ANN ARBOR—Encouraging dialogues about race and ethnicity, broadening understanding of health and educational disparities, and finding ways to empower marginalized people are among the research projects to be carried out by the faculty fellows of the National Center for Institutional Diversity (NCID).

The NCID announced March 6 four faculty teams that have been selected for the winter/spring term to conduct research, develop new courses, and begin or expand collaborations with community partners on projects related to diversity. The center also announced its support for a team project that will explore the way diversity is perceived in higher education.

“It is exciting to see the breadth of scholarship and outreach represented by our inaugural series of projects, and the outstanding faculty who bring them,” says Lester Monts, senior vice provost for academic affairs.” The center’s fellows and their projects promise to advance the understanding of diversity in higher education and beyond.”

The center fellows and their work include:

Barry Checkoway, professor in the School of Social Work, and a team of graduate students and community collaborators from the wider Detroit area will expand a program of youth dialogues for high school students with different social identities who live in the city of Detroit and surrounding suburbs. Metropolitan Detroit is among America’s most segregated communities. Young people from the area are open to discussions of race and ethnicity but have few opportunities to communicate with people different from themselves.

With support from the Skillman Foundation and Monts, initial dialogues with some 80 students were held during a nine-week period in summer 2005. These dialogues led to action projects the students designed and to a new production of Mosaic Youth Theater,” Speak for Yourself,” that is being presented in Detroit and southeast Michigan high schools this year.

The Skillman Foundation recently approved a three-year extension to this project, which will be carried out with the U-M Program on Intergroup Relations and numerous Detroit area community-based organizations. The Skillman grant will be housed in the NCID. Qualitative and quantitative research evaluation carried out on the initial dialogues has guided the expansion plan in which the team will conduct community meetings and a conference on best practices, and develop practical tools and research for strengthening youth dialogues in racially segregated areas.

Jane Hassinger, lecturer in psychology and women’s studies, and Mark Creekmore, lecturer in psychology, are developing project-based research opportunities for students and faculty from both South Africa and U-M that will be available between May-December 2006. These opportunities, aimed at empowering traditionally marginalized people in both work sites and townships in South Africa, will be developed collaboratively with faculty from the University of Johannesburg and Wits University. A seminar using CENTRA conferencing software will be offered for participants in the fall of 2006. Hassinger and Creekmore also will develop three public exchanges between U-M participants and those institutions of higher education, public agencies and non-governmental organizations in South Africa. The goal is to create activities that can be sustained beyond the life of the work supported by NCID.

Tabbye Chavous, associate professor of education, in collaboration with other faculty and students involved in the School of Education Social Justice Initiative (SJI), and collaborators in Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti, will develop four sets of activities aimed at understanding K-16 educational disparities and working to address them. The activities include development of new teacher education courses; integration of intergroup dialogues within existing courses for teacher education students; compilation of the major research on both causes and solutions for educational disparities; and development of local and national networks working on racial achievement disparities. Funding by the NCID will help the SJI lay the foundation to achieve these four objectives.

Derek Griffith, assistant research scientist, will use NCID funding to expand the training activities of the Center for Research on Ethnicity, Culture and Health at the School of Public Health. The expansion will focus on professional development and research components in both a doctoral and master’s level seminar on health disparities so that graduates can become more effective public health scientists and practitioners in multi-ethnic, multi-cultural communities. A plan for assessment of the effectiveness of the new components will be developed as part of the center fellowship.

The center also will support Michael McQuaid, assistant professor in the School of Information, and four graduate students, Daniel Diaz-Luong, Kaveri Misra, Jonathan James and Erika Doyle, as they develop a publicly accessible online semantic visualization of diversity (use of a computer to enable the visualization of language in picture form, often using graphs, charts and 3D images). It will provide a” bird’s eye view” from which to explore the ways that various American university academic departments, organizations and campus groups talk about diversity. The project, Diversity Kaleidoscope, will demonstrate the different ways the concept is understood and employed in higher education environments.

“This project fits the center’s desire to interrogate the meaning of diversity and to bring new voices into the discourse,” says Patricia Gurin, NCID acting director.

“The center’s first fellows and the projects they represent help us toward our goal of exploring diversity by engaging faculty to look at the challenges and opportunities of this issue in a broader way,” Gurin says.

The center offers four yearlong fellowships to U-M faculty who have an extensive record of research, practice and/or teaching related to diversity.

The NCID, the brainchild of Monts, began nearly a year ago when scholars from across the nation came together in a conference designed to develop a framework for the center. In addition to setting a course of action, the first year included the naming of an acting director, beginning the search for a permanent leader and recruitment of the faculty fellows.

The NCID also hosted a colloquium in November on complexity and diversity, and a second event on health disparities will be held later this month.

NCID