The purpose of this study is to determine what opportunities the public schools of the Lower Rio Grande Valley of Texas are offering to Latin-American students, how they are meeting the students' needs, and what changes, if any, could be made to adjust their curriculum to meet these needs.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the factors that impact achievement for African-American males in a charter school in hopes of providing insight as well as recommendations into effective ways to close the academic achievement gap between African-American males and their counterparts, specifically the so-called “achievement gap” through examination of leadership and other correlates of a successful school. Lastly, the habits of an effective leader and his impact on the belief system, values and behaviors in an African-American male charter school and the influence he has on teachers, parents and students was examined. Thirty participants responded to an online survey sent to teachers, parents and students. Two school principals, one past and the other current were interviewed. Data was collected through a single bounded longitudinal study for a period of six years. A holistic analysis of the entire case was conducted. Through this data collection, a detailed description of the case emerged in which detailed such aspects as the history of the case, the chronology of events, or the day-by-day rendering of the activities of the case. After this description, common or emerging themes were identified in an effort to identify lessons learned from the case. Qualitative analysis of the data provided evidence to support the three themes that emerged from the data collection. This research revealed the most important factor in African-American males and achievement is effective leadership, without that nothing else matters, with that everything is possible. Qualitative analysis of the data revealed the leader must see himself as the instructional leader in his school, have a shared belief system that all children can and will learn, and facilitate a culture that empowers students and teachers alike. Results of this research investigation provide implications and recommendations for all schools educating African-American males in single-gender environments, particularly for the administrators who lead these schools.

This dissertation examines the potential congruencies and complementarities of Waldorf education, Culturally Relevant Pedagogy (CRP), Culturally Responsive Schooling (CRS), Critical Pedagogy and Native American and Indigenous education. Waldorf education, a German education reform developed in the early 1920s, is a little researched schooling system, and previous research on this reform has examined its impacts within its traditional contexts, namely, private schools. At the same time, significant literature exists which addresses the importance and efficacy of reforms for students of color such as those in CRP, CRS and Critical Pedagogy. There is also a body of work which points to key pedagogical components which support Native American/Indigenous students in school. This dissertation examines the interplay between all three of these complex systems by examining attempts to integrate them in the classroom. By examining Waldorf education initiatives in three distinct contexts, I demonstrate that these reforms can work in concert without diminishing the efficacy of any of them. I explore three distinct contexts of Waldorf education. The first examined the impacts of Waldorf education on students who participated in the reform in a private Waldorf school, who transitioned to more traditional, mainstream classes. I conducted participant-observation of a local Waldorf school and in-depth interviews with 14 alumni to explore the impact of this reform. In the second context, I examined how students responded to the use of Waldorf-inspired methods in a community college course I taught, and I investigated their experiences of the reform. Seven students who participated were interviewed in order to investigate the impact of these reforms on their experience as college students. These interviews were complemented by teacher-research I conducted while teaching this Waldorf-inspired course. Finally, I explored the potential of Waldorf education as a reform for Native American students, examining my own incorporation of this reform with other pedagogical tools, such as CRP, CRS, and other forms of critical pedagogy. Included in this section of research are my reflections on a course I instructed with Waldorf-inspired reforms. I also explored various accounts of Waldorf-education reforms by tribal communities, like the Lakota Waldorf School in South Dakota. Several findings from the research conducted here are encouraging. Students from Waldorf school environments demonstrate critical skills and critique schooling environments, invoking stances familiar to critical pedagogues. Students from a Waldorf-inspired community college course were also critical of the typical schooling experiences they had encountered, and spoke of the enriching feeling in their Waldorf-inspired course. Investigation into the philosophical tenets of Waldorf education and Native American/Indigenous epistemologies shows several examples of overlap and similarity, the most striking being elements of spiritual belief and practice as foundational to Native American/Indigenous well-being, and the ability of Waldorf education to address this. While these fields may appear unrelated, this study explores the praxis of these seemingly disparate bodies of work, by examining their similarities and differences. Ultimately, I argue that these reforms can work in concert to support the academic success of culturally and linguistically diverse students and Native American/Indigenous students in particular. The research in these three contexts demonstrates need for further investigation into Waldorf education and its potential to support students of all backgrounds.

