Education Commons^™

Her Voice Matters: Life Histories Of Black Women Teachers’ Working Conditions, G. Funmilayo Tyson-Devoe

Antioch University Dissertations & Theses

This study explored Black women’s lived experiences as teachers in urban schools during the era of 21st-century education reform. It centers around the relationships between Black women teachers (micro), their working conditions in low-performing urban schools (mesa), and neoliberal education policies (macro) that affect their work. The theoretical frames were Black feminist thought and critical race theory. The research questions were as follows: first, what are the working experiences of Black women teachers of tested subjects in low-performing urban public schools and, second, how do socio-political factors affect their working conditions? The research design was qualitative and included narrative inquiry …

The Bursting Of The Non-Profit Bubble: Why Non-Profit Kids Simply Won’T Catch A Break, Jederick Estrella

Senior Theses and Projects

Studying conceptions of success within nonprofit and boarding school students and how they envision their future. Through an understanding of students' individual conceptions of success, one can start to analyze how reliant students were on elite educational institutions and nonprofit scholar programs to make them worthy of sponsored mobility through their track record of success.

Youth And Adult Education In The Context Of Student Movements: The Cases Of Egypt, Puerto Rico, And Chile, Maria A. Vetter, Mai Atta, Kamil M. Gerónimo-López, Javier M. Campos-Martínez, John D. Holst

Adult Education Research Conference

Participants of the student movements in Egypt, Puerto Rico, and Chile present on their experiential learning in the context of the social movements that took place between 2005 and 2019.

Supervision To Deepen Teacher Candidates’ Understanding Of Social Justice: The Role Of Responsive Mediation In Professional Development Schools, Megan E. Lynch

Journal of Educational Supervision

Those responsible for supervising teacher candidates have an obligation to promote socially just pedagogies. In this paper, I investigate my own supervisory practice as a novice supervisor in my mediation of a teacher candidate’s understanding of social justice. I rely on a sociocultural theoretical perspective (Vygotsky, 1978) and the psychological tool of responsive mediation (Johnson & Golombek, 2016) for my supervisory practice and an anti-capitalist interpretation of socially just teaching (Apple, 2004; Ayers, 2010; Bowles & Gintis, 2011). Through a microgenetic analysis (Wertsch, 1985) of a post-observation transcript, I empirically document the developmental opportunities that take place over a span …

A Teacher Shortage And Lack Of Representation In The Classroom: A Neoliberal And Critical Race Study Of The Broken Teacher Pipeline And The Impact On Education Majors, Sara Piotrowski

Theses and Dissertations

Teacher education attrition is a largely understudied topic, especially from the perspective of the college student. What factors prevented education majors from graduating with a teaching degree? There are countless studies about teacher attrition within the first five years in the classroom (DeAngelis et al., 2013; Kopkowski, 2008; Office of Postsecondary Education [OPE], 2015), but the research is sparse when it comes to the retention rate of education majors. Why do students get accepted and enter college as education majors and then not graduate with a degree to become a teacher? The purpose of this study was to consider factors …

Where Is The Community? A Qualitative Case Study Of A School Closure In An Urban School District, Anthony Mcwright

Educational Leadership and Policy Studies: Doctoral Research Projects

Family and community engagement are a proven strategy for strengthening schools. Across the United States, parents and community members have pressed school boards and district leadership for more transparency and broader participation in decisions about school turnaround. The purpose of this qualitative case study is to understand the decision-making process for the school closure of Rocky Mountain High School, a neighborhood school in an Urban School District in the Rocky Mountain West and the impact it had on the community. To better understand this dilemma, a case study method was used to identify real-life perspectives of community members associated with …

Speaker Of The House: The Intersection Of Faculty And Administrator Roles Among Community College Faculty Department Chairs, Miles Young

Department of Educational Administration: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Community colleges face significant challenges in the 21^st century due largely to the effects of neoliberalism. Shifts in governance structures and an emphasis towards productivity and accountability have put a strain on institutional relationships, particularly between the faculty and the administration. Much attention has been given to how this relationship could be restored through direct means; however, another institutional stakeholder group has largely been overlooked in terms of a resource that could help bridge the faculty and administration. The community college faculty department chair is uniquely situated between the faculty and administration within these institutions, yet little is known …

I Don’T Really Work Here: Part-Time Faculty And The Adjunctification Of Higher Ed., Maggie Cawley

