The goal of
the collaboration is to identify students with untapped potential
who can be prepared for teaching careers. These collaborative
efforts have led to new screening techniques to identify those with
a potential for teaching, to the creation of support services on
campus, and to new ways to measure the effectiveness of
teacher-education programs. In 1992 the Foundation granted more
than $8 million to Minority Teacher Education consortia in Los
Angeles, in six states—Alabama, Georgia, Ohio, Louisiana,
North Carolina, and Florida—and on the Navajo
reservation.
Social
Sciences and Community Service
The
Foundation has a long-established interest in the social sciences
because of their capacity to illuminate contemporary social,
political, and economic issues and to prepare students for the
responsibilities of citizenship. The Foundation has also for many
years supported efforts to enhance the capacity of U.S. citizens to
understand other parts of the world. These interests are combined
in a predissertation fellowship program designed to encourage
doctoral students in the social sciences to work in the developing
world. The emphasis is on assisting universities to make
instruction and research relevant to presentday concerns and to
train scholars, teachers, and policy makers to deal with the
problems America confronts in the post-cold war world. An important
aspect of the Foundation's programming in international studies
focuses on efforts to increase the nation's capacity to teach
foreign languages, particularly the less commonly taught languages.
The Foundation funds efforts to train teachers, develop
instructional materials, and improve methods of assessing
proficiency in these languages.
The
Foundation's interest in preparing students for citizenship is also
reflected in grants that encourage schools and colleges to
incorporate community service into the curriculum. The aim is both
to improve civic education and to contribute to communities'
well-being. Funds have supported such organizations as the
Constitutional Rights Foundation, the Campus Outreach Opportunity
League, and the Partnership for Service-Learning. In 1992 the
Foundation also supported a new venture, called Break Away, in
which college students engage in community service during spring
break and other recess periods.
Cultural Preservation
To help
remedy the lack of qualified, well-trained minorities in the
management of arts institutions, the Foundation renewed support for
the Minority Arts Administration Fellowships program of Arts
Midwest. The program provides intensive on-the-job training in arts
institutions and then helps the interns find permanent jobs as
curators or managers.
The
Foundation continued to assist programs that seek to preserve and
interpret cultural traditions, especially in developing countries.
As a contribution toward China's nationwide process of
rediscovering and redefining its cultural identity, the Foundation
is supporting a program designed to restore and revitalize the
cultures of ethnic minorities in Yunnan Province.
In the
United States, the Foundation supports efforts to document the
cultural experiences of various racial and ethnic minorities.
Efforts range from a project at the University of Washington's
Burke Museum to preserve and disseminate the world's largest visual
record of Northwest American Indian art, to the World Music
Institute's African Heritage Tour, featuring African,
African-American, and Afro-Caribbean musicians and dancers resident
in New York City. Foundation funds enabled them to perform for the
first time at colleges and community centers outside the
city.