The purpose of this research study was to explore how the significance of place serves as a part of Indigenous—specifically Diné (Navajo)—education cultural responsiveness in the art classroom. Further, objectives of the study included learning how North American art teacher educators can more effectively weave Indigenous understandings of place into pre-service art teacher education to benefit Indigenous learners' needs. I employed a qualitative approach to this study using multiple methodologies: ethnography, phenomenology, an Indigenous research methodology, and arts-based research. Through personal interviews with six participants—two Diné artists, two art teacher educators, and two unfamiliar art teachers new to reservation-serving schools—I sought to locate culturally situated perspectives and values. The goal of the interviews was to gather ideas about the significance of place, about relationships between place and art, and about art teacher preparation for teaching in Diné-serving schools. The design of the study also included new unfamiliar non-Diné art teacher preconceptions and in-situ learning experiences of teaching on the reservation. Beyond the participant interviews, I engaged an arts-based exploration of my experiences with Diné people as an outsider/insider member of the Diné community. The artwork I created also helped weave together data from participant interviews. Findings from the Diné artist participants suggested that places hold significance in Diné culture, art making, and the display or use of art. According to Diné epistemological perspective, place is more than just a physical location, and different from some mainstream ideas about place. For Diné interviewees, place is a container of aspects of life such as energies, nature, spirits, people, and a multitude of other significances, some tangible and some intangible. Findings from interviews with art teacher educators of other Indigenous groups also indicated that place is significant to many Native American peoples, and the idea of that significance is difficult to transmit to Euro-American pre-service teachers. Interviews also indicate that focusing teaching education on social justice theories and employing Native American art and artists can assist in the preparation of pre-service art teachers to teach in reservation or pueblo communities. However, there are deeply rooted cultural concepts that come into play once the new teacher reaches her/his teaching assignment community. Lastly, findings revealed that new unfamiliar art teachers experience a number of obstacles upon entering Diné communities when their prior understandings about the place is limited. Challenges include understanding acceptable cultural observances, student proclivities, and art making practices. Understanding significance of place, stereotyping concerns, and positionality challenges are among the themes that arose as a result of cross-participant analyses. The implications of this research study advocate for: a) building further knowledge about educating pre-service teachers about cultural relevance, stereotyping, and positionality in Native American-serving art classrooms; b) the need for continued cultural learning and mentoring in-situ; and c) the need for unfamiliar art teachers to develop culturally relevant teaching practices with the help of people in the community.

abstract: This study examines the multiple and complicated ways that Native American students engage, accept, and/or reject the teachings of a Native American literature course, as they navigate complex cultural landscapes in a state that has banned the teaching of ethnic studies. This is the only classroom of its kind in this major metropolitan area, despite a large Native American population. Like many other marginalized youth, these students move through "borderlands" on a daily basis from reservation to city and back again; from classrooms that validate their knowledges to those that deny, invalidate and silence their knowledges, histories and identities. I am examining how their knowledges are shared or denied in these spaces. Using ethnographic, participatory action and grounded research methods, and drawing from Safety Zone Theory (Lomawaima and McCarty, 2006) and Bakhtin's (1981) dialogism, I focus on students' counter-storytelling to discover how they are generating meanings from a curriculum that focuses on the comprehension of their complicated and often times contradicting realities. This study discusses the need for schools to draw upon students' cultural knowledges and offers implications for developing and implementing a socio-culturally sustaining curriculum. / Dissertation/Thesis / Ph.D. Curriculum and Instruction 2013

The focus of this study was on how to help narrow the achievement gap between Native American students and their non-Native peers in an urban Oklahoma school district. A qualitative case study approach was used to answer the questions of how parents of Native American students perceive their children's academic success in reading and mathematics in Grade 1- Grade 12 and why they believe their children have consistently (or historically) performed below district, state, and national expectations in these subjects in an attempt to better understand the achievement gap. Progress reports, institutional reports, and standards-based test scores were indicative of the widening achievement gap between Native American students and their non-Native peers. Bourdieu's cultural capital theory supported by Epstein's model of parental involvement were used as the conceptual framework for this study. Six parents of Native American students in Grade 1– Grade 12 were selected as participants and were interviewed using open-ended, semistructured questions to gain insight and help to answer the research questions. The coding of collected data, an analysis of emergent themes and triangulation, peer debriefing, and member checks were all utilized as analytical procedures to ensure accuracy and credibility. Results from the study revealed that parents of Native American students perceive their students' academic success as a struggle and identify parental involvement, curriculum relatability, class size and communication among some of the barriers to their students' success. Implications for positive social change for this study included the potential to inform more effective teaching strategies for teachers who teach Native American students, inform their curriculum development, and foster the empowerment of Native American families.

