Social reproduction is well established in educational literature. Diminished outcomes for students marked by class and race persist despite analysis and educational policy. Teachers articulate discourse to explain student success and failure and satisfy personal and professional investments (Miles, 1989; Popkewitz, 1998). Interviews with teachers in urban secondary schools point to the operation of discourse in the reproduction of inequality with profound effects on students on the margin. Meritocratic, individualist discourses privilege white, middle-class students, excluding others. Constructing students as Other and beyond reason (Popkewitz, 1998), teachers articulate discourses of motivation as explanatory of student success and failure and posit a neoliberal normative subjectivity as explanatory of success. Social, historical and economic factors are silenced. The instability and arbitrary closure of discursive articulation offer possibility for a progressive, ethical pedagogy.

The purpose of this study was to explore how students with learning disabilities understood and experienced their transition from high school to postsecondary education. In-depth interviews with 7 graduates of Achievement School (pseudonym), a private high school for students with learning disabilities in the southwestern region of the United States, were conducted to elicit personal narratives of students��� transition experiences from high school to college. By doing so, findings contribute to a deeper understanding of students��� experiences and what allows students with learning disabilities to succeed in their transition to university or college. In addition, 4 parents and 4 high school staff members were interviewed for this study to provide a triangulated perspective on the experience studied. Few studies have collected and analyzed the perceptions and voices of students with learning disabilities as they transition to postsecondary education. This study provides insight towards bridging the gap in providing further insight into the students with learning disabilities��� experiences on their transition to college and the factors students��� feel have impeded or supported their success in this new environment. This study utilized a descriptive and phenomenological qualitative research methodology consisting of individual in-depth interviews with the students and member checks with informants, their parents, and staff members of the participants��� former high school. Suggestions will be made for future research as well as for practical application for future students as well as high school and postsecondary service providers.

This thesis explores the influences of social networks and social support on the literacy engagement of 7 high school students from a multicultural, multilingual, and economically disadvantaged urban neighborhood in a large, diverse North American city. Specifically, this study describes (1) students’ social networks and social literacy interactions; (2) the types of social support the network relationships provide for participants’ literacy; and (3) the ways in which this socioliterate support might affect participants’ literacy engagement. Guided by Ecological Systems Theory (Bronfenbrenner, 1979, 1992/2005), at three times during an 18-month period the 7 participants completed social network maps and interviews, checklists about their reading and writing choices, and retrospective interviews about their reading and writing practices on self-selected texts. These data were analyzed on the basis of Tardy’s (1985) typology of social support and the tripartite model of engagement proposed by Fredricks, Blumenfeld, and Paris (2004), then individual case reports were created for each participant. For cross-case analysis (Stake, 2006), the individual reports were compared across similar, predetermined themes. Two primary conclusions are supported by the data and analysis: These adolescents received varying amounts and types of socioliterate support from certain members of their social networks, particularly teachers and family members, and this support positively influenced their literacy engagement when they were facing difficult or uninteresting tasks. The study provides an understanding of the relationship between social support, motivation, and engagement in single literacy events, including proposed relationships between these three concepts, as well as perspectives on the role of technology in adolescent social network formation and on the sources from whom adolescents seek literacy-based social support. The study describes pedagogical spaces that can provide and activate such literacy support and suggests topics for future research relating to adolescent literacy, socioliterate networks and support, and literacy engagement.

This analysis is concerned with the spatially-anchored hierarchies of power that organize Ontario’s current schooling model. Using the experiences of four young Latina girls, it questions how current school safety discourses function as barriers to educational success, vis-à-vis their role in reconfiguring these students’ identities through narratives of danger, menace, and unruliness. Specific safety and security related practices are explored as sites through which marginalized students are produced as dangerous bodies who are undeserving of full educational opportunities. It is argued that these practices (as manifest in current approaches to surveillance, policing, discipline and punishment, and the restriction of educational mobility) all work to produce the school space as dominant space. Rather than offering youth the opportunity to overcome inequalities, schools and education instead play a definitive role in their continued propagation by sanctioning the control, containment, and eviction of those who are deemed to be deviant.

