Developing Musicianship And 21st Century Learning Skills Using The Lisk “Creative Director” Series, Thomas Reynolds

Doctoral Dissertations

ABSTRACT

The Experience Of Chinese Students Enrolled In Graduate Music Education Degree Programs In The United States, Kailimi Li

Doctoral Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to examine the experience of Chinese graduate students enrolled in music education master’s and doctoral degree programs in the United States. Specifically, it explored participants’ perceptions of (a) their educational experiences (past and present), (b) the challenges they faced, (c) their strategies for success, (d) the benefits they experienced as international graduate students in the United State, (e) the effect of this experience on their thinking, self-perception, and behavior, and (f) how they planned to move forward or move on following this experience. Participants were six native Chinese graduate students enrolled at the time …

The History Of Massachusetts Transfer And Articulation Policies In Contexts Of Evolving Higher Education System Structure, Coordination, And Policy Actors, Daniel De La Torre, Jr.

Doctoral Dissertations

Community colleges carry out dual missions providing occupational and collegiate preparation in local communities across the United States. These institutions prepare students for advanced study via transfer policies that lead to enrollment in baccalaureate institutions. State higher education systems use transfer and articulation policies to strengthen academic pathways between two-year and four-year institutions. These policies rely on established governance to facilitate student transfer between sectors. The transfer and articulation literature stresses the importance of statewide policy guidelines, yet little has been written about the process of transfer policy development involving state higher education governance and policy groups and actors. The …

Perceptions Of African American College Students In San Francisco Bay Area Community Colleges On Their Developmental Training To Participate In Civic Engagement During High School, Melvin Davis

Doctoral Dissertations

The democratic practice of representative government in the United States is supposed to represent and protect its citizens. Since the United States abolished legalized slavery with the 13th Amendment in 1865, individual states have made many attempts to impede the civil rights and voting rights of African American citizens. Several pieces of legislation were designed to protect citizens, such as the Civil Rights act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. In addition to overt legislated actions to thwart voting rights, the 26th Amendment of 1971 afforded citizens at least 18-years old the right to vote. Studies, however, …

Peace Education In Kenya: Tracing Discourse And Action From The National To The Local Level, Kathleen Louise Zanoni

Doctoral Dissertations

Recent Presidential elections in Kenya (2017) resulted in a contested re-run election and demonstrated the presence of systemic corruption, a culture of impunity, and a continued rift among civil society. Deep wounds were awakened during this recent election triggering past grievances from the post-election violence in 2007-08. It is critical and timely to explore various cross-sectoral peacebuilding approaches at the national and local levels to increase the capacity of individuals to act as agents of peace. However, peacebuilders often overlook the possibilities that exist within formal education to foster spaces of resistance against direct, structural, and cultural forms of violence. …

Critical Peace Pedagogies At The American Center For Civil And Human Rights And The Canadian Museum For Human Rights: A Comparative Case Study, Ion Vlad

Doctoral Dissertations

The struggle for racial equity in the United States and Canada is ongoing. Troubled historical legacies in both countries have present-day implications. African Americans and Indigenous Canadians are still two of the most marginalized populations from the standpoint of socioeconomics and political representation (Giroux, 2013; Vickers, 2012). In order to redress these problems, human rights and peace education have to pose structural questions and expose systemic unbalances. In the recent past, neoliberalism has had a major influence on the organization and content of American and Canadian formal education, obscuring some of these structural questions (Ravitch, 2013). In this context, human …

Verbal -S Productions In The Structured Writing Samples Of Variable Aae-Speaking Fourth-Grade Students With And Without Language Impairment, Jacklyn High Felton

Doctoral Dissertations

Researchers in speech-language pathology and ethnolinguistics have worked to gain knowledge about typical and atypical language patterns of African American children who are identified as African American English (AAE) dialect speakers. Much progress had been made, but limitations in this field of knowledge have persisted, especially for AA children who demonstrate variable use of AAE, presumably through the process of assimilation in the school setting. Therefore, more information is needed to provide diagnostic markers for deviations in typical language development for variable AAE-MAE speakers. Prior empirical research has found that third- and fourth-grade AAE-speaking children with typical language development overtly …

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, …

Factors For Academic Success Among African-American Men: A Phenomenological Study, Samuel R. Williams

Doctoral Dissertations

Academic success among African men has increased but many African-American men continue to fall behind the academic achievements of their Caucasian male counterparts. African-American men who achieve academic success have been marginalized in research that primarily focuses on reporting deficit or negative factors that hinder and not promote academic growth. The purpose of this phenomenological study was to identify environmental, social, and socioeconomic factors that were perceived to contribute to the academic success of African-American men in secondary and post-secondary institutions. The researcher used the Ecological Model of Human Development (EMHD) to identify factors and which systems had the greatest …

