Educational Sociology Commons^™

Examining Culturally Responsive Understandings Within An Undergraduate Teacher Education Program, Kelly M. Gomez Johnson, Anne E. Karabon, Derrick A. Nero

Journal of Curriculum, Teaching, Learning and Leadership in Education

This article examines how a group of elementary and secondary preservice teachers engaged in understanding “culture” and culturally responsive teaching while enrolled in an early program course. We analyze how culturally-related experiences, emotions, and perspectives contribute to the overall understanding of cultural competency training in teacher education. Preservice teachers varied in their use of individual- and structural-orientations, in isolation and in combination, as they developed and progressed as socially just teachers. These findings reveal that despite attempts to develop and shift toward asset-based perspectives, far more culturally embedded coursework and practicum experiences are necessary. This paper includes a reflection on …

Different Choices: A Public School Community’S Responses To School Choice Reforms, Amanda U. Potterton

The Qualitative Report

In the United States, state and federal reforms increasingly encourage the expansion of school choice policies. Debates about school choice contrast various concepts of freedom and equality with concerns about equity, justice, achievement, democratic accountability, profiting management organizations, and racial and class segregation. Arizona’s “market”-based school choice programs include over 600 charter schools, and the state’s open enrollment practices, public and private school tax credit allowances, and Empowerment Scholarships, (closely related to vouchers), flourish. This qualitative analysis explores one district-run public school and its surrounding community, and I discuss socio-political and cultural tensions related to school choice reforms that exist …

Unequally Adrift: How Social Class And Institutional Context Shape College Academic Experiences, Mary Scherer

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation focuses on how class background and institutional context shape students’ experiences of faculty mentorship, academic success strategies, and the relationship of college values and academic decision-making. In this comparative study, I draw from 68 interviews with working- and upper-middle-class students at a regional and flagship university to identify how institutional variation matters across moderately-selective public universities, the kind where the majority of four-year college students matriculate. Mentorship, often informal, is a resource most easily accessed by students with preexisting cultural capital—specifically, the knowledge that mentoring relationships are available and advantageous, and the skills for cross-status interaction with professors. …

The Predictors Of Juvenile Recidivism: Testimonies Of Adult Students 18 Years And Older Exiting From Alternative Education, La Toshia Palmer

Dissertations

Purpose: The purpose of this descriptive, qualitative study was to identify and describe the importance of the predictors of juvenile recidivism and the effectiveness of efforts to prevent/avoid juvenile recidivism as perceived by previously detained, arrested, convicted, and/or incarcerated adult students 18 years of age and older exiting from alternative education in Northern California. A second purpose was to explore the types of support provided by alternative schools and the perceived importance of the support to avoid recidivism according to adult students 18 years of age and older exiting from alternative education.

Methodology: This qualitative, descriptive research design identified …

Between A Rock And A Hard Place: Urbanormativity And Rural Located Private Higher Education, Jonathan Jared Friesen

Theses and Dissertations--Sociology

As urban areas have come to increasing dominate the social landscape, rurality is often defined in negative ways such as being backwards, simple, or even deviant. Urbanormativity is a theoretical approach developed to capture the normative and structural impacts and implications of privileging the urban. The result is not only the construction of urban as correct and positive and rurality as abnormal and backwards, the cultural ideology impacts the structural flow of resources which negatively impacts and results in a marginalization of rural areas.

The primary question motivating this research is how does urbanormativity shape the interactions between rural towns …