Browsing by Author "House-Soremekun, Bessie"

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    Assessing Frederick Douglass’s 1853 Novella The Heroic Slave
    (Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research, 2015-04-17) Kaufman-McKivigan, John R.; House-Soremekun, Bessie; Schultz, Jane
    In summer 2014 the Frederick Douglass Papers, a unit of the Indiana University School of Liberal Arts at Indianapolis’s Institute of American Thought published the first-ever scholarly edition of Douglass’s sole work of fiction, his 1853 novella, The Heroic Slave. With the support of the IUPUI Arts and Humanities Institute, the Indiana University New Currents Program, a number of campus units, and Indiana Humanities, a scholarly symposium, "Frederick Douglass's The Heroic Slave and the American Revolutionary Tradition," was held on the IUPUI campus on October 9 and 10, 2014 to observe this event and to reassess the historical and literary significance of The Heroic Slave. The two-day symposium was organized by John R. Kaufman-McKivigan, Editor of the Douglass Papers, and Bessie House-Soremekun, Chair of the IUPUI Africana Studies Program. Nine internationally recognized scholars in the disciplines of history, literature, and Africana Studies attended this two-day event and presented original research on Douglass, utilizing the new Yale University Press edition of The Heroic Slave. Kaufman- McKivigan of the Douglass Papers and symposium participant Professor Jane Schultz of the IUPUI English Department will edit these papers and provide appropriate accompanying apparatus for a special issue of the Journal of African American History to be published sometime in late 2016. The symposium and the journal issue will become a valuable new addition to the expanding scholarship on Frederick Douglass’s central role in the nineteenth-century African American experience.
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    A Case Study of Extracurricular Activities in Central Indiana
    (Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research, 2015-04-17) Bah, Aissata; Dennis, Sheila; Hester, Nicholas; Hutcherson, Andricus; Kessler, Alexandra; Khalid, Ariba; Khalid, Umara; Gentle-Genitty, Carolyn; Kim, Jangmin; Karikari, Isaac; House-Soremekun, Bessie; Dennis, Shelia; Hutcherson, Andricus; Veal, Brittany
    Although previous research noted that extracurricular activities are significantly associated with various students’ outcomes, little research to date has explored their current conditions. This case study examined the status and quality of extracurricular activities in 11 public schools around Central Indiana. Two sets of data were combined and matched by each school’s identification: the survey of extracurricular activities from schools and the schools’ characteristics from Indiana Department of Education. Of the sample, 67% were elementary schools and 42% were relatively low SES schools with a larger number of students receiving free meals. Our study showed that on average, schools provided 21 different extracurricular activities for their students. Academic activities were most prevalent (100%), followed by performing arts activities (83.3%), sports activities (83.3%), prosocial activities (75%), and school involvement activities (66.7%). For the quality of extracurricular activities, about 12% of students in each school participated in at least one activity and spent an average of 2.6 hours a week on extracurricular activities. The mean number of staff and volunteers who administered activities was 5. Approximately 39% of activities in each school were delivered by community partnerships. Our study also found that elementary schools had the lower mean scores in most measures of the quality of extracurricular activities, such as the frequency of the activities, hours spent per week, and the number of staff and volunteers. Furthermore, low SES schools tended to have lower levels of students’ participation in extracurricular activities, although they provided more frequent and diverse activities than high SES schools. These results may imply that more significant attention should be paid to elementary schools to improve the quality of activities as well as low SES schools to promote students’ active involvement.