IDE Excellence Grant Recipients
The IDE Excellence Grant Initiative for Employees provides one-time funding for faculty or staff to creatively strengthen teaching; pedagogical practices; or research with inclusion, diversity and/or equity implications for our increasingly diverse community and student populations enrolled at MU.
The IDE Excellence Grant Initiative for Students provides one-time funding for undergraduate or graduate students to creatively strengthen research with inclusion, diversity, and/or equity implications for our increasingly diverse community and student populations enrolled at MU.
Below, you will find the projects that were selected from many outstanding applications for the 2019-20 academic year.
Direct and Indirect Effects of Perceived Threat and Discrimination on Mental and Behavioral Health Outcomes Among Non-minority and Minority Students
Submitted by Joy Roos, MSW PhD student, and Gustavo Carlo, PhD, Millsap Professor of Diversity and Multicultural Studies
In the fall of 2018, the University of Missouri experienced a striking increase in minority student enrollment, introducing a pivotal opportunity to foster positive student interactions and a campus climate supportive of diversity. Prosocial behavior, or helping behavior, is a key marker of social and moral development and it facilitates quality social relationships. The goal of the current study is to further understand the mechanisms that can support or hinder prosocial behaviors between minority students and their non-minority peers. Furthermore, we will seek to understand how experiences of discrimination influence student mental health outcomes, how perceptions of threat influence an individual’s empathy for another, and how both discrimination and threat may affect the extent to which students engage in prosocial behaviors toward students outside of their identity. The results will inform faculty, students,and staff at MU to further educate and raise awareness of diversity challenges and how to set the stage for a welcoming campus environment.
Developing Assessment and Administrative Practices to Support Minoritized Student Success
Submitted by Dr. Marjorie Dorimé-Williams and Dr. Michael Steven Williams
Through a collaborative effort between Drs. Marjorie Dorimé-Williams and Michael Steven Williams and the Center for Academic Success (CASE), a team of researchers and staff will implement a comprehensive planning and assessment framework to maximize the use of unit-level and institutional data to support minoritized student success. The mission of CASE is to support the retention and graduation of underrepresented students at the institution. It serves as an ideal area to focus on how assessment and data-informed decision making can contribute to more equitable student outcomes. The proposed study will examine longitudinal data and focus on using a critical lens to bridge theory and practice to promote substantive change and community development.
Promoting Social Awareness: Intervention Strategies to Enhance Media Literacy
Submitted by Elizabeth (Lissa) Behm-Morawitz, Ph.D., Assistant Vice Provost for Graduate and Postdoctoral Affairs
The goals of our project are to implement and assess the effectiveness of a media literacy intervention, centering on media diversity in relation to underrepresented and stigmatized identities. This project advances student learning as well as research centering on inclusion, diversity, and equity. We will test an innovative approach to incorporating media literacy lessons into existing courses offered at the undergraduate level on the Mizzou campus to increase students’ media literacy skills and their understanding of how media impact our constructions of identity and social group stereotypes. A team of undergraduate and graduate research assistants from the Media & Diversity Center in the Department of Communication are working with us on designing and assessing the intervention. The results of our work will advance research as well as have a broader impact on the Mizzou campus with the potential expansion of the intervention to a diversity of majors across campus.
Early Career Exploration and Academic Success Model for Understanding Students
Submitted by Farouk Agrebe and Devon Washington
The Center for Academic Success & Excellence will implement a pilot program to decrease the time to graduation of underrepresented students by incorporating a career exploration course and the Guaranteed 4.0 Learning System to create a comprehensive educational intervention that supports early career exploration and academic success. This pilot will lead 35-50 students through a career exploration course the summer before their freshman year exploring their interests, values, abilities, majors at Mizzou and the world of work. Additionally, participants will engage in a six-hour “Guaranteed 4.0 workshop” and follow-up sessions which challenge students’ social pre-conditioning and provides tools to maximize class time, instructor engagement, knowledge acquisition, note-taking, reading retention, concept analysis and test taking for success in college and beyond.
