The Center for Antiracist Scholarship, Advocacy, and Action (CASAA), since its creation in 2021, has awarded a number of faculty and staff microgrants to support the development of antiracist and social justice projects aligned with the mission of the Center. Last year, however, marked the beginning of a new venture, CASAA’s Emerging Scholars Program, providing microgrants to support research and community action projects for undergraduate and graduate students in alternating years. These microgrant awards–typically up to $750.00 for individual projects and up to $1500.00 for collaborative projects–provide students invaluable financial resources and research support for work that will uncover new ways of thinking about individual, institutional, and systemic change as it relates to racism and other social justice issues. 

This year, the CASAA Leadership Team is pleased to announce three CASAA microgrant awards awarded earlier this academic year to graduate students in different disciplines. Our grant recipients are:

Clarissa Faustin ’27M, MFA received a $1,000 microgrant to support her project titled “Reading Knight and Day at Arcadia University.” Faustin, concerned with a decline in literacy rates for children in the United States, reviewed data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress that identified a decline in reading levels with the COVID-19 pandemic and “[f]urther decreases […] found along demographic lines, with more significant gaps between higher-and lower-income pupils, as well as among white students and Black and Hispanic ones.” While reading comprehension is one challenge, accessibility is another, she argues. If students do not have books to read, how are they expected to do so? And how are they supposed to truly enjoy reading if they are unable to see themselves in the books they read? 

Funds for this project will be used to host a literacy day event on Arcadia’s campus in May, providing students free books in collaboration with the Tree House Books bookmobile and hosting a live reading as well as other activities aimed at getting children excited to read. To read more about this microgrant project, click here. 

Latoya J. Noble ’25M received a $1,100 grant to support her ongoing research project, “Restoration during Surveilled Invisibility,” which explores the impact of counterspaces for Black women at predominately white institutions (PWIs). While Black women are proportionately the highest earners of conferred degrees (National Center for Education Statistics, 2023), their experience in education is impacted by intersection as well as compounding marginalization (Allen et al., 2019). Encounters with discrimination, verbal and/or physical abuse, and microaggressions are often coupled with the experience of being constantly surveilled and rendered invisible (Kelly et al., 2021). Noble, through this project, aims to raise awareness about these challenges but to also explore how counterspaces, particularly those integrating progressive muscle relaxation exercises, can alleviate the emotional toll and help Black women at PWIs to thrive. 

Funds for this project will be used as compensation for focus group participants led by Noble and for year-long access to the Academics for Black Survival and Wellness training organized by Dr. Della V. Mosley of the WELLS Healing Center. To read more about this microgrant project, click here. 

Dani Shylit ’27EdD received a $1,000 microgrant to support her project tentatively titled, “Catalyzing Learner-Centered Ecosystems in Pennsylvania for a Future of Human Thriving.” As Shylit argues in her proposal, “School-centered education has not yielded equitable or hopeful student learning outcomes in Pennsylvania. Thus an urgent need has emerged for a new paradigm that meets stark realities” such as “declining student engagement, widening opportunity gaps, a toxic hustle culture around rigid, myopic accountability metric,” and more. This has historically had a significant impact on “learners on the margins of power” who regularly encounter climates of exclusion and/or discrimination in what Khalifa (2018) sees as “forms of anti-Blackness, epistemicide of Indigenous knowledge, homophobia, or Islamophobia.” Recognizing these pervasive concerns, Shylit advocates for a culture shift in education that centers the learner and redefines the dynamics of power in order to counter student disenfranchisement, especially among students from marginalized and/or minoritized communities. 

Funds will be used toward a subscription to the Fora platform and digital portal to gather qualitative data for the study as part of her dissertation work. To read more about this microgrant project, click here.

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To reflect on the outcomes of the project and provide the Arcadia University community insight into the overarching importance of antiracist and social justice experiential learning, microgrant recipients will deliver a presentation as part of the CASAA Race Matters Forum within the next year that will be open to the public and made available for future review on the CASAA website. Congratulations again to our microgrant recipients of their stellar projects, and stay tuned for additional updates on these innovative projects-in-progress. 

To learn more about the Center for Antiracist Scholarship, Advocacy, and Action (CASAA) and the ongoing work in which we are engaged, please visit our website at www.arcadia.edu/CASAA and/or stop by the Center at 2035 Church Road (across the street from Taylor Hall).