Education School Theses and Dissertations

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Are the racial disparities in school discipline the result of or a function of systemic racism mediated by educators' dispositions?
(2015-08-28) Williams, Nathaniel Andrew; Scheurich, James Joseph; Hughes, Robin Lee; Skiba, Russell; Murtadha, Khaula H.
With over 40 years of research on the well-documented issue of racial disparities in school discipline, scholars have begun to explore a plethora of plausible causalities for this phenomenon. Recent literature on the causal agents have centered on cultural differences and/or racial prejudices held by educators. Building from this emerging logic, this dissertation specifically focused on the disposition (e.g. enduring traits, character type, mentality, and temperament) of educators and its influence, if any, on discipline-related outcomes. Additionally, this exploratory study sought to build a conceptual map for future research to explore how educators' dispositions may act as conduits between systemic racism and the historic racial disparities in discipline-related outcomes. Through an intensive, multiyear embedded case study of four middle schools with both high and low rates of racial disproportionality in school discipline and with the creation and use of the Four Domains, this dissertation explored whether discipline-related outcomes are the result of systemic racism mediated by educators' dispositions. Findings from the analysis suggested the existence of shared characteristics among the dispositions of those categorized as high and low referring. Specific to those findings, trends within low referring teachers suggested that low referring teachers maintain high and consistent expectations of student behavior, but allowed for flexibility in how their discipline response was mediated out among their students. Despite a deferred approach within discipline response, low referring teachers were consistent and did not show favoritism. On the contrary, high referring teachers were inconsistent with their responses and demonstrated biases in actions and beliefs. Accordingly, it was found that high referring teachers held racially deficit beliefs about Black students and their families. Additionally, high referring teachers were more represented by the Four Domains in comparison to lower referring teachers. As a result, findings from the Four Domains support the existence of a causal link among systemic racism, higher referring teachers, and racial disparities in school discipline. In particular, it was found that classroom teachers engage in and hold racially deficit views of Blacks and these same teachers disproportionately refer Black students for out-of-school suspension.
Toward relevant immigrant pedagogy: teacher and student interactions in an urban classroom
(2016-07-11) Adams, Benedict Lazarus; Berghoff, Beth; Seybold, Joy; Keller, Melissa; Scribner, Samantha M. Paredes
One in five children in schools today are from immigrant families and speak a language other than English. Research reveals many teachers in urban schools feel inadequately prepared to meet the unique needs of these students. Teachers lack research- based knowledge about culturally relevant teaching and differentiated instructional strategies that benefit all learners. They do not understand issues such as ethnicity, poverty, racism, cultural and linguistic identities, and immigration. Few studies have described the nature of the learning experiences of English Language Learners (ELLs) and immigrants in urban high schools. Using identity, sociocultural, and self-efficacy conceptual frameworks (relevant immigrant pedagogy), this qualitative case study focused on classroom interactions and instructional efforts of two teachers in an English 10 class in an urban high school. The researcher observed class activities, took field notes, interviewed teachers and students, collected instructional planning documents, and photographed student artifacts and interactions. One teacher in the classroom had an English as a Second Language (ESL) certification and extensive professional development to increase her competency as a teacher of immigrants. The other teacher had English Language Arts certification. Findings indicated that relevant immigrant pedagogy was an expansive instructional framework which transformed ELLs and immigrants to grow in their construction of self and identity, self-efficacy, sociocultural consciousness, and academic rigor within a period of five months despite the prescriptive curriculum from vii the district in a restricted environment. The urban teachers displayed skills, zeal, and commitment to building a community of learners of all ability levels in class and bridged the gaps between immigrants and non-immigrants. All students grew together in their learning and socio emotional experiences and became advocates and helpers for one another, not competitors. The conclusions suggest that it is possible to improve the educational programs for immigrant students and English Language Learners through well-developed research-based instruction, and proposes a model for effective urban teacher education.
Reframing parental involvement of black parents: black parental protectionism
(2016-05-11) Moultrie, Jada; Scheurich, James Joseph; Lopez, Gerardo; Mutegi, Jomo; Scribner, Samantha; Waterhouse, Carlton
In 1787, Prince Hall, a Revolutionary War veteran, community leader, and Black parent, petitioned the Massachusetts legislature on behalf of Black children demanding a separate “African” school. Hall claimed that Black children were met with continuous hostility and suffered maltreatment when attending White controlled schools. Many have documented similar claims and actions by Black parents throughout history. These experiences present a consistent insidious counter-narrative of parental involvement challenging the notion of race neutral schools but congruently demonstrate a racial phenomenon in the purview of parental involvement that is undertheorized. Considering these experiences, my central research question was, how is one involved as a Black parent in their child’s education? Among 16 sets of Black parents, this study explored the relationship between race, racism, parental involvement using critical race theory (CRT), and critical qualitative research methods. Findings indicate that Black parental involvement included the consideration of how race and racism in schools may impact, at the very least, their children’s academic achievement, which led to two means of protection of their children from anticipated or experienced school related racism; racial socialization, which was chiefly exercised as involvement at the home level, and racial vigilance, which seemed to be a pervasive form of involvement at the school and home level. I consider the totality of these parental involvement means, Black parental protectionism drawing from Mazama and Lundy conception of racial protectionism. This finding should reframe our understanding of parental involvement but the implications of Black parent protectionism suggest that Black children need protection from racist institutions. When considering the treatment of Black children in White dominated schools over the last four centuries, perhaps Black parents have been their children’s only saving grace to escape the continuous racial maltreatment in schools through time. Instead of falling into traditional research paradigms, which typically relate involvement to achievement, this study concludes with questioning if Black children can receive an optimal education in a pervasive system of racism in schools regardless of Black parental protectionism.
