SMART Grant team studies race, privilege

When it comes to promoting feminist ideals and combating racism, the work of Meredith Tweed and Caroline McFadden expands beyond UCF's walls.

Tweed, a Women's Studies visiting instructor and McFadden, an undergraduate student, were awarded the UCF Student Mentor Academic Research Team (SMART) Grant in November.

 As soon as the collegiate crowd descends back onto campus for the Spring 2011 semester, Tweed and McFadden will  begin collecting data for their winning project, called "Invisible Ink: Whiteness, Young Women Leaders, and Bridging Difference to Build Community."

"We were ecstatic when we found out,"  Tweed said.

The team was awarded $1,000 each. McFadden's portion will go toward her tuition and financial assistance while the remaining funds are for supplies to conduct the project.

McFadden, a women's studies major projected to graduate this May, will create a lesson plan about white privilege for seventh-grade girls at the Young Women Leaders Program, a mentoring program that pairs UCF women with middle school girls in Seminole County.

McFadden's lesson will be added to the YWLP syllabus and will utilize the group's current activity structures to develop the lesson.

The lesson will focus on learning, understanding, interpreting and analyzing the ways that girls perceive and experience privilege in their lives and the lives of others in the YWLP community, McFadden said.

 The team intends to study the test subjects through focus groups and content analysis of creative projects to record qualitative data, according to McFadden.

"As an anti-racist activist, I am attracted to this concept because I believe that education on white privilege is a key component to the understanding and dismantling of racism in our society,"  said McFadden.

The Office of Research & Commercialization and the Burnett Honors College awards up to three SMART Grants per semester, which are designed to help students identify and work with faculty mentors in a research area.

Tweed estimates that she and McFadden will spend about 100 hours conducting research throughout the semester.

"The Women's Studies department has not done a large amount of research in the past and I am excited to get others excited about the process,"  Tweed said.

McFadden says that the purpose of the project is to study the ways that education about white privilege shapes how young women think about race, ethnicity, difference and privilege.

"I also want to see how white-privilege education effects the leadership development of adolescent girls,"  McFadden said. " This project is important because the topic has never been explored before in this way."

McFadden said she would recommend all students pursue research programs because it provides students with a chance to use their original ideas and unique talents to create new knowledge or examine old ideas in fresh ways.

"This research project is not just an experiment to me, but one step toward a lifelong goal of being a catalyst for change within society," McFadden said.