Teaching and Learning: TC's Minority Postdoctoral Fellows
A sociologist and Ph.D. graduate from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, Belkis Suazo-Garcia grew up in the Bronx and attended a boarding school in Wellesley, Massachusetts. She focused her dissertation on black and white young adults transitioning from high school to postsecondary education. She became interested in the fact that more women and fewer men were reportedly attending college, and also found that black males are at a greater disadvantage in their academic preparation for four-year colleges. While working on her dissertation, Suazo-Garcia received a Minority Access and Graduate Network (MAGNET) dissertation fellowship.
Belkis Suazo-GarciaA sociologist and Ph.D.
graduate from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York,
Belkis Suazo-Garcia grew up in the Bronx and attended a boarding school
in Wellesley, Massachusetts. She focused her dissertation on
black and white young adults transitioning from high school to
postsecondary education. She became interested in the fact that more
women and fewer men were reportedly attending college, and also found
that black males are at a greater disadvantage in their academic
preparation for four-year colleges. While working on her dissertation,
Suazo-Garcia received a Minority Access and Graduate Network (MAGNET)
dissertation fellowship.At Teachers College, Suazo-Garcia will
be working on two projects with similar goals. She will look at data
from the Department of Education to investigate the institutional
features of universities and students' backgrounds prior to entering
higher education. She hopes to determine the role these two factors
play in students' success in college. Her second project will
investigate the educational achievement gap between young blacks and
whites and how they develop the academic preparation given to them
during their early years of schooling. Maisha FisherAt
the University of California, Berkeley, Maisha Fisher's dissertation
was based on an ethnographic study of teaching and learning spaces in
non-school settings for spoken-word poetry events. Fisher also wrote
about two black-owned and operated book stores. "I looked at the way
people created practices around literacy and also interviewed
participants-owners of the venues, organizers of the events, poets and
writers, and audience participants-to find out what their motivation
was for participating in these activities," she explained. "I'm really
interested in people making choices about their learning and what types
of choices they make, particularly when it is in an out-of-school
setting."Her study, "Choosing Literacy: African Diaspora
Participatory Literacy Communities," explores the diversity and the
continuities among people of African descent. Fisher has taught
elementary school and high school in the Sacramento City Unified School
District and also supervised student teachers in the Multicultural
Urban Secondary Education (MUSE) program at UC Berkeley. While at TC,
Fisher will be working with two teachers in the New York City public
schools who have organized spoken-word poetry writing workshops with
their students. In the spring, she taught the class Reclaiming Literacy
Through Ethnography, which was based on her dissertation research.
Published Saturday, Apr. 2, 2005