West Chester University Master’s Theses

This critical action research thesis will explore the 40-year rise of adjunctification, the term coined to describe the increased reliance on adjunct and contingent labor in institutions of higher education. This thesis will examine adjunctification’s detrimental effects on teaching in higher education as a profession, on adjuncts and contingent teachers, and on students. Institutional overreliance on adjunct faculty as cheap, ad hoc labor flies in the face of the role that education should play in society: to develop student potentiality and capacity for critical thought. I believe that the casualization of teaching and the subsequent rise of adjunctification preclude these …

Performance-Based Funding Of Higher Education: Analyses Of Policy Discourse Across Four Case Studies, Mary Ziskin, Karyn E. Rabourn, Donald Hossler

Mary B. Ziskin

Performance-based funding (PBF) for public colleges and universities is increasingly prevalent worldwide, as a part of a broader pattern of marketisation in public education. This study focused on developing an empirical view of how, and in what contexts, policy makers use the concepts of neoliberal economics to design and support PerformanceBased Funding (PBF) policies in higher education. We analysed 121 policy documents, white papers, evaluation reports, and news items related to PBF policies in four case jurisdictions: Tennessee, Washington, United Kingdom, and Italy. We employed critical discourse analysis methods as framed by Fairclough and colleagues and implemented this approach within …

Mission Enactment And Strategic Enrollment Management At Jesuit Universities, Drew Roberts

Doctoral Dissertations

The larger neoliberal environment that is driving all of higher education has left Jesuit universities and their leadership to face two problems. First, the ability for Jesuit universities to uphold their social justice inspired mission and offer an affordable and accessible liberal education is being threatened because they are pricing out those they seek to serve. Second, there is a growing disconnect between the espoused mission of Jesuit universities and the decisions that their leaders and administrators make to run the enterprise.

This explanatory case study seeks to understand the ways senior-level strategic enrollment officers at Jesuit universities experience and …

Performance-Based Funding Of Higher Education: Analyses Of Policy Discourse Across Four Case Studies, Mary Ziskin, Karyn E. Rabourn, Donald Hossler

Educational Leadership Faculty Publications

Performance-based funding (PBF) for public colleges and universities is increasingly prevalent worldwide, as a part of a broader pattern of marketisation in public education. This study focused on developing an empirical view of how, and in what contexts, policy makers use the concepts of neoliberal economics to design and support PerformanceBased Funding (PBF) policies in higher education. We analysed 121 policy documents, white papers, evaluation reports, and news items related to PBF policies in four case jurisdictions: Tennessee, Washington, United Kingdom, and Italy. We employed critical discourse analysis methods as framed by Fairclough and colleagues and implemented this approach within …

Abandoned Places Of Adult Education In Canada And Germany, Maren Elfert, Bernd Käpplinger, Suzanne Smythe

Adult Education Research Conference

The symposium discusses and compares abandoned places of adult education in Canada and Germany. These are physical (and intellectual) spaces that have been abandoned or moved, or changed its use

Neighborhood Strategizing: Understanding Community Collaborations Within California Bay Area Public Schools, Windi Hazzard

Master's Projects and Capstones

For the better half of a century, education policy has been guided by economics and profit. One after another, every U.S. president since the 1960s has championed legislation that reflects neoliberal ideals of competition and profitable skills. Through the standardization of the public school system, education has become a marketplace rather than an environment for cultivating empowered learners and critical thinkers. The purpose of this field project is to show how communities are challenging the current education system in order to influence education policy in San Francisco, California. I interviewed four participants from two organizations that advocate parents’ rights as …

So Do Values: A Critical Discourse Analysis Of Quality Matters, Paul G. Nagy Iii

Teacher Education, Educational Leadership & Policy ETDs

In the first part of the 21^st century, community colleges in the U.S. have embraced exclusively online coursework as a major part of their curriculum. Yet students at community colleges face a variety of impediments--including socioeconomic and cultural barriers--to their success in online coursework, and research at community colleges has revealed that success in those online courses has varied widely for the diverse student populations of those colleges. Such selective success of students lends itself to inquiry regarding why online learning has become such a prominent educational arrangement at community colleges. A review of the history and policy context …

Impacts Of Neoliberal Managerial Practices On Faculty Engagement In Student Learning Assessment, Christopher Urban

Prairie Journal of Educational Research

Faculty perceptions of student learning assessment were examined in the context of neoliberal trends in higher education in this exploratory survey study. For this preliminary study, a small department consisting of sixteen faculty members was surveyed. Responding faculty rated themselves as highly engaged in assessment, and rated course uses of assessment as more important than institutional uses of assessment. Faculty perceived administrators as placing more importance on institutional uses over course uses, though the gap between administrators and faculty was less in course uses than in institutional uses. Faculty ratings of neoliberal manifestations at their institution varied considerably, with a …

