The Program in Educational Theatre faculty have prepared this report to document efforts made in the aftermath of the racial reckoning that began in summer of 2020. Reflecting on commitments made in June 2020, discussions at the NYU Educational Theatre Forum on Racial Justice and Social Change (June 23, 2020), and outreach from students, alumni, and faculty, this status update documents some of the areas in which the faculty have taken steps to reflect, evaluate, plan, and implement systemic change. This is a work in progress and work that continues.
In June 2020, the Educational Theatre Faculty released a statement of commitments to the Educational Theatre Community which have guided reflections and actions in the subsequent year. In light of the central role these initial commitments had in framing faculty actions up to this point, they are listed here to provide context for the remainder of this report.
----------------------------------
We commit to ongoing meetings dedicated to critical questions of racial injustice and are beginning the process of assembling a paid task force to help create change. With the aid of the task force, we plan to:
Ensure that we are responsive to the political climate and the anti-black rhetoric and racial bias that has been embedded in our social and political structures and discourse.
Examine social structures that block people of color from full participation, as well as probe the traditions and oppressive structures that exist within the art form
liberatory practitioners and theorists like Charlene Carrauthers, Michelle Alexander, bell hooks, and Zaretta Hammond will be deeply studied and embraced.
Fully evaluate programmatic structures to:
Center student voices
Create space for student reflection, investing further in diverse communities
In preparing teachers for the classroom and beyond, promote a stronger culturally responsive pedagogy through mentorship, modelling, and reflective practice.
Make a better effort to identify strong and diverse role models already in the field in the student teaching experience.
Engage in more active recruitment, looking to students and alumni to assist in this effort, and find ways in which to fund and support more black teachers in the arts.
Facilitate a critical dialogue with current students, alums, adjunct and full-time teachers in educational theatre to conceptualize, build capacity and grow our artistic and civic community engagement capacity, particularly in relation to highlighting the voices of black artists and teachers. Here we will welcome your thoughts and ideas in a forum setting. More on this forum to come soon.
Feature the work of black artists more prominently, including hiring black artists to direct and have creative control for our productions, teach courses and master classes, and engage in forum presentations and other important community dialogues. On that note, where we don’t have control we pledge to be more active agents of change, making critical conversations more visible and joining forces with colleagues across disciplines for support.
Confront challenges of University structures that limit our own agency, especially in regards to hiring more full-time faculty of color and allotting more scholarship funds. Both these efforts (hiring and scholarship funds) are crucial!
In order to provide a space to collect and disseminate proactive anti-racist and culturally relevant practices in which some members of the field may already be actively engaged, we have released a call for papers for an issue of ArtsPraxis, the journal for practice and research, which will focus on Social Justice Practices in Educational Theatre.
The Task Force on Racial Justice (as outlined above) was meant to be a deliberative body and advisory board made up of students and alumni from the NYU Steinhardt Program in Educational Theatre, spanning 15 years of program history (2005-2020). The Program intended to seek members representing a diversity of experience from all degree programs to serve on a semester-by-semester basis. Importantly, Educational Theatre’s goal was to pay each board member for their participation. We did not want any work to be done for free. Ed Theatre faculty assumed that paying board members would be possible through accessing an endowed fund to which the program had access called the Nancy and Lowell Swortzell Permanent Fund in Educational Theatre. Unfortunately, after an administrative review of the terms of the fund, we discovered there was not in fact an explicit term outlined that allowed for paying students to serve on a committee. The Ed Theatre faculty then reached out on a departmental level to see if there were funds available, to which we received an answer of no, as it was pointed out that if funds were provided to just our program, for the sake of equity, other programs would need money for their initiatives too.
Therefore, we as Ed Theatre faculty began to address the goals of the task force themselves, having realized that we must take full responsibility for this self-reflection and action instead of short-sightedly expecting other stakeholders to do this work on our behalf. The faculty were guided by Ann James’ essay, “Putting Out the American Theatre Dumpster Fire Through White Abolition,” in which she recommends that institutions, “.... dig deep and do some serious work on healing the racism within themselves and their organization—all the way back to their personal ancestral trauma.” We are (and will continue to be) focused on our “own personal relationships to prejudice, gatekeeping, microaggressions, gaslighting, and ‘othering’” (Howlround, 2021).