A Quantitative Analysis Of A Critical Pedagogy In Catholic Secondary School Religious Studies Teachers In The San Francisco Bay Area, Alex Porter Macmillan

Doctoral Dissertations

Scholarship has indicated that Catholic, secondary school religion teachers in the United States are often not adequately prepared pedagogically and theologically (Aldana, 2015; Ramey, 2014; Schroeder, 2013; Cook and Hudson, 2006; Cook, 2001, 2000; Lund 1997). Rossiter (2011, 2010, 2007) and Crawford and Rossiter (2006) described aspects of a pedagogy that can be summarized as “Critical Interpretation and Evaluation of Culture” (Rossiter, 2011), where a number of different criteria and examples are described that can serve as a relevant pedagogy for religious education.

In a researcher designed, online, cross-sectional survey, 18 questions from relevant literature using both binary “yes / …

Culture Teaching And Learning In An Advanced Placement Chinese Course, Yu-Han Lin

Doctoral Dissertations

The significance of teaching culture in the foreign language classroom has been widely acknowledged. However, it remains a challenge for language teachers to properly incorporate culture teaching into language teaching. Chinese language teachers in the United States also encounter the challenge of teaching culture to the increased number of Chinese language learners. In particular, scant attention has been paid to how Chinese language learners approach cultural issues and develop cultural awareness in the language teaching context of American secondary education. In order to address the research gap, the present study aims to explore how the teaching and learning of culture …

The Educational Dimensions Of Filipina Migrant Workers’ Activist Identities, Rowena Magdalena Tomaneng

Doctoral Dissertations

There are 10.4 million Filipino/a migrant workers worldwide, with the large majority of Filipina migrants working in traditional gendered labor such as domestic work, care giving, nursing, teaching, and factory work (Ruiz, 2013). Because of the private nature of household work, Filipina migrants are vulnerable to mental and physical abuses from their employers in addition to labor exploitation. While researchers recognize migrants’ agency and acknowledge migrants as political and social actors, few studies connect Filipina migrant workers’ activist identities to the political education they receive from grassroots organizations in the Philippines, United States, and other countries. Consequently, the purpose of …

Differentiating Literacy Instruction For Digital Learners: The Effect Of Multimedia Think-Aloud Worked Examples On Adolescent Analytical Reading Comprehension, Diana Combs Neebe

Doctoral Dissertations

Learning by example is nothing new to the education landscape. Research into think-aloud protocols, though often used as a form of assessment rather than instruction, provided practical, content-specific literacy strategies for crafting the instructional intervention in this study. Additionally, research into worked examples—from the earliest pen-and-paper studies of algebra and statistics, to more recent multimedia studies of legal reasoning and writing—shaped the conceptual framework for the present study by detailing a series of design principles for effective multimedia worked examples. This study aimed to reimagine the face-to-face, teacher-facilitated think-aloud as a multimedia worked example, which could be leveraged for differentiated, …

Folklórico Testimonios: Identity, Community, And Agency As Social Justice Cultural Performance For Dancers Of Mexican Folklórico, Manuel Alejandro Perez

Doctoral Dissertations

Mexican students in higher education have few opportunities to learn about their heritage and history outside of Ethnic Studies courses. Some students seek alternative opportunities to learn about their identity and to build community with other Mexican students through folklórico. In Mexican folklórico, dancers learn the techniques and skills to communicate stories about their history, culture, and heritage through movement, song, and dance. This study is the story of Mexican students and folkloristas on their journey to (re)discover identity, community, and agency as they move through higher education.

This study uses testimonio to capture the voice, the struggle, and the …

Queens Speak - A Youth Participatory Action Research Project: Exploring Critical Post-Traumatic Growth Among Black Girls Within The School To Prison Pipeline, Stacey Michelle Ault

Doctoral Dissertations

A gap exists in both research and practice when it comes to issues related to girls within the school-to-prison pipeline. Girls are also often ignored in the educational literature about trauma. Educators tend to take a deficit approach toward youth experiencing trauma and often reinforce trauma through discriminatory and exclusionary disciplinary practices. Using a Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) methodology centered in the lives of Black girls, with an intentional focus on their agency and growth, this study educated, coached, and supported a research team called Queens Speak. The primary purpose of this qualitative study was to elevate the voices …

Exploring The Experiences Of Black Men As Respondents In University Student Conduct Processes, Brian Arao