Transgressive Acts In An Era Of Accountability: Narratives Of New Jersey's Public School Teachers, Gary Daniel Scavette

Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this qualitative study was to investigate the transgressive responses that have emerged in the wake of AchieveNJ, New Jersey’s new teacher evaluation system. Ten teachers, each with five or more years of teaching experience, all of which had demonstrated manifestations of transgression, were selected from random schools throughout the state based upon surveyed response. Through the use of graphic elicitation and narrative interviews, the teachers in this study revealed a variety of responses ranging from open acts of defiance, to more subtle performances, enacted on the spot, while under the surveillance of inspectors. Findings suggest that the …

Youth Participatory Action Research And The Future Of Education Reform, Oiyan Poon, Jacob Cohen

OiYan Poon

This article presents a youth participatory action research (YPAR) study, which was conducted through a theoretical lens incorporating the social justice youth policy framework and Critical Race Theory. Led by youth from the Vietnamese American Young Leaders Association (VAYLA), the study explored the impacts of post-Katrina school reforms on student experiences at six New Orleans high schools. The findings from the study exposed troubling educational disparities by race, class, limited English status, and geography. The YPAR project’s results counter neoliberal reform advocates’ narrative of a post-Katrina New Orleans school “miracle.” This article illuminates YPAR as both research method and pathway …

Shifting Narratives In Doctoral Admissions: Faculty Of Color Understandings Of Diversity, Equity, And Justice In A Neoliberal Context, Dian Drew Squire

Dissertations

Little is known about how faculty make decisions in the doctoral admissions process or how they conceptualize diversity, equity, and justice in those same processes. As the United States continues to diversify, understanding how students are selected into graduate programs and how faculty understand diversity, equity, and justice is increasingly important to supporting diverse leadership bodies and shaping an inclusive campus cultural context. This qualitative study utilized semi-structured interviews, focus groups, and critical discourse analysis to explore how faculty of color understand diversity, equity, and justice norms, values, and behaviors in the doctoral admissions process in Higher Education and Student …

College Mission Change And Neoliberalism In A Community And Technical College, Christine Mollenkopf-Pigsley

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Administrators of 2-year colleges are working in an environment where they seek to balance the social development of the student and the community's demand for a trained workforce to achieve economic development. This balance has resulted in ambiguity about the mission and purpose of 2-year colleges. The purpose of this case study was to explore a community college's experiences with mission change by exploring the interaction between a neoliberal public policy environment and the traditional social democratic mission of academia. Harvey's conceptualization of neoliberalism was used as the theoretical framework. Data were collected through 15 semi-structured interviews with members of …

Distinguishing Assessment From Accountability: Honoring Student Learning And Values In Assessment, Erin Elizabeth Pearce Thomas

Theses and Dissertations

Accountability is documented as one of the two major forces for engaging in assessment (Ewell, 2002, 2009; Keeling, 2006; Keeling et al., 2008; Love & Estanek, 2004; Terenzini, 1989). Due in part to neoliberalism's influence on education assessment rhetoric and discourse, accountability dominates how assessment is understood and practiced. The dominance of the accountability rhetoric effects how student affairs educators perceive and value assessment. The purpose of this study is to explore why assessment is not a pervasive or consistent practice within student affairs. Through an interpretivist case study examination of Manresa University's division of student affairs, participant observation, document …

Exploiting Globalization While Being Exploited By It: Insights From Post-Soviet Education Reforms In Central Asia, Sarfaroz Niyozov, Nazarkhudo Dastambuev

Institute for Educational Development, Karachi

Building on an examination of comparative and international literature and their research and development experiences, the authors highlight a number of continuities, changes, and issues between Soviet and post-Soviet, international and Central Asian experiences of borrowing and lending of education reforms. Even though Central Asian actors and institutions are not totally helpless victims and though international experts and NGOs appear well-meaning in these globalizing education transfers, the processes are leading toward reproducing global and local dependencies and inequalities.The trajectory of education reforms in Central Asia echo those of other developing countries. In response, the authors urge local policy makers and …

Fiction Writing And Learning For Critical Citizenship:Exploring The Potential Of Reading And Writing Fiction To Foster Democratic Learning Opportunities, Patricia A. Gouthro, Susan M. Holloway, Erin Careless

Adult Education Research Conference

Drawing upon the results of a Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) funded research study, this paper examines connections between lifelong learning, citizenship and fiction writing. Using critical and feminist theoretical perspectives, the paper explores how fiction writing can provide opportunities for adult learning and can address concerns around diversity and inclusion when exploring issues around citizenship.