Digital Commons Network^™

Authentic And Unapologetic: Culturally Responsive Leadership Strategies Used By California Community College Senior-Level Leaders Of Color, Renee Craig-Marius

Dissertations

Purpose: The purpose of this qualitative study was to identify and describe how California Community College senior-level leaders of color are culturally responsive in their leadership strategies, based on Horsford, Grosland, and Gunn’s (2011) culturally relevant leadership framework.

Methodology: This qualitative ethnographic study identified and described the culturally responsive leadership practices utilized by 15 senior-level leaders of color within California Community Colleges and explored how their lived experiences and identities influence their ability to lead their institutions using the four dimensions of Horsford et al.’s (2011) culturally relevant leadership framework: political context, personal journey, pedagogical approach, and professional duty. …

Leading Change: Generating Cultural Responsiveness And Competence In Nursing, Kerstin G. Hudgins

Dissertations

Culturally responsive teachings prepare students to support social justice, diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in and beyond the classroom. Rising reports of culturally insensitive care and the reported challenges that nurses experience when caring for culturally diverse patients warrant the advancement of the intercultural readiness of nursing students. The study investigated the cultural content taught, encompassing LGBTQ+ health education, at the School of Nursing at a historically black college and university (HBCU) in the Southeastern United States. The participant selection involved purposeful sampling of various stakeholders engaged in interviews and focus groups, including faculty, nursing students, and nurse managers with …

Persistence Factors Described By Nursing Students Of African Descent: A Narrative Inquiry, Claudette R. Spencer

Dissertations

High attrition rates among nursing students of African descent have resulted in a nursing workforce that lacks diversity. Research has largely focused on the obstacles facing students who dropped out of their nursing programs, including financial constraints, academic issues, and personal challenges. Few studies have considered the students who persisted. The purpose of this qualitative dissertation study was to examine the factors that contributed to the persistence of students of African descent enrolled in nursing programs in community colleges as described in the stories and reflections of recently graduated alumni. Data was obtained with the use of two research questions …

Clinical Faculty Strategies To Decrease Nursing Students' Anxiety During Clinical Practice: A Qualitative Study, Elijah Z. Yarpah

Dissertations

Stress in the clinical learning environment is a psychological and physiological element that affects nursing students' learning outcomes and health. In clinical settings, nursing students encounter stressors that are critical to their academic success as well as their future professional performance. Nursing educators struggle to assist students in developing strategies to manage clinical stress. A review of relevant literature did not identify coping strategies clinical educators and nursing staff can promote to help learners deal with stressors. Therefore, to provide robust ideas to help nursing students manage stress in the clinical learning environment, this study was designed to answer one …

The Effects Of Disinformation Upon National Attitudes Towards The Eu And Its Institutions, Alex Murphy

Dissertations

This work explores the effects of misinformation and disinformation upon national attitudes towards the EU. Several nations, in particular the Russian Federation, have been working for decades to spread narratives that debase the political processes of healthy democracies around the world. There is strong evidence to show that extensive efforts have been made to disrupt the inner workings and overall membership of the EU, to support disruptive policies in the United States such that political deadlock is maintained indefinitely. These efforts are largely based on the spreading of misinformation and disinformation across social networks that have done very little to …

The "Othering" Of America: How The Strategic Use Of Crisis And Ressentiment Succeeded In The Trump Era, Laura J. Franklin

Dissertations

The establishment of a crisis theme through public rhetoric often triggers widespread attention, resulting in public concern and media coverage of an issue that could potentially be overblown or deceptive. In right-wing political discourse, this crisis warning is typically delivered by a White male leader with ready access to the powerful news media. An “us versus them” theme often occurs. Within this mode of a hegemonic exclusion, a culture of immigrants or an American minority are often depicted, perhaps aggressively, as a threat: A threat used to motivate, enrage and create the frustrations inherent in ressentiment. This dissertation explores the …

