This research project emerged from the researcher's work as an adult basic education instructor in a community learning center. With an inordinately high attrition rate (over seventy percent), the researcher's attention was easily focused on the small number of students who remained in the Learning Center and attended classes consistently. This group of five learners became the self-selected participants in the study. The purpose of the study was to examine the life experience of the five learners to gain insight into the nature of their motivation and commitment to learn. A series of up to six, one hour interviews were conducted with each of the participants. During the interviews, participants reflected on both past and present experience. Although it varied from person to person, discussions included childhood and family experience, prior school and educational experiences. Conclusions drawn from the research are not easily categorized. Motivating factors were different for each learner; one was motivated by a life-altering illness and another by the realities of finding employment without a high school diploma. The most salient insight gained from the research, however, was the similarity of experience across participants with issues related to dysfunctional families, personal violence, and substance abuse.

<p> The hospital setting provides an environment for patients to receive medical care, for medical professionals to provide treatment, and for medical students and residents to learn the practice of medicine through supervised patient encounters. Education provided at the point of care allows students and residents to apply knowledge and develop clinical skills needed for medical practice. The hospital environment is also a confluence of learning and work, where applied learning takes place in an integrated and simultaneous manner with work duties. This setting, referred to as the clinical learning environment (CLE), is a focus for educators, scholars, administrators, regulators and accrediting agencies to understand, measure and improve it. While several instruments have been developed to measure the CLE, they suffer from great variation in subscales and content. The purpose of this study is to deconstruct the CLE, apply theories from related fields, and frame those theories in the context of the hospital setting to develop a conceptual framework for the CLE. A systematic review of the literature and thematic synthesis of existing research about the CLE provided evidence to inform and test a learning environment framework in the clinical setting. Data from qualitative CLE assessments, the ACGME Clinical Learning Environment Review (CLER) <i>Pathways to Excellence</i>, and existing CLE measurement instruments informed these results. Findings showed that a CLE framework consists of three mediating factors: <i>learning</i>, <i>people</i>, and <i> change.</i> As the clinical setting is a unique environment for learning, the <i>people</i> dimension (as a community of practice) was found to be the most influential on learning outcomes for students. The dimension of <i>change</i> was found to be most influential from the perspective of improving organizational or work outcomes, including patient care, clinical quality and patient safety. Findings from this study provide researchers and scholars with a framework to for developing measures of clinical learning environment effectiveness, and informing practitioners of CLE components and relationships that impact both learning and organizational outcomes.</p>

<p> Race, as Delgado and Stefancic (2001) stress, is a structuring agent that greatly affects the experiences and even the well-being of individuals in US society. While American education has been considered a driver for equality, racism and race-based inequities are significant components of this institution, creating qualitatively different daily and cumulative experiences and outcomes for students based on race. Not only is it important to uncover how race and racism are manifested in educational institutions, but it is also necessary to better understand the intersecting oppressions that work alongside race to create particular experiences for brown and black students.</p><p> Using Critical Race Theory Methodology and relying on the counter-narratives of 31 students of color collected during 9 focus group meetings in the spring of 2014 at a predominately white university in the US Southeast, this study finds that these students are emotionally, academically, and socially affected by microaggressions, namely subtle and overlooked forms of racism and other intersecting oppressions in various campus settings. Sue et al (2007) defines microaggressions as &ldquo;<i>brief, everyday exchanges that send denigrating messages to people of color because they belong to a racial minority group </i>.&rdquo; Through such verbal and behavioral cues, brown and black students continually encounter white normativity and &ldquo;otherness&rdquo; throughout campus. Respondents also experience stereotype threat and reveal a social and cognitive burden of reconciling and juggling a complicated identity as <i>students</i> and <i>persons of color</i>, while also internalizing the oppressions they encounter daily. Findings indicate a need for effective training of professors in recognizing their cultural biases and stereotypes they are reinforced through their interactions and curriculum. Sincere and effective awareness efforts need to be implemented on campus for students and faculty, and should replace superficial attempts at diversity awareness that often reinforce racial and other inequities and differences.</p>

<p>This dissertation advances scholarship on how financialization ? the increasing power of financial ideologies and markets ? has transformed diverse organizations, including non-profits, state institutions, and households. In three papers, I explain how financialization has contributed to rising organizational inequality in U.S. undergraduate education education since the 1990s: 1) ?The Financialization of U.S. Higher Education? develops new quantitative measures to find large but skewed relative increases in the financial costs and returns from endowments, colleges? institutional borrowing, equity offerings by for-profit colleges, and student loan borrowing, 2) ?The Transformation of U.S. For-Profit Colleges,? uses a unique college-level and multi-wave longitudinal dataset to show how the spread of shareholder value ideology led to a new industrial-scale business model with negative consequences for student outcomes, and 3) ?The Ivory Tower Tax Haven? explains how long-standing tax exemptions have supported new endowment investment strategies that have fueled rising expenditures to maximize the prestige of the wealthiest universities. Altogether, I highlight the importance of finance ideologies in the shifting balance of resources between and within the many heterogeneous types of U.S. colleges.

