(2021). How Selected Title I ESSA Designated Priority & Focus Districts and Schools Utilized and Applied the Tenets of Culturally Responsive-Sustaining Education (CR-S) Framework to Improve Learning Outcomes for Marginalized Students. ProQuest LLC, Ed.D. Dissertation, Sage Graduate School. Given the historical trend in segregation across New York State that is profoundly and systematically rooted within the fabric of the state's education system, it is no surprise the education system had been viewed as having two separate systems, for example, Title I versus non-Title I. For non-Title I districts/schools, the average graduation outcome was 84% in SY 2017-18 compared to 69% for the study's selected Title I priority and focus districts/schools. In fact, the New York State Board of Regents had cited and charged its own education system as having a history of structural and institutional racism. What has become more evident is that most students attending low-performing Title I priority and focus districts/schools are non-whites. This qualitative grounded theory study investigated how educational administrators in the Northeast Region of the United States, in selected Title I priority and focus districts and schools utilize culturally responsive pedagogical practices to… [Direct]
(2016). Reasoning about Race and Pedagogy in Two Preservice Science Teachers: A Critical Race Theory Analysis. Cognition and Instruction, v34 n4 p285-322. This study describes the experiences of two preservice science teachers as they progress through their respective teacher education programs and uses critical race theory to examine the manner in which conceptions about race and its pedagogical implications change over time. Using a longitudinal case study method, participants' conceptual ecologies of race and pedagogy are mapped both before and after student teaching, and each case is analyzed for evidence of conceptual change in these areas. Findings show that conceptions about race and the pedagogical implications of race changed in ways that likely would have gone undetected in earlier studies because they did not result in wholesale changes in beliefs or teaching practice. This study suggests that the difficulty of fostering an understanding of structural racism and difference may often be underestimated, as revising one's model about race is mitigated strongly by learners' existing conceptual ecologies…. [Direct]
(2016). White Skin, Black Friend: A Fanonian Application to Theorize Racial Fetish in Teacher Education. Educational Philosophy and Theory, v48 n3 p221-236. In "Black Skin, white masks" (1967, Grove Press), Franz Fanon uses a psychoanalytic framework to theorize the inferiority-dependency complex of Black men in response to the colonial racism of white men. Applying his framework in reverse, this theoretical article psychoanalyzes the white psyche and emotionality with respect to the racialization process of whites and their racial attachment to Blackness. Positing that such a process is interconnected with narcissism, humanistic emptiness, and psychosis, this article presents how "racial attachment" becomes "racial fetish." Such a fetish reifies whiteness by accumulating fictive kinships with friends of color; hence, the common parlance of "But I have a Black friend!" The article, then, overlays this theoretical interpretation onto the subject of teacher education in the US, specifically urban teacher education programs that are predominantly comprised of white middle-class females who claim a… [Direct]
(2016). The Teaching Context Preference of Four White South African Pre-Service Teachers: Considerations for Teacher Education. South African Journal of Education, v36 n1 Article 1111 Feb. In an attempt to bring about a society in which individuals can realise their full potential, South African (SA) education has undergone fundamental reforms. However, despite these changes, the education system seems to remain hampered by ongoing systematic and institutional racism, and subsequent socio-economic structures of poverty and privilege. Given the national requirement for all teachers to be socially just educators, pre-service teachers need to be guided to first recognise and understand their own worldviews, before they will be able to understand the worldviews of learners in diverse teaching and learning contexts. Framed within Critical Race Theory, this article draws on the interplay between race and whiteness as property to explore four white pre-service teachers' preference for working with black learners. Data generated through an iterative process of qualitative interviewing revealed how the participants' preference is strongly embedded in power and privilege. Based… [PDF]
(2017). Religious Education for Generating Hope. Religious Education, v112 n3 p225-230. This article discusses how religious education began at Esperanza College in North Philadelphia, one of the poorest counties of the United States. It also is the largest community of returning citizens in Pennsylvania. Student access and success in higher education continues to be impacted by the effects of structural racism and systemic poverty. Achievement gaps among student groups reflect structural inequities that are often the result of historic and systemic social injustices. These inequities typically manifest themselves as the unintended or indirect consequences of unexamined institutional or social policies. Colleges must routinely scrutinize structural barriers to equity and invest in equity-minded policies, practices, and behaviors that lead to success for all students. Esperanza College was started with the mission of making college accessible and affordable. It is mostly adjunct-driven, but the structure makes the adjuncts part of the team. Faculty are persons invested… [Direct]
