Faculty in the Department of Education at UCLA ( Robert Cooper, Kim Gomez, Sandra Graham, Tyrone Howard, Louis Gomez, and Edith Omwami) have established a paid summer research internship for HBCU students, entitled Summer Training for Excellence in Education Research (STEER). The 8-week program is designed to expose four to five undergraduates from an HBCU to research of multiracial faculty that addresses some of the most pressing issues in K-12 and higher education today. These issues center around two key themes: (1) equity and access to educational resources – that is, how do we assure that all students have opportunities for high quality education that will equip them with the skills needed to be competitive in the 21 century workforce and (2) addressing diversity – that is, how do we assure that K-12 and higher education systems meet the needs of a student body that is becoming more racially, ethnically, culturally, and linguistically diverse. Through hands-on engagement with the research projects of faculty mentors, the goal of STEER is to introduce summer interns to education research – its interdisciplinary and developmental themes, its focus on societal concerns – and to encourage interns to pursue doctoral training in education as a means to addressing some of the most critical problems facing American society today.

 

The Department of Education at UCLA is consistently rated by US News & World Report in the top 10 among private and public schools of education, and is currently rated to be the top program in the nation.  Part of our mission is to address the needs of low-income and racial/ethnic minority populations, locally and globally, by fostering the training of new scholars whose research, teaching, and professional activities can help us better understand and ameliorate those challenges. The department is interdisciplinary, comprised of faculty whose research is grounded in the basic disciplines of psychology, sociology, political science, and anthropology. Faculty are also skilled at using basic research findings to affect policy and practice. We are an ideal intellectual environment for emergent scholars from HBCUs who are particularly concerned with “making a difference” in the lives of socially and economically marginalized groups in contemporary society.