<p> Elementary teachers educating both students with and without disabilities require access to effective, easily implemented classroom management techniques to address challenging behaviors. One such intervention is a contingency contract. A review of literature suggests that contracts are implemented for students experiencing challenges with academic and social behaviors both with and without formally diagnosed disabilities in general and special education settings. However, there was little consideration of the social significance of behaviors, and contract goals were not often set according to behaviors of comparison peers. The purpose of the current study examined the effects of contingency contracts on engagement for three students in an elementary general education classroom for three participants exhibiting high rates of disengaged behavior during instruction. Contingency contracts were written with consideration of social significance and function of behavior, preference surveys, observation of comparison peers to set goals, and reinforcement for desired behaviors. Using an ABAB withdrawal design, duration of engagement and frequency of instances of engagement were both recorded. Experimental effects were observed when participants&rsquo; duration of engagement increased and frequency of engagements decreased while under contract. The results suggest that contingency contracts can successfully be implemented to increase a desired behavior (engagement) with students in the general education classroom. Implications and future research directions immediately follow a discussion of the results.</p>

<p> This ethnography reconceptualizes the paradigm of cultural competence used within the literature on teacher education to describe the multicultural learning of White teacher candidates. Within the cultural competence framework, White learning is problematic, dichotomously defined, and fixed. The binary of competence/incompetence established by this paradigm has recently been questioned within the literature as deficit-based and in conflict with postmodern, critical theories of learning and teaching espoused by multicultural education espouses. </p><p> This study of the researcher's multicultural education class at a private, religious, four-year undergraduate college on the East Coast of the United States used co-constructed pedagogical practices&mdash;including a co-constructed community engagement experience, dialogic critical reflection, student-led inquiry-based seminars, and student-teacher email dialogues&mdash;to reconceptualize White multicultural learning as a dynamic process involving both teacher candidates and the teacher educator. As such, this work is co-ethnographic because it analyzed the learning of both the researcher and her students. </p><p> The study found that antiracist White learning within multiple, co-constructed approaches on a public/private spectrum is related to learners' placeling identities; multicultural learning was a migration and re-negotiation of the histories of White learners' homes and geographies. This re-negotiation&mdash;called de-/reterritorialization&mdash;occurred within a dialectic of Whiteness as space and Whiteness as places; both universal characteristics and local expressions of Whiteness were important in the learning of this classroom. White placeling de-/reterritorialization was also found to be unique to each learner, thereby reconceptualizing White learners as diverse. In addition, White placeling de-/reterritorialization was incremental and agentic, extending previous studies' findings that White learners are disinterested and resistant within multicultural teacher education classrooms. </p><p> Within this study, patterns of de-/reterritorialization emerged as particular learning dynamics between the researcher and the teacher candidates; these dynamics included guarding and stagnating, pushing/pulling, and inviting. These patterns, their uniqueness within the encountering of placeling identities' borders, and the attempts at antiracist learning that were made by the White teacher candidates in this classroom offer a reconceptualization of cultural competence that is geographic and complex. Placeling de-/reterritorialization resists the flattening of White identities too often found in the multicultural literature, situates place as the site of antiracist inquiry when working with White learners, and offers a new paradigm for teaching and researching with White teacher candidates.</p>

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Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, 2007. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 68-09, Section: A, page: 3797. Adviser: Barry Bull. Title from dissertation home page (viewed May 8, 2008).

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2008. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 69-05, Section: A, page: 1644. Adviser: Scott Johnson. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 117-123) Available on microfilm from Pro Quest Information and Learning.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of Counseling and Educational Psychology, 2007. / Title from dissertation home page (viewed Sept. 26, 2008). Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 69-02, Section: A, page: 0506. Adviser: Jack A. Cummings.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of Instructional Systems Technology and the Dept. of History, Philosophy and Policy in Education, 2008. / Title from PDF t.p. (viewed on Jul 20, 2009). Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 69-10, Section: A, page: 3920. Advisers: Charles M. Reigeluth; Heidi A. Ross.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Catholic University of America, 1936. / Bibliography: p. 91-98.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Educational Policy Studies, 2006. / Title from PDF t.p. (viewed Dec. 5, 2008). Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 67-04, Section: A, page: 1183. Advisers: Margaret Sutton; Barry Bull.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Educational Policy Studies, 2006. / Advisers: Margaret Sutton; Barry Bull.