Education Commons^™

Weekend Spanish Immersion Camp: A Non-Traditional Teaching World Language To Middle School American Students, Jorge Oscar Ramirez

Dissertations and Theses

The nature of today's global economy demands that students demonstrate high levels of proficiency in foreign languages. To meet global demand, most countries around the world are including comprehensive world language instruction in their educational systems beginning at an early age. The increasingly multi-lingual nature of culture within and beyond the Unites States. is escalating the importance of immersing students in world languages as early as possible to ensure a high level of written and oral foreign language skill proficiency by the time students graduate from high school. However, most American students do not have the opportunity to study a …

Settler Colonial Curriculum In Carlisle Boarding School: A Historical And Personal Qualitative Research Study, Patrick Gerard Eagle Staff

Dissertations and Theses

This dissertation research study brings together a historical account and one scholar's personal and family stories of how Indigenous children were stolen and sent to the first Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) boarding schools and tribal schools. In the case of the researcher's family, the educational experiences at Carlisle Indian Industrial School immediately started a traumatic assimilation process on Indigenous children that instilled generational trauma for them and their descendants. At these schools, Indigenous children were forced to conform to a foreign European school designed to abolish their Indigenous identity that demanded they give up their language and culture to …

Animal Magic, Secret Spells, And Green Power: More-Than-Human Assemblages Of Children's Storytelling, Angela Molloy Murphy

Dissertations and Theses

Early childhood settings have become contested spaces, or sites of struggle, between economic and sociocultural interests disputing their purpose. Recent years have shown increased pressure on children in early education settings to demonstrate predetermined learning outcomes, which (a) limits the scope of what is possible in the classroom, (b) narrows the range of what learning is considered valid, and (c) privileges the experience and values of the dominant culture, thereby determining who and what matters in early childhood settings. Thus, in the current education climate where conventional knowledges are routinely privileged, unconventional knowledges and small stories from children's lives are …

Perceptions Of Students Of Color About Their Experience In An Alternative High School: A Phenomenological Inquiry, Massene Mboup

Dissertations and Theses

Public schools in Oregon have been struggling to include students of color and teachers of color for so long. Students of color represent more than one third of the school population, yet remain underserved, underrepresented, and over disciplined. Most of their teachers and support staff are White; the teachers of color represent less than 8% of the teaching staff. The students of color attend comprehensive high schools that generally ignore them--or push them out. Some students of color end up in alternative schools.

My problem of practice was the oppression of students of color in urban schools. Specifically, my research …

Amplifying Latinx Voice Through Interview Study: Highlighting Mathematics Identity As A Pathway To Student Self-Empowerment And Academic Agency, Brea Justine Cohen

Dissertations and Theses

Nationally, the percentage of high school students taking higher-level mathematics courses (beyond Algebra 2) has increased from the late 20th century to the present. However, as compared to White high school students enrolled in advanced math classes, the rate is lower among students of color, specifically students who identify as Latinx, African American, or Native American. My school district (a suburban district in the Northwestern United States) is working to address this problem by implementing several district-wide initiatives that focus on increasing students' engagement in mathematics, which focuses teacher pedagogy on leveraging mathematics communities to support collaborative mathematics dialogue. The …

Medical Faculty Engagement In Curricular Revisions: An Inquiry Into Individual And Organizational Factors That Support Participation, Tomoko Tanikawa

Dissertations and Theses

In efforts to facilitate the education of highly qualified and best-prepared medical professionals, many medical schools are either planning for or engaging in curriculum revisions including a complete overhaul of the curricular structure, academic and medical content, and pedagogical delivery modalities. To be effective, such changes require faculty buy-in, participation, engagement, and innovation. Unfortunately, despite medical schools' efforts to support faculty involvement in curricular revision, a range of reactions exist, including resistance. Thus, understanding the interactions between individual faculty attitudes and behaviors toward organizational initiatives and structural support is critical in advancing the educational mission of medical schools. Based on …

Paradigm Shifts In Large-Scale Educational Change: Uncovering The Oregon Education Investment Board's Theory Of Change-In-Action, Johanna Kathryn Blackford

Dissertations and Theses

Education system leaders and policymakers around the globe expend vast amounts of resources on educational reform efforts and despite positive intentions, most attempts to affect educational change fail to realize large-scale, sustainable, positive outcomes--yet some have. While it is widely acknowledged that no two systems' educational change journeys are the same, what is becoming clear is that there is significant similarity among the thinking or paradigms underpinning theories of change-in-action guiding positive large-scale system-wide reform. This research highlights four change paradigms and suggests that a collective learning paradigm guided by systems thinking represents the paradigm shift associated with successful large-scale …