- Royce Fellowship
Concentration
Award Year
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