Matching Items (12)
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- All Subjects: Education Policy
- Creators: Fischman, Gustavo
Description
This project offers an exploration of the constitution of English language learners (ELLs) in the state of Arizona as subjects of government through the discursive rationalities of rule that unfolded alongside the Flores v. Arizona case. The artifacts under consideration span the 22 years (1992-2014) of Flores' existence so far. These artifacts include published academic scholarship; Arizona's legislative documents and floor debate audio and video; court summaries, hearings, and decisions; and public opinion texts found in newspapers and online, all of which were produced in response to Flores. These artifacts lay bare but some of the discursive rationalities that have coagulated to form governable elements of the ELL student population--ways of knowing them, measuring them, regarding them, constituting them, and intervening upon them. Somehow, some way, students who do not speak English as their first language have become a social problem to be solved. ELLs are therein governed by rationalities of English language normalization, of enterprise, of entrepreneurship, of competition, of empowerment, and of success. In narrating rationalities of rule that appear alongside the Flores case, I locate some governmental strategies in how subjects conduct themselves and govern the conduct of others with the hope that seeing subject constitution as a work of thought and not a necessary reality will create a space for potentially unknown alternatives. Through this work, I'd like to make possible the hope of thinking data differently, rejecting superimposition of meaning onto artifact, being uncomfortable, uncertain, undefinitive, and surprised. With that, this work encourages potential paths to trod in the field of curriculum studies.
ContributorsThomas, Melinda Arlene Hollis (Author) / Carlson, David Lee (Thesis advisor) / Malewski, Erik (Committee member) / Fischman, Gustavo (Committee member) / Brass, Jory (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
Description
This study is a narrative inquiry into teachers' and instructional coaches' experiences of new curriculum policy implementation at the classroom and district levels. This study took place during the initial year of implementation of the third grade Common Core State Standards in Mathematics (CCSSM). Interviews were conducted with individuals directly involved in policy implementation at the classroom level, including several teachers and the school's instructional coach. Observations of the teachers' instruction and professional practice were also conducted. As an embedded researcher, I used this data to create a series of fictionalized narratives of the initial policy implementation experience. My analysis of the narratives suggests that accountability structures shaped individual's sense-making of the original policy. This sense-making process consequently influenced individuals' actions during implementation by directing them towards certain policy actions and ultimately altered how the policy unfolded in this school and district. In particular, accountability structures directed participants' attention to the technical instructional `forms' of the reform, such as the presence of written responses on assessments and how standards were distributed between grade levels, rather than the overall principled shifts in practice intended by the policy's creators.
ContributorsFrankiewicz, Megan Marie (Author) / Powers, Jeanne (Thesis advisor) / Fischman, Gustavo (Committee member) / Berliner, David (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015
Description
The Civil Rights Project estimates that Black girls are among the least likely to graduate from high school. More specifically, only about half, or 56%, of freshman Black girls graduate with their class four years later. Beyond the statistics little is known about Black girls who drop out, why they leave school and what happens to them once they are gone. This study is a grounded theory analysis of the stories eight adult Black women told about dropping out of high school with a particular focus on how dropping out affected their lives as workers, mothers and returners to education. There is one conclusion about dropping out and another about Black female identity. First, the women in my study were adolescents during the 1980s, experienced life at the intersection of Blackness, womaness, and poverty and lived in the harsh conditions of a Black American hyperghetto. Using a synthesis between intersectionality and hyperghettoization I found that the women were so determined to improve their economic and personal conditions that they took on occupations that seemed to promise freedom, wealth and safety. Because they were so focused on their new lives, their school attendance suffered as a consequence. In the second conclusion I argued that Black women draw their insights about Black female identity from two competing sources. The two sources are their lived experience and popular controlling images of Black female identity.
ContributorsGriffin, Erica Nicole (Author) / Powers, Jeanne (Thesis advisor) / Fischman, Gustavo (Committee member) / Margolis, Eric (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
Description
The Kasturba Gandhi Balika Vidyalaya (KGBV) policy scheme launched in 2004 by the Ministry of Human Resource Development, the Government of India, aims to provide secondary level education (grade 6-8) for girls residing predominantly in minority communities, the Scheduled Caste (SC), the Scheduled Tribe (ST), and the Other Backward Caste (OBC). Since its launch, the Government of India established 2,578 KGBV schools in 27 states and union territories (UTs). The present study examines the new policy and its implementation at three KGBV schools located in rural villages of Uttar Pradesh (UP), India. The purpose was to analyze the Government of India's approach to increasing education opportunity and participation for educationally disadvantaged girls using the empowerment framework developed by Deepa Narayan. Observations at three schools, interviews with teachers and staff members of the implementation agency (i.e., Mahila Samakhya (MS)), and surveys administered to 139 teachers were conducted over a four month period in 2009. Adopting creative teaching approaches and learning activities, MS creates safe learning community which is appropriate for the rural girls. MS gives special attention to nurturing the girls' potential and empowering them inside and outside the school environment through social discussion, parental involvement, rigid discipline and structure, health and hygiene education, and physical and mental training. Interviews with the state program director and coordinators identified some conflicts within government policy schemes such as the Teacher-pupil ratios guidelines as a part of the programs for the universalization of elementary education. Major challenges include a high turnover rate of teachers, a lack of female teachers, a lack of provision after Class 8, and inadequate budget for medical treatment. Recommendations include promoting active involvement of male members in the process of girls' empowerment, making MS approaches of girls' education in rural settings standardized for wider dissemination, and developing flexible and strong partnership among local agencies and government organizations for effective service delivery.
