Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Exploring Purpose, Practices, And Impacts Of Non-Formal Education In Egypt, Mariam Hussien Sayed Abdelhamid

Theses and Dissertations

This research explores non-formal education in Egypt, analyzing its alignment or divergence with prevalent human capital and modernization discourses. Using a narrative approach, the study explores the practices of four organizations that offer non-formal education opportunities in greater Cairo: San3a Tech, Wataneya Society, Alwan wa Awtar, and AlAthar Lina. The study explores the narration of 9 educators and 10 learners from these organizations to understand from educators’ perspectives how they design their experiences and its relation to the culture and needs of the targeted audience. It also looks at what kind of impact do these experiences have on the learners. …

A Bathroom Break For Teachers: An Institutional Ethnotheatrical Inquiry, Jonathan M. Coker

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to examine the teacher bathroom dilemma, a term I coined to describe teachers not having adequate access to the bathroom during their workdays. While this issue is widely known by those in the profession, only a handful of articles have been written on this topic. The teacher bathroom dilemma is part of a litany of working conditions that have intensified due to the neoliberal turn in education, forcing teachers to perform precarious actions that endanger their physical and psychological health. This dissertation explored how the teacher bathroom dilemma impacted teachers’ work and personal lives. …

The Bursting Of The Non-Profit Bubble: Why Non-Profit Kids Simply Won’T Catch A Break, Jederick Estrella

Senior Theses and Projects

Studying conceptions of success within nonprofit and boarding school students and how they envision their future. Through an understanding of students' individual conceptions of success, one can start to analyze how reliant students were on elite educational institutions and nonprofit scholar programs to make them worthy of sponsored mobility through their track record of success.

Standardized Test And The Covid-19 Pandemic: A Phenomenological Multi-Site Case Study Of Singapore And Southern Nevada Within A Culturally Responsive Evaluation Framework, Rosnidar B. Arshad

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

As world governments scramble to contain the spread on Covid-19, temporary closure of schools was enforced, and on-site classes were converted to online or virtual versions within short notice. Yet, as dictated by world society, schools must prepare students for standardized tests in order to be acknowledged as legitimate. World rankings impose pressure on school systems to target high standardized test scores in order to gain and maintain economic viability for jurisdictions. This dissertation presents the pressures of high performance in standardized tests amidst a global pandemic as a problem to be researched within a context of sociopolitical and socioeconomic …

Meritocracy And Marketization Of Education: Taiwanese Middle-Class Strategies In A Private Secondary School, Amanda Shufang Yang

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

In the 20th century, economic growth in Taiwan has brought social prosperity and fundamentally altered Taiwanese social structure. While successive generations of young people have climbed the social ladder and experienced upward mobility, being successful is still narrowly defined through academic achievement. This study argues that, despite constant education reform, a solution to class inequality in education has yet to be found. The mandate of the 12-Year Basic Education Curriculum in 2019 was an answer to local, global, and international transformations. While citizens celebrate the neoliberal concepts of autonomy and deregulation embedded in the 12-Year Basic Education Curriculum, coercion is …

A Teacher Shortage And Lack Of Representation In The Classroom: A Neoliberal And Critical Race Study Of The Broken Teacher Pipeline And The Impact On Education Majors, Sara Piotrowski

Theses and Dissertations

Teacher education attrition is a largely understudied topic, especially from the perspective of the college student. What factors prevented education majors from graduating with a teaching degree? There are countless studies about teacher attrition within the first five years in the classroom (DeAngelis et al., 2013; Kopkowski, 2008; Office of Postsecondary Education [OPE], 2015), but the research is sparse when it comes to the retention rate of education majors. Why do students get accepted and enter college as education majors and then not graduate with a degree to become a teacher? The purpose of this study was to consider factors …

Trailblazing Transformation: Pioneering Transformative Peacebuilding In Academic Labor Conflicts, Sam Frazier Hediger

Dissertations and Theses

Unionized contingent faculty in the United States face an increasingly difficult economic landscape in their labor-management conflicts with university administrations. These unions, comprised of graduate student employees and adjunct instructors, won significant victories for their members but have failed to shift the broader patterns of casualization, unsustainable compensation, and job precarity, stemming from the systemic debasement of higher education institutions and the American labor movement, both of which pose significant challenges to conventional conflict resolution strategies. To find a path forward, this thesis explores the nature and possibility of transforming of the academic labor conflict, using a transformative peacebuilding approach …