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, Youngbok
The 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.
My life is in their hands: Latina adolescent border-crossings, becoming in the shadows, and mental health in schools
(2016-06-22) Elfreich, Alycia Marie; Thompson, Chalmer; Dennis, Barbara; Helfenbein, Robert; Medina, Monica
This project endeavors to move beyond traditional conceptualizations of voice in conventional qualitative research and instead focuses on embodied, liminal experiences of Latina adolescents, the intersections of identity, gender, spirituality, ethnicity, etc., how these junctures broadly impact mental health, and more specifically, how we perceive mental health and well-being within educational institutions. The study draws upon an intervention pilot study that sought to increase resiliency and self-mastery in Latino adolescents while simultaneously reducing their depressive symptoms. However, this project aims to take these findings and focus upon the complex and multiple factors that influence depression, including citizenship status, trauma in crossing the border from Mexico into the United States, and racial and gendered oppression specific to the experiences of Latina adolescent immigrants. Thus, this project explores ways in which four Latina adolescents make sense of their lived experiences through a critical feminist theoretical framework that integrates post/anti colonial feminism. The framework provides a nuanced conceptualization of power, oppression, and marginalization that creates opportunities to explore alternative notions of thinking that encourages new paths to transform interdisciplinary, university, community, and family relationships surrounding mental health concerns within educational institutions. Finally, theory, research, epistemology, and ontology are interwoven to inform a methodology that is fluid, interchanging, and always becoming.
Controversy and counternarrative in the social studies
(2017-05-12) Shaver, Erik James; Rogan, Patricia; Medina, Monica; Keller, Deb; Engebretson, Kathryn; Pike, Gary
This qualitative study sought to explore reasons why social studies teachers chose to teach controversial issues and counternarratives in their classroom in an era where doing so is dangerous for teachers and their job security, and how they go about doing so in their classrooms. The theoretical framework of this study encompassed the notion that the five selected teachers embodied and practiced elements of Foucauldian parrhēsía, which is teaching the truth despite the risk of doing so, despite not having explicit knowledge of this particular philosophy, and utilized counternarratives and controversial issues as a means of challenging dominant social norms to bring about a more just and equitable society. The existing literature suggests that their pre-service teacher education provided little influence on their decisions, despite the positive historical, personal, and democratic outcomes from teaching a curriculum exploring controversial issues and counternarratives. Five teachers were recommended for this study due to their reputations for teaching controversial issues and counternarratives in their social studies classrooms. After interviewing and observing these teachers, a number of interesting findings came to light, including a list of best practices for how to teach controversial issues in the classroom, reasons why the teachers taught controversial issues in the classroom, structures of support and barriers for teaching a critical social studies curriculum, and differences between those who believed they taught controversial issues in their classroom but did not, and those who actually did.
Gender, subjectivity, and the material-discursive school entanglement
(2018-04-04) Robbins, Kirsten Rose; Pike, Gary; Thorius, Kathleen King; Dennis, Barbara; Engebretson, Kathryn; Medina, Monica
New materialist scholars argue that schools are important material-discursive entanglements for engendering, racializing, and subjectivizing human subjects. Despite this claim, there is a dearth of research that examines the perceptions that students have of the messages they are sent from schools about how to perform their gendered subjectivities in schools, particularly from a material feminist framework. This study used native photography through a post qualitative methodological framework to explore the messages that students’ receive from their school related to subjectivity and gender. This study took seriously both the voices and perceptions of the participants and the significance of the material environment of the school. Within the course of the research study, students both resisted and conformed to messages the school sent them about their subjectivities. Students conformed to many of the dominant ideas about gender, including privileging maleness. Students resisted the school’s control of their bodies, as well as the school’s attempts at rendering the student population homogenous. The students, though aware that there were differences in the way the school treated them based in gender and other identity markers, struggled to articulate those differences because the school sent a false message of equality. This false message of equality performed an erasure of their experiences of differences and denied them the language they needed to discuss the inequities they experienced. The results of the analysis contribute to conversations about the ways in which school environments contribute to narratives about identity, particularly as it relates to gender. Additionally, the way in which this post qualitative study unfolded has implications for research, including the importance of emergent design. Finally, the tensions that exist in using the new materialisms as a framework when studying schools led me to question the benefits of choosing to decenter humans in this type of research.
