Research on resilience (ability to overcome obstacles in life) has shown that early childhood socio-emotional competence is a strong predictor of future resilience as an adolescent and adult. Research shows that resilience is not a stable quality of individuals, but rather a changeable, dynamic pattern of functioning that is influenced by protective factors such as positive relationships, strong attachment bonds, and self-regulation skills. Early childhood intervention programs have been found to make lasting effects on the functioning of individuals into adulthood. Children who have attended preschool programs are less likely to be incarcerated, drop out of school, and placed into special education programs. (Barnett, 2002) However, research on preschool intervention has focused mostly on cognitive and adult outcomes, rather than socio-emotional competence in childhood. This study seeks to learn if preschool programs targeting disadvantaged children, is related to outcomes of protective factors and behavioral concerns, as measured the the DECA-C, an assessment tool becoming widely used to study resilient functioning in children ages 2 to 5 years. The design of this study involves two full-day, demographically-similar preschool classrooms. In addition to comparing children’s scores on the DECA instrument, teachers were audio-taped and observed for 20 hours to identify the quality of teacher-child relationships, a factor known to be very influential to child self-efficacy. It is hypothesized that children that participate in high-quality preschool intervention programs will show higher DECA scores measured over the course of one year. This research has implications for teacher-training, curriculum design, and family programs that have a stronger emphasis on socio-emotional development in low-income early childhood classrooms. This research is also specifically interested in how early childhood intervention can promote resilience to future adverse life experiences for underprivileged children.

According to the 2011 Citizens’ Report Card on Washington State Education, 18 out of 100 Washington State kindergarteners continue with their education and eventually graduate from college. Within those numbers, there exists an achievement gap that divides along racial, ethnic, geographic and socio-economic fault lines. Despite decades of raised awareness on the issue and despite enormous efforts and billions of dollars in investments towards proposed “solutions”, this gap is actually widening in Washington State. Privileging an Applied Anthropological perspective, this research will investigate some of the roles that Community Based Organizations (CBO) play in addressing this pressing issue. With the intent to provide deliverable recommendation to the CBO for improvements and tangible steps towards holistic solutions, this project will examine ways in which the South Seattle Neighborhood is addressing the education deficit outside of the classroom. This project will employ Participant Action Research methods (such as peer-led focus groups, participant observation, photo-voice, and discourse analysis) within a a non-profit organization in the Jackson neighborhood that offers college planning advising and financial aid assistance. As a participant in their Mentor2College year long program, I will experience the program first hand as a mentor and will be able to lay that experience into the macro picture in an effort to provide recommendations to help the CBO provide more effective, culturally competent and more relevant services with quantifiable outcomes. 

As environmental degradation continues to worsen around the world, finding ways to mitigate the effects is increasingly important. Currently, school systems widely utilize standardized testing as a method of teaching resulting in disconnect between children and nature. Environmental art education is a medium that can be used to develop tangible connections between the youth and the environment. It has even been shown to promote environmental concepts as well as produce more environmentally aware citizens.Through my capstone experience, I will be working with Nature Consortium and the Yesler community center to develop environmental art curricula and evaluate the impact of these curriculum on creating tangible connections between the youth and the environment. I will be developing 10-20 environmental art curriculums and projects. Comparative evaluations of the students that have particpated in the environmental art curricula and the students who have not participated in the lessons will be conducted through surveys. Through this project I will also be responsible for creating plans for an environmentally aesthetic  classroom to contribute and facilitate the connections between the environmental art lessons and the students. My deliverables resulting from this project will include 10-20 environmental art curriculums, annotated bibliography, capstone journal logging my hands-on experience, and research material on the environmental art education. This data will help contribute not only to the organization I am working with, but to the future organizations. Discovering how to engage youth with the enviornment is key to both mitigating environmental degradation and creating adults who are more environmentally aware. 

The Common Core State Standards were developed in collaboration with teachers, school administrators, and experts, in order to provide a clear and consistent framework to prepare American students for college, the workforce, and successful competition in the global economy (www.corestandards.org). The Standards for English Language Arts & Literacy in History/Social Studies, Science, and Technical Subjects (henceforth, “the Standards”) were published on June 2, 2010 and have since been adopted by forty-five of the fifty states, including Washington. As schools begin the enormous effort of re-shaping their curricula to meet the Standards, students and teachers will find themselves subject to many changes. This presentation focuses on the changes that will impact the teaching of literature in the high school English Language Arts (ELA) classroom. It reveals the underlying assumptions the Standards make about literary texts: that they are not argumentative texts, that they therefore cannot be used toward the teaching of argument, and that they are therefore somewhat irrelevant to the Standards’ goals of college and career readiness. It then draws upon interviews I conducted with local ELA-teachers and relevant academic literature in order to critique these assumptions, demonstrating that literature not only can be used to teach argument, but should be. In short, it makes the case that using literature to teach argument better prepares students for college and the workforce than the use of informational text alone and, moreover, imparts the additional benefit of preparing students for responsible citizenship in a democracy.

The recent increase in international students at the University of Washington (UW) has been an extremely controversial issue. As undergraduate tutors in a writing center that serves these students, we are concerned with how this changing institutional climate affects both the students we work with and the university. This has prompted us to ask: What are these students’ needs, how can we best support them, and what institutional structures and policy must be changed or developed in response to the increasingly multilingual and multicultural demographic of the university? Through further development of a peer-led group tutoring program, Targeted Tutoring (TT), we have explored these questions and their implications for academic support models and policy relating to English Language Learners (ELLs) and international students. In particular, we have focused on researching ELL policy and support mechanisms at other universities and developing research designed to assess how student feedback about classroom and writing experiences and their perceptions of second-language writing at UW can be used to improve existing programs and policy. In practice, this has focused on efforts to design student-centered research methods and materials (reflective writing, surveys, interviews and observations), used in conjunction with TT, that can supply student feedback in order to assess our response, and the university’s response, to the increasingly diverse student body. While incomplete, this research has already shown promise. It has demonstrated the value of opening new avenues for students to communicate their needs, concerns, and views – providing the university with a clearer picture of these students’ needs and enabling a more effective response to, and support of, an increasingly diverse student body. In doing so, our research has the potential to be a valuable resource for students, administrators, and academic support programs and inform the university’s response to the changing student population at all levels.