Matching Items (17)
Description
The purpose of this study was to understand how community members within a segregated school district approached racial inequities. I conducted a ¬nineteen-month-long ethnography using a critical Participatory Action Research (PAR) approach to explore how members in a community activist group called Eliminate Racism interacted and worked with school district officials. My goal was to identify and examine how community members addressed racially inequitable policies and practices in the Midwestern city of Pinecreek (pseudonym) in the context of a school district that had undergone two school desegregation lawsuits. I conducted 32 interviews with 24 individuals, including teachers and school leaders, parents, and community members.
This study answers three research questions: (1) What strategies did the community activist group use to influence local education policy for addressing racism in the schools? (2) How did community participation influence local education policy? (3) What were the motivating factors for individuals’ involvement in issues of local school segregation? To answer these questions, I used concepts from Critical Race Theory and Social Capital Theory. I employ Putnam’s and Putnam and Campbell’s social capital, Warren’s civic participation, Bonilla-Silva’s color-blind racism, Yosso’s community cultural wealth and religio-civics. My analysis shows that the community group used the social capital and community cultural wealth of its members to create partnerships with district officials. Although Eliminate Racism did not meet its goals, it established itself as a legitimate organization within the community, successfully drawing together residents throughout the city to bring attention to racism in the schools.
The study’s results encourage school and district leaders to constantly bring race to the forefront of their decision-making processes and to question how policy implementation affects minoritized students. This research also suggests that strategies from this community group can be adopted or avoided by other antiracist groups undertaking similar work. Finally, it provides an example of how to employ critical PAR methods into ethnography, as it notes the ways that researcher positionality and status can be leveraged by community groups to support the legitimacy of their mission and work.
This study answers three research questions: (1) What strategies did the community activist group use to influence local education policy for addressing racism in the schools? (2) How did community participation influence local education policy? (3) What were the motivating factors for individuals’ involvement in issues of local school segregation? To answer these questions, I used concepts from Critical Race Theory and Social Capital Theory. I employ Putnam’s and Putnam and Campbell’s social capital, Warren’s civic participation, Bonilla-Silva’s color-blind racism, Yosso’s community cultural wealth and religio-civics. My analysis shows that the community group used the social capital and community cultural wealth of its members to create partnerships with district officials. Although Eliminate Racism did not meet its goals, it established itself as a legitimate organization within the community, successfully drawing together residents throughout the city to bring attention to racism in the schools.
The study’s results encourage school and district leaders to constantly bring race to the forefront of their decision-making processes and to question how policy implementation affects minoritized students. This research also suggests that strategies from this community group can be adopted or avoided by other antiracist groups undertaking similar work. Finally, it provides an example of how to employ critical PAR methods into ethnography, as it notes the ways that researcher positionality and status can be leveraged by community groups to support the legitimacy of their mission and work.
ContributorsWinn, Kevin (Author) / Fischman, Gustavo E (Thesis advisor) / Berliner, David C. (Committee member) / Powers, Jeanne M. (Committee member) / Sampson, Carrie (Committee member) / Bebout, Lee (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2020
Description
The purpose of the project was to explore the extent to which an asynchronous online professional development (PD) model focusing on instructor presence would improve feedback and interactions with students. The study is grounded in Community of Inquiry theory, which situates learning at the intersection of teaching presence, social presence and cognitive presence. The study aimed to improve student success by empowering instructors to integrate engaging strategies and technology tools into fully online courses. The participants were 4 higher education instructors teaching in fully online degree programs delivered to 160-200 undergraduate students. For eight weeks the 4 instructors participated in the PD. The goals of the PD were to learn strategies for improving instructor presence and integrating student engagement opportunities in a collaborative online format. Data was collected from pre- and post-intervention offerings of the instructors’ courses to determine the impact of participation in the PD. Results suggest that the PD model was an effective intervention to increase presence and engagement. Presence and engagement were found to have increased in participants’ courses. Interactive video was found to serve multiple purposes including increasing instructor presence and student engagement, facilitating feedback between instructors and students, and elevating the level of cognitive presence of students. As a result, instructors and students both indicated a perception of improved interactions and feedback.