ContributorsWatanabe, Miku (Author) / Fischman, Gustavo (Thesis advisor) / Wiley, Terrence (Committee member) / Mccarty, Teresa (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
Description
The presence of language minority students in American schools is a growing phenomenon in present-day times. In the year 2008, almost 11 million school-age children spoke a language other than English at home. Educational language policy is largely influenced by the attitudes that society holds regarding the presence of language minority speakers in the community. One of the sources of these attitudes is the written press. This research aimed at identifying and analyzing the ideologies that newspapers display in connection with language minority speakers. The underlying assumption of the study was that the English language occupies a dominant position in society, thus creating a power struggle in which speakers of other languages are disenfranchised. Using critical theory as the theoretical framework enabled the study to identify and oppose the ideologies that may reproduce and perpetuate social inequalities. The methodological approach used was critical discourse analysis (CDA) which aligns with the main tenets of critical theory, among them the need to uncover hidden ideologies. The analysis of articles from English-language (The Arizona Republic and the East Valley Tribune) and Spanish-language (La Prensa Hispana) newspapers allowed for the identification of the ideologies of the written press in connection to two main hypothetical constructs: education and immigration. The analysis of the results revealed that the three newspapers of the study held specific ideologies on issues related to the education of language minority students and immigration. Whereas the East Valley Tribune showed an overarching ideology connected to the opposition of immigrant students in schools, the hegemonic position of theEnglish language, and a belligerent stance toward the immigrant community, The Arizona Republic showed a favorable attitude to both English Language Learners and immigrants, based on reasons mainly related to the economic interest of the state of Arizona. La Prensa Hispana, on the other hand, showed ideologies favorable to the immigrant community based on humanitarianism. In summary, the results confirm that newspapers hold specific ideologies and that these ideologies are reflected in the content and the manner of their information to the public.
ContributorsGonzález-Carriedo, Ricardo (Author) / Ovando, Carlos (Thesis advisor) / Wiley, Terrence (Thesis advisor) / Fischman, Gustavo (Committee member) / Mccarty, Teresa (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
Description
This study describes how the concept of “community” is framed in traditional public and charter high school guiding statements and interviews with school leaders. Guiding statements from public high schools in Arizona were analyzed and interviews were conducted with principals from traditional public schools and charter school principals. The findings suggested similarities between traditional public high schools and charter high schools in their framing of the concept of community, suggesting that schools are loosely coupled to state and federal education departments in particular, and to varying degrees at the district level: The guiding statements and high school leaders generally distinguished between the “school as community” frame inside the school and the “the local community” frame focused on the community outside of the school. Both traditional public high schools and charter schools emphasized the importance of both frames and their connections with “the local community.” Differences between traditional public schools and charter schools were observed, as schools appeared to attempt to legitimize themselves in different ways to the communities they are located in. Despite open enrollment policies leading to inter-district enrollment, traditional public schools have a mandate to primarily serve students from a specific area and were framed in the guiding statements and by school leaders as being part of and serving a geographically defined community that they have close ties to, the “school as a member of community” frame. Charter schools, on the other hand, focused on creating and serving a specific educational community characterized by shared interests, ideals, and expectations (‘school as community”) and contributing to the community that the school is located in (“school as a contributor to community”).
ContributorsSchreiber, Constantin (Author) / Fischman, Gustavo (Thesis advisor) / Anderson, Kathrine (Committee member) / Powers, Jeanne M. (Committee member) / Beardsley, Audrey (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2018
Description
In 2010, the Arizona Legislature established a performance-based diploma initiative known as Move On When Ready (MOWR). The policy relies on an education model designed to evaluate students' college and career readiness by measuring their academic ability to succeed in the first credit-bearing course in community college. Move On When Ready is a structurally oriented, qualification system that attempts to attain a relatively narrow goal: increase the number of students able to successfully perform at a college-level academic standard. By relying on a set of benchmarked assessments to measure success and failure, MOWR propagates a categorical binary. The binary establishes explicit performance criteria on a set of examinations students are required to meet in order to earn a high school qualification that, by design, certifies whether students are ready or not ready for college.
