Racial Equity Special Research Grants

Overview

<p>In honor of the Spencer Foundation's 50th Anniversary, the Foundation has launched The Racial Equity Special Research Grants program to support education research projects that will contribute to understanding and ameliorating racial inequality in education. We are interested in funding studies that aim to understand and disrupt the reproduction and deepening of educational inequality in education, and which seek to remake and imagine anew forms of equitable education. Thus, we are also interested in research projects that are working to reimagine educational opportunities in a multiplicity of education systems, levels, settings, and developmental ranges and that reach beyond documenting conditions and paradigms that contribute to persistent racial inequalities.</p> <p>Our goal for this program is to support rigorous, intellectually ambitious, and technically sound research that is relevant to the most pressing questions and compelling opportunities in relation to racial equity in education. We are interested in proposals at all levels and in all settings of learning, including early childhood, higher education, and in schools, families, and communities. We are also interested in studies that seek to understand the situated experiences of minoritized groups, including Black, Latinx, AAPI, Indigenous and other minoritized communities.</p> <p>In addition, we are interested in studies that focus on those learners that are multiply marginalized, including intersections with English language learners, immigrants, students with disabilities, highly mobile and institutionalized youth (e.g., foster youth or those in youth prisons), LGTBQ youth, and those in rural communities. In addition, we encourage proposals that are reflective of other national and local contexts. We recognize that the experiences of inequality, as well as the histories and structures producing it, will vary. We especially welcome proposals that advance strength- and resiliency-based perspectives and those that may push us to rethink current paradigms.</p> <p>We seek to support scholarship that develops new foundational knowledge that may have a significant impact on practice and policy. We value work that fosters creative and open-minded scholarship, engages in deep inquiry, and examines robust questions related to education and inequality. We also value work that is engaging emerging possibilities. We invite proposals that aim to grow the current scope of research on racial equity, develop new knowledge through interdisciplinary scholarly engagement, and include collaboration in the service of increasing the impact of educational research.</p> <p>To this end, this program supports proposals from multiple disciplinary and methodological perspectives, both domestically and internationally, and from scholars at various stages in their careers. We anticipate that proposals will span a wide range of topics and disciplines. We expect and welcome methodological diversity in answering pressing questions; thus, we are open to projects that utilize a wide array of research methods including quantitative, qualitative, mixed-methods, ethnographies, design-based research, participatory methods, and historical research, to name a few.</p> <p>We are also interested in methodological research that can enable and support research on and with racialized communities that build capacity for equitable educational systems. This could include exploration of methods appropriate in small samples and populations, the development of new measures and indices, and studies regarding the impact of methods and algorithms on reducing or promoting inequality. We are open to projects that might incorporate data from multiple and varied sources or work closely with practitioners or community members over the life of the project. Further, we recognize that social distancing policies may pose challenges to some modes of inquiry. We encourage creative new approaches to the collection and analysis of data.</p>