This study explores whether students in the mandated Ontario high school community service program consider their service requirement to be meaningful; the relationship between meaningful service and subsequent service; and other factors related to a meaningful experience and future service. A secondary analysis was conducted using a survey of 1,341 first-year university students, collected by a research team led by Steven Brown of Wilfrid Laurier University. The main finding is that meaningful service is a predictor for subsequent service and can contribute to individual and social change. Meaningful service opportunities help address a gap in service learning literature, which is the impact of service on communities, perhaps by underestimating the capacity of youth to contribute to social change. Three policy recommendations emerge: curriculum should be created to enable students to serve more effectively; program structure is necessary for reflection; and nonprofit agencies can meet both of the above needs.

This study explores whether students in the mandated Ontario high school community service program consider their service requirement to be meaningful; the relationship between meaningful service and subsequent service; and other factors related to a meaningful experience and future service. A secondary analysis was conducted using a survey of 1,341 first-year university students, collected by a research team led by Steven Brown of Wilfrid Laurier University. The main finding is that meaningful service is a predictor for subsequent service and can contribute to individual and social change. Meaningful service opportunities help address a gap in service learning literature, which is the impact of service on communities, perhaps by underestimating the capacity of youth to contribute to social change. Three policy recommendations emerge: curriculum should be created to enable students to serve more effectively; program structure is necessary for reflection; and nonprofit agencies can meet both of the above needs.

This design-based research study investigates the development of pedagogical content knowledge among nine teacher-participants (N = 9) in three design phases. PCK is a particular type of teacher knowledge that addresses not only the teacher’s understanding of the content to be instructed, but also ways of how to teach that content effectively. This knowledge has been well documented over several decades, and is seen as central to teacher expertise. However, its actual development has been difficult for researchers to investigate. This study offers a detailed perspective on how teachers developed PCK with their engagement in lesson planning and enactment of a project-based technology-enhanced lesson. The study includes two specific interventions designed to enhance teachers’ development of PCK: (1) scaffolded reflection that occurs throughout the practices; and (2) peer-exchange of lesson plans, enactment ideas, and completed reflections. The findings demonstrate that teachers improve their planning and enactment of project-based technology-enhanced lessons with scaffolded reflection and peer exchange. Positive correlations were seen between teachers’ engagement in the reflections and the quality of their lesson planning. Teachers who participated more deeply in the scaffolded reflections were able to understand how their lesson plans and enactment patterns fostered student understanding of relevant science concepts. Positive correlations were also seen between community influence and teacher lesson plans and enactment. Additionally, positive correlations were confirmed between teachers’ level of participation in the peer exchange activities and the quality of their lesson planning and enactments. Teachers who contributed more deeply within the online and face-to-face peer community meetings benefited from the different perspectives of their peers about student learning and the best ways to succeed with project-based instruction. This study allowed some insight into how PCK develops as a result of teachers’ engagement in the complex set of activities that constitute the practices of lesson planning and enactment. The primary implication of this study is that engaging teachers in scaffolded reflections and peer exchange can be a valuable in-service professional development activity. A methodological strength is derived from an approach to coding teachers’ lesson planning and enactment according to an activity systems perspective, drawing on a spectrum of data sources (e.g., wiki-based reflections, planning artefacts, videotaped classroom enactments). Teacher learning—particularly the development of PCK—is recognized as critical in promoting student understanding of science concepts. This dissertation lays out a possible foundation for professional development models that promote effective teacher learning.