This study sought to reveal how students’ perceptions of the policy and schooling in general affect their understanding of the concept of college readiness and the college readiness binary and to identify factors that help formulate those perceptions. This interpretivist, qualitative study relied on analysis of multiple face-to-face interviews with students to better understand how they think and act within the context of Move On When Ready, paying particular attention to students from historically vulnerable minority subgroups (e.g., the Latina (a)/Hispanic sub-population) enrolled in two schools deploying the MOWR strategy.
Findings suggest that interviewed students understand little about MOWR's design, intent or implications for their future educational trajectories. Moreover, what they believe is generally misinformed, regardless of aspiration, socio-cultural background, or academic standing. School-based sources of messaging (e.g., teachers and administrators) supply the bulk of information to students about MOWR. However, in these two schools, the flow of information is constricted. In addition, the information conveyed is either distorted by message mediators or misinterpreted by the students. The data reveal that formal and informal mediators of policy messages influence students’ engagement with the policy and affect students’ capacity to play an active role in determining the policy’s effect on their educational outcomes.
This study sought to reveal how students’ perceptions of the policy and schooling in general affect their understanding of the concept of college readiness and the college readiness binary and to identify factors that help formulate those perceptions. This interpretivist, qualitative study relied on analysis of multiple face-to-face interviews with students to better understand how they think and act within the context of Move On When Ready, paying particular attention to students from historically vulnerable minority subgroups (e.g., the Latina (a)/Hispanic sub-population) enrolled in two schools deploying the MOWR strategy.
Findings suggest that interviewed students understand little about MOWR's design, intent or implications for their future educational trajectories. Moreover, what they believe is generally misinformed, regardless of aspiration, socio-cultural background, or academic standing. School-based sources of messaging (e.g., teachers and administrators) supply the bulk of information to students about MOWR. However, in these two schools, the flow of information is constricted. In addition, the information conveyed is either distorted by message mediators or misinterpreted by the students. The data reveal that formal and informal mediators of policy messages influence students’ engagement with the policy and affect students’ capacity to play an active role in determining the policy’s effect on their educational outcomes.
ContributorsSilver, Michael Greg (Author) / Berliner, David C. (Thesis advisor) / Fischman, Gustavo (Committee member) / Amrein-Beardsley, Audrey (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015
Description
Employing Queer Intersectionality, this study explored how undocuqueer activists made sense of, interacted and worked within the intersection of their LGBTQ and undocumented experience. Participants ascribed three overarching self-meanings: Vulnerability, Complexity, and Resilience. These self-meanings describe the ways participants perceived the interplay of their gender, sexuality and immigration status within the current sociopolitical context of the U.S. Recognizing their vulnerability within a state of illegibility, participants described a sense of exclusion within spaces of belonging, and wariness managing relationships with others; opting for more complex self-definitions, they resisted simplistic conceptions of identity that rendered their social locations invisible (e.g., homonormativity, heteronormativity, DREAMer); and describing themselves as resilient, they described surviving societal as well as familial rejection even when surviving seemed impossible to do so. Interacting and working within the intersection of gender, sexuality and immigration status, participants described identity negotiation and coming out as a form of resistance to institutionalized oppression, and resilience amidst simultaneous anti-immigrant, xenophobic and heterosexist power structures. Participants learned to live in multiple worlds at the same time, and embrace the multiplicity of their undocuqueer identity while seeking to bridge their communities through stories, activism and peer education. This study has implications for further understanding the way that queer politics and identity interact/ relate with various axes of inequality.
