Education Commons^™

For The Love Of Teaching: Pre-Service Teachers’ Experience Of Moral Education, Anne Marie Foley Ruiz

Doctoral Dissertations

Moral aspects of teaching arise each and every day, yet we lack information about how prepared teachers feel about this critical aspect of teaching. This multi-case study explores perceptions of five pre-service teachers in an elementary teacher education program in Western Massachusetts. A series of interviews explore their histories prior to the program and their experiences in the program as related to the pre-service teachers’ orientations to the moral work of teaching. Research questions address the awareness and self-efficacy of student teachers in implementing the moral aspects of teaching. Using Thematic Analysis (Braun & Clark, 2006), this study explores beliefs …

A Phenomenological Exploration Of The Lived Experiences Of Second-Year African American Male Students On Predominantly White Campuses Through Critical Race Theory, Craig S. Pickett Jr.

Doctoral Dissertations

Title: A Phenomenological Exploration of the Lived Experiences of Second-Year African American Male Students on Predominantly White Campuses through the Lens of Critical Race Theory

Abstract:

The critical nature of the first year has pushed thousands of colleges and universities across the United States to create intentional programs specifically for first-year students. Less understood are the experiences of students during their second year – a different and, at times, even more challenging period. Second-year students face a myriad of issues, including achieving competence, desiring autonomy, establishing identity, and developing purpose, with many experiencing a phenomenon called the sophomore slump. …

Class, Family Involvement, And Asian American Four And Two-Year College Students’ Experiences Of Advantage And Disadvantage, Blair Harrington

Doctoral Dissertations

While the significance of familial support in college receives substantial and growing attention, Asian American college students’ experiences of such support remain unclear. In a series of three articles that draw on a total of 140 intensive semi-structured interviews, this dissertation explores the effect class has on students’ experiences of three different types of familial support: 1) students’ receipt of parental support, 2) students’ provision of parental support, and 3) students’ receipt of sibling support. The first article “The Power of Class and Not Institution Type: Asian American Four and Two-Year College Students’ Receipt of Parental Support” employs a …

When Healing And High-Stakes Meet: Restorative Justice In An Era Of Racial Neoliberalism, Dani O'Brien

Doctoral Dissertations

Based on a 3-year ethnography, this dissertation documents the story of Presente, an explicitly critical youth-led restorative justice group attempting to dismantle the school-prison nexus and create a more youth-centered culture at their high-reform high school. This dissertation addresses the questions: How does serving as a restorative justice peer leader impact students? What challenges and opportunities arise as the school tries to transition to more restorative practices? And how do the values central to restorative justice come up against, challenge, and get challenged by neoliberal education reform?

Factors That Shape Arab American College Student Identity, Abdul Rahman F. Jaradat

Doctoral Dissertations

Arab American identity has not yet received the research attention and scholarship that it deserves. In this dissertation, I have qualitatively studied the narratives of young Arab American college students and recent graduates. The research questions that I explored include what makes them Arab Americans, and what are the factors that help them identify as such. By focusing on Arab Americans and their identity factors, I have presented the narratives of those women and men who self-identify as Arab American and quoted their accounts of how they navigate this undervalued, misunderstood, and stereotyped identity. I have used ethnic and racial …

Verbal -S Productions In The Structured Writing Samples Of Variable Aae-Speaking Fourth-Grade Students With And Without Language Impairment, Jacklyn High Felton

Doctoral Dissertations

Researchers in speech-language pathology and ethnolinguistics have worked to gain knowledge about typical and atypical language patterns of African American children who are identified as African American English (AAE) dialect speakers. Much progress had been made, but limitations in this field of knowledge have persisted, especially for AA children who demonstrate variable use of AAE, presumably through the process of assimilation in the school setting. Therefore, more information is needed to provide diagnostic markers for deviations in typical language development for variable AAE-MAE speakers. Prior empirical research has found that third- and fourth-grade AAE-speaking children with typical language development overtly …

The Role Of Resistance And Social Capital In Facilitating Latino/A College Success, Patricia Sánchez-Connally

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation examines the relationship between race and educational achievement among inner city, low income, first generation, and high achieving Latino/a students. Research on students of color has focused on cultural deficit models, which portray students as culturally deprived and proposes cultural assimilation as the solution (Nieto 2010; Delpit 2006; Solórzano & Yosso 2002). As a way to contest these models, I describe the role of Academic Support & College Readiness Program (ASP) as a place where community cultural wealth (Yosso 2005) is being created and transferred. Community cultural wealth is an alternative concept that uses Critical Race Theory (CRT) …

