COEHD professor is named a Ford Foundation fellow

MAY 26, 2020 — One of UTSA’s own has joined the ranks of one of the most competitive national scholarly programs.

Claudia García-Louis, an assistant professor of educational leadership and policy studies in the College of Education and Human Development, has been named a postdoctoral fellow through the 2020 Ford Foundation Fellowship Program.

The Ford Foundation program, which is administered by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, awards about 130 fellowships annually at the predoctoral, dissertation, and postdoctoral levels. Between 1980 and 2017, only 2% of the fellowships have been awarded to individuals in the education field.

“I am extremely proud that this was my first time applying and I was awarded it because it’s extremely rare to receive it on the first go-around. I’m still pinching myself,” García-Louis said. “I think being selected for such a highly competitive fellowship is an affirmation that hard work pays off.”

During García-Louis’ fellowship, which will last for a year, she’ll be researching her project, “A Chicana Feminist Approach to Disaggregating Hispanic Ethnicity in Higher Education: An Analysis on Latina/o/x Students’ Sense of Belonging.”

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“I think being selected for such a highly competitive fellowship is an affirmation that hard work pays off.”

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“The research is formed through my own experiences. I grew up in the Pacific Northwest, where there weren’t a lot of Latinos,” she said. “And so, what I experienced is what a professor in the field of cultural studies calls deculturalization, which forces students of color to assimilate, often at the cost of their language and culture. I want to understand how those experiences at the K–12 level impacts Latinx students in college.”

Very often, Hispanic students are portrayed as being at the lowest ranks in academic performance, but those are deficit perspectives that negatively impact Latinx students, García-Louis said.

“We must understand how deficit perspectives at the K–12 level influence Latinx relationships with education at the college level. So what I wanted to understand is how those experiences at the K–12 level—in terms of being forced to assimilate and give up one’s culture, language and identity—influence students at the higher education level,” she said. “Particularly their relationship with how they see themselves in higher education and their overall academic potential.”

For this project, Rogelio Sáenz, a professor of demography in the College for Health, Community and Policy, will serve as García-Louis’ project mentor.

“I am so very excited that Claudia García-Louis received a highly competitive and coveted Ford Foundation postdoc to support her state-of-the art research project,” Sáenz said. “As her mentor, I am excited to work with her and see the impactful research that she will be generating. Claudia is a very creative and engaging scholar and colleague, and I look forward to learning from her as well.”

“Congratulations to Dr. García-Louis on this most recent accomplishment, which accelerates the trajectory of her career success” said Kimberly Andrews Espy, provost and senior vice president for academic affairs. “As a preeminent Hispanic Serving Institution, UTSA has an outsized opportunity and particular responsibility to promote the success of faculty who identify as Hispanic/Latino. So we are especially proud to see her recognized by the Ford Foundation, which also seeks to increase the diversity of college and university faculties across the nation.”

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García-Louis identifies as an interdisciplinary scholar and she plans to pull from different fields such as sociology, anthropology, ethnic studies and different areas to best understand the Latino student experience.

García-Louis added that she hopes her research will be able to push boundaries.

“I think that the biggest impact is that I’m pushing for desegregation of racial data within Latinx students,” she said. “Oftentimes, Latino students are presented as a monoracial group, and so they say all Latino students experience the same thing. But we know that within the Latino ethnic category, we’re very racially diverse. You have people who self-identify as Asian Latinos, indigenous Latinos, black Latinos and the whole gamut, and so what we’ve learned is that racialization impacts students in the way they are seen and treated by educators but also how they self-identify.”

As someone who identifies as a Mexican immigrant, first-gen student and mother-scholar, García-Louis said she is proud to have been selected by the Ford Foundation for the postdoctoral fellowship.

“Essentially, people who have these identities aren’t seen as scholars or at the top of their game,” Garíca-Louis said. “So I think the overall message is that for me, being a Mexican immigrant, who is also a mother to black children, it means that we are here, we’re doing the work. These aren’t barriers. It is possible, and not only are these the identities that we hold powerful but they also help inform the critical research that we are doing. Si se puede.”

— Valerie Bustamante

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