Sophia Rodriguez is a William T. Grant Scholar investigating how schools and community-based organizations facilitate the educational success and social inclusion of recently arrived immigrant students. She has mentored twenty-five doctoral students, nineteen of whom identified as students of color. Rodriguez’s goals include developing additional skills to support the junior scholars of color on her research team and to assist her college’s efforts to improve mentoring structures of support. With this award, Rodriguez will share what she learns about mentoring with her department chair and dean and host a brown bag lunch series to share research and key learning about mentoring with other faculty and graduate students. Rodriguez’s mentee, Lisa Lopez-Escobar, is a Latina doctoral student in her second year at the University of Maryland College Park. Lopez-Escobar’s goals include enhancing her capacity to use participatory action methodologies to interrogate how community-school partnerships serve as spaces of belonging for Latinx immigrant youth, learning to navigate relationships with community-based organizations, and disseminating research in ethical and accessible ways. Lopez-Escobar will provide research assistance for Rodriguez’s Scholars project while developing a participatory action research component that positions youth as agents and co-thinkers of how community-based organizations can increase belonging. With Rodriguez’s counsel on study design and data collection, Lopez-Escobar will recruit youth and work with them to collectively draft research questions, methods, and analytic techniques that explore factors that enhance their sense of belonging.
With this award, Rodriguez will share what she learns about mentoring with her department chair and dean and host a brown bag lunch series to share research and key learning about mentoring with other faculty and graduate students.