Where Is The Community? A Qualitative Case Study Of A School Closure In An Urban School District, Anthony Mcwright

Educational Leadership and Policy Studies: Doctoral Research Projects

Family and community engagement are a proven strategy for strengthening schools. Across the United States, parents and community members have pressed school boards and district leadership for more transparency and broader participation in decisions about school turnaround. The purpose of this qualitative case study is to understand the decision-making process for the school closure of Rocky Mountain High School, a neighborhood school in an Urban School District in the Rocky Mountain West and the impact it had on the community. To better understand this dilemma, a case study method was used to identify real-life perspectives of community members associated with …

Mission Adrift: The Impact Of Managerialism On Graduate Social Work Education, Carolyn Hanesworth

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Neoliberal policies have led to the installation of managerialism, or the application of business practices and principles in institutions of higher education. Although much is known about the impact of managerialism on faculty in the overall academy, very little is known about its impact in specific disciplines, particularly in the United States. Using semi-structured interviews, this dissertation investigates how social work faculty experience and negotiate managerialism in the traditional pillars of teaching, service, and scholarship.

This study found that managerialism leads universities to place new and increased demands for productivity, efficiency, and accountability on social work faculty. Respondents report major …

The True Capabilities Of American Education Policy, Mirren Galway

Political Science

This paper is an analysis of today’s American education system, how it has come to be, and why it seems to consistently fall behind when compared to other countries. Beginning with an evaluation of American education today, this paper follows the implementation of recent policy, the deep issues facing the education system and what can be done to address them. Specifically, it explores why, despite such bipartisan legislation like the No Child Left Behind Act, many students and teachers are still being left behind, and why common arguments about education policy continue to fail students. I argue that, although new …

Adult Educators At The Crossroads Of Language Learning And Workforce Development: A Qualitative Study Of Teacher Agency, Liz Ging

Graduate Masters Theses

Since the passage of the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA) in 2014, there has been renewed questioning about the nature and purpose of adult education programs in the United States, including English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL). The heavy workforce development orientation of the new law is a starker manifestation of trends focused on job training which have been sweeping through the field of adult education for the last few decades. In the midst of these shifts, little research has been done to investigate what the educators charged with meeting these policy goals think about these changes, the …

Labor Experiences Of Public High School Counselors: Neoliberalism, Productivity, And Care, Avery Harwood

Scripps Senior Theses

This thesis explores the day-to-day realities for public high school counselors inside their schools. The national average student-to-counselor ratio in public high schools in the U.S. is 482:1. This is almost double the recommended counselor caseload by the American School Counselor Association, which recommends 250 students per counselor. However, counselors’ inflated caseloads are not the only reason why counselors are overworked. Using a year’s worth of ethnographic research, I analyze the bureaucratic and care labor practices of counselors and the ways in which their labor exploitation reflects years of neoliberal discourse influencing the functioning of public education. This neoliberalization of …

The Impacts Of Acculturation Patterns And Processes On Immigrants' Success In Higher Education: A Multiple Case Study Of 1.25-Generation Third-Wave Iranian Immigrants To The United States, Fereshteh Rezaeian

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

The United States of America is inherently a pluralistic society composed of various groups of immigrants. As scholars (Camarota & Zeigler, 2016; Gibson, 1998) state, the number of immigrant children accounts for 20% of the total number of school-age children. Despite all attempts to provide the best education to such a great number of immigrant students, the achievement gap between immigrant and non-immigrant students still exists (Baum & Flores, 2011; Rong & Preissle, 2008). Some scholars (e.g., Ramos & Sanchez, 1995) have proposed that the key factor for immigrants to be successful in the United States is to adapt to …

Afro-Latinx Transnational Identities: Adults In The San Francisco Bay And Los Angeles Area, Koby Heramil

Master's Theses

This paper examines the identity construction of Afro-Latinas/os/x in the San Francisco Bay and Los Angeles Area. Marginalized communities predominately Black and Latina/ o/x concentrated are at the epicenter of disenfranchisement caused by the globalization of neoliberalism. Neoliberal reforms to education restrain the various nuances of pluralistic teaching, focusing only on the performance of standardized tests thus pressuring schools to center their interest in securing funding. This has greater implications for low-income communities of color where multicultural pedagogy is limited. More importantly, this association of neoliberalism reforms to education affects Afro-Latinx individuals, because they are maligned in the conversation about …