(2017). Learning to Do Diversity Work: A Model for Continued Education of Program Organizers. Physics Teacher, v55 n6 p342-346 Sep. Physics and physics education in the United States suffer from severe (and, in some cases, worsening) underrepresentation of Black, Latinx, and Native American people of all genders and women of all races and ethnicities. In this paper, we describe an approach to facilitating physics students' collective and continued education about such underrepresentation; its connections to racism, sexism, and other dimensions of marginalization; and models of allyship that may bring about social change within physics. Specifically, we focus on the efforts of undergraduate students, graduate students, and postdocs who are members of a student-run diversity-oriented organization in the physics department at the University of Colorado Boulder (CU), a large, selective, predominantly White public university with high research activity. This group's education was accomplished through quarterly Diversity Workshops. Here we report on six Diversity Workshops that were co-designed and facilitated by the… [Direct]
(2018). Intersectional Leadership: A Critical Narrative Analysis of Servant Leadership by Black Women in Student Affairs. ProQuest LLC, Dr.Ph. Dissertation, University of Dayton. Little research exists that centers the experiences of African American women student affairs administrators in higher education. The challenges and barriers that exist for African American women student affairs administrators are complex and directly connected to the history of slavery, race and racism in the United States. Concepts such as mentorship, success, and leadership are situated in normative practices informed by White narratives and privileged vantage points. The aim of this qualitative study is to illuminate how the experiences of African American women student affairs administrators at predominantly White institutions support or contradict leadership models often used as frameworks for development and strategy. The research questions are as follows: What are the experiences of African American women student affairs administrators at predominantly White institutions in higher education as they relate to race and gender? How do participants describe reflecting on,… [Direct]
(2022). Social Studies Teachers' Conceptions of Human Rights Education. ProQuest LLC, Ph.D. Dissertation, The University of Wisconsin – Madison. This study examined social studies teachers' conceptions of human rights education (HRE), with a focus on the connection between HRE and global citizenship education (GCE). These conceptions were studied through a Critical Race Theory framework. This study took place in a small city in North Dakota and utilized a collective case study approach. The eight participants in this study taught social studies at the secondary level. Data for this study was collected through two one-on-one semi-structured interviews with each teacher, as well as classroom observations and document analysis (lesson plans, curricular materials, etc.).The first key finding of this study indicated that participants' conceptions of human rights centered on Western notions of rights, such as individual rather than collective rights or the right to participate in capitalist economic systems. Democratic participation was also cited as a basic human right, though few teachers elaborated beyond the act of voting on… [Direct]
(2021). °Si Se Puede!: Understanding the Experiences of Latina Students during Their Doctoral Journey at a Hispanic-Serving Institution. ProQuest LLC, Ph.D. Dissertation, The University of Texas at El Paso. The existing body of literature on Latinas has mostly been focused on the undergraduate student experience (Hernandez, 2002; Hurtado et al., 1996; Kena et al., 2016; Tinto & Goodsell, 1994; Torres, 2004). Additionally, despite the increasing participation of women in graduate education since the 1980s (Walker et al., 2008), Latinas have been and continue to be underrepresented in doctoral programs and the professorate (Myers, 2016). In spite of recent increases in enrollment, Latinas attained just 8.8 percent of the doctoral degrees awarded from 2018-2019 (National Center for Education Statistics, 2020). As Latinas are projected to account for a third of all women in the United States by the year 2060 (Gandara, 2015), it is crucial to understand their experiences in doctoral programs and how their presence in higher education can disrupt the continuous dissemination of dominant culture and knowledge that reinforces the inequalities and systemic barriers in academia. The purpose… [Direct]
(2018). Barack Obama, Racial Literacy, and Lessons from "A More Perfect Union". History Teacher, v51 n3 p445-476. Due to its direct approach and its detailed analysis of race, the "A More Perfect Union" (AMPU) speech makes for a likely primary source to be included in a lesson addressing Obama's racial significance. As social studies teacher-educators who draw from critical perspectives on race and racism, the authors hope to see Obama's speech used as a catalyst for nuanced, historicized conversations about race in the United States. The authors argue throughout this paper that the race speech has the pedagogical potential to create such conversations. Instead, we hope to underscore the potential for using Obama's AMPU speech as a vehicle for promoting a rich, nuanced understanding of race in America. We contend that this speech has the potential to foster both productive and unproductive conversations about race, reflecting theories of both racial literacy and racial liberalism. Examining these curricula does, however, provide a snapshot into how the field of education has begun to… [PDF]