Qualitative interviews with 12 Native American high school junior and senior students who grew up on reservations identified the following themes related to their persistence in college: (a) faculty support, (b) structured social support, (c) family support or the lack thereof, (d) motivation to be better, and (e) encountering racism. The results indicated a need for clear academic expectations between the school district and the tribal liaisons, multicultural training to foster positive relationships from the primary to secondary level, and structured college preparatory instruction designed for Native American students. Results also indicated a need for further research into the educational experiences of multiethnic students.

Este estudo da figura de Horace Manley Lane leva em consideração as lutas de representações e a formação de rede de Escolas Americanas no Brasil entre os anos de 1885 e 1912. O objetivo é lançar luz sobre essa figura, cuja atuação foi marcada por disputas de poder no campo educacional protestante, e suas práticas educacionais e missionárias. Tradicionalmente, ele é conhecido como consultor da reforma do ensino público paulista, mas como veremos, sua atuação vai além das representações construídas na historiografia e no campo educacional brasileiro. Como educador, foi defensor do modelo educacional norte-americano, fazendo circular no Brasil elementos de uma pedagogia então moderna. Além disso, o trabalho discute o fato de que uma de suas propostas para disseminar a cultura e os valores do presbiterianismo norte-americano foi a criação de uma rede de escolas americanas. Nossa hipótese é que entre suas práticas como educador estava a organização de escolas, principalmente em cidades que contavam com o apoio de maçons, presbiterianos, republicanos e de pessoas ligadas a sua rede de relacionamentos, o que configura sua relação de poder com agentes sociais ligados à Maçonaria, à educação e ao presbiterianismo. Como educador organizou o Mackenzie College, primeira instituição particular de ensino superior no Brasil. Como missionário, não estava ligado ao campo presbiteriano brasileiro e nem frequentava uma igreja. Nessa condição, não atuava como os primeiros missionários norte-americanos de confissão de fé presbiteriana, através da evangelização direta, e sim, através da educação como forma de evangelização indireta. Como missionário e educador, construiu representações acerca do Brasil, da educação, da política e da catequese indígena que nos ajudam a compreender representações e práticas pouco conhecidas e pouco trabalhadas na historiografia e na perspectiva da história da educação. Como fundamentação teórica, utilizamos o conceito de representação em Roger Chartier, a categoria de lugar social, estratégia e tática de Michel de Certeau, o conceito de campo em Bourdieu, de sociedade de ideias de Bastian, de paradigma indiciário de Ginzburg, entre outros. A pesquisa faz uso de fontes primárias, tais como: relatórios educacionais produzidos por Horace Lane, Relatórios da Igreja Presbiteriana norte-americana, prospectos educacionais, relatórios de missionários, jornais, cartas e outros. / This study about the figure of Horace Manley Lane takes into account the struggles of representations and the formation of the American Schools network in Brazil in the years 1885 to 1912. Our objective is to shed light to this person whose actions were marked by power disputes, and to his educational and missionary practices. Lane is traditionally known as a consultant for the public education in São Paulo, but as we shall see, his actions go further than that which is presented in the constructed representations in historiography and in the Brazilian educational field. As an educator, he was a defender of the American Presbyterian educational model. In Brazil, he prompted the circulation of some elements of what was then known as modern pedagogy. Moreover, this paper discusses the fact that one of his propositions to disseminate the American Presbyterianism culture and values was the creation of a American schools network. Our hypothesis is that among his practices as an educator there was the organization of schools, especially in cities where he could find the support of Masons, Presbyterians, Republicans; people who were linked to his personal network, thus configuring his power relations with social agents connected with the Masonry, the education and the Presbyterianism. As an educator organized the Mackenzie College, the first private institution of higher education in Brazil. As a missionary, he presented no connection with the Brazilian Presbyterian field, nor did he attend religious services here. Therefore, he did not work as the first American Presbyterians, through direct evangelization, but rather through education as a way of indirect evangelization. As a missionary and an educator, he built representations about Brazil, the local education, politics, and the catechism of the indigenous people. Those representations allow us to understand the representations and practices which are little known or worked on in historiography and on the perspective of history of education. To a theoretical foundation we bring representation concepts developed by Roger Chartier, the social place category, strategy and tactics in Michel de Certeau, the field concept in Bordieu, the society of ideas in Bastian, and the evidential paradigm in Ginzburg, among others. The research uses primary sources, such as, educational reports produced by Horace Lane, American Presbyterian Church reports, educational prospects, missionaries reports, newspapers and others.

