Grant awarded to team including Dr. Jessica Toste from the Department of Special Education, Dr. Huriya Jabbar from the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy, and Dr. Kathrynn Pounders, Stan Richards School of Advertising & Public Relations.
In September 2020, newly tenured associate professors participated in a design thinking and flash funding faculty retreat hosted the Office of the Vice President for Research. The goal of the Associate Professor Experimental (APX) is to provide faculty with “dedicated funds and focused time to envision new research directions with colleagues in diverse academic disciplines.” Drs. Toste, Jabbar, and Pounders were awarded $100,000 for their project titled GoKAR! Educational Program: Teaching Anti-Racism to Preschoolers at Home. They will develop a new educational program for caregivers to teach anti-racism at home with preschool age children (4-5 years): GoKAR! (Kids Against Racism). GoKAR! will be framed within an integrative social-cognitive development perspective on prejudice and bias. This perspective considers the interactions between socio-contextual factors, such as social norms and in-group identity, and children’s socio-cognitive development. As such, the content for GoKAR! will focus on engaging with children’s context to influence emotional and cognitive processes to counter the development of racial bias. The research team aims to recruit 100 caregiver-child dyads over the next year to explore the potential of GoKAR! to reduce implicit bias and increase awareness of structural racism in young children.
