Announcing 2023 HSI Seed Grant Awardees

Recipients

Celeste Atkins, Assistant Professor of Practice and Director of the Initiative to Maximize Student Development (IMSD), Office of Diversity and Inclusion, Graduate College; Nicole L Marrone, Associate Professor, Speech/Language and Hearing, Department of Speech Language and Hearing, College of Science,

Abstract

Funding for a Research Assistant to help assess our current HSI Fellows Project, the Graduate Communities for Academic Fellowship and Efficacy (Grad CAFE). The HSI Fellows Project is collectively funded by the Technology and Research Initiative Fund, HSI Initiatives, the Graduate College, the College of Education, and a Commission on the Status of Women mini grant. Grad CAFE pilots an innovative interdisciplinary multi-tiered mentoring community approach. Sixty graduate students from the Colleges of Education, Engineering, and Science will be supported (48 early-career peer mentors and 12 community leaders who have passed their comprehensive exams). Through a mixed methods case study, we evaluate how graduate peer mentoring communities that connect early graduate students with near-peer mentors, faculty mentoring, and professional development will increase belonging, satisfaction, self-efficacy, and ultimately improve retention and degree completion. This data will be used to support larger projects pending funding from the Provost’s Investment Fund, the National Science Foundation, and other future proposals. This project has potential to shift graduate support from siloed/discipline specific approaches to a more interdisciplinary institutional approach. We request funds for a graduate research assistant to help us assess, compile, and publish our results both internally and in peer-reviewed journals.

Recipient

Philip Alejo, Associate Professor of Music, Double Bass, Fred Fox College of Music, College of Fine Arts

Abstract

Together with my chamber music partner, Dr. Claire Happel Ashe, I perform in River Town Duo. Our duo features the double bass and harp, an unexpected, but beautiful musical pairing. Building on the success of a recent commissioning and recording project, we have begun a new project to commission Latinx composers who are fluent in Latin American music traditions that feature either the double bass or harp, and then ask those composers to write concert pieces inspired by those traditions. I am applying for the HSI Faculty Seed Grant for funding to provide commissioning honoraria for three composers: Alfredo Rolando Ortiz, Daniel Rojas, and Andrés Martín. Additional travel funds and harp rental fees are being requested for Happel Ashe for two visits to Tucson to workshop and perform the newly commissioned pieces. We will work closely with the composers, learning about elements of style from heritage performers and sharing the unique capabilities of our instrumentation. We will then perform the newly commissioned works in a variety of settings around Southern Arizona (University of Arizona, public schools, local chamber music series) and Illinois (the home state for Happel Ashe), reaching a wide array of audiences, with special attention toward Hispanic/Latinx communities.

Recipient

Lia Falco, Associate Professor, Department of Disability & Psychoeducational Studies, College of Education

Abstract

PreK-12 school and community partnerships provide a natural structure for diverse students to engage with institutions of higher education while also providing opportunities for those institutions to bring servingness (Garcia, Núñez, & Sansone, 2019) to practice. Connecting research, pedagogy, and practice, the proposed project examines a partnership between the UArizona counseling program and Tucson Unified School District (TUSD) to provide free school-based mental health counseling to students and families using a practicum training model. The proposed project will generate data on how the model for mental health counseling is associated with access to and quality of care for students and families in TUSD, a majority Hispanic school district, as well as its effectiveness for preparing diverse (40% Hispanic) pre-service counseling professionals at UArizona. Funds will be used to hire a 0.25FTE graduate assistant tasked with supporting data collection, data analysis, reporting, and dissemination efforts related to the project. Analysis will be descriptive and provide summary information in response to implementation and impact research questions with the larger goal of building evidence of the model’s effectiveness at improving outcomes identified the in the logic model.
 

Recipients

Carol Brochin, Associate Professor, Department of Teaching, Learning, and Sociocultural Studies, College of Education; Kathleen Short, Professor, Department of Teaching, Learning and Sociocultural Studies, College of Education; Desiree Cueto, Associate Professor, Department of Teaching, Learning and Sociocultural Studies, College of Education; Lillian Gorman, Assistant Professor, Department of Spanish and Portuguese, College of Humanities; Leah Durán, Associate Professor, Department of Teaching, Learning, and Sociocultural Studies, College of Education

Abstract

Our interdisciplinary team requests HSI funding to expand our innovative community literacy initiative, Salas de Libros (living rooms of books). Salas are led by literary mediators who foster communities of readers through literary engagements. We plan to establish two new Salas in Tucson: one on-campus with the Spanish as a Heritage Language Program at the Guerrero Student Center, and one off-campus at Holladay Elementary School. These Salas will directly serve and impact QT BIPOC communities by providing access to high-quality experiences with literature and culturally relevant literary engagements. This project will also involve recruiting and preparing a cohort of bilingual and bicultural mediators for future expansion. This cohort of future mediators will ensure sustainability. We will also use community-engaged research methods to document and make visible what we learn as a community of practice and share ways to replicate this program in other contexts. Our project will demonstrate the potential of literary engagements, shared readings and conversations to create solidarity, care and a sense of belonging in QT BIPOC communities.