This design-based study was the first empirical investigation of a new model of learning and instruction called Knowledge Community and Inquiry (KCI). In KCI, students are engaged as a learning community as they work on scaffolded inquiry activities that target specific science learning objectives. Although community-oriented approaches have been successful at the elementary level, there has been relatively little uptake of such methods at the secondary school level – particularly in science. The pedagogical framework of KCI addresses the challenges of community models by blending established inquiry based approaches with community-oriented pedagogy. This dissertation tested the validity of KCI by designing, implementing, and empirically evaluating a curriculum based on the KCI model. This was achieved through curriculum trials involving two separate cohorts of grade-ten biology students (n = 102; n = 112). The first implementation consisted of a two-week physiology lesson that engaged students in co-authoring wiki artifacts about human system diseases, which students then used as a resource for solving medical case studies. The second implementation, an eight-week lesson on Canada's biodiversity, was a deeper application of the model, and focused on students' collaborative processes during the construction of their wiki-based knowledge repository. In both cases, the curriculum was evaluated according to its design, enactment, and learning outputs, as evidenced by students' knowledge artifacts and performance on the final exam. Technology scaffolds ensured that students focused on the physiology and biodiversity science curriculum expectations. Analyses of the data revealed that KCI engaged students in collaborative learning processes that were characteristic of a knowledge community. Additionally, final exam scores demonstrated increased learning performance when compared to those from previous years where students did not participate in KCI. The findings from this research provide the first empirical support for KCI, and demonstrate its potential for engaging secondary science students in the kinds of collaborative inquiry processes of authentic knowledge communities. This dissertation provides insight into the conditions necessary for such engagement, and contributes design recommendations for blending knowledge community and inquiry in secondary school science curriculum.

An engaging education attends to the subjective quality of students’ perceptions and experiences within learning and school life: It converges on whether, how, and why students meaning-make and belong within the school; and focuses on the conditions for their attachment, participation, and commitment within school programmes, practices, policies, and people. Three main questions guided this two-phase, mixed-methods study: 1) What makes international schools engaging places for students? 2) What meanings do students attach to key areas of their day-to-day experiences within the international school in Hong Kong? 3) How might re-imagining student engagement through a cosmopolitan lens lead to clearer understandings of students’ experiences within the international school? In Phase 1, an achieved sample of 729 senior secondary students at 9 purposively selected schools were surveyed using a mainly Likert scale questionnaire: to describe their socio-demographics; to examine the relationships between their socio-demographics, attitudinal features, and schooling experiences, as measured by the researcher-designed Experience of International School – Revised (EIS-R) scale; and to cluster using their socio-demographics and attitudinal profiles. Building on the tripartite cluster solution, Phase 2 used observations and interviews with 30 purposively sampled teacher-leaders and 34 students, from across the three clusters, to investigate how the “institutional habitus” (Thomas, 2002) the students encountered at two international schools shaped their experiences of and engagement within the contexts of school culture, community, curriculum, and co-curriculum. A two-stage process of thematic content analysis revealed two super ordinate themes: 1) race/ethnic, linguistic, and nationality identities intersected to shape and challenge patterns of relationships amongst students (and between students/families) and the school to both include and exclude; and 2) the institutional contexts supported and constrained students’ sense of belonging therein. Overall, seen through a cosmopolitan lens the study implications are discussed as three lessons to achieve a better fit between students and the international school: 1) Attend to the school’s living and learning environment; 2) Take a cosmopolitan turn to school for cosmopolitan subjectivity; and 3) Adopt a student engagement-driven approach to improve and reform school policy, administration, and practice.

This analysis is concerned with the spatially-anchored hierarchies of power that organize Ontario’s current schooling model. Using the experiences of four young Latina girls, it questions how current school safety discourses function as barriers to educational success, vis-à-vis their role in reconfiguring these students’ identities through narratives of danger, menace, and unruliness. Specific safety and security related practices are explored as sites through which marginalized students are produced as dangerous bodies who are undeserving of full educational opportunities. It is argued that these practices (as manifest in current approaches to surveillance, policing, discipline and punishment, and the restriction of educational mobility) all work to produce the school space as dominant space. Rather than offering youth the opportunity to overcome inequalities, schools and education instead play a definitive role in their continued propagation by sanctioning the control, containment, and eviction of those who are deemed to be deviant.