Sharon Fries-Britt, Assistant Professor, Education (2001-02)

Dr. Sharon Fries-Britt seeks to understand the academic, social, family, and racial experiences of honors students at the University of Maryland. She will use her Diversity Initiative award to conduct individual interviews with 10 Black and 10 White high achieving collegians in the Honors Program on the campus. Dr. Fries-Britt is interested in learning about the students’ experiences both inside and outside the classroom, with a particular focus on events that have shaped their sense of self and their motivation to achieve. She will attempt to determine if there are particular strategies Black and White students have developed to persevere in highly competitive environments, as well as to determine similarities and differences in their experiences in the Honors Program. Students will also participate in focus groups to discuss themes and issues that extend across the groups.

Gay Gullickson, Professor, History & Women’s Studies (2001-02)

Dr. Gay Gullickson will use the Diversity Initiative award to create an undergraduate course on Americans with Disabilities. Her hope is that the course will begin to bridge the abled-disabled divide on the campus and to make our community more inclusive of all of its members. Questions that she expects to address include: How do we define “disabled?” Who does the defining? Does the language we use (“disabled,” “handicapped,” “crippled,” “differently abled,” “blind,” “sight-impaired,” “hearing-impaired,” “deaf,” “hard of hearing”) make a difference? What are American attitudes toward disabilities and have these attitudes changed in the past century? How are people with disabilities represented in the press, histories, films, television, and literature? How do people with disabilities think of themselves? What language do they use? Why was the inclusion of a statue of Franklin Roosevelt in a wheelchair at the Roosevelt memorial so controversial? Dr. Gullickson’s goal is to help her students to better understand and articulate the issues relating to Americans with disabilities.

Ana Patricia Rodriguez, Evelyn Canabal-Torres, and Manel Lacorte, Assistant Professors, Spanish and Portuguese (2001-02)

Professors Rodriguez, Canabal-Torres, and Lacorte will use their Diversity Initiative award to develop a team-taught course on “Being in the Middle: Latino Bilingualisms and Biculturalisms.” The three-module course will focus on transcultural linguistic continuities, which are encoded in the “admixtures” of the Spanish language informally known as “Spanglish” or “Inglenol.” The first module of the course introduces students to sociolinguistic fundamentals of bilingualism. The second module continues with an overview of Latino communities in the Washington D. C. metropolitan area and their use of nonstandard dialects. The final module provides a general introduction to US Latino/a literary and cultural production, with a special emphasis on the hybrid texts that represent transcultural experiences.