This multiple-case study investigated six teachers’ perspectives on their teaching practices and cultural integration in a Chinese heritage language school. This research also explored how the teachers’ instructional practices were linked to Ladson-Billings’ theories on culturally relevant pedagogy (1994). Qualitative in nature, multiple data sources were included, such as semi-structured interviews, classroom observations, and teachers’ artifacts. Data analysis included both within- and cross-case analysis. Within-case analysis showed that each teacher had her particular method of fostering students’ language learning. They also had unique ways of teaching Chinese culture; one held that culture is embedded in literature, another held that culture is the daily life of a group of people, another held that culture is gained through reading, a fourth held that culture is transmitted from one generation to the next, another held that culture is analyzed in relation to other cultures, and, finally, one teacher perceived that culture is hybrid and multifaceted. Based on the central tenets of culturally relevant pedagogy, four themes emerged from the cross-case analysis: (a) motivational and skill-building strategies to promote academic success, (b) individual, plural, and progressive ways to integrate and reconceptualize Chinese culture, (c) rebalancing authority to share power with students, and (d) culture identity development to enhance self-empowerment. Despite the link between the current study and Ladson-Billings’ theory, differences were found. For example, the Chinese teachers viewed heritage language learning as a way to help students connect their family members rather than to become active agents in the larger society. Besides cultural facts, the teachers incorporated cultural virtues and cultural reconceptualization. Instead of focusing on questioning inequities, the teachers encouraged students to build harmonious relationship with other ethnic groups. As the existing studies emphasized minority education for Mexican and African American students, the present study shed new light on language and culture instruction for Chinese Americans. This study suggests four implications: (a) developing heritage language teachers’ professional knowledge about implementing a “student-centered” approach, (b) enhancing heritage language teachers’ critical cultural awareness, (c) investigating heritage language teaching from diverse sociocultural backgrounds, and (d) introducing the theory of culturally relevant pedagogy in heritage language education. / text

abstract: This dissertation examines a long-term activist effort by American Indian educators and intellectual leaders to work for greater Native access to and control of American higher education. Specifically, the leaders of this effort built a powerful critique of how American systems of higher education served Native individuals and reservation communities throughout much of the twentieth century. They argued for new forms of higher education and leadership training that appropriated some mainstream educational models but that also adapted those models to endorse Native expressions of culture and identity. They sought to move beyond the failures of existing educational programs and to exercise Native control, encouraging intellectual leadership and empowerment on local and national levels. The dissertation begins with Henry Roe Cloud (Winnebago) and his American Indian Institute, a preparatory school founded in 1915 and dedicated to these principles. From there, the words and actions of key leaders such as Elizabeth Roe Cloud (Ojibwe), D’Arcy McNickle (Salish Kootenai), Jack Forbes (Powhatan-Renapé, Delaware-Lenape), and Robert and Ruth Roessel (Navajo), are also examined to reveal a decades-long thread of Native intellectual activism that contributed to the development of American Indian self-determination and directly impacted the philosophical and practical founding of tribal colleges and universities (TCUs) in the 1960s and 1970s. These schools continue to operate in dozens of Native communities. These individuals also contributed to and influenced national organizations such as the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI) and the National Indian Youth Council (NIYC), while maintaining connections to grassroots efforts at Native educational empowerment. The period covered in this history witnessed many forms of Native activism, including groups from the Society of American Indians (SAI) to the American Indian Movement (AIM) and beyond. The focus on “intellectual activism,” however, emphasizes that this particular vein of activism was and is still oriented toward the growth of Native intellectualism and its practical influence in modern American Indian lives. It involves action that is political but also specifically educational, and thus rests on the input of prominent Native intellectuals but also on local educators, administrators, government officials, and students themselves. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation History 2017