Over the course of his academic career, Gilberto Q. Conchas, the inaugural Wayne K. and Anita Woolfolk Hoy Endowed Professor of Education in the Penn State College of Education, has accumulated an extensive research portfolio with an overarching theme: Public schools located in urban areas typically face the greatest challenges and the most acute problems.
“Fundamentally, my research is about the institutional mechanisms — in school and outside of school — that promote school success among low-income youth and young adults,” he said. “Scholars have discovered a great deal about why such students fail in school but we know surprisingly little about the conditions under which they succeed.”
Conchas joined the College of Education in 2020 after serving as professor of educational policy and social context and founding director of Community Engagement & Student Success at the University of California Irvine. He earned a bachelor’s degree in sociology from UC Berkeley and both a master’s and doctorate in sociology from the University of Michigan.
Conchas’ interest in educational inequality is closely intertwined with his personal history and ethnoracial identity as the son of Mexican immigrant farmworkers. His work to date is a detailed examination of Latino, African American and Vietnamese students in schools and communities through the use of interviews, observations and document analysis.
He is the author or coauthor of nine books, with the most recent, “The Chicanx/o/a Dream: Hope, Resistance and Educational Success,” published in 2020 with Harvard Education Press, which was awarded the 2021 American Association of Hispanics in Higher Education (AAHHE) Book-of-the-Year.
Conchas’ newest project is a forthcoming edited book with TC Press, “Race Frames in Education.” The book centers the concept of race as a socially and historically constructed master category, and corollary concepts that help interrogate how race is lived and experienced, such as racial projects and racialization processes.
Conchas and his co-editor, Sophia Rodriguez, assistant professor at the University of Maryland, worked together on conceptualizing the book, writing the book proposal, securing a book contract and soliciting chapter authors.
Conchas said the authors of “Race Frames in Education” argue race is a system of categorization designed for the purposes of power and hierarchy, and that this system of categorization is a historical and ongoing process that is referred to as racial formation.
“These processes are so deeply rooted in our daily interactions that even well-intentioned people can perpetuate negative or inaccurate racial classifications or meanings, especially if their perspectives are heavily influenced by a white racial frame,” he said.
Conchas has continued to be prolific in his scholarly activities since arriving at Penn State. He is in the process of analyzing data for a book-length manuscript on the success of first-generation Vietnamese American, Chinese American, Korean American, African American and Latinx students.
In addition, he was recently appointed editor-at-large of the Journal of Leadership, Equity and Research (JLER), a new journal dedicated to educational leadership and social justice.
“This has kept me quite occupied, but I simultaneously plan to continue my California-based research and expand it to Pennsylvania, both in urban and rural contexts,” said Conchas.