Cultivating Parental Participation And Community Engagement Through Building A Culinary Garden And Teaching Kitchen: Latinx Perspectives On Parental Participation In A Community School, Jaclynne Michelle Medina

Dissertations

This study researched how a school could increase parental participation and community engagement while building a new Culinary Garden and Teaching Kitchen project. This engagement was foundational for expanding parental participation opportunities and further developing the community school. The study explored ways to balance power relationships between the home and school to develop an implementation plan that better reflects the community being served. Theoretical lenses such as CRT and LatCrit were the basis for centering the voices of Latinx families and valuing their various forms of capital consistent with the Community Cultural Model. Participants influenced the design of the garden …

Gardening And Watering 21st Century Soil: Culturally Responsive And Technology Enhanced Instructional Design In K12 Schools, Elissa W. Frazier

Dissertations

Decades of research have documented the positive impact of culturally responsive teaching on academic outcomes for African American and LatinX students. However, as the field of education has become increasingly embedded with technology as a powerful tool of instruction, more attention is needed to understand how culturally responsive teachers use technology to close achievement gaps. Although national public policy over the last twenty-years has documented the negative impact of the digital divide on low SES, African American and LatinX students, large-scale efforts to close the divide have focused primarily on access to devices only. More recently, the second digital “use” …

Evaluation Of Text Transformers For Classifying Sentiment Of Reviews By Using Tf-Idf, Bert (Word Embedding), Sbert (Sentence Embedding) With Support Vector Machine Evaluation, Mina Jamshidian

Dissertations

As the online world evolves and new media emerge, consumers are sharing their reviews and opinions online. This has been studied in various academic fields, including marketing and computer science. Sentiment analysis, a technique used to identify the sentiment of a piece of text, has been researched in different domains such as movie reviews and mobile app ratings. However, the video game industry has received relatively little research on experiential products. The purpose of this study is to apply sentiment analysis to user reviews of games on Steam, a popular gaming platform, in order to produce actionable results. The video …

Modelling And Mitigating Interlocutor Confusion In Situated Human-Avatar And Human-Robot Interaction, Na Li

Dissertations

Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) is an important but challenging field focused on improving the interaction between humans and robots, to make the interaction more intelligent and effective. However, building a natural conversational HRI is an interdisciplinary challenge for scholars, engineers, and designers. Achieving successful conversational interaction with a social robot necessitates not only observing a user’s active participation in the interaction but also being aware of their emotional and attitudinal states as the interaction progresses. On the topic of attitudinal states, one field that has received little attention to date is monitoring the user for possible confusion states. Confusion is a …

“The Issue Is Already There; Just Have The Conversation!”: Culturally Sustaining Reflection In The Student Teaching Triad, Hanna M. Asrat

Dissertations

There is a vast demographic mismatch between California’s public school teachers (who are majority White, mono-lingual English-speaking women) and California’s public school students. Though universities responsible for educating preservice teachers often include coursework that attempts to help address this demographic mismatch, such as instruction about Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy, if preservice teachers do not get the chance to practice this pedagogy in their fieldwork placement, they tend to fall into to the two-worlds problem. The two-worlds problem posits that preservice teachers view constructivist and Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies learned at the university as theoretical and incompatible with actual teaching, and so they …

Ethnic Studies Implementation In A K-8 District: Culture, Critical Consciousness And Collective Efficacy, Genvieve Dorsey

Dissertations

This research was a descriptive study in which the researcher explored the beginning phases of Ethnic Studies implementation in a Kindergarten through Eighth grade (K-8) school district in Northern California. Using a social justice lens, and through a review of Ethnic Studies, Collective Efficacy, Critical Consciousness, and School Culture constructs, the researcher attempted to capture and articulate a cultural profile of the school district and the degree to which it aligned to the cultural typologies articulated among Ethnic Studies scholars.The study included the collection of several types of data, including: (1) archival documents; (2) teacher focus groups; and (3) administrator …

How Can I Help You Today? How First-Generation Latinx/A/O Community College Students Perceive Counseling, Isaac Escoto

