Vonzell Agosto (vagosto@wisc.edu), Department of Curriculum and Instruction, UW-Madison - "The Identities and Social Justice Values of Prospective Teachers of Color"
     Agosto's study examines the historical memory and legacy of racial and/or ethnic related sociocultural experiences that inform the development of social justice values or sensibilities, or lack thereof, in three prospective teachers of color. She aims to identify the dimensions of social justice with which they are concerned, if any, and examine how race and/or ethnicity orient them toward specific dimensions of social justice as personal experience (affecting self), as categories of analyses (affecting others), and/or the bridging of the two.
     She is using life history methods and a multicultural narrative approach to generate data through interviews and student work samples. Through Critical Race Theory and Latino Critical Race Theory, she will analyze their stories in relation to institutional contexts. Their stories and actions will give insight into how the three research subjects integrate new experiences into their pre-established system of beliefs, and will reveal how they mature in their thinking and acting related to ideas associated with social justice.
     The goal of this research is to inform teacher education, especially as situated within higher education. Teacher recruitment and retention efforts aimed at increasing the diversity of the predominantly white K-12 teaching force hinge on the argument that teachers of color possess a body of experiences and knowledge that make them more likely to develop perspectives, dispositions, and attitudes conducive to fostering social justice. Learning lessons from these participants can assist teacher education programs to rethink their pedagogy in supporting prospective teachers, both of color and white, to further develop their understanding and values related to social justice in the classroom and beyond.

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Yung-Lung Chen (ypchen@uwm.edu), Department of Educational Psychology, UW-Milwaukee - "Asian American Educational Achievements: A Test of Relative Functionalism."
     Over the past three decades, considerable attention has been paid to the academic achievement of Asian Americans. For example, according to the U.S. Census Bureau (2004), 47% of Asian American adults have college degrees (national average, 27%), and 16% have advanced degrees (national average, 9%). In 1990 two prominent Asian American psychologists, Dr. Stanley Sue and Dr. Sumie Okazaki, argued that hereditary and cultural factors have failed to explain the phenomenon and proposed a theory of "relative functionalism." According to the theory, Asian Americans have experienced restrictions in upward mobility in careers/jobs that are unrelated to education such as leadership, entertainment, sports, politics, and so forth. Consequently, education has become an important avenue to enhance their career. In other words, Asian Americans use education as a way to cope with racial barriers. This theory has raised an interesting nationwide debate among psychologists; however, there has been no empirical research investigating this theory. Currently, Chen is developing statistical models identifying important variables to test the hypotheses in their theory on East Asian American college students.
      In addition, Chen, in collaboration with a research team headed by Dr. Nadya Fouad of UWM's Department of Psychology, has also published an empirical study that investigated the career decision process of Asian Americans. Currently, he is developing a bicultural work motivation scale for Asian American college students.

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Matt Nichter (mnichter@ssc.wisc.edu), Department of Sociology, UW-Madison - " "Rethinking the Origins of the Civil Rights Movement: Radicals, Repression, and the Black Freedom Struggle, 1930-1965.""
     Nichter's dissertation explores the impact of McCarthyism on the development of the African-American civil rights movement. He argues that the repression of leftist radicals and progressive labor unions after World War II delayed the emergence of a sustained civil rights insurgency, narrowed the range of permissible African-American political discourse, and reduced the centrality of organized labor within local civil rights coalitions. Notwithstanding these significant discontinuities, many participants in the labor and leftist movements of 1930s and 1940s also played important leadership roles in the resurgent civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s.
      Nichter's research utilizes a variety of sources and methods. One component of the project involves systematic coding of newspaper articles and the construction of a database of protest events, designed to track changes in protest frequency, sponsorship, and demands over a span of several decades. A chapter on Chicago activists' responses to the lynching of Emmett Till will draw on declassified surveillance documents and interviews to reveal how fear of 'Communist subversion' divided local activists and conditioned authorities' reactions to demands for redress. Another chapter, based on newly available archival sources, traces the rise and fall of two interracial veterans' organizations with footholds in the Deep South: the American Veterans Committee and the United Negro and Allied Veterans of America.

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Jen S. Schoepke (schoepke@cae.wisc.edu), Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, UW-Madison - "What Does it Mean to be White? The Experiences of Male Engineers at a Research University."
     Schoepke's research interests include racial climate in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) higher education disciplines; teaching and learning in STEM higher education; higher education organizational design; issues of diversity in STEM higher education; community ergonomics; and macroergonomics as applied to the above areas of interest. Her doctoral research is a qualitative phenomenology study aimed at answering the following question: What does it mean to be a white male faculty member in a College of Engineering (herein CoE) at a research university? Using semi-structured and photo elicitation interviewing, the overrepresentation of white male faculty in CoE will be examined to understand how white faculty make sense of their whiteness. Specifically, the following research questions are asked: 1) How do white racial identities inform the explanations that white faculty have as to why they are overrepresented and faculty of color are underrepresented in a CoE?; 2) What assumptions are behind the explanations white faculty give for their overrepresentation in a CoE?; and 3) How, if at all, do white faculty contribute to the racial climate in a CoE?
      Schoepke hopes this study will help to inform why there is an overrepresentatioin of white faculty in engineering, and therefore an underrepresentation of engineering faculty of color. Through this understanding, she hopes to increase the diversity of engineering faculty to ultimately affect the quality of engineering education that all students receive.

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