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Full-Text Articles in Education

Working The System: The Role Of Islam In Student Negotiations Of A Midwestern Charter School, Elizabeth J. Baer Apr 2009

Working The System: The Role Of Islam In Student Negotiations Of A Midwestern Charter School, Elizabeth J. Baer

Religious Studies Honors Projects

“What should the role of Islam be in American public life?” Rather than answer this question through broad, theoretical discourse, I turn to a case study of Somali Muslims in a Midwestern charter school. Through this case study, I analyze how individual Muslims, tied to communities and Allah in diverse ways, actively negotiate how to incorporate their religious practices into public space. I argue that by examining specific strategies used by individuals in an actual school setting, as opposed to making generalizing assumptions, one can better understand that Islam already plays a variety of constantly changing roles in American public …


Don't Judge A Book By Its Cover: An Ethnography About Achievement, Rap Music, Sexuality & Race, Bettina L. Love Jan 2009

Don't Judge A Book By Its Cover: An Ethnography About Achievement, Rap Music, Sexuality & Race, Bettina L. Love

Educational Policy Studies Dissertations

The purpose of this ethnographic study was to explore how youth consumption of rap music informed their ideas of gender, race, sexuality, and education at a local community center in Atlanta, Georgia. The participants in the study were comprised of three male and six female Black students from working class families, ranging in age from 13–17 years old. The data collection process included 60 formal interviews, 55 informal interviews, 27 focus group interviews, 103 participant observations, and document analyses of media materials. Atlas.ti: The Knowledge Workbench (2003) assisted with the organizing, coding, categorizing, and interpreting of the vast amount of …


A Connective Ethnography Of Peer Knowledge Sharing And Diffusion In A Tween Virtual World, Deborah A. Fields, Y. B. Kafai Jan 2009

A Connective Ethnography Of Peer Knowledge Sharing And Diffusion In A Tween Virtual World, Deborah A. Fields, Y. B. Kafai

Instructional Technology and Learning Sciences Faculty Publications

Prior studies have shown how knowledge diffusion occurs in classrooms and structured small groups around assigned tasks yet have not begun to account for widespread knowledge sharing in more native, unstructured group settings found in online games and virtual worlds. In this paper, we describe and analyze how an insider gaming practice spread across a group of tween players ages 9–12 years in an after-school gaming club that simultaneously participated in a virtual world called Whyville.net. In order to understand how this practice proliferated, we followed the club members as they interacted with each other and members of the virtual …