Dissertations

Latinx/a/o students make up almost half of the California Community College system’s population. However, Latinx/a/o students account for about 15% of three-year completion rates (certificate, degree, or transfer). In support of student success strategies, the literature describes the role of counselors and how they help students navigate the complexities of higher education. This mixed-methods study investigated how community college counseling practices and services are perceived by Latinx/a/o students; and which of those practices and services best supported the success of this student population. Key findings included the importance of counseling services, as well as preferred counseling appointment logistics and topics …

Never Too Young: The Existence, Impact, And Sustainability Of Ethnic Studies In Elementary School, Angela R. Guzmán

Dissertations

Ethnic Studies has existed in higher education for more than fifty years. In high school, critical education researchers have recognized Ethnic Studies as vital to improving attendance, lowering suspension rates, and boosting GPAs for BIPOC students. This has given rise to the recent K-12 Ethnic Studies model curriculum adoption by the State Board of Education, and the signing of Assembly Bill 101, making California the first state to require that all high school students complete a semester-long course in Ethnic Studies. Regrettably, Ethnic Studies continues to be mostly limited to higher education and grades 9-12 in public schools despite research …

Voice Of The Inaudible: Well-Being Of Chinese American Young Adults, Chinese American Parents’ Parenting Competency, And The Correlation Of The Two, Diana Huang

Dissertations

Violence against Asian Americans since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic has become a national crisis in the United States. Racism against Asian Americans in the country, however, has been deep-rooted since the nineteenth century. Chinese American adolescents, who are susceptible to identity crisis as young adults and confront racial discrimination as a minority race, face distressing challenges. It is critical to inquire into their lived narratives and hear their voices. The author investigated the early life experiences of nine Chinese Americans and identified how racial identity is shaped at a young age with negative external inputs, as well as …

An Exploratory Study Of Entrepreneurial Intention Among Hispanic Entrepreneurs In Toronto, Jorge Perez Moreno

Dissertations

The Problem

Entrepreneurship scholars have claimed that immigrants are more likely to become self-employed due to limited job opportunities, access to social networks, cultural background, necessity, and education and skills. However, the entrepreneurial experience of Hispanic immigrants in Toronto has yet to be examined. This quantitative study examined the attitudes, norms, and perceptions influencing entrepreneurial intention and the factors that encourage self-employment continuation among immigrants in Canada.

Method

This study used a survey questionnaire of ninety-four Hispanic entrepreneurs in Toronto to comprehend their entrepreneurial intention. It examined their proficiencies, studied their business characteristics, and predicted their behavior toward self employment …

Understanding Secularized People Of Metro Manila: A Case Study Approach For A Contextualized Urban Ministry Strategy, Ermela T. Dizon

Dissertations

Problem

Secularization shapes people's thinking, feeling, and behaving in the cities. Yearly, there is a rise in the number of de-religionized or secularized people in cities of the world who engage in pursuits of materialism and show declining interest in religion. Sociologists and missiologists postulate about the spectrum of secularity and the variety of secularism in different context. Since Metro Manila is one of the world's top highly urbanized and densely populated cities, the Seventh-day Adventist Church encounters challenges in reaching its secularized people. It is a new turf for the church. Pastors trained for rural settings may not understand …

Predictors Of Statistics Anxiety Among Graduate Students In Saudi Arabia, Rabab Abdulghani

Dissertations

Problem

The problem addressed in this study is the anxiety experienced by graduate students toward statistics courses, which often causes students to delay taking statistics courses until the end of their program. Students believe that statistics courses are not essential and are the greatest obstacles to obtaining their degree. Previous theoretical models have focused on predicting student performance in statistics. However, this study aims to identify specific factors that could decrease student statistics anxiety and enhance positive attitudes and self-efficacy toward statistics. The study developed a conceptual model to predict statistics anxiety among graduate students in educational and social science …

Beyond Social Emotional Learning: Toward A Humanizing And Transformative Teacher Sel, Ash Ray Busby

Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to bring to life the experiences of how the development of a Social, Emotional and Cultural lens prepares teachers to meet their own social and emotional needs in the classroom and consequently be better prepared to meet their students’ social and emotional needs in ways that are culturally sustaining. This qualitative research study explored these phenomena through a series of three in-depth interviews and a classroom observation with four in-service teachers in a Northern California school district that prioritizes social emotional learning (SEL) for students and teachers. The insights from this research may inform …

Play On; Give Me Excess Of It: Intercorporeality And Musical Definitions, Abram Basil Soucy Capone

Dissertations

Philosophy of music, especially in the 20th and 21st centuries, presides over a relatively narrow range of field-specific ontological and metaphysical questions. I claim that a focus on classical music and a reliance on analogies to the plastic arts constitutes an unhelpful (but pervasive) methodology in philosophy of music, one that stands in tension with its purported aim of accurately accounting for “the ways we talk, think, and act” in relation to music and musical works (Rohrbaugh 2003, 179). While philosophers of music explicitly aim to describe praxis, a significant gap exists between existing theory and ordinary musical experiences. To …

Artapanus And Greek Colonial Poetics, Scott Harris

Dissertations

The fragments of Artapanus have proven to be enigmatic for most scholars over the years and as such have not been treated in significant detail. Most scholarship has been restricted to two separate lines of enquiry: genre and ethnicity. I suggest that the resonance between Greek colonial poetics sheds new light on Artapanus's literary agenda: namely, that Artapanus is constructing and representing the memory of Jewish cultural and political foundations using broader Greek poetics which were used to describe the civic, cultic and geographic foundation of a colony. In this way, Artapanus is no longer an outlier within the Hellenistic …

None Of Us Are Safe: How Leaders Sustain Culturally Responsive Elementary And Middle School Improvement Planning, Jerry B. Michel

Dissertations

In the spring of 2020, school leaders, school boards, and teachers faced challenges beyond the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States, finding themselves under attack for the perceived applications of critical race theory in school curriculum. These conditions made active engagement in equity-focused school improvement planning more challenging. School leaders and leadership teams may benefit from using an established framework to identify strengths and areas for growth around culturally responsive pedagogy for effective school improvement planning. This article explores the use of Hammond’s (2015) Ready for Rigor Framework as a tool for identifying prioritizing which conditions for culturally responsive pedagogy …

The Forgotten Minority—The Experiences Of Somali-Jareer Bantu Students In Higher Education: “I Don’T Even Exist At This Institution. I’M Barely Recognized As A Human Being”., Arli Mohamed

Dissertations

The purpose of this dissertation is to examine how students of Somali-Jareer Bantu descent experience education, particularly how they navigate higher education in the United States and how they make meaning of their experiences. Grounded in a descriptive phenomenological approach, the design method includes semi-structured individual and focus group interviews, with a holistic interpretative phenomenological analysis as a method of data analysis. This study utilizes descriptive phenomenology to investigate how Somali-Jareer Bantu students experience higher education in the U.S. and make meaning of their multiple identities as they navigate higher education environments. Using this methodological approach, the following questions guide …

Higher Education, Neoliberalism, And Conflict: A Case Of The University Of Balochistan In Pakistan, Syed Amir Shah

Dissertations

The current study focuses on the role of peacebuilding in the higher education sector of Pakistan’s conflict-affected region of Balochistan. The research is an extended case study of the University of Balochistan. It addresses how the institution’s peacebuilding agency has evolved in the face of ethnic conflict and the neoliberal reforms pursued by the state during the past two decades. The research is based on the study of policy documents, official reports, and individual and focus group interviews with various educational actors.