ContributorsRomanoski, Matthew Peter (Author) / Fischman, Gustavo E (Thesis advisor) / Wolf, Leigh (Committee member) / Farmakis, Heather (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2020
Description
This dissertation details an action research study designed to teach engineering students enrolled in a First Year Composition course understand and learn to use effective conventions of written communication. Over the course of one semester, students participated in an intervention that included embodied and constructive pedagogical practices within a rhetorical framework. The theoretical perspectives include Martha Kolln’s rhetorical grammar framework, embodied cognition, and Chi’s ICAP hypothesis. The study was conducted using an explanatory multi-methodological approach. The majority of students demonstrated that in their post-intervention writing samples, their ability to use effective conventions had improved. Over the course of the study, students’ attitudes about writing improved as did their self-efficacy about their writing ability.
ContributorsEllsworth, Allison Jane Troe (Author) / Fischman, Gustavo E (Thesis advisor) / Wolf, Leigh (Committee member) / Brumberger, Eva (Committee member) / Kellam, Nadia (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2020
Description
The lasting benefits of high-quality early childhood programs are widely understood. These benefits and the well-documented return on investments are among the factors that have shaped executives at philanthropic foundations’ grant making in support of early childhood programs, policies, and research in the United States. Yet little is known about the investments they are making in the field of early childhood. Drawing from a conceptual framework that combines types of philanthropic investment with the concepts of accountability and transparency, I conducted a comparative case study of the Buffett Early Childhood Fund, George Kaiser Family Foundation, and Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, all of which began financially supporting early childhood between 2000 and 2005. I attempted to understand how and why philanthropic foundations and pooled funding organizations have supported early childhood from the late 1990s through 2018.
Based on my analysis of 32 semi-structured interviews with current and former early childhood philanthropic foundation, pooled funding, and operating organization executives, I found that each foundation independently determines their investment decision processes and invests a disparate amount of money in early childhood. In addition, philanthropic foundations gain programmatic and legislative power by leveraging funds and partnering with additional foundations and businesses. With the inclusion of early childhood programs in K-12 education systems and the decrease in national and state education funding from those same budgets, it is critical to understand how philanthropic foundations have supported early childhood education and some of the implications of their support both locally and nationally.
Based on my analysis of 32 semi-structured interviews with current and former early childhood philanthropic foundation, pooled funding, and operating organization executives, I found that each foundation independently determines their investment decision processes and invests a disparate amount of money in early childhood. In addition, philanthropic foundations gain programmatic and legislative power by leveraging funds and partnering with additional foundations and businesses. With the inclusion of early childhood programs in K-12 education systems and the decrease in national and state education funding from those same budgets, it is critical to understand how philanthropic foundations have supported early childhood education and some of the implications of their support both locally and nationally.
ContributorsChapman, Kathryn Patricia (Author) / Powers, Jeanne M. (Thesis advisor) / Dorn, Sherman J (Committee member) / Fischman, Gustavo E (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2019
Description
Arizona's English Language Development Model (ELD Model) is intended to increase and accelerate the learning of English by English Language Learners (ELLs), so that the students can then be ready, when they know the English language, to learn the other academic subjects together with their English speaking peers. This model is part of a response to comply with the Flores Consent Order to improve services for ELLs in Arizona public schools. Whether or not it actually has improved instruction for ELLs has been the subject of much debate and, in 2012, after four years of the requirement to use Arizona's ELD Model, the ELL students who were identified as reclassified for the six districts in the study did not pass the Arizona's Instrument to Measure Standards (AIMS) test. The model's requirement to separate students who are not proficient from students who are proficient, the assessment used for identification of ELLs, and the Structured English Immersion four hours of English only instruction are at the nexus of the controversy, as the courts accepted the separate four hour SEI portion of the model for instruction as sufficient to meet the needs of ELLs in Arizona (Garcia, 2011, Martinez, 2012, Lawton, 2012, Lillie, 2012). This study examines student achievement in Reading and Math as measured by AIMS standards-based tests in six urban K-8 public school districts between 2007-2012. This period was selected to cover two years before and four years after the ELD model was required. Although the numbers of ELLs have decreased for the State and for the six urban elementary districts since the advent of the Arizona ELD Model, the reclassified ELL subgroup in the studied districts did not pass the AIMS for all the years in the study. Based on those results, this study concludes with the following recommendations. First, to study the coming changes in the language assessments and their impact on ELLs' student achievement in broad and comprehensive ways; second, to implement a model change allowing school districts to support their ELLs in their first language; and, finally, to establish programs that will allow ELLs full access to study with their English speaking peers.
