Education Commons^™

Community Resilience In Portland Parkland Soils, Jason W. Triefenbach

Student Research Symposium

Proposing soil nutrient testing as a model for community research and ecology education, this presentation considers pathways to raising public engagement with sustainability issues while enhancing community resilience and social capital. "Community Resilience in Portland Parkland Soils" represents my research thus far on the conjoined topics of urban soils and community efficacy, in which I have attempted to synthesize biogeophysical processes in city parklands with strategies for raising public awareness about urban ecosystems.

I measured and compared soil nitrogen levels at 8 iconic Portland area parks using commercially- available garden test kits, while concurrently researching the historical and contemporary land …

Culture Beyond Borders: A Postcolonial Analysis Of Multicultural Education, Alex Diaz-Hui

Student Research Symposium

Using Third-World feminist and postcolonial theory, this research complicates the narrative of culture in education. While multicultural education is well intentioned, it creates caricatures of communities of color. Multicultural education also functions through an anthropological perspective of culture, one that relays on portraying communities of color through national cultures. According to Third-World feminist scholarship, particularly through the writings of Uma Narayan, national cultures do not exist but are actually constructed through distinguishing the colonizer and the colonized. Culturally responsive pedagogy provides a theoretical framework that attempts to remedy the issues of multicultural education. However, it fails to separate itself from …