Recipient:

Janelle Lamoreaux, Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology, College of Social & Behavioral Sciences

Abstract:

This study foregrounds perspectives of young BIPOC in Arizona, which had the sharpest fall in fertility rate of any U.S. state between 1990-2020, to better understand global trends in reproductive decision-making. We ask how racialized and minoritized young adults understand and anticipate the future at a moment of ecological, institutional, and everyday crises through reproduction. Using a collaborative anthropological approach, this project will enrich UA’s HSI designation by expanding and enhancing academic offerings, educational opportunities and, thereby, the academic attainment of Hispanic students and other students of color. Specifically, it will engage six BIPOC undergraduate students in research – training students to design, conduct and analyze qualitative research, including focus groups and interviews. Furthermore, the project will advance scholarship in areas related to the HSI designation by making important collaborative contributions to research on the relationship of fertility decline to climate change which currently often overlooks BIPOC perspectives. Results of this research will be presented by students at the Society for Applied Anthropology Annual Meeting (Santa Fe 2024) and published as a collaborative peer-reviewed article. Furthermore, the project’s methods and results will be used as scoping research for further funding applications, which will support future cohorts of student researchers. 
 

Recipients:

Javier Osorio, Assistant Professor, Department Social and Behavioral Sciences, School of Government and Public Policy; Yi Jyun Lin, Postdoctoral Research Associate, Department Social and Behavioral Sciences, School of Government and Public Policy

Abstract:

This HSI faculty seed grant application pursues three objectives. First, develop a bi-lingual interactive web application (IWA) to showcase the advances of our grant-supported research on migration from Central America and Mexico. In particular, the project seeks to develop a StoryMap, a type of IWA that integrates interactive maps, data visualizations, text content, images, and video to convey an engaging narrative. Second, use the IWA as a hub to integrate the findings of other research projects on migration conducted at the University level. This StoryMap will have tangible impacts in three areas. First, this development will directly engage Hispanic graduate students in high quality research. Second, it will create a space for the UA research community to initiate multidisciplinary research collaborations on migration. Third, it will serve as a focal point to showcase to the broader community the range of UA research on migration and potentially attract external funding opportunities. 

Recipient:

Gabriela Ocádiz, Assistant Professor, School of Music Education, College of Fine Arts; Carissa DiCindio, Assistant Professor, School of Art, College of Fine Arts; Ryan Shin, Professor, School of Art, College of Fine Arts; Kelsey Nussbaum, Assistant Professor, Fred Fox School of Music, College of Fine Arts

Abstract:

This project aims to foster and develop an emerging partnership with the Cante’ Waste’ Youth Program at the Native Music Coalition Wellness Center (NMC). Partnership and reciprocity are expected to grow through this arts/music-based participatory project to better respond, connect and serve the Native and Indigenous community in Tucson. Considering that the state we know as Arizona is the land of 22 federally recognized tribes; and that, the University of Arizona is a Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI) situated in the lands of the Tohono O’odham peoples and home to Pascua Yaqui tribes, we aim to: (1) acknowledge the still prevalent colonial practices that have implications for inclusion and access to higher education for Native American youth in the music and art programs at the university; and (2) to collaboratively envision new ways in which our programs at the College of Fine Arts (CFA) could be decolonized. By engaging in knowledge-sharing through the arts with Native children and youth –in multimodal forms in music, theater, dance, visual arts, film, and television – we will follow three phases to develop education and outreach projects inside and outside of the university between the Fall of 2023 and the Spring of 2024. This grant is instrumental in establishing a network of Native American and Indigenous UA students and artists to support and reinvent programs at the CFA in collaboration with the Cante’ Waste’ Youth Program at the NMC. 

Recipient:

Shelley Staples, Associate Professor of English, Department of English, College of Social & Behavioral Sciences

Abstract:

This project leverages ongoing work on corpus-informed writing instruction facilitated by Crow, the Corpus and Repository of Writing (Staples & Dilger, 2018-). Our corpus (collection of texts) is unique: it is built from student writing in first year composition courses across three institutions (UArizona, Purdue, and NAU), two of which are Arizona HSIs. With funding from ACLS, the Crow team added texts from Spanish heritage speakers at UArizona to better represent students at our HSI.

Corpus-informed instruction uses the texts in the corpus as models, or “mentor texts”, for writing instruction (Reppen, 2010). This instructional practice identifies patterns of writing in the genres included in the corpus (e.g., literacy narratives, research-based arguments). Teachers use those patterns to facilitate students’ understanding of genre conventions and to open up discussion around meaningful language choices.

Through this approach, students can feel motivated by working with texts by other students from similar backgrounds. It also validates voices of students who have been traditionally underrepresented in writing classrooms. In these ways, corpus-informed instruction aligns with other approaches to culturally and linguistically responsive pedagogy in that it “honors … culturally-influenced communication styles of the community in which they teach,” and draws on students’ cultural practices (including language) (Muñiz, 2019).

By engaging HSI community colleges and non-R1 universities in this innovative pedagogy through workshops and focus groups, the grant will provide direct benefits to HSI teachers and students. It will also expand research and materials development for broader impact at HSIs across the state, and provide findings on the effectiveness of this pedagogy beyond UArizona.