Two teams of Marsal School faculty and researchers awarded OVPR Anti-Racism Grants

The Office of the Vice President for Research has awarded nearly $450,000 in grants across seven research teams to investigate the effects of systemic racism and inform strategies to combat them. Among the teams awarded, two are comprised of Marsal Family School of Education faculty and researchers. 

The Record reports that OVPR designed its Research Catalyst and Innovation Program, in part, to support research and scholarship that address complex societal racial inequalities, with a goal to inform actions that achieve equity and justice.

The OVPR grants are jointly administered and advanced in partnership with the National Center for Institutional Diversity’s Anti-Racism Collaborative, which aims to support and amplify the work of anti-racism scholars at U-M.

Camille M. Wilson, Mara Johnson, and Tonya Kneff-Chang will lead the project School Shuttering and Equitable Educational Access Study. Their investigation endeavors to understand how a community engages, negotiates, adapts or resists state policies to shutter local schools, with the aim of helping to inform community members, educators and policymakers of more equitable and sustainable ways to improve and protect public schools.

Matthew Ronfeldt, Thomas Drake and W. Carson Byrd, along with Eric Schwartz (Stephen M. Ross School of Business), will collaborate on Exploring the Influence of Faculty Courses, Their Contexts, and Student Evaluations of Teaching on Faculty Career Inequalities in Engineering and Psychology. This project will examine the relationships between student evaluations and career outcomes for faculty (with a focus on outcomes of historically marginalized populations) as well as the impact of various characteristics of the instructor, course, evaluating student and department.