigns, scapegoating African Americans to gain White voter support. 

I talked about how important it is to understand how this racist rhetoric is really more than just words: it leads to action and makes White supremacy and racism more comfortably performed, and in turn, communities of color are targeted.

We’re seeing racist rhetoric now, even with Trump gone. That does not go away when he leaves office. It remains and people remember that it was [considered] okay to treat immigrants and people of color in that way. 

How do you hope that educators and administrators will benefit from this book?

Pérez Huber: Susana and I wrote the last chapter and we called it, “The Racism Pandemic,” thinking about how the COVID-19 pandemic has really highlighted racial inequities, with disproportionate impacts of hospitalization and death in communities of color, particularly Black and Brown communities. The most disenfranchised communities are really struggling to get access to the vaccinations. And then, we have the racism pandemic. In summer of 2020 the  Black Lives Matter movement demanded national attention to the racism pandemic and the murders of unarmed African Americans by White perpetrators. 

We used that concept of the racism pandemic as a framework to call upon educators, administrators, and educational leaders in K-12 and higher education to recognize and understand the historical legacies of racism that persist in this county, and especially how it has persisted within immigration discourses and policies. In education, we don’t talk much about how racism shows up in our history of immigration and how it impacts immigrant communities and students.  

An understanding of those histories and also an understanding of how the sociopolitical contexts matter for our students directly shapes the experiences and structural inequities faced by immigrant students, undocumented students, Black students, and other students of color. So, that is a really important call we make at the end of the book, for educators to really understand where these experiences are coming from so that we can begin to engage in discussions about how to disrupt it.

How will this improve the racial climate for students?

Pérez Huber: Students are actually one of the audiences we had in mind when we were writing this book and thinking about what we wanted this book to do. Our goal would be for students to know that they are not alone in having these experiences, that this racist rhetoric is targeting them and is being perpetrated upon many students across the United States. It’s not only happening to them - they're not crazy to think these things are happening. They're very real, they're very hurtful, and they're traumatic.

One thing that did not surprise me among the contributions to this book was that we heard very similar experiences of racism across racial groups and different levels of education. I think often that educators think that children are not up for these conversations; that they're too young, particularly when we get to these very triggering discussions about racism and what Trump was saying about their communities at the time. [Children] were talking about this in their households, they were seeing it on TV, and they had a very grounded understanding of what was going on. I think it's important to understand that we should be having these conversations with our young people and our youth early on.

I hope what this book does is really resonate and affirm students who read it, students who have been through experiences like these, as a result of of racist rhetoric in their schools and universities.

UCLA alumna is an associate professor in the Social and Cultural Analysis of Education program at CSU Long Beach.

Lindsay Pérez Huber: New Book Examines Harmful Effects of Racist Rhetoric in Education

The UCLA Center for the Transformation of Schools (CTS) has been awarded a 3-year, $1M National Science Foundation (NSF) grant to strengthen Computational Thinking (CT) and build a pipeline to STEM careers for students in South Los Angeles. The grant will support a Research-Practice Partnership (RPP) working to identify the critical academic and support systems students need to acquire foundational Computer Science knowledge, skills, and competencies. The funding will also support the development of a pathway from John Muir Middle School (JMMS) to The Critical Design and Gaming School at Augustus F. Hawkins High School through mentoring provided by UCLA’s Center for Excellence in Engineering and Diversity. The partnership includes collaboration with The Hidden Genius Project to provide mentor training, and The California Mathematics Project to provide educator coaching and project-based learning support.

The Research Practice Partnership builds upon a previous NSF-funded project to spur interest in Computer Science, expanding the program from 50 ninth-grade students to 300 students in grades 6-12 engaged in Computer Science and STEM learning. The effort aims to positively impact students by increasing their computational thinking skills, strengthen partnerships with key STEM industries and organizations, and continue building relationships with relevant community members.

Previous research has made clear that students of color have less access to STEM-related fields of study and occupations than their peers. Low-income students of color in the Los Angeles area have historically struggled to meet state standards in mathematics, a pattern that is reflected in the two school sites in South Los Angeles participating in the project. 

“Our hope is that the Research-Practice Partnership pathway can inform district intervention policies and practices to effectively close learning gaps; particularly gaps in mathematics and related subjects for historically marginalized groups,” said UCLA Project Director Stanley L. Johnson Jr., lead researcher on the project. “Additionally, we believe that our model for co-constructing the development of computational thinking through teacher-centered pedagogy and near-peer mentoring can inform teachers’ instructional approaches to CT development.”

“We are hopeful students will want to return to the program as college-age mentors due to their involvement in the program,” Tyrone Howard, UCLA Professor of Education and Faculty Director of the Center for the Transformation of Schools,  Tyrone Howard said. “We anticipate new and unique outcomes from these two South Los Angeles communities that will benefit significantly from stronger STEM connections.”