ContributorsCisneros, Jesus (Author) / Ott, Molly (Thesis advisor) / Fischman, Gustavo (Thesis advisor) / Anderson, Kate (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015
Description
In this three-article dissertation study, I examine the educational experiences of students from refugee backgrounds (SRBs) and the teachers that serve them in an urban high school in Arizona. Through a year-long ethnographic study, I attempt to contribute to the existing literature by exploring three salient issues that mediate experiences for participating teachers (n = 3) and SRBs (n = 32) in three classrooms. The participating SRBs came from a wide variety of home countries and spoke a combined 15 different home languages. In the United States, where the instruction of SRBs is generally framed by language policies, English as a second language (ESL) teachers play an crucial role in SRBs’ schooling. In the first article, I examined how teachers’ language ideologies shaped their implementation of structured English immersion (SEI), the authorized language policy in the state of Arizona. Findings describe how the teachers enacted agency to appropriate authorized language policy and create new, unauthorized policies that met the perceived needs of SRBs in their classrooms. I also examined the identity construction of SRBs in figured worlds of resettlement. Once resettled, SRBs are legally tied to their status as refugees, which may operate as a mechanism of oppression in the host country. These individuals are often stripped of all identities but one—that of being a refugee—which essentializes their vulnerability and perpetuates deficit-oriented perspectives that may limit learning opportunities for SRBs. Findings describe how participating teachers constructed SRBs’ identities and how SRBs constructed refugee-ness for themselves, highlighting the strength and resiliency of this student population. Finally, I used phenomenology as a methodological frame from which to interpret SRBs’ experiences with SEI and the policy-related barriers they described as negatively impacting their education. As refugees flee their countries of origin, educational systems in their countries of resettlement have struggled to provide quality education to their children. Themes summarizing participants’ collective experiences highlighted specific challenges related to SEI policy mandates, including SRBs’ isolation, limited opportunities to interact with English-speaking peers, and low graduation rates.
ContributorsAmbroso, Eric Patrick (Author) / Anderson, Katherine T (Thesis advisor) / Fischman, Gustavo (Committee member) / Liou, Daniel D (Committee member) / Warriner, Doris (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2021
Description
This dissertation identified ideas and prototypes framing the notion of “preschool” in two types of influential public discourses in Arizona during the 1987-2014: a) editorials, op-editorials, and opinion letters appearing in the Arizona Republic and Arizona Daily Star and b) political documents, including Senate and House Committee Meeting Notes and Comments, Gubernatorial Speeches, Executive Orders, Comments, Proclamations, Memos, and Press Releases. Seventy seven newspaper articles and 43 political documents that substantively addressed debates about preschool in Arizona were identified from an initial pool of 631 documents, of which, 568 were newspaper articles and 63 were political documents.
This dissertation argues little progress can be made in education policy by ignoring the unconscious and automatic levels of thinking, which are not easily dissuaded with rational and factual arguments. Haas and Fischman’s (2010) model for identifying prototypes provided an analytical method to capture the richness and diversity of the educational policy debate about preschool in Arizona. Prototypes captured the values, ideologies and attitudes behind the discourse of “preschool.” Prototypes provide a window into the unconscious thoughts of the authors of the editorials, op-editorials, opinion letters and political documents. This research identified five newspaper prototypes: “Last Resort,” “Community and Family,” “Evidence-Based for At-Risk Children,” “New Knowledge Community,” and “Learner of 21st Century.” It also identified four political political prototypes: ,three of them (“Community and Family,” “Evidence-Based for At-Risk Children,” “Learner of 21st Century”) were aligned with the newspaper prototypes. The fourth prototype was “Arizona Citizen.”
This research concluded that: (1) Multiple “truths” of the concept of “preschool in the newspaper and political documents existed between 1987 and 2014, (2) An inter-relational cross-over existed between the newspaper and political documents effecting the policy debate of preschool, and (3) In less than 30 years, the newspaper and political prototypes narrowed to one. Movement away from the rational policy model, and a broader use of prototypes and discourse analysis in education policymaking, is advocated.
This dissertation argues little progress can be made in education policy by ignoring the unconscious and automatic levels of thinking, which are not easily dissuaded with rational and factual arguments. Haas and Fischman’s (2010) model for identifying prototypes provided an analytical method to capture the richness and diversity of the educational policy debate about preschool in Arizona. Prototypes captured the values, ideologies and attitudes behind the discourse of “preschool.” Prototypes provide a window into the unconscious thoughts of the authors of the editorials, op-editorials, opinion letters and political documents. This research identified five newspaper prototypes: “Last Resort,” “Community and Family,” “Evidence-Based for At-Risk Children,” “New Knowledge Community,” and “Learner of 21st Century.” It also identified four political political prototypes: ,three of them (“Community and Family,” “Evidence-Based for At-Risk Children,” “Learner of 21st Century”) were aligned with the newspaper prototypes. The fourth prototype was “Arizona Citizen.”
This research concluded that: (1) Multiple “truths” of the concept of “preschool in the newspaper and political documents existed between 1987 and 2014, (2) An inter-relational cross-over existed between the newspaper and political documents effecting the policy debate of preschool, and (3) In less than 30 years, the newspaper and political prototypes narrowed to one. Movement away from the rational policy model, and a broader use of prototypes and discourse analysis in education policymaking, is advocated.
ContributorsShonteff, Alexia Christian (Author) / Fischman, Gustavo (Thesis advisor) / Schugurensky, Daniel, 1958- (Committee member) / Powers, Jeanne (Committee member) / Berliner, David (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015