English Department's 2020 Adelante Scholars

During summer 2020, two English students--Theodore “Sam” Haynes IV and Jasmine Corona--became part of the first class of Adelante research grant recipients. The Adelante Pipeline to Postbaccalaureate Program is funded by a five-year, $2.9 million grant (Title V “Developing Hispanic-Serving Institutions”) from the Department of Education to support Latinx and low-income students to prepare for, apply to, and successfully attain master’s degrees and teaching credentials. You can learn more about the Adelante Program here on their webpage.

“Making as an Epistemic Practice in English”

Jasmine Corona

Faculty mentor: Kim Jaxon

Jasmine Corona was born in Hayward California and is a recent English Education graduate (fall 2019) at Chico State. She is currently pursuing her MA in English in the Language & Literacy pathway. Her project for the Adelante program analyzes artifacts created by students in a first-year writing course for Heritage speakers. Jasmine is paying particular attention to analyzing the creation of multimodal texts that were driven by students’ goals and purposes: texts students created when given the choice to create any artifact they chose to represent languages and identities. Students created a variety of artifacts—from art to games to slam poetry to essays—that wove Spanish and English identities and language together to create new meaning in the classroom. Jasmine is looking at the use of students’ upbringing around chicanismo in Los Angeles or the influence of Mexican food culture and the ways in which these identities made their ways into calls for action around language policies and students’ rights to language. She hopes her findings offer up possibilities for cultural ways of knowing in English classrooms. Jasmine is always interested in what other people are reading and loves talking about Young Adult Fiction. She is constantly buying new books for her future classroom library. She hopes to continue her graduate studies, perhaps to pursue a PhD, and eventually teach in a high school setting.   

“Emerging Black Identity: A Comparative Analysis of James Baldwin & Ta-Nehisi Coates.” 

Theodore “Sam” Haynes IV

Faculty mentor: Nathaniel Heggins Bryant

Theodore “Sam” Haynes IV is from Carson, CA and is entering his final year at CSU Chico as a senior. Sam strives to serve underprivileged students as faculty/staff on a college campus after he earns both his Master’s and Ph.D in English focusing on Black American Studies and literature. Sam’s Adelante research aims to focus on the development of Black American identity and how that is conveyed through literature. Using renowned authors James Baldwin and Ta-Nehisi Coates among others, he aims to observe how the portrayal of Black American identity has changed from the mid-twentieth century to today. He wants to learn and observe more on how the conversation of Black identity development has changed and modified to what we see Black identity as currently. Certain metaphors and terms used by authors such as W.E.B. DuBois will also be used as a reference point of exactly how Black identity was seen as and formed during Reconstruction and after the Civil War. This research project also looks at the current Black Lives Matter movement as a current reference on how Black Americans are represented currently.