Doctoral Dissertations

Student conduct processes in higher education have been studied and theorized extensively from a structural perspective, yielding a wealth of guidance for practitioners on how they can best design and administer disciplinary interventions (e.g., Lancaster & Waryold, 2008b). However, very little published research has focused on students' perceptions of and experiences with student conduct processes, and to what extent these are congruent with the espoused learning goals of student conduct practitioners (Dannells, 1997; Karp & Sacks, 2014; Stimpson & Stimpson, 2008). Among these scant studies, the findings of King (2012) and Karp and Sacks (2014) suggest that Black men may …

Multimodal Assessment In Action: What We Really Value In New Media Texts, Kathleen M. Baldwin

Doctoral Dissertations

As the Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing illustrates, writing teachers at all educational levels can no longer ignore multimodality and the challenges that come with incorporating multimodal writing—texts composed using a combination of sound, images, video, etc.—into the classroom (NCTE, Framework). A chief struggle most writing teachers face is how to evaluate the multimodal texts their students produce, texts that are inherently diverse. In answer to the calls of scholars such as Yancey, Herrington, and Moran for research exploring multimodal assessment in situated classroom practice, my dissertation examines what K-16 writing teachers are and should be valuing in …

Reclaiming Voices And Identities: An Examination Of African American Educators’ Experiences Before And After Brown V. Board Of Education, Leta Hooper

Doctoral Dissertations

The Brown v. Board of Education rulings in 1954 and 1955 are often regarded as cases that set the precedent for dismantling schools operating on a racially “separate but equal” system. The outcome of the Brown v. Board of Education rulings led to the closing of Black schools as well as the dismissal and displacement of Black educators (Fultz, 2004). Black educators’ experiences of teaching in segregated and desegregated schools, as well as their role in challenging inequitable education conditions, are topics that continue to be ignored in mainstream society (Fultz, 1995; 2004; Siddle-Walker, 2013). The purpose of this life …

The Discursive Construction Of Language Teaching And Learning In Multiuser Virtual Environments, Douglas W. Canfield

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation seeks to broaden how researchers within computer-assisted language learning (CALL) make sense of and examine psychological and power constructs at play in language courses conducted in 3D multiuser virtual environments. 18 students and 2 teachers in 8 formal English as a Second Language (ESL) classes in the 3D multiuser virtual environment of Second Life participated in a discourse analysis study to explore the theoretical and analytic ways in which critical discursive psychology could function to explore how teaching and learning are performed as interactional events in a community of language teachers and learners in Second Life by investigating …

Followership And The Development Of Female Leaders In Higher Education Administration, Donna Johnson

Doctoral Dissertations

Much attention in occupational advancement has been devoted to leadership studies, leadership literature, leadership trainings, leadership styles, and leadership strategies; however, the leadership dynamic is merely one side of the organizational coin. On the less-addressed flipside is the topic of followership. This Grounded Theory (GT) study addresses the perception of the role of followership in the development of female leaders in higher education. The study uses semi-structured interviews with 10 females in higher education administration to gather data concerning the perceived role followership has played in the professional development of the female administrators. Through GT qualitative data analysis procedures, interview …

The Effect Of A District-Wide Literacy Initiative On English/ Language Arts Standardized Test Scores, Sheri R. Robken

Doctoral Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to determine the effect of a District-Wide Literacy initiative that implemented the 18 literacy strategies and Silent Sustained Reading activities incorporated in the 2008 Revised Louisiana Comprehensive Curriculum on English/Language Arts standardized test scores. Standardized test scores were obtained for seventh and eighth grade students from a control group (n=204, 2006-2008 tests administrations) and an experimental group (n=185, 2008-2010 test administrations). An Analysis of Variance was used to determine significance (p

Transnationalizing Social Justice Education: Interamerican Frameworks For Teaching And Learning In The 21st Century, Mirangela G. Buggs

Doctoral Dissertations

Social Justice Education currently uses mostly U.S.-based theories and concepts, and it often relies upon nation-specific historical legacies and nation-centric contemporary understandings of patterns of inequality. This study offers interdisciplinary conceptual-historical frameworks garnered from historical studies, African Diaspora Studies, Gender and Women’s Studies, along with studies of frameworks and pedagogies in critical and multicultural education to enlarge Social Justice Education. This conceptual study utilizes a world-historical analysis and focuses on the interconnectedness of the Americas—Latin America, the Caribbean, and North America— establishing a hemispheric and regional framework to inspire more transnational work in educational projects. Arguing that there are shared …

Arabic Teachers' Perception Of An Integrated Approach For Teaching Arabic As A Foreign Language In Colleges And Universities In The United States, Abeer Al-Mohsen

Doctoral Dissertations

This study examines the perception of Arabic teachers on whether an integrated approach is critical for students’ communicative competence in Arabic. Additionally, the study attempts to uncover what might be potential barriers to the integrated-approach program-wide implementation in the field of Teaching Arabic as a Foreign Language in higher education institutes in the United States. Although many studies investigated students’ perception of learning Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) only, few studies focused on teachers’ perceptions of the issue and understanding of what communicative Arabic instruction should entail.