The full time faculty meet regularly on a bi-weekly basis in a standing Program Meeting. The topic of the Task Force in particular as well as the other topics addressed in this report have been placed on the standing agenda following the June 23, 2020 Forum. Upon review, there was insufficient time to address other program concerns and the topics discussed in this report, so a separate bi-weekly meeting was arranged from February 17, 2021 and has been attended by all full time faculty since its implementation.
The full time faculty began discussions about course curriculum at the outset of the racial reckoning in June 2020. In those conversations, the faculty reflected on the breadth of courses we offer, the instructors of those courses, and the content of the courses. The faculty met with adjunct faculty prior to each semester in order to assess and revise course content, share pedagogy, and review course readings.
In spring, the faculty engaged in a self evaluation through a survey protocol. Information was gathered around the following five levels of culturally responsive pedagogy (as outlined by Re-Imagining Migration’s Culturally Responsive Teaching Checklist):
Level 0: No culturally relevant or linguistically relevant materials are included in my course(s).
Level 1: CONTRIBUTIONS APPROACH: Heroes, holidays, historical events, and discrete cultural elements are incorporated into my course(s).
Level 2: ADDITIVE APPROACH: Multi-cultural content, concepts, themes are incorporated into the course(s) from multi-cultural students' perspectives.
Level 3: TRANSFORMATION APPROACH: The structure of the course curriculum enables students to view concepts, issues, events, and themes from the perspectives of diverse ethnic, racial, and cultural groups.
Level 4: SOCIAL ACTION APPROACH: Students make decisions on important social issues and take action to help solve them.
The faculty framed this evaluation around Geneva Gay’s definition of culturally responsive teaching as: “the behavioral expressions of knowledge, beliefs, and values that recognize the importance of racial and cultural diversity in learning. It is contingent on . . . seeing cultural differences as assets; creating caring learning communities where culturally different individuals and heritages are valued; using cultural knowledge of ethnically diverse cultures, families, and communities to guide curriculum development, classroom climates, instructional strategies, and relationships with students; challenging racial and cultural stereotypes, prejudices, racism, and other forms of intolerance, injustice, and oppression; being change agents for social justice and academic equity; mediating power imbalances in classrooms based on race, culture, ethnicity, and class; and accepting cultural responsiveness as essential to educational effectiveness in all areas of learning for students from all ethnic groups." (Gay, G., 2018)
The faculty are currently engaged in analyzing the survey data in service of revising course curricula and degree requirements to bring them into better alignment with the culturally responsive paradigms outlined above. For example, in January 2022, the program will partner with community theatre artists Daphnie Sicre and Quenna Barrett to offer a study away opportunity in Los Angeles, California focused on Radical Theatre Pedagogy.
Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Program in Educational Theatre consistently offered education and outreach programming throughout the year, primarily through its performances. Each main stage production included two matinee performances attended by students and teachers from around the New York City metro area, and these performances were accompanied by a curriculum resource guide. The New Plays for Young Audience series brought playwrights and directors from across the US and the world to workshop new Theatre for Young Audience plays, with in-school workshops around the city, and weekend readings that brought young people and their families into the theatre to assist the playwright with the development of their script. The storytelling series housed at the Provincetown Playhouse featured three different practitioners per semester, sharing stories with the NYU and Greenwich Village communities free of charge. The program’s Shakespeare to Go traveling troupe brought 60-minute cuts of Shakespeare’s plays to schools throughout the city, reaching 3000-4000 students per year. For many years, the program has had an ongoing collaboration with Rehabilitation Through the Arts (RTA), where students work with incarcerated men and women throughout the New York State prison system under the supervision of Nan Smithner. The program’s newest project, the Verbatim Performance Lab (VPL), started offering in-school educational programming in 2018, and continued to expand these offerings through early 2020. VPL also developed collaborations with other offices at NYU, bringing its performances to the larger NYU community, and eventually taking projects to communities in other parts of the country.