Master's Tools And The Master's House: A Historical Analysis Exploring The Myth Of Educating For Democracy In The United States, Timothy Scott

Doctoral Dissertations

Over the past forty-years, neoliberal education reform policies in the U.S. have spurred significant resistance, often galvanized by claims that such policies undermine public education as a vital institution of U.S. democracy. Within this narrative, many activists call to “save our schools” and return them to a time when public schools served the common good. With these narratives in mind, I explore the foundational and persistent power structures that characterize the U.S. as a means to reveal the fundamental purpose of its public education system. The questions that guide my research include: (1) With an understanding that capitalism, white supremacy, …

Performing Critical Consciousness In Teaching: Entanglements Of Knowing, Feeling And Relating, Kathleen A. Mcdonough

Doctoral Dissertations

At a time when education reform is guided by neoliberalism, accountability and standardization have reshaped teaching as highly technocratic and threatened the democratic possibilities of public education. Even so, many teacher education programs have taken up the call to prepare teachers to teach for social justice, whether framed as multicultural education, critical literacy, or critical pedagogy. A construct that ties these pedagogical approaches together is critical consciousness, with the aim of some teacher education efforts to evoke critical consciousness among preservice teachers. This study focuses on exploring how nine educators from elementary grades to higher education experience and enact critical …

Deficit Discourse, Literate Lives: Success Narratives Of Black Youth, Ann Marie Bennett

Doctoral Dissertations

The current dialogue surrounding Black youth portrays these youth as “thugs” who come from “broken” families and “apathetic” communities. Even some educational discourses portray Black youth as “at-risk” students who lack the resources necessary to achieve in school. These dialogues traffic in deficit language without paying attention to the successes found in the Black community. The purpose of this study was to utilize an anti-deficit perspective to capture the stories of how urban Black children in a mid-sized Southeastern city are achieving positive literacy and academic outcomes in the upper elementary and middle grades. I sought to understand how Black …

African American Oral Histories Of Oak Ridge, Tennessee, Public Schools During The Early Days Of Desegregation, 1955 – 1967, Lorena B. Whipple

Doctoral Dissertations

Many traditional historical texts of the United States are missing the voiced presence of African Americans. Existing historical texts concerning desegregation in the South, and particularly in Tennessee, are missing African Americans’ experienced perspectives during racial desegregation in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. The intention of this dissertation is to use oral history as a methodology to document the memories of seven African Americans who participated in the racial desegregation of Oak Ridge, Tennessee public schools. Critical race theory is the interpretive lens used to analyze the interviews. The oral historical accounts contained in this study suggest African Americans have a unique …

“Holla If You Hear Me”: A Conversation With Black, Inner-City Youth On Career Preparedness Programs, Theressa N. Cooper

Doctoral Dissertations

This research study specifically addressed; how vocational preparedness programs effect the career aspirations of Black youth, within the context of the Middle Tennessee Council Boy Scouts of America’s Exploring program. The goal of this research is to represent Black youth participating in a vocational preparedness program. Interviews, journals, and rich, thick descriptions are utilized in this work.

Using the lens of narrative inquiry and cultural studies, I hoped to further the field of career development through the experiences of some of its key players, African American youth. Within the context of their stories five major themes surfaced around the ideas: …

I Am Not My Hair...Or Am I?: Exploring The Minority Swimming Gap, Dawn M. Norwood

Doctoral Dissertations

A review of literature has revealed a dearth of research on leisure swimming patterns of Black females. Black youth, both male and female, have a higher rate of drowning than any other racial/ethnic group in the United States (“Water‐related injuries: Fact sheet”, 2005). Two known studies produced by (Irwin et al., 2009; 2010) examining hair as a constraint to swimming for African American youth produced conflicting results. In order to comprehensively examine hair as a constraint to African American female participation in swimming, the current study adopted a qualitative approach which allowed exploration of the cultural background and experiences of …

Effect Of Cooperative Learning (Student Teams -Achievement Divisions) On African American And Caucasian Students' Interracial Friendships, James Edward Cook

Doctoral Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to gauge the impact of cooperative learning teams on interracial friendships. The participants were 256 sixth, seventh, and eighth grade students in English classes (20% African American and 80% Caucasian) at a rural middle school in Louisiana. After delivery of instruction, the experimental group studied worksheets in teams, received rewards based upon the team's performance, and received individual grades based upon individual exam scores. The control group studied worksheets individually and received individual grades. This eight week study utilized the sociometric question, “Who are your friends in this class?” as the pretest and posttest …