Education Commons^™

The Boston Opportunity Agenda: A Historic Case Study Of Public-Private Partnership In Education (2007-2019), Timothy M. Lavin

Graduate Doctoral Dissertations

This historic case study studied the development of the Boston Opportunity Agenda (BOA), a public-private educational partnership, from 2007-2019. Despite significant prominence, influence, and investment from the partners involved, public-private educational partnerships in Boston have been understudied. The intention of this dissertation was to bring an understanding of how this urban educational public-private partnership developed; the motivations of the partners to participate; the partner perceptions of the successes and challenges of the partnership; and the extent of the partnership's influence on the Boston Public Schools.

This case study utilized qualitative methods of document analysis and semi-structured interviews of partnership leaders …

Critical Transformations Through Community Service-Learning Programs For Students Of Color At Predominantly White Institutions, Varsha Ghosh

Graduate Doctoral Dissertations

Service-learning has become deeply embedded in higher education, as both a co-curricular and curricular tool to achieve learning outcomes, promote civic engagement and promote diversity. Yet it has also struggled with the critique that service-learning, unintentionally, reinforces deficit thinking by promoting a dominant narrative centered on the White middle-class perspective. This narrative excludes the experience of students and faculty who reflect the demographics of the community served or who are simultaneously from the community and the institution. This qualitative study seeks to challenge the traditional narrative to understand the service experience of students of color from low-income backgrounds at predominantly …

Let's Play A Story: Early Educators' Experience Implementing Story Drama With Support From Coaching, Amanda Wiehe Lopes

Graduate Doctoral Dissertations

While imaginative play, music, movement, and the visual arts are established components of the curriculum in early childhood education (ECE), teacher-guided story drama, or “improvised role play stimulated by a story” (Booth, 2005, p. 8), is an underutilized arts-based practice that supports children’s early literacy skills, creativity, and enjoyment of learning. There are numerous practitioner books and resources about the benefits of and strategies for how to incorporate storytelling, dramatic play, theater, and creative dramatics into the early learning environment (Bolton & Heathcote, 1999; Booth, 2005; V. Brown & Pleydell, 1999; Carleton, 2012), however, there is little research examining the …

The Activity Of Abstraction In Physical Chemistry Problem Solving And Instruction, Jessica M. Karch

Graduate Doctoral Dissertations

Productive problem solving, concept construction, and sense making occur through the core process of abstraction. Although the capacity for domain-general abstraction is developed at a young age, the role of abstraction in increasingly complex and disciplinary environments, such as those encountered in undergraduate STEM education, is not well understood. Undergraduate physical chemistry relies particularly heavily on abstraction because it uses many overlapping and imperfect mathematical models to represent and interpret phenomena occurring on multiple scales. To reconcile these models, extract meaning from them, and recognize when to apply them in problem solving requires processes of abstraction. This dissertation aims to …

Don’T Ignore My Voice: A Call To Action By And For Gender-Expansive Youth, Sam Hoyo

Graduate Doctoral Dissertations

Gender-expansive youth are regularly discriminated against because they do not fit into the socially constructed gender binaries of the schools they attend. Nor, typically, do they have a general sense of personal safety, often feeling socially and academically excluded from their dominant heteronormative school culture. This youth participatory action research mixed method study advocates for the academic success of gender-expansive youth by documenting how gender expansive young people embody damaging educational experiences and to what extent these experiences can also lead to solidarity, resilience, and perseverance. The research findings include that gender expansive youth feel tolerated but not supported by …

A Framework For Justice-Centering Relationships And Understanding Impact In Higher Education Community Engagement, Melissa M. Quan

Graduate Doctoral Dissertations

Community engagement in higher education has been promoted as critical to fulfilling higher education’s responsibility to the public good through teaching, learning, and knowledge generation. Reciprocity and mutual benefit are key principles of community engagement that connote a two-way exchange of knowledge and shared power and decision making. However, it is not clear, from existing literature, whether community engagement impacts communities in meaningful or positive ways.

The problem addressed through this study was how campus-community partnership stakeholders define impact. This was a study of how impact was determined; it was not an assessment of whether identified outcomes were achieved. Using …

Daring To See: White Supremacy And Gatekeeping In Music Education, Brian A. Gellerstein

Graduate Doctoral Dissertations

Music education in the U.S. maintains a legacy of cultural hegemony that has historically and systemically benefited the White students it was designed to serve, at the expense of Black and Brown students and teachers. As a subdiscipline concerned with cultural production and reproduction, the persistence of White supremacy within music education contributes to its indefatigability within the broader society.

This study is cast within a theoretical framework that connects critical race theory and critical pedagogy in order to address the ways in which music teachers make meaning of gatekeeping practices mediated within hidden structures of White supremacy. This inquiry …