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Show 290 Eduardo Zaragoza A BRIGHTER FUTURE WITH STUDENTS OF COLOR Eduardo Zaragoza (Matt Bradley) Department of Sociology University of Utah honors college spring 2012 There is a steady growth in the number of students of color that have enrolled in the University of Utah in the past 30 years. It has been a slow and steady increase. However, there is still a sig-nificant racial/ethnic gap between students of color and the majority of students on campus. My research question is how can culturally relevant college prep programs serve as a model for creating a pathway for students of color to reach a higher education? Specifically, how can the Mestizo Arts and Activism Collective create an environment where students can come and ask questions, provide students with resources, and inform them about what they need to get into college? My goal for this research project is to understand how effective a program such as MAA is in order to help students of color in Salt Lake City access higher education and how these col-lege prep programs can increase diversity in universities in general. I will be conducting my research with the Mestizo Arts and Activism Collective (MAA), an organi-zation I have worked with for two years. MAA is a group of inter-generational students of diverse academic and ethnic backgrounds concerned about the communities in which we live in. Our goal is to create a pipeline to lead students of color into higher education. We aim to achieve this through developing young leaders, creating unity within our communities, informing the world about problems young people of color face and finding creative ways to solve them. The theoretical base I will use for my research is culturally relevant pedagogy. The research meth-od that I will be doing is ethnographic qualitative research. I will observe participants, interview the students, create focuses group, and do text analysis. Matt Bradley |