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ARHU Faculty Awarded Grand Challenges Grants
2/16/23

By ARHU Staff

In support of programs, initiatives and projects designed to impact enduring and emerging societal issues, the University of Maryland’s Grand Challenges Grants Program has awarded $30 million in funding to 50 projects and 185 faculty members across every school and college on campus. Among them, ARHU faculty are the recipients of one Institutional Grant, three Impact Awards, four Team Project Grants and one Individual Project Grant.

ARHU faculty are partnering with colleagues across campus to focus on groundbreaking and impactful research on topics including racial and social justice, education, pandemic preparedness and ethical technologies. Their work will shape the future of our community, state, nation and world.

Grand Challenges Grants with ARHU faculty involvement are outlined below. Please visit each project page for comprehensive details and a full list of participating faculty.

INSTITUTIONAL GRANT (up to $1M per year for 3 years of funding): 

Maryland Initiative for Literacy & Equity (MILE): seeks to transform and integrate practices in education, speech pathology, library sciences, and parent/family engagement through streamlined and cutting-edge models of professional development and community outreach. (Colleges Represented: College of Education (EDUC), ARHU, College of Behavioral and Social Sciences (BSOS), College of Information Studies (INFO), School of Public Policy (SPP))

Principal Investigator (PI): Donald Bolger (EDUC)

ARHU Co-Principal Investigators (Co-PIs): 

Kira Gor, Professor, School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures

Colin Phillips, Professor, Distinguished Scholar-Teacher, Department of Linguistics; Director, Language Science Center

Juan Uriagereka, Professor, School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures; Department of Linguistics

Learn more: research.umd.edu/mile

IMPACT AWARDS (up to $250K per year for 2 years of funding): 

Urban Equity Collaborative: seeks to strengthen community-based institutions and the work of community activists around issues of urban inequality. (Colleges Represented: School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation (ARCH), ARHU, School of Public Health (SPHL))

PI: Willow Lung-Amam (ARCH)

ARHU Co-PI: Nancy Raquel Mirabal, Associate Professor, Department of American Studies

Learn more: research.umd.edu/urbanequity

Pandemic Preparedness Institute (PPI): integrates a broad array of social and behavioral sciences to learn from COVID-19 and other disasters to better prepare for future public health emergencies. (Colleges Represented: SPHL, ARHU, BSOS, EDUC, INFO, Philip Merrill College of Journalism (JOUR))

Co-PI: Cynthia Bauer (SPHL) 

ARHU Co-PI and team members: 

Brooke Fisher Liu (Co-PI), Professor, Department of Communication

Anita Atwell Seate, Associate Professor, Department of Communication

Carina Zelaya, Assistant Professor, Department of Communication

Learn more: research.umd.edu/ppi

Values-Centered Artificial Intelligence: aims to promote the development of AI in a way that is not only ethical, but that advances human well-being more generally. (Colleges Represented: College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences (CMNS), ARHU, Robert H. Smith School of Business (BMGT), BSOS, EDUC, INFO, JOUR, SPHL) 

PI: Hal Daumé III (CMNS)

ARHU Co-PI: John Horty, Professor, Department of Philosophy

Learn more: research.umd.edu/vcai

TEAM PROJECT GRANTS (up to $500K per year for 3 years of funding):

Africa Through Language and Area Studies (ATLAS): will establish a central focal point for the study of African languages, history and contemporary issues in the UMD community with the goal of increasing the understanding of the African continent and its growing global influence. (Colleges Represented: ARHU, BSOS) 

ARHU PI: Miranda Abadir, Second Language Acquisition, National Foreign Language Center

Learn more: research.umd.edu/atlas

Music Education for All: aims to develop an Artificial Intelligence (AI) platform, VAIolin, that will democratize music education. (Colleges Represented: ARHU, CMNS) 

ARHU PI: Irina Muresanu, Associate Professor, School of Music

Learn more: research.umd.edu/music-ai

Fostering Inclusivity Through Technology (FIT): will develop a video-calling platform that promotes mutual understanding by highlighting team sentiment, building rapport with strangers, connecting past and current topics in conversations, and unobtrusively identifying and resolving misunderstandings. (Colleges Represented: BSOS, ARHU, BGMT, CMNS, A. James Clark School of Engineering (ENGR), INFO) 

PI: Yi Ting Huang (BSOS)

ARHU Co-PI: Shevaun Lewis, Assistant Research Professor and Assistant Director, Language Science Center

Learn more: research.umd.edu/fit

Anti-Black Racism Initiative: seeks to build upon the state of Maryland’s legacy of racial equity and social justice and will position the University of Maryland as a leading anti-Black racist institution through three strategic and institutional initiatives that will amplify the new anti-Black racism (ABR) minor. (Colleges Represented: BSOS, ARHU, EDUC, SPHL)

PI: Jeanette Snider (BSOS)

ARHU Co-PIs: 

John Drabinski, Professor, African American Studies and English, Department of English