The COVID-19 pandemic and the repeated murdering of Black citizens prompted the program to consider all of its existing education and outreach offerings and to re-think how those opportunities could be re-imagined and/or continue with a greater and more intentional investment in accessibility and equity as core guiding principles. Throughout the 2020-2021 academic year, faculty and students at all levels engaged in education and outreach programming that worked to center individuals and identities that have been historically marginalized, underrepresented, and/or underutilized. The program engaged in artistic projects (see above) focused on the intersectionality of race, ethnicity, gender, gender identity, and ability, and engaged in outreach activities to members of those communities through direct engagement in online presentations and workshops and indirect engagement via social media. Two faculty members received a 2021 Champions of Equity Gender and Trans Justice Award from NYU Steinhardt’s Office of Equity, Belonging, and Community Action for their work in this area. The shift to online platforms allowed program projects to reach communities across the United States, and engage young people from across the identity spectrum in dialogue about voting rights, voter suppression, anti-racism, power, immigration, and presidential leadership. Program students also reached out to members of communities across the country to hear their thoughts on the COVID-19 pandemic, the 2020 election cycle, and the events of January 6, 2021, and excerpts have been or will be shared as a way to generate dialogue around these moments that tend to have deeper and more negative enduring impacts on historically marginalized communities. The program also continued its long and ongoing commitment to working with incarcerated populations via an online collaboration with the University of Denver Prison Arts Initiative (DU PAI). This collaboration included fieldwork through the Applied Theatre course and via the program’s Verbatim Performance Lab.
Faculty dialogue around productions and programming has been focused around the theatre artists with which we collaborate and present through our various artistic outlets. The faculty sought, not only to center the voices and artistic praxis of BIPOC theatre artists, but also voices of other underrepresented communities. Traditionally, the main stage productions are directed by full time faculty members in the Program in Educational Theatre. In order to provide opportunities to present works created by and for people of color, it was necessary for our faculty members to step back from this traditional role. In fall 2020, Amy Cordileone served as producer for Quenna Barrett’s devised theatre production of Re-Writing the Declaration, a virtual performance produced in association with Chicago’s Free Street Theater (who creates original theater by, for, about, with, and in Chicago’s diverse communities) and New York City’s Speranza Foundation (who are committed to creating a more hope filled world). Catalyzed by the Movement for Black Lives, Re-Writing the Declaration was a devised, participatory play inviting audiences to center Black women, and femmes, non-binary, and trans folx of color, in order to free us all.
In spring 2021, Amy Cordileone collaborated with Deaf, Hard of Hearing, & Hearing theatre artists on the creation of Here, All Dwell Free, a virtually produced and pre-recorded musical adaptation of "The Handless Maiden," a modern-ancient epic following the healing journey of a young woman violently betrayed. Grounded in aesthetics of access, her world is explored through a visual and gestural vernacular rooted in American Sign Language (ASL). Over the course of the spring semester, an international ensemble of Deaf, Hard of Hearing, & Hearing performers actively re-imagined what it meant to collaborate in accessible and artful ways.
In fall 2021, Amy Cordileone will again serve as producer for a repertory series of community engaged theatre works created by doctoral students and alumni. Among the productions are Durell Cooper’s Socially Distant, Xiaojin Niu and Qian Wu’s Gaggle 雁 鸣: The Voices and Stories of Chinese International Students in the U.S., and Suzy Jane Hunt’s When You Ask Her.
A series of 6 media artifacts that are verbatim performances of moments from history related to voting rights in America, starting in March 1965 and moving through December 2019.
Given that 2020 was the centenary of the ratification of the 19th Amendment, we cast women to perform some of the men represented in these original clips.
Audiences were asked to consider the following question: How does your experience of these people and their messages change when their words and gestures are delivered by different bodied actors?
VPL’s first fully online and remote project.
You Can’t Unring the Bell was created for NYU’s 2020 Constitution Day Celebration: Voting Rights in America. It premiered on September 23, 2020, in a Zoom webinar format and featured commentary and discussion by Jack Knott, Dean of NYU Steinhardt, and Franita Tolson, Vice Dean for Faculty and Academic Affairs and Professor of Law at University of Southern California Gould School of Law.
Funding support provided by NYU Brademas Center, NYU Government Affairs, NYU Votes, NYU Student Affairs, and Birnbaum Women’s Leadership Network – NYU Law.
Through a series of social media posts from February 22 through March 5 called You’ve Got to be Brave, Brave, Brave, NYU Steinhardt’s Verbatim Performance Lab (VPL) celebrated the intersection of Black History and Women’s History Months.
Viewers are invited to test their knowledge of notable figures past and present via online engagements featuring images, quotations, and verbatim performances. In conjunction with this social media presence, VPL curated and posted the materials on its website to stimulate continued conversation around the importance of intersectionality when considering identity.
Educational Theatre doctoral candidate, adjunct faculty member, and VPL Artistic Associate Tammie L. Swopes served as the lead creative artist for You’ve Got to Be Brave, Brave, Brave.
This project is a collaboration between VPL, the Department of Music and Performing Arts Professions, and the Office of Equity, Belonging, and Community Action.