<p> This dissertation seeks to explain why large segments of the Jewish community, after working with blacks for decades, often quite radically towards expanding the boundaries of citizenship at City College, rejected the legitimacy of the 1970 Open Admissions policy? While succeeding in radically transforming the structure of City College and CUNY more broadly, the Black and Puerto Rican Student Community's late 1960&rsquo;s political mobilization failed as an act of citizenship because its claims went broadly unrecognized. Rather than being remembered as political action that expanded the structure and content of citizenship, the Open Admissions crisis and policy are remembered as having destroyed a once great college. The black and Puerto Rican students who claimed an equal right to higher education were seen as unworthy of the forms of inclusion they demanded, and the radical democracy of Open Admissions was short lived, being decisively reformed in the mid 70&rsquo;s in spite of what subsequent research has shown to be remarkable success in educating thousands who previously had no hope of pursuing a college degree. This dissertation places this question in historical context in three ways. </p><p> First, it historicizes the political culture at City College showing it to be an important incubator and index of the changing political imaginaries of the long civil rights movement by analyzing the shifting and evolving publics on the college&rsquo;s campus, tracing the rise and fall of different political imaginaries. Significantly, the shifting political imaginaries across time at City College sustained different kinds of ethical claims. For instance, in the period from the 1930 to 1950, Jewish and black City College students tended to recognize each other as suffering from parallel forms of systemic racism within U.S. society. Understanding each other to be similarly excluded from a social system that benefitted a largely white-Anglo-Saxon-Protestant elite, enabled Jewish and black City College students to position themselves and each other as the normative subjects of American democracy. However, in the 1960&rsquo;s, political imaginaries at City College had come to be anchored in more individualistic idioms, and ethical claims tended to be made within individualistic terms. Within such a context, when the BPRSC revived radically democratic idioms of political claims making, they tended to be understood by many whites as pathologically illiberal. </p><p> Second, it historicizes the ways in which City College constructed &ldquo;the meritorious student&rdquo; by analyzing the social, political and institutional forces that drove the college to continuously reformulate its admissions practices across its entire history. It shows that while many actors during the Open Admissions crisis invested City College&rsquo;s definitions of merit with sacred academic legitimacy, they were in fact rarely crafted for academic reasons or according to a purely academic logic. Regardless, many ignored the fact the admissions standards were arbitrarily based, instead believing such standards were the legitimate marker of academic ability and worthiness. By examining the institutional construction of the &ldquo;meritorious&rdquo; student the dissertation shows the production of educational citizenship from above while also revealing how different actors and their standpoints were simultaneously constructed by how they were positioned by this institutional process. </p><p> Finally, the dissertation examines two significant historical events of student protest, the Knickerbocker-Davis Affair of the late 1940's and the Open Admissions Crisis of the late 1960's. In these events, City College students challenged the content of &ldquo;educational citizenship.&rdquo; These events were embedded in the shifting political culture at City College and were affected by the historically changing ways different groups, especially Jews and blacks, were positioned by the structure of educational citizenship. </p><p> While Jews had passed into whiteness by the late 1960&rsquo;s in the U.S, there was no objective reason for many to claim the privileges of whiteness by rejecting a universal policy such as Open Admissions. Yet, many Jews interpreted Open Admissions as against their personal and group interests, and rejected the ethical claim to equality made by the BPRSC. By placing the Open Admissions crisis in deep historical and institutional context, and comparing the 1969 student mobilization to earlier student actions, the dissertation shows how actors sorted different political, institutional and symbolic currents to interpret their interests and construct their identities and lines of action. </p>

<p> In the absence of state and national governments leadership addressing climate change, cities and academic institutions have been taking the initiative to provide direction toward low-carbon transitions. From the U.S. Mayor's Climate Agreement, to the American College and University President's Climate Commitment, voluntary agreements are the only U.S. initiatives to address climate change systematically over the last decade or more. These voluntary agreements constitute a social movement and innovation space, supported through networks of sustainability practice and research. The proliferation of these agreements, the increasing numbers of participating organizations, and a nascent market in businesses providing supporting resources to network members, points to an action space that is a form of transition niche, unusual in that it is not protected or supported at any higher level of governance. Using a combination of social constructivist methods of situational analysis and social network analysis, this dissertation describes and analyzes six purely voluntary university agreements and makes visible their complex interactions. It investigates these voluntary agreements and the universities that are working to transform their operations, practices and curriculums in a collaborative effort to mitigate and adapt to climate change and move toward sustainability. It demonstrates that these networks are part of a larger network of cognitive practice for sustainable low-carbon transitions.</p>

Thesis--University of Wisconsin--Madison. / Typescript. Vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 196-202).