Because I Am Human: Centering Black Women with Dis/abilities in Transition Planning from High School to College
(2019-02) Cannon, Mercedes Adell; Thorius, Kathleen; Thompson, Chalmer; Mutegi, Jomo; Rogan, Patricia; Skelton, Seena
There is a dearth of literature about post-secondary transition experiences of Black women with dis/abilities (BWD). In this qualitative study, I explore transition experiences of five post-secondary BWD from high school to college in order to privilege her chronicles and narratives as knowledge. In addition, two urban public high school transition coordinators (TC) participated in the study. Three inquiries guided my dissertation: (1) features of educational experiences narrated by BWD, (2) features of transition services provided to students with dis/abilities, including roles of and approaches as described by the TCs, and (3) how BWD narratives may be leveraged to critique and extend transition services as the TCs described them. I engaged in three semi-structured interviews with six of the seven participants (one interview with the seventh). I drew from Disability Studies/Disability Studies in Education (DSE), Critical Race Theory, and Womanist/Black Feminist Theory and their shared tenets of voice and counternarratives and concepts of social construction and falsification of consciousness to analyze the narratives of BWD participants. I drew from the DS/DSE tenet of interlocking systems of oppression, DisCrit tenet three, race and ability, and constructs of Inputs and Outcomes in work on Modeling Transition Education to analyze the TCs’ narratives and in connection to the narratives of the BWD. Across both sets of participants, three themes in the form of Truths emerged; they were terrible and sticky experiences of racial/dis/ability oppression for the BWDs and, imposing of whiteness and normalization within the transition education practices described by the TCs. For the BWD, those terrible and sticky truths took three forms: (a) Pathologization; (b) Disablement; and (c) Exclusion. Another type of truth in the BWD’s narratives, however, was Subverted Truths: (re)defined identities and radical love, (re)placed competence and knowledge, and (revalued sisterhood and community, the ways of pushing back and resisting the Truths and their effects. I discuss implications for BWD post-secondary transition-planning-and-programming theory, research, policy, practice, praxis, and spirituality.
Voices of My Elders: Forgotten Place, Invisible People - A Phenomenological Exploration of the Experiences of African Americans Living in the Rural Southern Black Belt During the Jim Crow Era
(2019-10) Washington, DiAnna; Scheurich, James; Eckes, Suzanne; Medina, Monica; Thompson, Chalmer
The systemic racism imposed on the lives and education aspiration of six of my elders who stayed in the racist South during the ferociously deleterious era of Jim Crow is the focus of this phenomenological critical race study. These stories centered the voices of my elders as powerful weapons to expose white supremacy and the psychophysiological trauma imposed upon my elders. These stories were about the lives, lived experiences, and educational trials and triumphs of six of my Brown and Black hue American elders whose ancestry was born out of slavery and delivered into the vicious Jim Crow era. My work was grounded in Phenomenological Critical Race Theory. Critical Race Theory validates my elders’ narratives and their narratives fortify the tenets of CRT. For you see, racism was an everyday phenomenon my elders experienced as residents of rural Southern America. My elders came to understand “what” they were, Black, by understanding “who” they were not, White. Furthermore, this qualitative phenomenological critical race study was guided by three inquiries, what experiences have you had with Jim Crow; how or in what ways did your experiences with Jim Crow affect your education; and how or in what ways did your experience with Jim Crow affect your life? These inquiries produced four intersecting themes, 1) the survival of racism as part of everyday life, 2) economic exploitation of Black labor, 3) denial of equitable education, and 4) the sociopolitical construction of racial identity, and three significant findings, racist place, sociopolitical oppression, and inequitable education.
Toward Gaining Knowledge of Young Adult Black Males' Perceptions of Political Activism
(2019-10) Crayton, Troy A.; Maxcy, Brendan; Nguyen, Thu Suong; Blackmon, Sha' Kema; Seybold, Peter
There is a gap in our knowledge and understanding of perceptions of political activities, including the influence of education policies, by young adult Black males. There is a gap in our understanding of the formation of perceptions and attitudes. The purpose of this study is to gain a perspective of the perceptions of young adult Black male students regarding civic and political activism. By increasing our knowledge of Black students’ experiences and motivations, in relation to perception development, there could be lived experience-based pedagogy that encourages Black young adults to engage politically in a greater proportion. Additionally, such knowledge could provide insight toward being enabled to effectively react to perceived injustices and intolerant outcomes.

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