Psyche Williams-Forson, Professor and Chair, Department of American Studies

Learn more: research.umd.edu/abri

INDIVIDUAL PROJECT GRANT (up to $50,000 per year for 3 years): 

Human Rights Politics and Policies: Lessons from Latin America: two conferences, three articles and an edited volume that provides a definitive history of human rights in Latin America and corrects overly broad criticisms of human rights movements made by scholars who work on the United States and Europe. (College Represented: ARHU) 

Karin Rosemblatt, Professor and Director of the Center for Historical Studies, Department of History

Learn more: research.umd.edu/human-rights-latin-america

Surveying the Artistic Landscape
1/27/22

By Sala Levin ’10

In 2000 and again in 2010, Congress asked the U.S. Department of Education to conduct a nationwide study on the status of arts education in schools—information advocates used to argue for broader access to horizon-expanding activities ranging from watercolor painting to singing in the school musical.

After no such study was mandated in 2020, Kenneth Elpus, associate professor of music education in the University of Maryland’s School of Music, realized an arts education researcher would need to take on the task. Now, with $150,000 in funding from the National Endowment for the Arts, Elpus is launching a research lab at UMD that will survey 4,000 K-12 public schools to learn about their educational programming across music, theater, dance and visual arts.

Kenneth Elpus headshot

“Most efforts to collect data about the educational system in the U.S. are geared toward making reading, writing and math learning legible—so that we understand student engagement and success in those subjects. Teachers and school administrators use that data as a guidepost for setting policy and improving instruction,” said Elpus. “But when you look at the work of educating a child, there’s a lot more in preparing humans for the world than how well they read, write and do math.”

Without a recent federal study of the standing of American arts education, administrators, teachers and supporters have lacked data on trends and major changes, especially amid the disruption to schools caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. (Imagine trying to teach a middle school orchestra virtually.) That data, said Elpus, is crucial to advocates as they work to increase access to arts education and to arts educators as they strive to improve arts learning.

Elpus will examine questions like: Who’s taking arts classes? Who’s teaching them? How much funding does arts education receive? How many classes and extracurricular activities are offered? How has COVID-19 changed teaching and learning? Partner organizations including the National Association for Music Education and the National Art Education Association will help connect Elpus to educators across the country to craft survey questions that will illuminate the issues, and to distribute the survey.

Yan Li, professor of epidemiology and biostatistics in the School of Public Health and professor in the Joint Program in Survey Methodology, is serving as statistician and methodologist on the project, while four graduate students are also supported by the grant. Funding for the lab also comes from the School of Music, the College of Arts and Humanities and the Division of Research.

Elpus hopes the data will help influence legislative decisions and funding for primary and secondary arts education. “Very few people would ever … want to deny (a student) the opportunity for aesthetic and emotional understanding, but in the way that education works in the U.S., the decisions are made by policymakers who want to be informed by data,” he said. “When we collect and analyze high-quality data on arts education, then we have a stronger position from which to effect positive change in education policy.”

 

Music Education Ph.D. Wins Outstanding Dissertation Award
6/9/21

By Jessica Weiss ’05

Adam Grisé, who completed his Ph.D. in music education in 2019, has won the Outstanding Dissertation Award from the Council for Research in Music Education for his dissertation that focused on issues of access, representation and equity in secondary and postsecondary music educational settings. 

The Council, which is based at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, has awarded outstanding doctoral dissertations in music education for nearly four decades. 

Grisé’s dissertation, titled "Making It Through: Persistence and Attrition Along Music, Education, and Music Education Pathways," used a nationally-representative dataset to examine uptake, persistence and attrition along pathways to becoming a music teacher, a professional musician or a teacher of a non-music subject.

“I feel incredibly honored to be recognized,” said Grisé, who now works as a systems and data analyst at the School of Music. 

Grisé used data from the High School Longitudinal Study of 2009, an ongoing government study of 21,000 students across the country who have been tracked since their ninth-grade year, and identified those who had said they might like to be a musician, a teacher or a music teacher. He then tracked their development through four key decision points to see where the path narrowed.  

The resulting analysis shows the impact of factors like race, gender and socioeconomic status on students’ paths—and thus on equity in music education as a whole. For instance, Grisé found that music education majors tend to come from high schools with fewer racial or ethnic minority students and lower concentrations of poverty. Schools with high concentrations of poverty produce fewer aspiring music teachers. And women leave the path of being aspiring professional musicians or music educators at twice the rate of men. 

Associate Professor of Music Education Kenneth Elpus, who served as Grisé’s faculty advisor, said Grisé used “ingenuity and innovation … to help the profession understand key characteristics about the students who become music teachers and the pathways they take to get there.”  

“It's a monumental piece of scholarship that brings strong evidence and strong interpretation to bear on questions of importance, and I'm so proud to have seen it through from germ of idea to completion,” Elpus said. 

Grisé said this research will also have an impact at the University of Maryland, where he’s working to help transform the ways the School of Music uses data to inform processes and decisions.
 
“I am able to apply many of the insights from my dissertation as we strive to increase equity and diversity in our music programs,” he said.

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