Dean’s Lecture Series Archive: 2021–22
2021–22 Theme: Equity and Education
GSE is committed to creating an equitable, diverse, inclusive and just community where all feel welcomed, included, supported and empowered. It is crucial our communities have equal access to supports, services and opportunities that ensure learning and success.
Invited speakers were selected by a committee of junior faculty who also picked the theme. Their topics reflect a range of perspectives on the theme, representing the various departments within GSE.
JESSICA CHANDRAS
Visiting Professor
Wake Forest University
“The Sociolinguistics of Caste and Class Privilege in Education in India”
This talk presents a model of the intersection of language and social privilege in education as applied to a broader issue of educational equity in India. Based on research conducted from 2016 to 2018 in schools in Pune, an educational hub in the western Indian state of Maharashtra, the central question asks: How are multilingual practices in education in India used to keep education largely segregated by socioeconomic class and caste? In this talk, I will explore examples of classroom discourse, language socialization, and language ideologies collected using ethnographic and sociolinguistic methods to illuminate language as social action through privilege and its impacts on structural inequalities in education. Speaking against a narrative of social stratification in education in India amounting to economic capital and socioeconomic class differences, this discussion prompts a critical rethinking of the relationship between language, social status, and pedagogical structures within the socially stratified cultural context of urban India.
Jessica Chandras is an anthropologist trained in ethnographic methods with a focus on linguistic anthropology and anthropology of education. She joined the anthropology department at Wake Forest University in 2021 as a visiting professor. Chandras received a bachelor’s degree with honors in cultural anthropology from the University of Washington in 2010 and her PhD in cultural and linguistic anthropology from the George Washington University in 2019. Her on-going research in India and the United States examines values attached language and practices of identity formation and multilingual language socialization pertaining to education through a lens of power.
FREDERICK LEONG
Retired Professor of Psychology and Psychiatry
Michigan State University
“Desiderata: Diversity Mindsets”
This talk will describe a diversity mindset measure (DMM) based on the diversified portfolio model (DPM; Chandra and Leong 2016). The DMM captures the degree to which an individual’s mindset predisposes them to engaging in diverse roles and experiences, thereby engendering psychologically relevant diversification. A diversity mindset consists of a set of beliefs regarding the nature and consequences of diversity in life. These multidimensional beliefs pertain to the biological, psychological and social aspects of life. These beliefs also pertain to ideas, experiences, relationships and life roles. The Diversity Mindset Measure postulates that individuals develop a higher level of the diversity mindset by seeking out diversity in life which in turn reinforces the diversified portfolio. In addition to describing the Diversified Portfolio Model and the development of the Diversity Mindset Measure, future research directions and practical applications of the DMM will also be discussed in this presentation. Given the current attention to BIPOC populations and their experiences, the DMM can serve as an important measure and tool to aid in the exploration of the psychological mindsets underlying racism, stereotyping, prejudice and discrimination.
Frederick Leong is a retired professor of psychology and psychiatry at Michigan State University. From 2006 to 2021, he was the founding director of the Consortium for Multicultural Psychology Research at MSU. He has authored or co-authored over 310 journal articles and book chapters and edited or co-edited 22 books.
Leong's major research interests center around culture and mental health, cross-cultural psychotherapy (especially with Asians and Asian Americans), cultural and personality factors related to career choice and work stress and adaptability.
Leong is editor-in-chief of the Encyclopedia of Counseling (Sage Publications), the APA Handbook of Multicultural Psychology (APA Books), and the APA Handbook of Psychotherapy (APA Books). Leong is the founding editor of the Asian American Journal of Psychology and the lead editor of the Handbook of Asian American Psychology, 2nd Edition (Sage Publications). He served as the associate editor of the of the American Psychologist and the Archives of Scientific Psychology.
He is the past president of APA’s Division 45 (Society for the Psychological Study of Ethnic Minority Issues), Division 12-Section VI (Clinical Psychology of Ethnic Minorities), the Asian American Psychological Association, the Division of Counseling Psychology of the International Association of Applied Psychology.
He was the recipient of the 2007 APA Award for Distinguished Contributions to the International Advancement of Psychology and the 2013 APA Award for Distinguished Service to Psychological Science. He received the 2009 Stanley Sue Award for Distinguished Contributions to Diversity in Clinical Psychology from APA Division 12 and the 2018 Leona Tyler Lifetime Achievement Award from the APA Division of Counseling Psychology.
RODERICK CAREY
Assistant Professor
College of Education and Human Development, University of Delaware
“How Black Boys Perceived Their Mattering During the ‘Dual Pandemics’: Race, Schooling, and Adolescents’ (In)Significance Throughout Health and Racial Crises”
Over two years, the “dual pandemics”—COVID-19 and anti-Black extrajudicial police violence—wrought peril on the Black community. These pandemics and the accompanying Black Lives Matter movements also awakened Black youth to systemic challenges they navigate in society and school and mechanisms that prove their (in)significance, (un)importance, or (non)-mattering. Carey will reveal how his research team currently explores this concept qualitatively with a group of 16 adolescent Black boys in one urban high school through The Black Boy Mattering Project. Carey will reveal data from sub-set of participants (N=5) captured during four focus group interviews captured over two school years (2019–2021) to explore how they made meaning of the dual pandemics. This inquiry, grounded in critical consciousness, and Carey’s racialized formulations of mattering (e.g., inferred importance and significance) reveals the interplay between their school’s response to the dual pandemics, the boys perceived school mattering and their visions for change.
Roderick L. Carey, PhD, is an assistant professor in the Department of Human Development and Family Sciences, in the College of Education and Human Development at the University of Delaware. His current interdisciplinary research serves to make sense of the school experiences of Black and Latino adolescent boys and young men in urban contexts, drawing upon critical theories, sociological tools and constructs from developmental psychology. Carey employs primarily qualitative approaches in researching and writing about both macro and micro issues related to families and schools, teacher education, professional development for equity, Black Boy Mattering, and the ways Black and Latino adolescent boys and young men conceptualize their postsecondary school futures and enact college-going processes.
Carey is the founder and director of the Black Boy Mattering Project, a unique secondary school partnership study that investigates how adolescent Black Boys and young men articulate their mattering across multiple school and social domains. This work is primarily funded through his University of Delaware Partnership for Public Education Fellowship and the National Academy of Education's Spencer Research Development Award.
Carey received his PhD in curriculum and instruction with a concentration on minority and urban education from the University of Maryland College Park; his EdM in human development and psychology from the Harvard University Graduate School of Education; and his BA in secondary education and English from the Lynch School of Education and Human Development of Boston College.
Prior to joining the University of Delaware, Carey was a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Urban Education. In partnership with the Department of Applied Developmental Psychology in the School of Education, he was the lead qualitative researcher on a team conducting mix-methods evaluations of the Heinz Endowments Youth Organizing initiative. He also chaired the first Center for Urban Education Summer Educator Forum, which brings together Pittsburgh area educators annually for two days of workshops, lectures, discussions and other professional learning experiences.
Recent invited blogs posts: Voices in Education: The Blog of Harvard Education Publishing, Forum of the American Journal of Education and the Official Blog of Kappa Delta Pi.