When Earl Edwards came to the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) to interview as a doctoral candidate, something felt different about the interview process. He looked around at the other would-be students, hoping to join the urban schooling division of the graduate school of education and information studies. Most of them were Black.
“The overwhelming number of Black candidates shifted the culture of how the environment felt,” he said. The majority were “first generation, who were interested in social-justice-oriented research and had a really keen eye on people of color in Black and Brown communities and inner cities.”
They had a lot in common. Even if students were competing for scarce positions, “it wasn’t really as tense in terms of the competition,” he added. As they waited, students were “interested to learn about each other and building rapport and sharing resources.”
When Edwards came to campus, his cohort was almost entirely Black, except for one student. The group had already built a “really strong connection.”
Other members of the cohort include Travis Dumas, Tr’Vel Lyons, Jamelia Harris, Terry Allen and Menissah Bigsby.
“That made my community, my sense of belonging, at UCLA really unique,” he said.
That was intentional. Black faculty in the urban schooling division, with support from their colleagues, have been proactively recruiting Black doctoral students, taking a cluster hire approach to graduate education.
