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- Genre: Masters Thesis
Description
Mexico City has an ongoing air pollution issue that negatively affects its citizens and surroundings with current structural disconnections preventing the city from improving its overall air quality. Thematic methodological analysis reveals current obstacles and barriers, as well as variables contributing to this persistent problem. A historical background reveals current programs and policies implemented to improve Mexico’s City air quality. Mexico City’s current systems, infrastructure, and policies are inadequate and ineffective. There is a lack of appropriate regulation on other modes of transportation, and the current government system fails to identify how the class disparity in the city and lack of adequate education are contributing to this ongoing problem. Education and adequate public awareness can potentially aid the fight against air pollution in the Metropolitan City.
ContributorsGarcia, Lucero (Author) / Duarte, Marisa E. (Thesis advisor) / Arzubiaga, Angela (Committee member) / Richter, Jennifer (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2018
Description
This thesis study describes English Language Learner (ELL) participation practices in a summer English language development (ELD) middle school classroom in a public school district in Arizona. The purpose of the study was to document Mexican immigrant and Mexican American English learners' language experiences in a prescriptive ELD program in relation to the social, historical and cultural context. The study utilizes a sociocultural framework and critical language awareness concepts as well as qualitative interpretive inquiry to answer the following research questions: What is the nature of ELL participation during language lessons? That is, what are the common participation practices in the classroom? What social or cultural values or norms are evident in the classroom talk during language lessons? That is, in what ways do participants use language for social purposes? And, what is the cultural model of ELD evident in the classroom language practices? Data collection and analyses consisted of close examination of ELL participation within official language lessons as well as the social uses of language in the classroom. Analysis of classroom discourse practices revealed that ELL participation was heavily controlled within the common Initiation-Response-Evaluation pattern and that the students were limited to repetition and recitation responses. Further, analysis of discourse content demonstrated that classroom participants used language for social purposes in the classroom, most often using regulatory, decontextualized and resistance language. The findings revealed a cultural model of constrained ELD language practices that can be considered a pedagogy of subtractive assimilation.
ContributorsMartinez, Theresa (Author) / Powers, Jeanne M. (Thesis advisor) / Arias, Beatriz (Committee member) / Arzubiaga, Angela (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2010
Description
The primary question driving this research regards how individuals in mixed-citizenship couples employ different strategies and/or tactics to access and maintain valid immigration status during processes of Adjustment of Status through marriage in the United States. A dominant narrative prevails in the US that immigration through marriage to a citizen confers immediate or an easy pathway to citizenship. For roughly two-hundred thousand immigrant spouses that currently navigate adjustment annually, however, this narrative falls short of and obscures the reality of adjustment processes. There is a lack of focused academic study to help contribute to more accurate public understandings of what these realities are. To combat this false narrative and help fill a gap in research, this work examines how such dominant ideology stems from historic legal inequality and hegemonic discourse, reified through Enlightenment-centric thinking and becoming tangled with state power through Foucault’s conception of the body politic. The day-to-day actions, interactions, and transactions within the body politic and adjustment processes are then put into conversation with De Certeau’s strategies and tactics, providing a means for accentuating how individuals, society, and the state enact specific practices to support or resist Foucauldian technologies of oppression and control. As an exploratory case-study, this work engages four individual partners from two mixed citizenship marriages in a series of three semi-structured, in-depth phenomenological interviews each. Reporting is centered on participant’s histories and adjustment narratives, told through their own voices. Evidence supports that easy pathway public narratives are inaccurate, that adjustment processes assert state power on citizen petitioners and migrant spouses alike, but in different ways, and that they in turn enact complicated and intertwined strategies and tactics to achieve adjustment and resist the oppressive power of the state that is carried through adjustment processes.
ContributorsFurnish, Daniel Robert (Author) / Arzubiaga, Angela (Thesis advisor) / Lara-Valencia, Francisco (Committee member) / Broberg, Gregory (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2022
Description
This qualitative exploratory study examined how young people from refugee backgrounds were formulating thoughts on a sense of belonging, and social change through activism, during their participation in the Making Worcester Home youth participatory action research (YPAR) project. Nineteen young people from refugee backgrounds participated in the project, sixteen were in high school, and three were first-year college students. The study employed a narrative perspective premised on a postmodern social constructivist model. This study gathered data from students' class journal entries, transcriptions from interviews conducted by the students, class discussions, interview questions for their YPAR projects, and final project presentations. Inductive content analysis was used to code the data, and emerging themes were recorded. Six themes described the participants' formulation of a sense of belonging, 1) spatial belonging - relationship to place, 2) intersectionality and social location, 3) boundaries - inclusion and exclusion, 4) dual identities - ethnic, 5) feeling supported and well resourced, and 6) belonging through activism and community change. The emerging themes are discussed in context to existing migration and transdisciplinary scholarship on belonging to determine how new thoughts on newcomer belonging might be formulated. The study highlights several critical considerations that educational institutions, community-based organizations, and cities can adopt to support young people from refugee backgrounds to achieve a sense of belonging.
ContributorsMortley, Craig Merrick (Author) / Arzubiaga, Angela (Thesis advisor) / Flores-González, Nilda (Committee member) / Lopez, Vera (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2022
Description
The United States is currently the world's largest reception and placement country of the nearly 22 million refugees worldwide. Of the numbers of refugees resettled, almost half of them are under the age of 18 and are arriving in American schools having experienced trauma, stress, and limited education during the conflict in their home country. Teacher experiences with refugee students can have a profound effect on the way refugee children feel they are received in the school community. Drawing on previous studies that emphasize the challenges that refugee students face, this thesis looks at the training that teachers receive that prepares them to work with refugee students in public schools in Maricopa County, Arizona. Through a review of the literature and data collected from teacher and former refugee student interviews, this research explores what teachers know and need to know to teach refugee students successfully. Innovative practices that teachers employ are also highlighted, and recommendations for further research, policy, and practice are provided.
ContributorsHenderson, Joanna (Author) / Schugurensky, Daniel, 1958- (Thesis advisor) / Arzubiaga, Angela (Thesis advisor) / Androff, David (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2017