Computational Thinking (CT) Development Pathways Research Practice Partnership is a project of the UCLA Center for the Transformation of Schools. More information about the project can be found here.

$1M National Science Foundation grant will expand UCLA Center for the Transformation of Schools' effort to close learning gaps and increase opportunities in STEM for low-income students of color at two LAUSD schools in South Los Angeles. 

UCLA Computer Science Model Expanding in Los Angeles Unified Schools

UCLA Center X Executive Director Annamarie Francois, Ph.D., was interviewed by Alison Munzer, a doctoral candidate at UCLA, for a series on "Leading Scholars in Teacher Education." The interview is featured on the website of the California Teacher Education Research and Improvement Network. 

Francois, a UCLA alumna, discusses the circumstances that have shaped her as a professional teacher educator and her hopes and dreams for the future of teacher education: equity, democracy, and justice. 

To view "Leading Scholars in Teacher Education: Dr. Annamarie Francois," visit this link.

Executive director of UCLA Center X shares her experiences as a teacher educator and her hopes for the future of preparing teachers.

Annamarie Francois Featured on UC Website for Teacher Education Research and Improvement Network

UCLA Professor of Education Sylvia Hurtado will deliver the 2021 AERA Distinguished Lecture on Thursday, Sept. 30, 6-7 p.m., EDT. The lecture, titled “The Inevitability of Racial Bias and Exclusion: Implications for Identity-Based Education and Practice,” is rescheduled from the Virtual Annual Meeting in April. The event will include a welcome from AERA President Na’ilah Suad Nasir and an introduction from AERA Past President Shaun R. Harper, with an open discussion with Q&A from virtual attendees following Hurtado’s lecture.

“Racial/ethnic identity groups have endured racial profiling, are targets of hate crimes, and are often viewed not as individuals but as a faceless mass on a daily basis—even in classrooms. Dr. Hurtado personalizes “facelessness” using research on campus racial climates and Latinx experiences, articulating how our tendencies for recognition bias are perpetuated and reinforced at the individual and institutional levels in education. She articulates the need for identity-based education, re-humanizing practices, and increased specificity to target racial equity aims in higher education.”

A longstanding AERA Fellow, Hurtado is a professor in the division of Higher Education and Organizational Change in the UCLA School of Education and Information Studies. As a first-generation Latina student from San Antonio, Texas, she has made a lifelong study of the sociology of education. Influenced by her experiences, her scholarship focuses on student educational outcomes, campus racial climates, and equity and inclusion in higher education. 

Hurtado says that looking back on her career as an academic researcher, “You think about your career and [wonder], ‘What message can I send?’ and what I was thinking about was really trying to touch people … where the issues of race and recognition and identity become very personal, and that reflects a lot of my research and my teaching. 

“I hope that I touch those chords with this talk, and also tie it [together] not just at the individual level but also at the institutional [level],” Hurtado notes. “As we’ve seen, recognition bias is about creating this facelessness… not really understanding the differences, not recognizing people’s identities. It happens on a daily basis, but we also know that there are some very serious consequences to recognition bias when it plays into racial profiling or hate crimes. This is a great time to have a broader conversation about how those issues really impact us individually, in how we look at each other and how we become more humane in understanding and appreciating our identities.”

Professor Hurtado says that identity-based education goes beyond the aims of culturally responsiveness, “… recognizing multiple social identities humanizes our interactions because now we understand a little bit more about each other, or, are wiling to learn,” with a recognition of the uniqueness within and among groups that may seem, to those outside those groups, almost the same.

“Identity is incredibly important to specific groups – their cultural traditions, their histories of immigration, all of that,” notes Hurtado. “And becoming more identity-focused, we actually incorporate that in our teaching, in our inclusion practices in the classroom, in the way we collect data on campuses. We’re more specific about specific groups because we want to monitor their progress more accurately. There are a lot of different ways, both institutionally and also in the classroom in which we can become more identity-based in instruction and also learn from each other.”

Professor Hurtado served as director of the Higher Education Research Institute (HERI) at UCLA for more than a decade and is past-president of the Association for the Study of Higher Education. She served on the Board on Higher Education and Workforce of the National Research Council and was on study panels that produced several National Academy Press reports on STEM, student success, and mentoring. 

In addition to being inducted as an AERA Fellow in 2011, Hurtado was elected to the National Academy of Education and to the AERA Council in 2019. She has led several national research projects, including NIH-sponsored projects on the longitudinal assessment of students aspiring to STEM careers, and institutional strategies to broaden participation in STEM. 

Professor Hurtado’s current research includes case studies of departments that implement culturally aware mentoring among faculty (NIH U01) with the University of Wisconsin; university organizational change after the replication of the Meyerhoff Scholars Program, funded by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute; and another Spencer-funded project on organizing for student success at Hispanic-serving institutions. 

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