This ongoing project captures the experiences and viewpoints of people living and working throughout the United States during historical events and happenings. The project investigates how people from different parts of the country respond to the same event. We’re curious about how a person’s geographical location influences their position or viewpoint on an issue of national importance. Additionally, we wonder how an audience interprets a person’s position or viewpoint when it is performed verbatim by a different bodied actor.
COVID-19: interviews conducted from April 2020 through April 2021; interviewing process involved VPL student interns, affiliated artists, and students in two NYU courses.
Election 2020: interviews conducted throughout October 2020; interviewing process involved students in two NYU courses.
January 6, 2021: interviews conducted in March and April 2021; interviewing process involved students in one course.
Planning for a project on polarization in advance of the 2022 midterm elections; grant submitted to National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) on February 23, 2021.
This arts-based research project placed a 4-minute excerpt of the first presidential debate between Joe Biden and Donald Trump moderated by Chris Wallace into the voices and bodies of young actors to explore the following questions: What do young actors discover about these candidates and the moderator when they take on their speech and gestural patterns through verbatim performance? What happens to an audience’s perception of the interactions between the adults during this debate when younger and different bodied actors take on these roles?
The purpose of the project was to use verbatim performance as an intervention around civic and constitutional understanding.
12 teachers/schools from around the United States and over 60 student middle school and high school students partnered on this project from across the country: Delaware, Pennsylvania, New York, North Carolina, Illinois, Texas, California. List of schools available upon request.
Each school created a filmed version of their students’ investigation.
VPL provided a curriculum linking verbatim performance with the scientific method.
Coordinated viewing / release of all filmed investigations occurred on April 17, 2021.
Respondents across 4 sessions included Maria Guadalupe (INSEAD), Elisabeth King (NYU), Fabienne Doucet (NYU), and Nisha Sajnani (NYU).
An ongoing collaboration between NYU Steinhardt’s Verbatim Performance Lab (VPL) and the Johnson County Arts and Heritage Center in Johnson County, Kansas.
Using VPL’s interviewing and performance techniques, actors and teaching artists interview veterans about their experiences and then create short verbatim performance portraits that are then shared with the community as a way to educate about veterans’ military experiences and to assist with veterans’ re-acclimation after returning to civilian life.
VPL conducted remote training and coaching with 8 teaching artists from the Kansas City metro area in April and May 2021.
VPL was in residence from May 9-15 to complete the filming of this project with a production team at Johnson County Community College.
This new set of portraits premiered on Sunday, May 30, at 6:00pm (EDT).
If Light Closed its Eyes: a verbatim documentary theatre play constructed from interviews conducted by students at Sterling Correctional Facility in Colorado
VPL trained the students in interviewing techniques and is contributing to the creation of the project through creative consultation and transcribing support.
A/live Inside featured an excerpt of the above project. This event was a virtual showcase of artists and their stories from Colorado’s prisons.
VPL interns assisted with transcribing of interviews for the scripting stage of If Light Closed its Eyes.
Writing team from Sterling Correctional Facility guest lectured in Creating Ethnodrama & Documentary Theatre course on March 23, 2021.
Residency with students in the Advanced Acting class at the Westtown School in West Chester, PA, focused on using verbatim performance tools for cultural responsiveness. The residency was made possible by the McLear Artist in Residence Fund at Westtown.
Culminated in a presentation of You Can’t Unring the Bell for the school community.
VPL trained the students in the course to conduct interviews for our Portraits US series, focused on COVID-19 and Election 2020. Some excerpts from those interviews are being performed by VPL actors and will become part of the project.
Students also created 45-minute lesson plans using the 6 media clips from You Can't Unring the Bell. The lesson plans explored voting rights and voter suppression, and they were taught virtually during the week of November 30. The students taught in 8 different schools in New York, New Jersey, Delaware, Pennsylvania, California, and Texas.
Collaboration with the drama teacher Rai Arsa Artha and students to create an original verbatim documentary theatre play that examined the experiences of first and second generation immigrants and their attitudes towards the “American dream.”
The project had over 1000 views during its “performance” weekend in December.
Lead Teaching Artist: Lilly Stannard
Collaboration with drama teacher Ross Shirley who received a grant to create a project around anti-racism.
Worked with two acting classes to explore the dynamics of power and celebrity using verbatim performance.
March-May 2021
Lead Teaching Artist: Tammie L. Swopes
Collaboration with drama teacher Donna Romero.
