Education Commons^™

How The Classroom Schools: A Focused Ethnography Exploring The Built Classroom Environment And Its Inhabitants In One Kindergarten, Meredith Devennie

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This study is a focused ethnography around the sociology of a classroom’s built environment and its young inhabitants. I spent three months immersed in a kindergarten classroom where I used child-centered research methods (ie. the kids created collaborative and individual classroom maps and conducted child-led video tours) alongside participant observation to gather data related to how young children perceive and experience the materiality and spatiality of their classroom.

As a result of grounded visual and multi-modal analysis, I centered the young children’s voices and perspectives and discovered how the kids picked up on certain physical and symbolic markers bounding zones …

Self-Initiated Creativity In The Elementary Classroom, David Rufo

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In this study, the researcher used an action research methodology to investigate the self-initiated creative processes and artifacts of his fourth and fifth grade students over the course of one school year in an attempt to shed light on the pedagogical effects of an elementary classroom that allows its students significant creative agency. The majority of the literature on the self-initiated creativity of children examines the work of primary grade students in an art room setting, revealing a gap in the literature and the need for a study regarding self-initiated creative processes and products made by children in an intermediate …

Navigating The Urban-Rural Divide: The Agency Of Rural Chinese Female Higher Education Students In China, Lifang Wang

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This dissertation explores how rural Chinese female students at urban Chinese higher education institutions conceptualize and negotiate the urban-rural divide that often interplays with gender and the discourse of quality (suzhi) to shape their lives. A substantial body of literature discusses the profound inequalities that rural Chinese people encounter due to the urban-rural divide and household registration system (Chan & Zhang, 1999; Wang & Zuo, 1999; Loong-Yu & Shan, 2007; Tang & Yang, 2008; Whyte, 2010; Han, 2010). An increasing amount of literature also addresses the experiences of rural Chinese migrant women working in urban China (Gaetano & Jacka, 2004; …

Toward A Co-Vivial Community: Hopes Found In The Friendship Among People With Intellectual Disability Labels, Maho Suzuki

Dissertations - ALL

This is a qualitative study of friendships among people with intellectual disability labels in two countries - the United States and Japan. As a field to study friendships among adults with intellectual disability label, I gained access to two sheltered workshops ("The Farm" in the U.S. and "The Kapu Kapu" in Japan) and conducted participant observation, through which I wished to identify broader, multiple, and more humane ways to define competence and human value that could validate people labeled intellectually disabled whose humanity and citizenship are often doubted by dominant standards in industrialized societies. In addition to resisting social standards …