On Monday February 27, 2017, Dr. Emmet Campos, Pavitee Peumsang and Jorge Burmicky, participated in the Texas Association of Chicanos in Higher Education (TACHE) 42st Annual State Conference. This year’s theme was “Creer y Crecer: Inspiring and Building a Stronger Nation through Higher Education.” This year Dr. Campos and team presented a session on the work of the Texas Education Consortium for Male Students of Color (TECMSC) titled, “Lessons Learned from Three Years of Work with the Texas Education Consortium for Male Students of Color”. The panelists provided an update on preliminary research findings from site visits conducted at seventeen Consortium partner institutions. The site visits and development of site reports were led by the Texas A&M team, headed by Dr. Luis Ponjuan, and team members Leticia Palomin, Susan Hernandez, and Juan Lopez. They were assisted by the UT Austin research team, Dr. Emmet Campos and Dr. Veronica Jones. The purpose of this work was to provide an “environmental scan” at each institution to assess its policies and practices and overall culture for meeting the needs of their males of color on their campus.
Panelists presented information gathered during each institutional site visit made up of individual interviews and focus groups with senior Administration, faculty, and staff members from each institution. In addition, the research team conducted focus group interviews with African American and Latino males. The preliminary findings from the case study highlights student voices in order to better understand the challenges these men face and the impact of programs and services that serve them. Findings were organized under four broad themes: college transitions, academic experiences, campus engagement, and degree completion and site reports will be presented to all seventeen institutions. In addition, the Consortium research team will be developing a “meta-report” that will capture research findings across all seventeen site visits and will be presented at the 2017 Texas Male Student Leadership Summit on August 17 and 18. The research findings will guide the development of Consortium tool kits, or CBTA’s (Capacity Building Tools and Activities) that will help institutional leaders to build capacity on their campuses to better serve males of color. Stay tuned for more updates on this important work throughout the Spring and Summer 2017
