Thesis advisor: Rebecca Lowenhaupt / School districts throughout the Commonwealth have engaged in initiatives to increase educators of color. Ingersoll et al. (2019) argue that while “many believe that the small number of minority teachers is caused by a lack of recruitment or intake” they concur with Pearson and Fuglei (2019) that recruitment is not the only problem. The issue is retention. Recent studies like these shed new light on the need for additional research on factors that increase the retention of educators of color. I posit that supporting the development of critical consciousness in Educators of Color can also support their retention in school districts. The purpose of this individual study is to identify the practices that Educators of Color (EOCs) report to be supportive, increase their critical consciousness, and/ or impact their retention in the district. This study centers the experiences of Educators of Color (EOCs), and amplify their voices in order to learn about the impact of school-based and district-sponsored practices. This individual study is part of a group qualitative case study that examines the practices of district leaders, school leaders, educators, and students to foster and advance the development of critical consciousness. / Thesis (EdD) — Boston College, 2022. / Submitted to: Boston College. Lynch School of Education. / Discipline: Educational Leadership and Higher Education.

Multiple accelerated cultural and social changes have been attributed to social media, from mobilizing social movements to problematizing or normalizing terms and concepts. Digital platforms are considered a vital element in the ecosystem for realizing change in societies, yet the focus is often on overtly sociopolitical content and the issue-driven or identity-driven networked society content. However, and despise the ubiquitous nature of digital media, the accumulative impact of mundane casual interaction has rarely been scrutinized beyond its ability to support rapport building. This research explores the influence of the mundane content in communities’ cultural repertoire. It positions it in the schema of narrative (re)building and meaning (re)making tools, processes that contribute to making lasting impactful change in society. The research especially highlights how the mundane content serves to aid the cultural evolvement of marginalized communities annihilated from the public sphere. Utilizing Paolo Freire’s critical consciousness, Andrea Brock’s work on Black cyberculture, and Zizi Papacharissi’s affective public thesis, this research explores how cultural and digital practices of the (stateless) Bidoon community in Kuwait intertwine in their everyday usage of Twitter. Through digital ethnography that involved discourse analysis of tweets and in-depth interviews with eight participants from the Bidoon community, this research exhibits how mundane Twitter usage has allowed the Bidoon community to reinterpret and recontextualize their cause through weaving their interpersonal grievances into a collective narrative, and how regaining power over their story and using the platform to spread their voice empowered a sense of agency to not only imagine a new world but also find creative ways to realize it. Mundane Twitter has allowed Bidoons to create counternarratives, penetrate the public sphere, control the advocacy rhetoric, and regain power over cultural symbols and thus their relationship with their collective memory. Through highlighting how what appears to be inefficient mundane tweets actually intertwine cultural with digital practices and motivate critical dialogue and reflective processes, this research identifies the importance of raising critical consciousness as an affordance of mundane Twitter, and it encourages extending the scoop of what is considered critical action to be inclusive of the accumulative digital efforts of communities suffering from cultural erasure. / Media & Communication

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Competitive youth sport does not occur in a vacuum, and societal changes impact coaches' practices. Researchers have called for a paradigm shift for coaches to become more socially responsible and adopt a critical praxis. The purpose of this dissertation was to advance our current understanding of critical praxis development within competitive youth sport, through narrative introspections into coaches' learning journeys. Anchored in cultural sport psychology research, this dissertation was guided by a relativist ontology, a social constructionist epistemology, and narrative inquiry methodology. The critical positive youth development framework (Gonzalez et al., 2020) was used to explore coaches' critical praxes and critical consciousness development in sport. In Article 1, I explored coaches' challenges and successes in creating safer and more inclusive sport spaces. The coaches felt responsible for enacting change in sport while questioning when it was okay to intervene, feeling burnt out, and finding success with their critical actions. Composite creative nonfictions were developed to reflect the individual and shared experiences in developing their critical praxes as coaches. The coaches shared a desire for in-situ support for unpacking their biases and understanding complicated social issues in sport. In Article 2, a 15-month collaboration is detailed, whereby I acted as a personal learning coach to support a competitive Nordic ski coach's (Sophie) critical praxis as they reflected on social issues and acted to enact positive change in their sport context and community. As suggested by Rodrigue and Trudel (2019), my role as a personal learning coach was guided by the narrative-collaborative coaching approach (Stelter, 2014) to focus on Sophie's narratives and co-create knowledge. From working together during two competitive seasons, Sophie's learning journey is presented through time hopping snapshot vignettes as they figured out what to fight for, grew through discomforts and unknowns, and experienced progress in their critical consciousness-building. An autoethnographic account is presented in Article 3 to detail how I 'ran with' becoming a personal learning coach for two competitive youth sport coaches, Sophie and Zoe. Through reflexive, evocative, and analytical writing, three salient experiences are presented, including how I used my 'full' biography to be(come) a personal learning coach, focused on the intricacies of relationality, and learned how to understand my limits as a researcher-participant acting as a personal learning coach. The complexities involved in co-learning between researchers and coaches are narratively explored. Collectively, this dissertation contributes to cultural sport psychology research with the use of the critical positive youth development framework and the narrative-collaborative coaching approach to explore coaches' varying levels of critical consciousness. Through creative analytical practices, narratives are shared of coaches' who are working to create safer, more inclusive competitive sport spaces. Researchers, sport leaders, and coaches are all responsible for looking inwards, challenging biases and assumptions, and advocating for a transformed competitive youth sport system that is safer and more inclusive for all.

