UCLA-HBCU Initiative​
Summer Training for Excellence in Education Research
Summer 2023
​FACULTY MENTORS
Robert Cooper, Associate Professor, Urban Schooling Division
Professor Cooper has spent the last 20 years conducting research on effective reform strategies that increase the educational opportunities of African American and Latino urban youth. As an urban sociologist of education, his work contributes to a growing body of empirical research documenting that excellence and equity can co-exist in public education and that well crafted educational reform strategies can be used as a vehicle to bring about excellence and equity in public schools. His research specifically illuminates how the social context of schools shapes the implementation of equity-minded school reform. In partnership with the California Academic Partnership Program, Cooper is conducting a 5-year study that seeks to identify the unique and complex relationship between institutional leadership and improved student outcome measures. This mixed-method study explores how school leaders at 10 urban high schools across the state of California are creating the conditions, structures, and policies to increase student achievement by providing opportunities for students to develop meaningful relationships with their teachers and peers.
Tyrone Howard, Associate Professor, Urban Schooling Division
Tyrone Howard studies the role of race, culture, and access in the schooling experiences of students in urban schools. He also studies teacher preparation in urban schools and the development of the necessary knowledge, skills, and dispositions to effectively teach in diverse settings. Howard is currently is involved in two research projects. (1) Saving Our Sons is a three-year study funded by the Haynes Foundation that is examining the utility of single-sex classrooms for African American males. The goal of the project is to investigate to what degree, if any, single-sex classrooms for Black males, improve their schooling experiences and academic outcomes. Currently in its first year, the project entails survey data, document analysis, focus groups, and interviews with African American male students and parents, in addition to school personnel involved in the creation of these learning environments. (2) Vice-Provost Initiative for Pre-College Scholars (VIPS), a college outreach program designed to improve college-going rates of African American and Latino high school students from 13 Los Angeles area schools. The study is an evaluation of the design of VIPS, its intended goals, and the degree to which students gain access to highly selective colleges and universities after spending two successive summers in a five-week residential program on UCLA’s campus.
Louis Gomez, Professor, Chair Education Department
Louis Gomez’s scholarship focuses on understanding how to support organizational change in schools and other institutions. Along with his colleagues, Professor Gomez has been dedicated to collaborative research and development with urban communities to bring the current state-of-the-art in instruction and support for community formation to traditionally underserved schools. Most recently, Professor Gomez has turned his attention to problem solving research and development. This is R&D organized around high-leverage problems embedded in the day-to-day work of teaching and learning and the institutions in which these activities occur.
Kim Gomez, Associate Professor, Urban Schooling Division
Kim Gomez’s research, design and analytic efforts are aimed towards (1) supporting students with low literacy skills and non-English background learners’ access to (a) developmental mathematics and statistics; (b) middle and high school science curricula. Design activities involve analysis of mathematics and science curricular and assessment materials. Research explores instructional approaches to supporting underserved students’ through language and literacy-infused mathematics and science teaching. (2) Teaching and learning through the use of digital technologies and Web 2.0 environments across learning ecologies (schooling, afterschool, community, and online). Special focus of research is on the affordances of tools to support literacy development, literacy production, and critical literacy. My theoretical influences include situated, constuctivist, reading and writing to learn perspectives on teaching and learning. Use of discourse analytic framing (social semotic analyses) to describe and compare talk in classroom, afterschool and community programs, and online contexts.
Edith Omwami, Associate Professor, Social Sciences and Comparative Education
Edith Mukudi Omwami is Associate Professor in the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies at UCLA. Previously she served as Coordinator for the HIV/AIDS in Africa Initiative of the UCLA Globalization Research Center- Africa and was Coordinator for the UCLA/ USAID Collaborative Research Support Program Child Nutrition Project in Kenya. Professor Omwami also works with the Center for International and Development Education. Her research focuses on educational access, participation and funding of education. She also studies nutrition and education linkages, education policy and practice, gender and education, and African education.
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