Leo Tamagawa Gordon was born and raised in Berkeley, California, where he attended public schools through twelfth grade. He is concentrating in Education Studies and plans to be a high school English teacher post-college. He’s worked a staff writer for the Indy, and is a Community Well-being Chair for Brownian Motion Ultimate Frisbee. He is passionate about educational equity, especially in Providence, and hopes his project can help local students for many years to come.

Project:

Generation Teach Providence is a non-profit organization that works to “end racial injustice and inequity in education” through its summer school program. Drawing on ethnographic program evaluation and community-based participatory research, I hope to better understand how the program functions to build community and empower its students in the local context by using an “ecological approach” (Hacker, 2013). I plan to both critique and uplift the crucial “gap filling” work this organization and its employees do in creating a “school-community partnership” with the Providence Public School District (McGuirk, 2019; DePetris & Eames, 2017). With this research, I also seek to “build capacity” for the Generation Teach to help them reach their goals (Hacker, 2013).

Mentor: Andrea Flores