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Browsing by Author "Kyser, Tiffany S."
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Item Folked, Funked, Punked: How Feminist Performance Poetry Creates Havens for Activism and Change(2010-07-19T18:37:40Z) Kyser, Tiffany S.; Kovacik, Karen, 1959-; Brand, Peggy Zeglin; Henry, Ronda C.My thesis examines the ways in which female performance poets deliver their messages and how those messages inspire, affirm, and encourage their audiences. From the traditions of outsider art—Beat poetry, feminist poetry, jazz, folk, punk, and rap—feminist performance poets choose the public sphere as a platform to witness to social injustices. In naming inequality, these poets challenge patriarchal foundations of gender roles, question academia’s criteria as to what constitutes “good” poetry, and expose social injustices. In this thesis, I examine the work of feminist performance poets Ani Difranco, Alix Olson, Andrea Gibson, Ursula Rucker, and Jessica Care Moore as examples of a new way of reading. Their work is significant in that they continue the tradition of feminist poetry by challenging the patriarchal status quo through a re-socializing and accessible style. Their work allows audiences to commune together in shared experience and promotes social change by demystifying cultural norms and gender codes in order to expose the exclusivity in patriarchal ideologies. These poets draw on a woman-centered spirituality, subvert misogynistic feminine archetypes, pay homage to ancestors and foremothers, and address issues of the body—naming oppression yet making room for pleasure.Item Make me a new foundation, make me a new house: how education reformers can capitalize on current portfolio management model implementations as a viable and equitable urban education reform strategy(2016-05-24) Kyser, Tiffany S.; Scheurich, James Joseph; Henry Anthony, Ronda C.; Helfenbein, Robert J., Jr.; Hong, YoungbokThe purpose of this research is to explore if policy makers and implementers shift and/or change their understandings of the portfolio management model (PMM) when engaged in equity-oriented transformative professional learning. The portfolio approach to urban education, at present, is being implemented or considered by over one third of the US. There are 20 states, 40 cities, and the District of Columbia that are pursuing and/or implementing the portfolio management model (PMM). This research study examines how systemic, socio-political, socio-historical, and interconnected policy networks have resulted in inequity. Furthermore, this study focuses on how policy makers and implementers engage with one another and their context(s) while learning about educational equity. This occurred via facilitating transformative professional learning opportunities aimed to illicit critical self-awareness, reflection, and examination of perhaps the more pernicious underpinnings of authentic decision and choice making in US education reform. The study also explores the ways in which institutional context and the research design itself may have impacted and/or impeded shifts in learning. The study’s theoretical frameworks guided the decision to use critical qualitative inquiry and narrative inquiry to investigate the raced, gendered, sexed, and classed experiences of policy makers and implementers, and further, implications for policy implementation regarding other forms of othering such as ableism, linguicism, ageism, etc. Thematic analysis of the data, analyzed using critical frameworks, were articulated as interspliced data vignettes. Findings suggest that learning is social and that designed experiences around educational equity can provide ways in which policy makers and implementers can formally intervene in their own practices of developing and/or cultivating critical consciousness, as well as decision-making toward PMM adoption and implementation in their respective contexts. Participant’s narratives both challenge and perpetuate dominant, historical approaches of urban education reform adoption and implementation, and exposes how US urban education policy arenas have not systemically centered critical consciousness, resulting in equity-oriented policies being interpreted and implemented in inequitable ways. Findings from this study guide future research and practice that focuses on urban education policy creation, adoption, and implementation.