Due to the limitations of the household registration system, rural migrants in Chinese cities are unable to access the same range of rights and benefits as urban natives. This rural-urban segregation has consequences beyond access to political and economic rights and resources; it has deepened to shape cultural and ideological perceptions. This deepening has a profound influence on the children of migrant workers who are moving to study in the city. Though nowadays children of migrant workers can study in urban public schools alongside local students, the rural-urban structural divide still exists and impedes personal and social relations between the two groups. This research investigated the difficulties and opportunities encountered by children of migrant workers after they have entered urban public schools and as the face the realities of contact with urban people. The research also discussed whether educating rural and urban students together can help children of migrant workers’ social adaptation in the city, or whether this studying together model places pressures on rural students which impede their social integration into urban communities. A ‘field-habitus’ analysis framework was used to assess rural students’ social adaptation performances in the city. Research methods including questionnaire surveys, in-depth interviews and focus groups were employed in the study. Besides rural students, urban people such as urban students and teachers whom rural students interact with in schools were investigated in the research. Moreover, to evaluate whether inclusive education in public schools has created an inclusive environment to help rural students’ social adaptation, rural students from private schools, who are receiving an exclusive education that is only for children of migrant workers, were also studied as the reference group. Based on the data analysis, the research found that rural students from public schools are generally well-adapted to their urban lives. Additionally, compared with rural students from private schools, rural students from public schools have more urbanized behaviours and lifestyles. Meanwhile, the research indicated that rural students being educated in public schools suffer from many misunderstandings and conflicts with urban students, which may bring them more pressures related to social adaptation compared with their counterparts in private schools. Rural students’ social adaptation performances were attributed to the dual functions of education, meaning that education in public schools may either improve or impede children of migrant workers’ adaptation to their lives in the city. The discussion on the role of education was mainly based on Pierre Bourdieu’s Theory of Cultural Reproduction and Inclusive Education Model. Moreover, students’ family background was also taken into consideration for a more comprehensive explanation.

<p> Racial microaggressions are present in daily classroom interactions between White teachers and students of color. White teachers, however, may be oblivious to the types of racial microaggressions they exhibit and how they perform them in their classrooms. Using autoethnographic research methods, this study seeks to expose implicit racial bias into explicit moments of teacher decision-making, transform dysconscious racism into conscious and concrete thoughts, and interpret previously unseen racist acts into seen and recognizable activities. The study asks the following research questions: (a) When and how do I permit my racial microaggressions to emerge and transgress in my classroom? And (b) In what ways, if at all, can a White teacher use autoethnography to detect and examine her racial microaggressions toward her students of color? Later, the study explores the ways in which critical self-reflexivity might promote an evolving anti-racist teaching identity. </p><p> The researcher, a classroom teacher, gathered data using daily reflective self-observations, daily reflexive field note journals, and periodic videotaping of her practice. She commenced the study with an introductory culturegram positioning her racial and cultural self-identity and concluded it with a final self-interview to complete the data-gathering. The researcher categorized each microaggressive event by form, medium, and theme using Sue&rsquo;s (2010b) &ldquo;Taxonomy of Microaggressions.&rdquo; Findings reveal (a) uninterrogated Whiteness dominates all aspects of the researcher&rsquo;s classroom, extending from her teaching to her White students&rsquo; behaviors and (b) transitional time, non-academic teacher talk, and other unstructured time remain especially hazardous for students of color in terms of receiving teacher-perpetuated racial microaggressions.</p><p>

<p> Post-secondary student retention and persistence is on the minds of professionals at various higher learning institutions due to the disparities in educational attainment. These disparities may lead to inhibited social mobility, and lack of cultural and social capital. This study examined what factors Southern Connecticut State University sophomore students perceived as aiding or impeding their degree path. It questioned how underrepresented students shaped their perception on their educational attainment and how this compares to the existing research and literature on the success practices of underrepresented students in higher education. The study was conducted using open-ended semi-structured interview questions administered to second year sophomore students at Southern Connecticut State University. Specifically, they were underrepresented students defined as being low-income, racial minority, and first-generation students. This study aimed to explore the narrative of underrepresented students by exploring why college access doesn&rsquo;t necessarily result in college completion. </p><p>