McKinney and Suthakaran awarded Drescher leaves to complete research

Two faculty members of the Psychology Department at SUNY Fredonia, Dr. Dani McKinney and Dr. Veersamy Suthakaran, have received grants from the Dr. Nuala McGann Drescher Affirmative Action/Diversity Leave Program to support separate research projects.

The Drescher program funds research and preparation of manuscripts or other publications, among other projects, that lead to enhancement of employment opportunities for minorities, women, persons with disabilities and Vietnam era veterans within SUNY.

Drescher funding will enable McKinney to complete her research on the evaluation of the effectiveness of education in a prison setting and the use of technology in the classroom. Veersamy will finalize his research on resistance to learning about white privilege in relation to an instructor’s race and lecture style as well as the relationship between racism and projection.

A longtime member of Cephas Ministries, known today as Peaceprints Ministries, McKinney is conducting research that focuses on development of new educational programs that address the skills that offenders need to successfully transition back into society. One program concentrates on increasing reading and writing competencies, the other on increasing social problem-solving skills.

“I was aware that many prison programs fail to produce much reduction in recidivism,” McKinney explained, “so I wanted to try some more research-based approaches to see if we could change that.”

McKinney, who earned her doctorate in Experimental Psychology/Cognitive Neural Sciences and joined SUNY Fredonia in 2000, has been engaged in this research for the last two years, and this coming summer and fall she will collect data from FCI McKean, a federal correctional facility in Bradford, Pa. Drescher funding will enable McKinney to receive release time from teaching this fall. “The facility I collect data at is 90 miles away, and having the course release time will allow me more days at the facility to work on these projects,” she said.

Past programming efforts that McKinney has developed in this field show promise, as inmates liked the courses and felt that they offered something of value to them, but not enough time has passed to track any change on recidivism rates. Results of her research will be published in a professional journal and final programming courses created as a result of the project will be made available to other facilities. The first phase of the project will be finished by December or January 2011.

The first topic of Suthakaran’s research, the effect of race and lecture style on the teaching of white privilege, will provide empirical evidence that supports the view of those who have encountered resistance to teaching about white privilege to white students, and also evaluate the role that teaching style – experiential or intellectual – has in generating resistance from students.

Suthakaran’s study is indeed timely, as the nation’s population is becoming increasingly more racially diverse, and educational institutions that enroll primarily white students will have to adapt to changing demographics and address the issue of multiculturalism in their curriculum.

His second study addresses the use of projection as a defense mechanism in which one’s anxieties are reduced by casting undesirable or negative traits onto others. In essence, Veersamy will examine the theory that racism can be explained as the projection of negative or undesirable personality traits onto a member of a minority race.

Suthakaran, whose post-doctorate research has been devoted to multicultural psychology, will collect data for both projects during the summer at SUNY Fredonia and Jamestown Community College, and then analyze the data in the fall. He plans to submit the findings of both studies for publication in a professional journal.

“If our hypotheses are confirmed by the data, the results from the study about teaching white privilege can be a useful resource for faculty and administrators here in Fredonia. I believe the results will provide further evidence for the unique challenges faced by faculty, especially faculty of color, who teach racial topics in a predominantly white university,” Suthakaran explained.

Suthakaran, who has a doctorate in Counseling Psychology, joined SUNY Fredonia in 2007.