Worked with two acting classes to explore verbatim performance as an acting technique; used media artifacts as source material.
April 26-May 28, 2021
Lead Teaching Artist: Joe Salvatore
This free workshop offered training in verbatim performance techniques to actors identifying from historically underrepresented groups as a way to expand the group of collaborators available to engage in new work creation with VPL.
Facilitated by Ashley Renee Thaxton-Stevenson, Joe Salvatore, and Tammie L. Swopes.
June 5, 2021
Students completed fieldwork one of three different settings:
NYU Steinhardt’s Patient Actor Ensemble: worked with graduate students in Occupational Therapy in Telehealth scenarios
Verbatim Performance Lab: conducted interviews and contributed transcripts and portraits to the Portraits US series; also created a social media campaign to highlight 10 of those portraits
University of Denver Prison Arts Initiative (DU PAI): provided transcribing support, catalogued images from past projects and productions, and organized data from various projects.
New Plays for Young Audiences (NPYA) is a summer play development series devoted to the work of the Theatre for Young Audiences (TYA) playwright and the development of TYA plays while also providing NYU students the opportunity to study and experience the process first-hand. Under the artistic directorship of David Montgomery and celebrating its twenty-third season, NPYA developed two new plays in summer 2021. Additionally, NPYA piloted a new BIPOC initiative to support BIPOC TYA playwrights and highlight BIPOC TYA stories.
New Plays for Young Audiences supported three nights of 6 BIPOC TYA stories written by 6 BIPOC playwrights in an event titled, A Night of BIPOC TYA stories: Get Your Play Heard! Selections from each selected script were presented virtually by NYU Steinhardt’s Educational Theatre program between June 17-19, 2021, each night. The showcases were free and open to the public. Each night’s showcase includes two script selections and a post-presentation discussion for each script.
The goal of the initiative is to help each script and playwright find additional support in their development and production journeys. An NPYA BIPOC Initiative Coordinator position was created, and Ed Theatre adjunct instructor and doctoral student Tammie Swopes, who has been in the business of theatre and education for over 20 years, assumed the BIPOC Initiative Director position.
The first night’s theme was folk tales and stories of the past. It featured Heartstrings by Lee Cataluna and Hee Hee Tales by M.J. Kang. The second night's theme was magical realism. It featured Spayce Boys by Mateo Hernandez and Yo So Frida by Israel Jimenez. The third night's theme explored what TYA is and what makes a TYA play. It featured R(estoration) I(n) P(rogress) by Andrea Ambam and Nzuri Haar by Darin F. Earl, II. Brief descriptions of each script and playwright bios were posted on our social media pages that included a Google site, 3 Facebook event pages (one for each night of the readings), and 3 Eventbrite pages. NPYA also contacted TYA theatres and other TYA professionals that could assist in getting these scripts additional development and production in furtherance of the initiative’s primary goal.
The additional plays NPYA developed began with Mariposa/Butterfly co-written by José Casas and Sandra Fenichel Asher, directed by José Cruz González, about two neighbors living side-by-side in Texas where a low fence separates their gardens, but much more divides them from one another. The 2nd play, R(estoration) I(n) P(gress), was part of the BIPOC initiative. NPYA further developed this piece by Andrea Ambam whose work intersects spaces where community, performance, and social commentary pulsate. Tammie Swopes directed.
The NPYA team is currently examining the festival process for identifying actors and supporting new Black actors at NYU, as well as local actors. Lack of diversity in our student population is a larger systematic issue, and one that impacts our casting. The NPYA team has been discussing what this series’ role is in diversifying the canon and fostering inclusion. A number of plays in the last few years have not been castable from our own pool of actors, and so we’ve gone to the larger theatre community. Because these readings were meant to be a student experience, there was never funding built in to pay actors, which means that when we reach out beyond the student body, we are asking actors to commit to a week of rehearsals without compensation. This is a problem that we need to further address as we have a real responsibility to be actively working to decolonize the field. Casting BIPOC actors, dramaturgs, and directors should be an opportunity to equitably expand the TYA field as we commit to inclusive creative spaces. We further ensure that our structural examination of NPYA will lead BIPOC creatives to become an integral part of the series at all levels. Finally, NPYA is examining better methods of communication with the incoming creative teams in order to make sure everyone feels included and heard.
