CREA investigates how dominant institutional policies and practices undermine educational, social, and mental health outcomes of minoritized students. We then examine how to reverse these effects through culturally-informed approaches, including drawing attention to students’ cultural strengths. This research offers new perspectives on understudied populations and utilizes multiple methodologies, including experiments, longitudinal designs, surveys, focus groups, interviews, and program evaluation. This work analyzes the intersections of class, race/ethnicity, and college generational status.
There are three main lines of research. We aim to…
– Unpack how learning contexts can misrepresent particular social identity groups (e.g., Indigenous students) in narrow and stereotypical ways.
– Explore how value in middle-class, White learning contexts, reflect a potential mismatch for students from working-class, Latinx, and Indigenous backgrounds.
– Reframe problematic contexts that delegitimize or mismatch one’s social identity group so as to reverse their deleterious effects.