Charting Constellations Of Power: Texas Public Education Policy, Hollie Wright

MSU Graduate Theses

For decades, public education in Texas has been entrenched in neoliberalism-inspired policies that research shows largely fail to produce promised results and have a tendency to perpetuate the very problems advocates claim the policies will solve. This raises questions about the decision-makers and what is happening in the public education policy process. In line with Laura Nader’s directive for more anthropologists to make those in power the subject of their research, I used both ethnographic and social network analysis methods to ‘study up’ in Texas public education. This study describes some relationships of members of the Texas State Board of …

Understanding The Right To Education In The Early 21st Century South African Context, Robert T. Zipp , '18

Senior Theses, Projects, and Awards

Evaluating the implementation of human rights norms as broad as the right to education at the domestic level requires the use of supplemental analytical frameworks. In this project, I discuss the implementation of the core norm of the right to education as it manifests in the prescriptive norms guided by the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Using the framework set forth by Betts and Orchard, I find that the current structural and ideational factors influencing access to primary education in South Africa are impacted by the country's historical legacy of racial inequality and the economic decisions of the post-apartheid government in …

Rapping Back: Counter-Narratives From Auckland, New Zealand, Mariel Lopez Rogers

Master's Theses

Across the Pacific in Auckland, New Zealand two rap groups, Homebrew and @Peace, are contributing to a theoretically rich and socially conscious Hip Hop scene. Their music critically questions commercialism and conformity in a culture shaped by a history of colonialism. This makes their message starkly opposed to the normative values of New Zealand. The musicians of Homebrew and @Peace, a mix of Polynesian and Pakeha (people of European descent), employ methods of decolonization theory through the use of storytelling and focus on indigenous values. In a country that has adopted the neoliberal beliefs that competition drives human relations, and …

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, …

College Mission Change And Neoliberalism In A Community And Technical College, Christine Mollenkopf-Pigsley

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Administrators of 2-year colleges are working in an environment where they seek to balance the social development of the student and the community's demand for a trained workforce to achieve economic development. This balance has resulted in ambiguity about the mission and purpose of 2-year colleges. The purpose of this case study was to explore a community college's experiences with mission change by exploring the interaction between a neoliberal public policy environment and the traditional social democratic mission of academia. Harvey's conceptualization of neoliberalism was used as the theoretical framework. Data were collected through 15 semi-structured interviews with members of …

Education In Juticalpa, Honduras : Analyzing Nonprofit Education's Impact On Socio-Cultural Reproduction, Eric Macias

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

This Master's project explores education's impact on socio-cultural and economic reproduction in Juticalpa, Honduras. Utilizing comparative analysis, I investigate the education system in Juticalpa employing a public, private, and a nonprofit school as analytical lenses to illustrate how schools reproduce certain existing inequalities and create new ones in this city. The purpose in the following pages is three-fold. First, I conceptualize and explain the neoliberal education discourses on the need to create alternatives to public education, such as private and nonprofit education institutions. Secondly, after contextualizing these education discourses, I use social reproduction theory to investigate how schools reproduce existing …

Resisting Criminalization Through Moses House: An Engaged Ethnography, Lance Arney

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Neoliberal restructuring of the state has had destructive effects on families and children living in urban poverty, compelling them to adapt to the loss of social welfare and demolition of the public sphere by submitting to new forms of surveillance and disciplining of their individual behavior. A carceral-welfare state apparatus now confines and controls the bodies of expendable laborers in urban spaces, containing their threat to the neoliberal socioeconomic order through criminalization and workfare assistance, resulting in a new symbiosis of prison and ghetto. The resulting structures of punishment, police surveillance, and criminalization primarily surround African Americans living in high …

Congressional Debates Over Prisoner Education: A Critical Discourse Analysis, Mark Timothy Yates

Educational Policy Studies Dissertations

The United States has the highest incarceration rate of any country. The causes for the large number of prisoners can be traced, in part, to a politicized war on crime that resulted in harsh sentencing and high recidivism rates. Prisoner education provides the potential for slowing the revolving door of prison by helping to create engaged citizens, who are committed to bettering themselves and their communities. However, there is a paucity of support for programs such as Pell Grants, which could facilitate emancipatory education in prisons. The purpose of this work is to examine why prisoners are provided few meaningful …