(2015). Colorblind Mentoring? Exploring White Faculty Mentoring of Students of Color. Journal of Diversity in Higher Education, v8 n4 p225-242 Dec. In this critical multisite case study we examined the concept of colorblind mentoring. Using Bonilla-Silva's Colorblind Racism Frames, we sought to understand White faculty members' perspectives on their mentoring of Students of Color. The findings revealed that White faculty members often engage with students from a "colorblind perspective." Their use of race-neutral, colorblind language (avoiding racial terms but implying them) allowed White faculty members to describe their students as academically inferior, less prepared, and less interested in pursuing research and graduate studies while potentially ignoring structural causes. Faculty perceptions of students may influence the way Students of Color perceive their academic abilities and potential to achieve success in STEM disciplines and in graduate education…. [Direct]
(2017). Student Engagement and Inclusive Education: Reframing "Student Engagement". International Journal of Inclusive Education, v21 n9 p920-937. "Engagement," or "student engagement," is widely used in educational research and public discourse to refer to the problem of public education. The underlying ontological and epistemological assumptions buoying engagement are rarely, if ever, addressed by educational researchers. The "silent omission" (Sidorkin 2014. "On the Theoretical Limits of Education." In "Making a Difference in Theory: The Theory Question in Education and the Education Question in Theory," edited by Julie Allan Gert Biesta and Richard Edwards, 121-137. New York: Routledge) of engagement's metaphysics has implications for inclusive education. This paper finds that despite being employed with good intent, "engagement" operates in a paradigm of normativity. In a gesture of bifocality (Weis and Fine 2012. "Critical Bifocality and Circuits of Privilege: Expanding Critical Ethnographic Theory and Design." "Harvard Educational Review" 82… [Direct]
(2011). The Place of Race in Cultural Nursing Education: The Experience of White BSN Nursing Faculty. ProQuest LLC, Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Minnesota. The growing cultural diversity in the United States confronts human service professions such as nursing with challenges to fundamental values of social justice and caring. Non-White individuals have experienced long-documented and persistent disparities in health outcomes and receipt of health care services when compared to whites. Medical evidence suggests that health care disparities experienced by non-Whites in the U.S. are perpetuated, in part, by bias, discrimination, and stereotyping by health care providers. National experts recommend cultural competence education to fix this problem. The cultural competence focus in nursing education programs has been criticized by some nursing scholars for essentializing culture and failing to examine the dynamics of race and racism in U.S. society. Yet, the call for an explicit focus on race and racism raises the question, \Are nursing faculty, of whom 93% are White, prepared to teach students about race and racism?\ This study investigated… [Direct]
(2022). The Historical and Contemporary Importance of All-Women's Colleges and Universities around the World: An Analysis through Context and Narrative with a Case Study of the Asian University for Women in Chittagong/Chattogram, Bangladesh. ProQuest LLC, Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Massachusetts Boston. Purpose: All-women's higher education institutions serve the goal of offering a highly marginalized population a safe space to learn, mature, grow and develop physically, emotionally and intellectually. What might seem to be an obvious criticism is that a woman can, theoretically, achieve the same in a co-ed institution. Arguably, the scale of this achievement is compromised based upon an ingrained reality of in-bred institutional patriarchy, systemic racism and other forms of systemic and institutional oppression that is bound by accepted cultural and societal norms. As such, the goal of this project is to present a contextualized analysis of a present day women-only institution whose missions and goals draw upon the historical underpinnings of a western-based institution, taking into consideration the elements of context and narrative. Design/methodology/approach: This study focused on an illustrative case which draws on a culturally responsive research methodology that… [Direct]
(2018). China's Soft Power Aims in South Asia: Experiences of Nepalese Students in China's Internationalization of Higher Education. ProQuest LLC, Ph.D. Dissertation, Cleveland State University. Internationalization of higher education is a major characteristic of China's higher education policy. Accordingly, the Chinese government is fervently encouraging the spread of Chinese language and culture through Confucius Institutes, student exchange programs, recruitment of international students, and international collaborations. South Asia is no exception to China's higher education outreach. Against this background, this qualitative study examined experiences of South Asian students with regard to China's higher education program(s) in relation to the explicit and implicit aims of China's soft power policy. Soft power refers to the power of attraction and co-optation, which is based on a nation's intangible resources such as "culture, ideology and institutions" (Nye, 1990). A case study approach was employed by using Nepal as the site for an in-depth investigation into academic, socio-cultural and political experiences of Nepalese students in relation to China's… [Direct]