Over the past ten years, Nan Smithner has continued to develop the Program in Educational Theatre’s Prison Initiative in collaboration with Rehabilitation Through the Arts (RTA). In both medium and maximum security correctional facilities in New York State, RTA teaching artists have worked to increase communication skills, develop empathy, teach aesthetic skills, provide opportunities for performance, and introduce innovative theatre techniques and theories to incarcerated individuals. Numerous graduate interns have accompanied Smithner to correctional facilities to work with both male and female inmates, and some of these students have gone on to develop their own workshops within RTA, contributing new language, processes, passion and insight to the organization.
In the year 2020 -2021, as entry into the prisons was impossible, RTA teaching artists have been attending workshops and trainings in culturally responsive education, reassessing pedagogical practices through the lenses of implicit bias and linguistic justice, and attempting to evaluate accountability and systemic racism. The trainings have included multiple follow up sessions with smaller affinity groups to examine how pedagogical practices will change and evolve when restrictions on Covid 19 are lifted, and RTA/NYU will be able to return to correctional facilities.
Published in December 2020, Volume 7, Issue 2b focuses on social justice practices for educational theatre. Editor, Jonathan P. Jones, introduced the issue with his editorial, I Can’t Breathe. Thereafter comes a series by theatre artists and practitioners who espouse theoretical frameworks for engaging in social justice theatre education and theatre making.
Tear the Walls Down: A Case for Abolitionist Pedagogy in Arts Education Teacher Training Programs by Durell Cooper
Identity Matters. All. The. Time. Questions to Encourage Best Practices in Applied Theatre by Rebecca Brown Adelman, Trent Norman, & Saira Yasmin Hamidi
Natasha Gordon in Conversation with Lucy Jeffery: 'It was around 7.27pm that suddenly diversity walked through the door' by Lucy Jeffery
ImaginingOtherwise: A Glossary of Arts Education Practice on the Cape Flats by Aylwyn Walsh, Alexandra Sutherland, Ashley Visagie, & Paul Routledge
The second series includes articles that look at the possibilities for social justice in drama pedagogy.
Process Drama as a Liberatory Practice by Joshua Rashon Streeter
Drama in Education as a Form of Critical Pedagogy: Democratising Classrooms in Chile by Catalina Villanueva & Carmel O’Sullivan
Theatre for Liberating Social Work Education by Alexis Jemal, Tabatha R. Lopez, Jenny Hipscher, & Brennan O’Rourke
A Welcoming Space for Whom?: Race and Inclusion in Suburban High School Theater Programs by Amanda Brown
In fall 2020, Jonathan Jones promoted the Program in Educational Theatre to all Historically Black College and University (HBCU) theatre programs as a way of introduction. This outreach included highlighting the availability of program scholarships and Steinhardt scholarships targeted for HBCU graduates.
The full time faculty were engaged in the recruitment of BIPOC applicants for doctoral study.
For the 2020/2021 academic year and into the 2021/2022, the Program was able to fund master’s and doctoral scholarships for 100% of scholarship applicants from four sources:
Steinhardt Doctoral Fellowship
Nancy and Lowell Swortzell Permanent Fund in Educational Theatre
Lowell and Nancy Swortzell Scholarship Fund
Myoung Cheul Chung Scholarship
Scholarships ranged from $1,038 to full tuition and registration fees ($24,635 for fall 2021), though the typical scholarship is for $5,000.
In 2020/2021, there were 33 funded master’s and doctoral students from Program or doctoral sources. Of those, 12 were students from the BIPOC community.
Figure 1: Demographic breakdown of the 2020-2021 master’s and doctoral scholarships from Program or doctoral sources
For the 2021/2022 academic year, we still have application cycles for spring and summer to come, but from current projections, we will have 16 funded master’s and doctoral students from Program or doctoral sources. Of those, 7 are students from the BIPOC community.
Figure 2: Demographic breakdown of the 2021-2022 master’s and doctoral scholarships from Program or doctoral sources
Following spring and summer application cycles, we anticipate the total number of scholarship recipients to increase, though we cannot project the demographic breakdown until we have the applications in hand. To that end, we encourage all students with financial need to apply for available scholarships.
Additionally, some graduate students in the program receive scholarships from Steinhardt - but the program does not receive data on that level of financial aid. We include this only to note that scholarships targeted specifically for BIPOC students include:
Dean’s Opportunity Scholarship
Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU), Hispanic Serving Institutions (HSI), and Tribal Colleges Scholarship
Interested students are encouraged to apply for both program-specific and Steinhardt scholarships.