The peacebuilding agency of the institution is theorized according to the 4Rs (Novelli et al., 2019; Novelli et …

Self-Efficacy, Knowledge, And Social Support On Self-Care Among Senior Korean Immigrants With Diabetes, Jung Eun Kim

Dissertations

Diabetes is a prevalent chronic disease that significantly affects morbidity and mortality among senior people. There are diverse ethnic populations in the United States, and Korean immigrants are one of the minority immigrant groups. Many senior Korean immigrants report language inadequacy, lack of social support, discrimination, anxiousness in an unfamiliar environment, and poor economic status. These barriers limit them from accessing adequate health care services and resources. Although self-care is the most important key part in managing diabetes, senior Korean immigrants with diabetes face challenges to perform effective self-care activities related to various barriers. However, studies about related factors on …

Cross-Cultural Adaptation And Validation Of Lung Cancer Screening Health Belief Scale, Fang Lei

Dissertations

Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer death and the third prevalent disease among Chinese Americans. Lung cancer screening with low dose computed tomography is an effective method to detect lung cancer. Compared to chest X-ray, low dose computed tomography can reduce the mortality rate of lung cancer by 20% in the high-risk smokers. Since 2013, lung cancer screening has been recommended by most health organizations and covered both by private and public insurances. However, the uptake rate of lung cancer screening is still low in the US, and there are few studies on lung cancer screening among Chinese …

Braving The Sea Change: An Interpretative Phenomenological Study Of How Counselors-In-Training Experience Their Interpersonal And Intrapersonal Relationships, Christopher Jess Ward

Dissertations

This interpretive phenomenological analysis asked counselors-in-training (CITs) to reflect on their connections with important others and with themselves, noting any changes which took place within said relationships over the course of counselor training. Seven CITs provided rich narratives around relational shifts and personal/professional development, bringing to the surface superordinate themes of (a) Insecurity and Confusion, (b) Growing Pains, and (c) Overcoming and Resilience. Superordinate themes were further divided into the following sub-themes: Insecurity and Confusion: Professional/Personal Identity Integration, Mental Health and Responsibility, Reassurance; Growing Pains: Relationship Imbalanced and Disequilibrium, Loneliness; Overcoming and Resilience: Ruptures and Repairs, Outright Benefits, Self-Prioritization. These …

Development Of Geoscience Interest And Identity Of Female First-Generation Undergraduate Geoscience Students, Dina London

Dissertations

The purpose of this basic qualitative study was to understand how female first-generation undergraduate geoscience students developed their situational geoscience interests into individual interests that, in turn, supported their geoscience identity and decision to become a geoscience major. The experiences of six female first-generation undergraduate geoscience students were used to explore how geoscience interests and geoscience identities developed over time. I analyzed three artifacts representing participants’ geoscience identity, geoscience interest development timeline, and transcribed interviews to explore emerging themes relating to interest and identity development. Participants described events relating to their situational geoscience interests, individual geoscience interests, and the formation …

Intersectional Identities Of Race And Religion Of African American Muslims And Their Attitudes Toward Seeking Mental Health Services, Cheruba A. Dhanaraj

Dissertations

African American Muslims have overlapping and interconnected identities of race and religion that can be conceptualized by the intersectionality framework to understand the complexities of barriers they face when seeking mental health services. African American Muslims have a higher risk of mental health issues due to systemic racism, racial discrimination, racial trauma, and Islamophobic discrimination. Yet, there is a lack of scholarly research or studies that focus explicitly on African American Muslims' specific mental health needs, barriers, and attitudes related to seeking mental health treatment.

This study sought to fill the gap in knowledge about attitudes toward seeking mental health …

The Acculturation Process Of International Students In Cacrep Counseling Programs: A Grounded Theory Approach, Hanny Wuysang

Dissertations

International students bring diverse, multicultural perspectives to the U.S. postsecondary education system through their participation in higher education. However, in their adjustment to U.S. higher education, international students in counseling programs face barriers and challenges such as language differences, lack of support, microaggressions and discrimination, culture shock, and different perspectives on mental health treatment as compared to their home cultures. These factors can interfere with their daily personal and academic lives, yet there is often minimal support from their academic programs and host institutions. The growing number of international students in counseling programs increases the importance of understanding their acculturation …