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This year, seven CCPA faculty members were awarded the competitive Research Excellence Awards. This seed-grant program, funded by the College of Community and Public Affairs (CCPA) and the Division of Research, provides support for proposed collaborative research projects that have strong potential to attract external funding.

Learn more about the awards and research proposals:

Lauren Dula, an assistant professor in the Department of Public Administration and Policy, received $2,800 for her proposal “Making a Representative Bureaucrat: An Intersectional Approach to Rectify Access to Public Service Careers.”

The study will investigate the early influences on individuals’ motivation to enter public service careers. Using the Add Health survey dataset of students from 1994 through 2018 from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, Dula will look into secondary education civic engagement and how it impacts students’ later entry into public service occupational fields such as local government. She hopes to understand if civic education participation at a young age of underrepresented groups leads to improved outcomes for the field of public service.

Beth Clark-Gareca, an associate professor in the Department of Teaching, Learning and Educational Leadership, received $6,903.40 for their proposal “Work, School and Access to Career Technical Education for Multilingual Learners in Secondary School.”

To better understand multilingual learners’ access to career and technical education (CTE) — which teaches practical skills like coding, drawing and welding and can help students break into STEM fields — this study will investigate how multilingual learners are granted or denied access to CTE programming in New York. Utilizing a statewide quantitative survey and interviews with high school administrators from partner districts, ESOL teachers and CTE teachers/principals, Clark-Gareca will address how multilingual learners are referred to CTEs, linguistic access to program requirements, and instructor perceptions of what priorities should take precedence for them in secondary schools. The findings will help define where equity, language, STEM and work meet for immigrant, language minority and high school students.

Youjung Lee, an associate professor in the Department of Social Work, was awarded $12,500 for her proposal, “Multigenerational Caregiving in Global Contexts: Comparative Transnational Study.”

To investigate the cultural role grandparents have on the next generation’s development, this study will collect global data from four countries with distinctive cultural differences, including grandparents in Malawi, South Korea, the U.S. and Mexico. Cultural factors impacting custodial grandparents’ experiences in raising grandchildren in their later years — including the cultural context of multigenerational caregiving arrangements, government support for grandparent-headed families and society’s view toward non-traditional caregivers — will be examined. Findings from the analysis will facilitate the development of culturally responsive and effective interventions that can be used across cultures and ethnicities.

Lightning Jay, an assistant professor in the Department of Teaching, Learning and Educational Leadership, along with Naorah Rimkunas, an assistant professor of Community Schools, received $9,000 for their proposal “Learning to See Families as Experts: An Intervention Study in Preservice Teacher and Social Worker Family Communication.”

Drawing on the Core Practices framework and family engagement research, this project aims to implement and assess an intervention to improve communication skills among prospective teachers and families, especially in schools serving low-income and minoritized communities, to improve academic success. Part of this study will include role-playing authentic conversations with families and receiving feedback, and pre-service social work students will collaborate on the project. Data will be collected from four Broome County school districts (to analyze how factors such as race, language, setting and class impact communication patterns) through video recordings and reflective memos. Jay and Rimkunas hope to create opportunities for interdisciplinary collaboration and community engagement.

Dalhee Yoon and Keisha M. Wint, assistant professors in the Department of Social Work, received $9,000 for their proposal, “The Role of Shared Trauma Experience: A Pilot Study for a Mentoring Program Serving Youth at Risk of Maltreatment.”

Peer relationships and child maltreatment impact healthy adolescent development. To investigate just how much this is the case, Yoon and Wint will study the effectiveness of shared-trauma-experience mentoring programs on mental and behavioral health for mentors and mentees. A second proposed research goal of the program will describe how mentors with trauma decide to work with traumatized mentees. At-risk mentees will be recruited from the Children’s Home of Wyoming Conference, while mentors with or without traumatic experiences will be recruited from among �������� undergraduate students. The pair will use the findings of the study to lay the groundwork for a long-term mentoring program for adolescents at risk of maltreatment.