Published Monday, March 01, 2004
SRC 2004 Gives Students a Chance to Shine
By Andrew K. Mandel and Lolita Paiewonsky
APPIAN STAFF WRITERS

Professor Emeritus Charles Willie offered Christopher Lohse six words that graduate students live to hear: "You should get that published immediately."

Lohse, who received the compliment after presenting his research on three of the most economically and racially isolated high schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District, was one of nearly 200 student presenters at Friday's tenth annual Student Research Conference.

The full-day event, co-chaired by doctoral students Rebecca Garland and Dominique Chlup, took over much of Gutman Library, the Larsen Hall ground floor, and Longfellow Hall with dozens of student mini-lectures, panels, and roundtable discussions. Students presented research in areas ranging from corruption in Soviet higher education to bilingual infant language development to the use of wireless handheld devices as instructional tools.

Lohse, who taught at two of the three schools he compared, found that the school choice program in Los Angeles completely ravaged certain schools of their resources, leaving one so ill-equipped that a security guard, rather than a teacher, supervised a particular class all year. All of the students in that classroom received letter grades of C, Lohse reported.

Interviewing successful graduates of the three schools, Lohse found that Compton’s King Drew High School, the only campus of the three with a diverse population of students from low-income backgrounds intermingled with students from more affluent families, best equipped students for college.

Professor Willie was not the only one intrigued by Lohse’s presentation. Maya Harris, a masters candidate in Administration, Planning and Social Policy from California, said she has friends who attended King Drew as students, and she plans to connect Lohse with them.

Harris said she attended the conference to hear the topics that the next generation of scholars are interested in pursuing—and to support her classmates.

"It's a very hard thing to go up there," she said. "You're very vulnerable presenting in front of professors who have published rigorous research."

She said she also wanted to witness the culmination of a semester’s worth of research by her friend, masters candidate Leslie Quigless.

Quigless’s interviews with a dozen African-American male high school students revealed that teachers can show they care about their students by expecting more of them in the early grades. These students felt that they were allowed to slide by in elementary school, leaving them unprepared for the rigors of juggling multiple class assignments in middle school.

"We rarely hear research that comes directly from the voice of youth," Harris said. "We study reform, we study policy, but rarely do we hear the perspectives of the people we are actually studying."

While most participants used speeches, PowerPoint presentations, or overhead slides to deliver their research, Lynn Ditchfield (Ed.M. ’03) created a film to demonstrate how using theater and movies in school can effectively engage students and reverse rising dropout rates. Ditchfield focused her study on teenage immigrants from Brazil.

Several Harvard professors appeared on Ditchfield’s film as experts, including Fisher Professor of Education Sara Lawrence Lightfoot, Arts in Education Director Jessica Hoffmann Davis, and former GSE professor Pedro Noguera. They all argued that theater and film can combat apathy and disinterest in students, as well as enhance, facilitate and scaffold other learning – a theme echoed in a panel later in the day on the future of arts education.

While Ditchfield used film to convey her message, masters students Rolland Janairo and Jesse Howes used audience participation.

In their proposal for a summer program involving youth from Dorchester, Janairo and Howes embedded pedagogical strategies into the camp’s activities. Demonstrating their approach, Janairo and Howes asked onlookers to gather in a circle on the floor, instructing them to draw or represent themselves in two situations -- one in which they were courageous and one in which courage failed. The presenters then lead the group in a discussion on the meaning of courage.

In addition to the social and emotional competencies that they were building as a result of the exercise, Janairo and Howes said they aimed to encourage expression in a representational medium for children, who are often discouraged to stop drawing (or singing or writing poetry, etc.) because someone tells them they are not good at it.

The conference represented research on both domestic and international issues.

Doctoral candidate Faryal Khan presented her case study from the province of Punjab in Pakistan, investigating the inner-workings of the decentralized school councils that hold significant educational decision-making power there.

Khan learned that, at times, the effectiveness of the councils is a factor of personal attributes of certain members; for example, the more energetic, charismatic, persuasive, or opinionated, the more such people may be able to accomplish. Drawing parallels to the U.S., Faryal noted that council members do not always forge consensus in formal meetings, but rather in informal settings, such as meeting colleagues while shopping or during an evening out.

In addition to delivering short speeches, students also displayed poster presentations during lunch at the Gutman Library Conference Center. Janairo and Edward Rhee, both students in Dorinda Carter's fall module, "Race, Identity and Academic Achievement in Education," shared their poster on the "model minority myth" and other stereotypes that affect Asian American students.

Echoing the sentiments of many of the day’s presenters, Rhee said he greatly benefited from sharing his work with his peers.

"When you're working on your own, you always think it's just something that you're into,” Rhee said. "It's very validating to be able to know that other people are interested in this too.”

Read next week’s issue of The Appian for our story on the International Forum. Andrew Mandel and Lolita Paiewonsky are members of the Appian Board of Editors.