Gilberto Q. Conchas

Associate Professor
Department of Education

email: gconchas@uci.edu
phone: on leave 2007-2008
office: Education 2094

Biography

Gilberto Q. Conchas is an Associate Professor in the Department of Education with joint appointments in Chicano/Latino Studies and Sociology at the University of California, Irvine. Prior to UCI, Dr. Conchas was Assistant Professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

A sociologist by training, Dr. Conchas' work focuses on inequality with an emphasis on urban schooling systems. Professor Conchas teaches courses on theory, policy, and practice about race and urban schooling. His research interests include the sociocultural processes within school contexts which structure variations in educational opportunity for low-income immigrant and U.S-born Latino, Asian American, and African American youth.

Professor Conchas' research illuminates student voices as a way to make meaning of their lives in urban communities and schools. As the son of Mexican immigrant farm workers, Dr. Conchas maintains a strong commitment to promoting school success. He closely works with communities and schools as a means to understand their roles in improving engagement and achievement among youth. He has been invited to many speaking engagements where he highlights his perspectives on the factors and influences that structure success instead of failure.

Numerous scholarly journals, including the Harvard Educational Review, Research in Sociology of Education, and Teachers College Record, have published Dr. Conchas' research on social equity and urban schools. He is the author of The Color of Success: Race and High-Achieving Urban Youth (2006). Through a mix-method approach, the book ascertains why and how some racial minority youth become high-achievers despite urban school inequality. He is also co-author of a second book, Small Schools: Digging Beneath the Layers of Educational Reform (2007). This book unearths the sociocultural processes with the small school context that mediate academic engagement and achievement among distinct student populations in two major urban cities.

Professor Conchas is currently in the initial stages of a multi-year research project that involves a qualitative study of Latino youth and their parents who participated in a larger quantitative study of promising after-school programs. This qualitative study will provide the first in-depth examination of parents' views about their children's after-school programs and also offer one of the first systematic investigations of the after-school experiences of Latino youth.

Research