Using a mixed-method study, the researcher conducted the study in two sequential phases: a …

The Effectiveness Of Graphic Organizers To Support Executive Function For Ninth Grade Struggling Readers, Elaine Ruth Barry

Doctoral Dissertations

Struggling readers, or students who read below grade level but have strong phonological awareness, may benefit from using instructional tools like graphic organizers (GOs) while reading. The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between reading comprehension and teacher-generated graphic organizers (GOs) as they support executive function for struggling readers. The use of GOs to support reading comprehension was grounded in cognitive load theory as it combines with the construction-integration model of reading to highlight the importance and potential weakness of executive function. Although researchers have identified component parts of reading comprehension and different instructional tools for supporting …

Effect Of Mindfulness Training On Interpretation Exam Performance In Graduate Students In Interpreting, Julie E. Johnson

Doctoral Dissertations

Many graduate interpreting students struggle because the real-time, interactive nature of interpreting dictates that they be able to regulate their attention across different parallel cognitive activities and manage the inherent stress and unpredictability of the task. Within the framework of Cognitive Load Theory, this mixed-methods study explored the effect of short-term mindfulness training on consecutive interpreting exam performance using a quasi-experimental repeated-measures design. It also examined the relationships among mindfulness, stress, aspects of attention, and interpreting exam performance. The sample included 67 students (age M = 26.9 years; 82% female) across seven language programs (Chinese, French, German, Japanese, Korean, Russian, …

“Leadership Means Moving A Community Forward”: Asian American Community College Students And Critical Leadership Praxis, Melissa Ann Loredo Canlas

Doctoral Dissertations

Asian Americans are underrepresented in both formal leadership positions and leadership research (Foldy & Ospina, 2009) and rarely are Asian Americans viewed as leaders, activists, or agents of social change. Leadership development programs, particularly those focused on social and racial justice, are largely absent from the curriculums and educational experiences of Asian Americans (Omatsu, 2006), and few leadership development programs focus specifically on the needs of Asian Americans (Chung, 2014; Liang, Lee, & Ting, 2002), particularly at the community college level.

This study addressed the need for critical leadership development for Asian American community college students, focusing specifically on leadership …

The Adjustment Of First Year African American Women To Predominately White Institutions: Implications For Best Practices, Maisha Beasley

Doctoral Dissertations

Currently, both scholarly literature and educational practice are lacking depth and scope about the lived experience of African American (AA) female students, and, as a result, they lack effectiveness for this population of students. In particular, they do not address the varying ways AA female students adjust to the university during their first year, the most critical year for student retention and persistence in the college experience (Pike & Kuh, 2005), nor do they recognize how intersectionalities of identities in AA women are salient to successes and challenges at PWIs. This study addresses this gap in the research by not …

Voices Of Female, Rural Superintendents As They Implement California's Local Control Funding Formula Policy, Claudia Coughran

Doctoral Dissertations

Improving American schools, and as a result, the educational leaders who guide and oversee American schools, has an historic background; yet research to accomplish the improvement is rooted in urban schools and male educational leaders, particularly the superintendent of schools. National and state leaders have used education policy as a means to improve student achievement for decades. California played a pivotal roll in the national trend for numerous years; most recently with the Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF) policy passed in 2013. The purpose of this study was to listen to the voices of female, rural superintendents as they implemented …

Slavery On Their Minds: Representing The Institution In Children's Picture Books, Raphael E. Rogers

Doctoral Dissertations

This study examines how slavery is represented in contemporary children’s picture books. Given that many primary and secondary school teachers are committed to using picture book fiction to teach students about slavery, it is necessary to explore how slavery is depicted in these texts. One of the goals of this study is to contribute to the discussion about how the featured picture books engage with and respond to the early historiography of slavery, which asserted that Black slave were content and docile and that slave owners were kind and paternalistic. This study seeks to analyze how the picture books that …

Reading Queerly In The High School Classroom: Exploring A Gay And Lesbian Literature Course, Kirsten Helmer

Doctoral Dissertations

The purpose of this dissertation is to explore how teaching an English literature curriculum centered on the stories, experiences, cultures, histories, and politics of LGBTQI (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex) people constitutes a meaningful site for teaching and learning in a high school classroom. The dissertation offers insights on how the teaching of LGBTQI-themed texts in English language arts classes can be reframed by bridging the goals, practices and conceptual tools of queer theory to critical literacies teaching. The project follows principles of critical qualitative research and employs an ethnographic case study approach with the purpose of transforming educational …