ContributorsRoa, Myriam (Author) / Fischman, Gustavo E (Thesis advisor) / Lawton, Stephen B. (Committee member) / Diaz, René X (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
Description
Despite the technical competence of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) graduates of the Department of Computer Science (DCS) at the University of Guyana, stakeholders’ perception generally holds that they lack affective and behavioural (soft) skills. These soft skills are expected of them to lead and champion technological change in Guyana. This dissertation addresses the question of what is understood about, and how meaning and sense are made of, the concept of ‘ICT graduate employability’, in the context of the local public sector, by the key stakeholders: employers (government), and alumni (graduates) and lecturers (educators) of the DCS. On account of the cyclic, incremental, reflective nature of Action Research (AR) and its tenet of integrating theory with practice, an AR project was undertaken to develop a deep local understanding about ICT graduate employability. This understanding has implications for how ICT graduates are prepared as a function of their programme of study in the DCS and how their performance and careers are managed in the public sector. The research comprised one reconnaissance study (Cycle 0), an intervention-based study (Cycle 1), and a qualitative study (Cycle 2). The focus and direction of Cycle 2 were refined by insights garnered from Cycles 0 and 1. Cycle 2 employed surveys, interviews, and focus groups to elicit the perceptions, views, opinions, experiences, values, and framing ideas and beliefs of a sample of forty participants. Thematic analysis was used to identify patterns and develop themes in the process of analysing and interpreting the data. The findings unearthed a local definition of ICT graduate employability; revealed implications of environmental factors in the public sector for the psychological safety and resilience of ICT graduates; and informed recommendations for a locally relevant ICT graduate education ecosystem.
ContributorsWilliams, Malcolm Maxwell (Author) / Fischman, Gustavo E (Thesis advisor) / Basile, Carole G (Committee member) / Thomas, Troy D (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2023
Description
Although an integral part of the pedagogical process is the evaluation of students, questions remain about the purpose and characteristics of effective assessments. Assessments should benefit both the instructor and the student, but this could be a challenge in large classes, such as the English service courses offered at the University of Guyana (UG), which are compulsory courses offered to over 2,000 first year students annually. However, the transition to online delivery of these courses because of the Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic has offered new opportunities for innovation in relation to course assessments. Consequently, this Action Research study was undertaken with the intention of improving the methods of assessment in the course, Introduction to the Use of English (ENG 1105), one of the three English service courses currently offered at UG.Multiple methods of data collection, including surveys, and semi-structured interviews, observations and analyses were used to determine how the assessment strategies used in the course helped develop academic self-efficacy in students and prepare them for other courses in their programs of study. The findings from the first two cycles of this study suggest that while the current assessment methods used in the course are beneficial to both lecturers and students, there is a need to adjust aspects of the assessments so students benefit from assessments that better align with other courses in their programs, as well as sharpen their English language skills. The third cycle captures the impact that the use of an innovation-an ungraded portfolio-had on student learning and suggests it should become a regular feature in the English service courses.
ContributorsMc Gowan, Mark Alastair (Author) / Thompson, Nicole L (Thesis advisor) / Fischman, Gustavo E (Committee member) / Wolf, Leigh G (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2023