Projects/Initiatives

CREER (Collaborative Research for Equity and Excellence in OuR Schools)

Launched in Fall 2017, CREER is a community-based, university-affiliated research initiative exploring how equity and excellence is born, cultivated, and sustained across the educational pipeline. We focus on the student experience to transform educational policy, pedagogy, and practice for social justice. The research team is comprised of Louie Rodriguez (PI), Lorena Gutierrez (post-doc/faculty member), three UCR graduate students, and three UCR undergraduate students.

CREER-University

CREER-U is the university version of CREER with a particular focus on the learning from the Educational Journeys (Rodriguez, 2018) of university undergraduates who successfully navigated the K-12 system and landed at a research–intensive undergraduate university for college. The unique feature of this project is its focus on students who attended K-12 schools in the Inland Empire region (San Bernardino and Riverside, California). Through one-on-one interviews, surveys, and focus groups, analysis will be placed on the policies, practices, and pedagogies that contributed to student success with analytical perspectives inclusive of home, school, and community experiences.

The IE Latina/o/x Doctors Project

The IE Latina/o/x Doctors Project engages an interdisciplinary group of Latinas/os/xs with doctorates in their respective fields who are committed to building transformative opportunities for Inland Empire youth, communities, and beyond. Learn more about them here.

IP3 Project

The Implications for Policy, Practice, and Pedagogy Project, IP3 Project, aims to leverage the expertise of students, faculty, community members, and policymakers in a series of strategic processes to not only learn from equity-driven and transformative research but co-create a set of implications for policy, practice, and pedagogy directly relevant to the work of community stakeholders. Not only will scholars be invited to share their key findings, but they will be given the opportunity to collaborate with Center-scholars in creating policy memos, podcasts, and other strategies to disseminate their work. Topics of particular interest to the Center for Educational Transformation at UC Riverside are: the experiences of English Learners, the experiences of Students of Color across the educational pipeline, issues in Latina/o/x education, undocumented students, critical perspectives in school and district practices such as restorative justice, promising practices and policies in education, and additive frameworks and approaches that focus on equity and excellence in education.

Cultivating Educational Excellence in the IE and Beyond

This is a policy memo series based on Center-related research aiming to disseminate education research that focuses on educational excellence particularly for the Inland Empire and beyond. The Center aims to publish a memo approximately once per month.