Research Project Update

I would like to put everyone in the picture of my research project and to kind of give an update of what I am doing. My topic actually is based on TRIO program; a federally funded educational opportunity for the under-represented people both in America and the Pacific Island. Those in America include Latinos, African Americans, and Natives/Alaska natives. And those in the Pacific Island among others are Samoans. It is interesting to know that people with disabilities are also included in this rewarding program. TRIO works in a way hand in hand with McNair program even though it is an independent body. In any case, I am going to be discussing in my final project all of these programs under one main topic of TRIO.
However, according to the sources from the website, TRiO is a set of seven federally-funded educational opportunity outreach programs and one staff training program that seek to motivate and support students from disadvantaged backgrounds, namely low-income, first-generation students. TRiO programs, currently serving nearly 850,000 students from middle school through post-graduate study across America, provide academic tutoring, personal counseling, mentoring, financial guidance, and other supports necessary for educational access and retention. TRiO programs provide direct support services for students, and relevant training for directors and staff. The TRiO programs were the first national college access retention programs to address the serious social and cultural barriers to education in America. TRiO began as part of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty. The Educational Opportunity Act of 1964 established in experimental program known as Upward Bound. Then in 1965, the Higher Education Act created Talent Search. Finally, another program, Special Services for Disadvantaged Students (later known as Student Support Services,), was launched in 1968. Together, this “trio” of federally-funded programs encouraged access to higher education for low-income students. By 1998, the TRiO programs had become a vital pipeline to opportunity, serving traditional students, displaced workers and veteran. The original three programs had grown to eight, adding Educational Opportunity Centers in 1972, Training Program for Federal TRiO programs in 1976, the Ronald E. McNair Post-baccalaureate Achievement Program in 1986, Upward Bound Math-Science in 1990 and the TRiO Dissemination Partnership in 1998. Another program associated with Trio in a way is the Ronald E McNair Post-Baccalaureate Achievement Program which is a highly competitive program funded by the U.S. Department of Education to prepare undergraduate college students in their sophomore through senior year who are low¬-income, first generation, and/or underrepresented in graduate education for doctoral education. The program was named in honor of the astronaut who died in the 1986 space-shuttle explosion. Currently, there are 179 programs nationally assisting students in the attainment of their education and personal academic goals through participation in research, faculty mentorships, and other scholarly activities.

Academic Curiosity

This week, David Gold discusses what to aim at when doing research especially in academics, and how to do it and where to search. And so out of his curiosity, he decided to go beyond the archives. Going beyond the archives according to him is to attend conferences, seminars, and symposium, make relevant phone calls, connect with people and individuals etc. He asserts that anything is possible with research if one is willing to devote time and money to it. He gave example of his trip to California to research on the life of Ellen Browning Scripps but ended up doing the Biography of Ritter the activist and feminist at that time period. Gold wanted researching into rhetoric but found out that going into oral history would give him more direction and focus. Humanly speaking, Gold said he was never one of those extra ordinary precocious children. Never! But knowing his limitations, he took advantage of that and maximized his potentials that he never knew were there. However, in the cause of his research, he made different connections with people and made use of everything around him like picture frames etc, and categorized all his experiences as negative and positive accidents. I think he referred to his adventures as “accident” because he stumbled and delved into things surreptitiously beyond his imagination and he states thus:
Each time I go to an archive or historical society, I ask the archivists
I meet to share my interest (and e-mail address) with other scholars
who might visit the archive. I find that networking and exchange
information about a common topic invigorates my work and leads
to further insights (25).

I personally find Gold’s statement very interesting because it gives me a clue of how and what to expect when researching in the archives. Not only that, he gave a vivid example of the essence of research and the obligations and responsibilities of researchers. He says that research brings history back to life. It serves as a powerful reminder (quoting Jacqueline Jones Royster ) he posits that:
As scholars, we have an ethical responsibility to members of the community we
study and, in the case of historical subjects, to their descendants, who have a
right to the respectful and dignified treatment if their ancestors (25).

Paradoxical Birth (wk 4)

This is one of the best texts I have read so far in this class. Not for anything but for the use of language; the breath taking poetic language/expression of Richard Wright’s 12 million Black Voices. His expression sounds more like a song than a narration in a way. Objectification of the human body was repeatedly emphasized like “free trade in our bodies”, “…the seven seas in search of our bodies”, “…traders brought rum and swapped it to corrupt chiefs for our bodies” , “…the new England Puritans and the imperialists of Europe erected the traffic in our bodies into the big business” (13). “Our black bodies were good tools that had to be kept efficient for toil” (25), “the Lords of the Land rose and threatened to resort to a wholesale breeding of slaves in order not to be deprived of our living bodies (26). “In their withered bodies” (36). “…it does not matter who, the innocent or guilty-and, as a token, a naked and bleeding body will be dragged through the dusty streets”, “our bodies will be swung by ropes from the limbs of trees, will be shot at and mutilated” (43). The image of the body could be seen in almost all the pages of the text. However, Wright discusses in detail the great concern of the paradoxical birth of the black people in America whose ancestors were Africans. He states thus:
We millions of black folk who live in this land were born into Western
civilization of a weird and paradoxical birth. The lean, tall, blond men of
of England, Holland, and Denmark, the dark, short, nervous men of France,
Spain, and Portugal, men whose blue and gray and brown eyes glinted with
the light of the future, denied our human personalities, tore us from our
native soils, weighted our legs with chains, stacked us like cord-wood in the
foul holes of clipper ships, dragged us across thousands of miles of ocean,
and hurled us into another land, strange and hostile, where for a second time
we felt the slow, painful process of a new birth amid conditions hash and
raw (12).

It is interesting to know that both the blacks and the poor whites were involved in slaving for the rich people who Wright calls the Lords of the Land. And none of these people (blacks and poor whites) had any formal education and so the only way they could keep record of the events in the 1940’s was to take photographs of people and places to be kept in the archive (xii). But when schools were being established, Wright said it was decreed that the black people were exempted and so literacy acquisition was not part of their lives.

The Wave of Literacy (wk 3)

Literacy in American Lives by Deborah Brand pointed out that literacy acquisition in America and among Americans took different dimensions depending on who you were in terms of race, class, and gender, and where you lived. People were not giving equal educational opportunities, and it is interesting to know that at the turn of events and time, like other Americans, African Americans have been under pressures of waves of social, economic, and communication changes associated with migrations from farms to cities and shifts from industrial manufacturing to information-based work (109). So reading and writing became very vital in order to blend with the advent of change as those who were literate were chosen over those who were not. Brandt says that sponsorship of literacy among the blacks basically was the church and family members. And among the whites and Latino families, mothers contributed a lot by reading to their children at home. In The Sacred and the Profane, Brandt says that by the 1830’s in England, unlike reading, with its direct and traditional connection to piety and Bible study, writing was considered too secular, worldly, and vocational and too strongly associated with upward mobility (a process that conservative church leaders wanted no part in encouraging) (146). In other words, writing was seen as something that should not be tempered with to avoid corruption of any kind I guess. But Bandit quoting Thomas Langueur recounted that an antiwriting movement was afoot to stop it. However, it is ironical to note that while in America, church sponsored literacy at the early stage especially among the blacks, in England, in the nineteenth-century, church kicked against writing. The question is: how would people read without writing?