January 2011
Associate Professor Na'ilah Suad Nasir is a new bright light on UC Berkeley's faculty — leading research and teaching in educational equity — but she is no stranger to Cal.
Nasir was a UC Berkeley undergraduate in the early 1990s, double majoring in social welfare and psychology, mothering her young baby, working 30 hours a week, and earning top grades — all before age 21 when UCLA snapped her up into a Ph.D. program. "I was a focused student," she explains with a laugh.
UC Berkeley recruited Nasir back to campus from her post at Stanford University two and a half years ago to join the nascent Berkeley Diversity Research Institute — recently renamed the Haas Diversity Research Center (HDRC). The HDRC is devoted to research in educational, health and economic disparities, LGBT equity, disability rights, and more. Last year, the center received a significant boost from the Evelyn and Walter Haas, Jr. Fund as part of a $16-million investment in the UC Berkeley Initiative for Equity, Inclusion, and Diversity.
"It is fitting that Berkeley be a real hub for the scholarly study of race and equity issues, as well as support for the policy world in thinking through new ways of addressing the vast inequalities that exist in our society," says Nasir, a faculty member in the School of Education and a leader of the HDRC's educational equity cluster.
Dean Judith Warren Little, from the Graduate School of Education, says Nasir and her colleague Janelle Scott — another recent HDRC hire — are helping to attract top graduate students to Berkeley. She calls Nasir is a leader and bridge builder.
"She's someone who really sees how issues of equity and diversity play out through one of society's major institutions — our education system — and more broadly in communities," says Little. "Her research is exactly in the spirit and mission of Berkeley as a public university."
Nasir's current research focuses on racial stereotypes about school and how young people make sense of these stereotypes and develop responses that affect their academic achievement. She is also evaluating the nature of schooling for incarcerated youth, who are largely men and boys of color, the educational opportunities provided within prisons, jails, and juvenile halls, and the role of education in their lives.
Nasir has examined mathematical thinking and learning in out-of-school activities like basketball and dominoes, looking to arenas where teaching and learning is organized in ways that support a wide range of learners, and where African American learners are not marginalized. These studies have important implications for how we organize teaching and learning in schools, says Nasir.
She explains that African Americans participating in these outside-of-school activities assume a level of competency and are given the right tools to increase their abilities. They watch experts, build on a set of skills (from small to big), have opportunities to practice, and are accountable for playing their part in a collective outcome. Nasir says this mode of learning diverges significantly from how mathematics is taught in school.
The middle of three sisters and daughter of a landscaper and a legal assistant, Nasir says attending East Bay public schools — where children come from both "the hills and the flats" — exposed her to diversity and disparity.
She attended El Cerrito High where she was one of three African American students in her honor's English class. "That experience was striking to me," she says. "It was my first exposure to how stratification was reproduced in school."
At UC Berkeley, Nasir studied alongside her mother, Leslie Stone, who had transferred from a community college to finish her undergraduate degree. Now Stone works as a legal assistant at Berkeley Law.
Nasir says she was influenced by pioneering Berkeley faculty members, such as African American studies professor Barbara Christian, whom she called "a strong and nurturing woman." She says Professor Roy Thomas, also from African American studies, encouraged her to look beyond a teaching credential to graduate school.
Nasir took his advice, heading from Berkeley to UCLA's School of Education to earn her Ph.D. in psychological studies in education (with a focus on human development) in 2000. She later joined Stanford University's School of Education faculty, winning an early career researcher award in 2006 and a coveted teaching award in 2007.
Now 38, Nasir is both a researcher and teacher — designing courses that draw students from across campus. Her class "Race, Culture, and Identity in Urban Schools" helps students study urban schools as a part of a broader system of social stratification. The course looks at how students in urban schools come to a sense of themselves as students, as members of cultural and racial groups, and as young people in America.
With colleague Janelle Scott, Nasir developed and now co-teaches "Research Advances in Race, Diversity, and Educational Policy," a course taken by students from many disciplines — from cell biology to ethnic studies. Nasir and Scott are also mentoring a cadre of graduate students who are interested in educational disparities.
Nasir's style of research and teaching is considered "engaged scholarship" that connects UC Berkeley to the broader community in significant ways.
She says her students have internships in local classrooms that provide opportunities to try out and understand more deeply the theories studied in class. "That's my definition of engaged scholarship — it's not volunteer work separate from what you're learning," she explains.
"In some ways, institutions are just the people who are a part of those institutions," says Nasir. "For the people who I'm working with, I am UC Berkeley."
The mother of three daughters, ages 11, 13, and 18, and a son age 5, Nasir says she's thrilled with Berkeley's commitment to pursuing equity and inclusion. "The idea of being part of a move on campus to build on the long history of thought at Berkeley on issues of race, and culture, and equity in an interdisciplinary way is really appealing to me," says Nasir. "There's a new energy around it."
