Education Commons^™

Performances Of An Able, Academic Mind, Caleb Green

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Western culture individualizes issues of public health. This is especially clear in academic life, where the structures of the university disable atypical bodies and minds in order to force them to simultaneously perform the roles of scholar, teacher, and colleague. The university not only fails to accommodate afflicted minds and bodies, it also produces more precarity in the process. This project is a performance ethnography of my time in the academy, starting with my life as an undergraduate being disciplined into academic life, moving toward recruitment for graduate school, and ending with events surrounding the construction of this very project. …

Dis/Ableist Consumption: A Critical Thematic Analysis Of Avowed And Ascribed Neuro-Identities In The Classroom, Shaundi C. Newbolt

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In the United States, faculty and students are publicly claiming neurodivergent identities and support for the neurodiversity movement. This study uses Collier and Hecht’s cultural identity theories with Lang and Chen’s two-step process, critical thematic analysis (CTA), to examine avowals and ascriptions with four diagnostic terms, ASD, ADHD, bipolar disorder, and dyslexia, of students and professors from Rate My Professors (RMP) with Ritter’s frame of RMP as a phenomenon.

A total of 1,022 posts are analyzed to understand how students resist or re-inscribe popular medical model/deficit discourse in the classroom: student avowals (N = 232), professor avowals (N = 51), …

Using Dialogue To Interrupt Legacies Of Exclusion, Incite Hope, Invite Change, And Increase Levels Of Awareness At Predominantly White Institutions With Diversity, Equity, And Inclusion Rhetoric, Amanda Meise

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation questions how a predominantly white institution (PWI) could infuse dialogue to aid the implementation of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives and invite institutional change. There has been an increased spotlight on racial tensions permeating predominantly white campuses with DEI initiatives; higher education scholars have identified several factors that prevent institutions from fostering inclusive spaces. This research addresses three specific hurdles for PWIs implementing DEI initiatives: (1) social amnesia characterized by romanticized versions of history; (2) a discontinuity between professed values and the goals of DEI initiatives with policy, structure, and experience; and (3) low awareness of privilege …

Men And Mustangs: From Communicative Messages Within The Wild Horse Inmate Program To A Communicative Theory Of Learning How To Teach, Kristine Larissa Reyes

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to discover the communicative messages within the Wild Horse Inmate Program. This dissertation developed the communicative theory of learning how to teach, a grounded theory based on the communicative messages of the Department of Corrections' officers and Bureau of Land Manager employees who work with inmates in a western state Wild Horse Inmate Program. I approached theorizing the communicative theory of learning how to teach from the applied communication perspective that communication is the enactment and application--symbolic and physical--of communication in daily life. The applied context was the Wild Horse Inmate Program where I …

Disrupting Privilege: A High School Curriculum, Cassidy M. Higgins

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Current privilege pedagogy scholarship demonstrates the importance of understanding privilege as an entryway into critical studies and everyday community engagement. Thus, this dissertation argues that privilege must be introduced into education earlier, such as high school. In order to demonstrate ethical possibilities of meeting the need for care, this project integrates social work and critical pedagogy scholarship that explores teaching privilege in the classroom, with culture and communication scholarship. This dissertation connects culture and communication, critical pedagogy, and performance to demonstrate an applied use of communication scholarship in two classroom settings to explore dialogues of privilege through a curriculum titled …

Fostering And Foreclosing Student Learning Potential: Portraits Of Performativity, Emotion, And Relationality In The Classroom, Jeanne Marie Jacobs

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation endeavors to build a much-needed bridge between the fields of communication and education. Using critical pedagogy and critical communication pedagogy as theoretical frameworks, this project advances an understanding of classroom communication as constitutive of power relations, and teachers and students as agents who can work together to foster learning potential and social justice. I look to interdisciplinary scholarship on affect to craft a nuanced conceptual framework of the connection between communication and emotion, and how they create learning opportunities for some students and construct barriers to learning for others. Through ethnographic fieldwork at an urban magnet school, I …

Secrets In Plain Sight: Institutional Covert Discrimination, Jacquelynn Suzette Mcdaniel

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

While dominant national P-20 narratives circulate a discourse of the near achievement of racial equity post Brown v. Board of Education, there remains a large gap between the experiences of people of color and the official record of their inclusion and access. Organizational self-analysis of racial disparities in education often attribute undeniable discrimination to the micro-level performances of individuals; claiming micro-aggressions, lack of training, political/personal conflict, or ignorance. When these reasons cannot fully explain gross inequity; organizations turn to society's socio-economic disparities and mirrored racial realities within the country as instructive on the inevitable realities of racism within schools.

A …