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Ford Fellowship
Professor named Ford Foundation fellow, continues work despite pandemic
by Christopher Reichert
Though 2020 presented many challenges, one COEHD faculty member was presented with a special opportunity. In May of 2020, Claudia García-Louis ,Ph.D., an assistant professor of educational leadership and policy studies, was named a postdoctoral fellow through the 2020 Ford Foundation Fellowship Program.
The Ford Foundation program, which is administered by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, awards about 130 fellowships annually at the predoctoral, dissertation, and postdoctoral levels. Between 1980 and 2017, only 2% of the fellowships have been awarded to individuals in the education field.
“I am extremely proud that this was my first time applying and I was awarded it because it’s extremely rare to receive it on the first goaround. I’m still pinching myself,” García-Louis said. “I think being selected for such a highly competitive fellowship is an affirmation that hard work pays off.”
During García-Louis’ fellowship, which will last for a year, she’ll be researching her project, “A Chicana Feminist Approach to Disaggregating Hispanic Ethnicity in Higher Education: An Analysis on Latina/o/x Students’ Sense of Belonging.”
“The research is formed through my own experiences. I grew up in the Pacific Northwest, where there weren’t a lot of Latinos,” she said. “And so, what I experienced is what a professor in the field of cultural studies calls deculturalization, which forces students of color to assimilate, often at the cost of their language and culture. I want to understand how those experiences at the K–12 level impact Latinx students in college.”
Despite receiving the fellowship amidst a world pandemic, social distancing, and uncertainty, she pushed through and continued her research in a virtual environment.
Within the first year, she was able to collect over 30 hours worth of interviews and focus groups. She began implementing new methodological approaches to data collection which included: reflections, participant led facilitations, letter writing (to self and parents), as well as reacting to images/prompts with Zoom icons, to name a few.
“I hope these approaches will allow me to illuminate the diversity within the Latinx nomenclature,” she said “as well as to identify the many (and often unknown) ways Latinx students and their families navigate belonging and academic success at high enrolling/high graduating Hispanic Serving Institutions.”
Her research will continue throughout the fall of 2021, but so far, one of her biggest findings has been that geography plays a significant role when it comes to local politics and how students are treated and seen by others (both on campus and in society).
“Very often, Hispanic students are portrayed as being at the lowest ranks in academic performance, but those are deficit perspectives that negatively impact Latinx students,” García-Louis said.
“We must understand how deficit perspectives at the K–12 level influence Latinx relationships with education at the college level. So, what I wanted to understand is how those experiences at the K–12 level—in terms of being forced to assimilate and give up one’s culture, language and identity—influence students at the higher education level,” she said. “Particularly their relationship with how they see themselves in higher education and their overall academic potential.”
