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Caryn Bailey - National Institute on the Education of At-Risk Students.
Dr. Bailey is a Senior Research Associate at the Center for Research on the Education of Students Placed At Risk (CRESPAR) and also the Director of Assessment at the Capstone Institute at Howard University. Her research project is titled, "Teaching Teachers to Build on Students' Assets: An Analysis of African American Elementary School Children's Reading Comprehension Performance, Utilization of Meta-Cognitive Strategies, and Learning Processes in Three Group Learning Contexts." Dr. Bailey plans to employ teachers-trained-as-researchers to investigate the effects of providing reading curriculum and instruction in three culturally-informed group learning contexts, namely communal or asset-based; cooperative; and interpersonal-competitive) on students' strategic reading, meta-cognitive, and group learning processes. This research, emanating from a Talent Development framework, seeks to contribute to the development of a new, asset-based pedagogy which documents the cultural integrity residing in the preexisting talents, assets, and learning experiences of children. It also offers educators effective instructional methods that build upon these assets for enhancing student academic achievement.
Dr. Bailey received her Ph.D. in Psychology from Howard University. She has been awarded a Postdoctoral Research Fellowship and a Trustee Award at Howard University. She has served as Research Associate at the Center for Family Research at the George Washington University School of Medicine and has consulted on various research projects, including the Turn of the Century Achievement Program Evaluation at the Center for Equity and Excellence in Education at the George Washington University, the National Child Development Associate Program at the Council for Early Childhood Professional Recognition, and the Predicting African American Children's School Competence Project at the Frank Porter Graham Child Development Center at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She has authored several publications and has given numerous presentations on the achievement, motivation, and psychocultural experiences of African American children placed at educational risk.
Michele Foster - National Institute on Student Achievement, Curriculum, and Assessment.
Dr. Foster is a Professor at the Center for Graduate Educational Studies, Claremont University in Claremont, California. Broadly focused on the social and cultural contexts of learning of African Americans, her research has been supported by OERI and by grants from the Spencer Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation. Her scholarship includes studies of teachers, research on teacher professional development and change, and sociolinguistic and ethnography of communication research in classrooms. She recently completed a major study in the San Francisco Unified School District, which explored how teachers who were involved in a professional development program designed to expose them to cultural and linguistic information about African American students translated this knowledge into appropriate curricular, instructional, and pedagogical practice, as well as the effect of this changed practice on the academic achievement of African American students.
Dr. Foster also completed the second year of the African American Culture and Language Project (AACLP). In this intervention/research study, she organized professional development activities with teachers in one Oakland Public School and is attempting to understand how the activities and their organization have promoted changes in teachers' classroom practice. As a 2000-01 OERI Visiting Scholar, she will conduct a research project titled, "The Uses of Culture in Teaching and Learning: Prospects and Possibilities."
Before joining Claremont University, Dr. Foster taught at various universities including the University of Massachusetts at Boston, Roxbury Community College, University of Pennsylvania and University of California at Davis. She has taught in the Boston Public Schools and worked in the Brookline Public Schools. She has also worked for the Massachusetts State Department of Education and served as a Director for the METCO Program, a voluntary urban desegregation program in the Boston Metropolitan Area. Dr. Foster has received several fellowships, awards, and research grants. She was a recipient of the National Academy of Education Postdoctoral Fellowship and a University of North Carolina (Chapel Hill) Minority Postdoctoral Fellow. In 1992, she received the Early Career Achievement Award from the American Educational Research Association. She is also active in professional associations, having held leadership positions and presented at yearly conferences, reviewed manuscripts and served on editorial and review boards for research proposals and publications. She was recently elected to be Vice President of Division G, the Social Context of Education, the American Educational Research Association.
Kimberley Ann Woo - The National Institute on Educational Governance, Finance, Policymaking, and Management.
Dr. Woo is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction in the Neag School of Education at the University of Connecticut. Her research and writing interests include Asian and Pacific American adolescents, gender roles, multiculturalism, secondary social studies, teacher education, school/community/university partnerships, bridging the gap between research and practice, and technology's role in research.
Dr. Woo's research project is titled, "An Opportunity for Dialogue: Research on the Diverse Experiences of Asian and Pacific American Adolescents." It explores the influences of diverse geographic locations and other factors such as immigration patterns, socioeconomic status, cultural traditions, state policies, educational experiences, and native residents' responses to Asian and Pacific American (APA) adolescents' lives. The project collects data using a web-based approach. A sample of students will be selected to participate in on-line discussions at two secured web sites, one regional and one national. Participants' discussions will be transcribed and analyzed to nuance understandings about the range of experiences that exist among and within APA adolescent communities. It is hoped that this study will influence teacher training, curricular choices, and pedagogy in two ways, first, through the creation of learning environments that celebrate and encourage the successes of all students; and second, by preparing all who are involved with the educational process to examine, critically, the APA legacy which is a part of their educational experiences.
Dr. Woo received her Ed.D. in Social Studies Education from Teachers College, Columbia University. She is a former secondary social studies teacher. At the University of Connecticut, she has taught pre-service courses related to social studies methods, qualitative research, and incorporating community resources into secondary curricula. Dr. Woo is an active member of many professional organizations such as the American Educational Research Association, National Council of the Social Studies, and National Association for Multicultural Education. She has reviewed manuscripts for publication (e.g., Urban Education, Social Education, Critical Inquiry). She has also achieved recognition as an AERA Minority Dissertation Fellowship, a Holmes Scholar Alumnus, and with a Teachers College Dean's Grant.
Min Zhou - National Institute on the Education of At-Risk Students.
Dr. Zhou is Professor of Sociology and Asian American Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Her main areas of research are immigration and immigrant adaptation; ethnic and racial relations; Asian Americans; ethnic entrepreneurship and enclave economies; the community; and urban sociology. She has done extensive work on the educational experience of immigrant children and children of immigrant parentage, the employment and earnings patterns of immigrants and native-born minorities, immigrant communities, ethnic economies, and residential mobility. Her work appears in American Sociological Review, Sociology of Education, Social Forces, International Migration Review, Amerasia Journal, and other academic journals. Currently, she is completing an ethnographic research project in three immigrant communities in downtown Los Angeles, examining how neighborhood environment influences parent-child and peer-group relations, children's after-school life, and their current academic and future occupational aspirations.
As a 2000-01 OERI Visiting Scholar, she plans to develop a book manuscript based on her Los Angeles Study titled, "How Community Matters for Immigrant Children? Structural Supports and Constraints in Inner-City Neighborhoods."
Dr. Zhou received her Ph.D. in Sociology from State University of New York (SUNY) at Albany. She teaches a variety of courses at UCLA, including Sociology of Los Angeles; Theories of Ethnicity; Contemporary Asian American Communities; Immigration and the New Second Generation; and Chinese Immigration. Dr. Zhou serves on the editorial board of Ethnicities and is a consulting editor of the American Journal of Sociology. She has been elected to the Committee on Nominations of the American Sociological Association (ASA) and to the councils of ASA's Section on Community and Urban Sociology and the Section on International Migration.
This page last modified September 28, 2000 (dlt).