Laying the Groundwork for Decolonized Education in CAFNR
Submitted by Hannah Hemmelgarn
Laying the Groundwork for Decolonized Education in CAFNR is an effort initiated by a partnership of Native and settler members of the University of Missouri who recognize an absence of Indigenous visibility and pedagogy at this institution. This project seeks to foreground Native voices and establish an infrastructure for allyship at MU by 1) initiating the formation of an Indigenous Advisory Board, 2) reframing a CAFNR course to highlight Traditional Ecological Knowledge, 3) developing an intercampus learning network and digital resources repository on decolonizing pedagogies, and 4) preparing representative CAFNR faculty and staff for diversity and inclusion in land-based disciplines by attending an Indigenous Farming Conference.
Maternal Risk, Parenting, and Mother-Child Conversations in Latino/a and African American Families
Submitted by Gustavo Carlo, PhD, Millsap Professor of Diversity and Multicultural Studies
There is evidence that positive parent-child communication has important consequences for children’s health. Yet for many families, it is a challenge to develop or maintain positive communication patterns as children of color living in poverty. We currently have a three-year,federally funded project designed to understand how these families can overcome these challenges and promote positive maternal-child communication. Our multidisciplinary, collaborative effort will examine these issues in Latino/a and African American mother-child dyads. We will recruit and train undergraduate students of color to transcribe and code for the quality of these dyadic conversations. These experiences will result in mentoring and training junior scientists, opportunities to disseminate study findings, and enhance their pursuit of graduate studies. We also expect that the study findings will have important implications for positive parenting intervention programs and policies aimed at ethnic/racial minority groups.
The University as a Site of Mental Health Promotion: A Situational Analysis
Submitted by Kaleea Lewis
The goal of my study is to begin the groundwork for the creation and implementation of a mental health promotion program that will support Black students at MU. I will explore how this predominately white institution (PWI) operates as a site of mental health promotion and what structural and institutional changes are necessary to more fully meet the mental health needs of MU’s Black students. Focus groups and individual in-depth interviews will be the main source of data collection for this study. Focus groups will be conducted with students and individual interviews will be conducted with faculty/staff. This study will use situational analysis in order to provide a better understanding of: (1) what services Black students want, (2) what services the university offers and how faculty/staff think about the university’s role in promoting positive mental health among Black students, (3) the role Black students see the university playing in promoting positive mental health, and (4) how students and faculty/staff can work together to implement structural change.
Black and Brown in STEM at Mizzou (BBSM)
Submitted by Terrell R. Morton, Ph.D. (Education), Tojan Rahhal, Ph.D. (Engineering) and Johannes Schul, Ph.D. (Biology)
Studies on Black students in postsecondary science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education suggest that environmental and individual influences inform retention and matriculation. BBSM is a research project designed to capture the perceptions and experiences of students who identify racially as Black (being of African ancestry) or Brown (being of Indigenous or Latinx ancestry) and are majoring in science, technology, engineering, or mathematics at MU. This study will produce a conceptual model, measures, and tools that can be implemented to transform institutional policies and faculty and staff practices. Learn more.
Exploring Black History Through a High School and University Partnership
Submitted by Gregory Simmons
The main purpose of this grant is to develop curriculum for a high school Black History course that would be a partnership between the University of Missouri and Columbia Public Schools. Patterned as a combination between a dual enrollment and Advanced Placement (AP) class, this course would involve MU faculty (mainly from the Department of Black Studies) who would visit CPS schools to lecture and work with students. In addition, CPS students will attend activities and facilities on campus. While the main goal of this class would be to provide an excellent educational opportunity to CPS students, a central goal of this class would be to make the university a more familiar place to students of color from Columbia and to encourage them to apply/attend the University of Missouri.
As one (out of two) of the student projects to be accepted in this competitive grant process, I am particularly thankful to the Division of Inclusion, Diversity & Equity for supporting this project as well as the support that I’ve received from the College of Education, the Department of Learning, Teaching & Curriculum, and the CARTER Center for K-12 Black History Education for this project.