The purpose of this study was to identify the strategies that middle school teachers utilize when incorporating culturally responsive pedagogy and practices to build positive relationships with students and families while building and maintaining positive student-peer relationships in the classroom. This qualitative study design, conducted in an urban public-school division in central Virginia, employed a teacher interview protocol questionnaire featuring open-ended questions. The primary objective was to investigate how middle school teachers utilize and incorporate culturally responsive pedagogical practices to build and maintain positive relationships with students, families, and peers. The resulting findings indicated teachers established cultural awareness and diversity to build and maintain relationships, communicated effectively through conferencing and discussions with their students, and communicated effectively through emails and in-person with their students' families. Teachers used multiple communication strategies for parent involvement, such as phone calls, text messages, emails, conferences, and social media. Students sharing life experiences during discussion helped them understand the material and establish classroom culture and diversity. Thus, implications indicated school divisions and building administrators should continually participate in cultural competence training, provide teachers with professional development to establish regular and consistent communication channels with students' families to build positive relationships, provide teachers with professional development to implement culturally responsive pedagogy, provide time for teachers to incorporate open-ended questions and alternative perspectives into lessons to stimulate critical thinking, and building-level administrators should foster a school culture that embraces diverse values by establishing and consistently reinforcing clear expectations of respect for all students and adults. / Doctor of Education / The purpose of this study was to identify the strategies that middle school teachers utilize when incorporating culturally responsive pedagogy and practices to build positive relationships with students and families while building and maintaining positive student-peer relationships in the classroom. The synthesis of the literature review and the results of this study may perhaps provide information that would support middle school teachers not only with the ability to build relationships with their students and their families and positive peer relationships but also improve cultural knowledge to increase and enhance academic achievement and decrease discipline concerns. A qualitative study design was used in one urban public-school division in the central region of Virginia, which incorporated a teacher interview protocol questionnaire with open-ended questions. The researcher sought to examine: How do middle school teachers utilize and incorporate culturally responsive pedagogical practices to build and maintain positive relationships with students, families, and peers? An analysis of the responses to the interview questionnaire from the middle school teachers revealed strategies used consistently and inconsistently throughout the sample. From the findings, implications for practices and recommendations for future studies were supplied.

The neoliberal political economy guiding our present food system has contributed to our present unsustainable situation, characterized by wicked problems such as environmental degradation, food insecurity and diet-related illness. Our current condition demands a new conception of sustainability to guide creative and counter-hegemonic interventions that can supplant the dominant oppressive structures and processes presently characterizing development efforts. While community gardens have been recognized as common grounds for food systems transformation, research has largely missed this opportunity for exploration. Drawing from the planetary and emancipatory frameworks of transformative learning, and a conception of sustainability rooted in life values, counter-hegemony, and social justice, this case study explores how a collective community garden is a critical pedagogy space for stakeholders to change their own reality within their food system. Using narrative inquiry as a methodology, I conducted semi-structured interviews with garden stakeholders (n=12). The lived experiences of study participants revealed the transformative potential of the Farmacy Garden rooted in the community food security movement. As a space that inspires critical consciousness for humanization, study participants deepened their awareness of new choices and possibilities in their food system rooted in life values. As a space that inspires social action for community economies, the Farmacy Garden promoted transactions rooted in reciprocity and gift-based exchange. Through critical hope and creative imagination for integral development, study participants are envisioning and exploring alternatives that can guide us in the challenging and contradictory work of "making new worlds" (Gibson-Graham, 2008, p. 628). / Master of Science in Life Sciences / The Farmacy Garden (FG) is a collective community garden built on public land in a small town in rural, southwest Virginia, with a mission to promote health, increase food security, and build community capacity among low-income residents in the region. As an educational garden funded within a public health context, the FG programs and evaluation parameters have prioritized health outcomes over other potential benefits of the site. This study embraces a whole-systems perspective, providing an opportunity to cultivate a richer understanding of the role the FG plays as a critical pedagogy space for sustainability and food systems transformation. Drawing on the planetary and emancipatory conceptions of transformative learning, and narrative inquiry as a methodology, this case study explores the perceptions and experiences of FG participants and practitioners (n=12) through story and critical reflection using semi-structured, narrative interviews. The lived experiences of these stakeholders reveals the FG's role as an educational site that enables participants and practitioners to cultivate new understandings of themselves, invigorate new forms of social action, and nurture new imaginaries that provoke possibilities beyond the current condition.

The concept of self-esteem has so thoroughly infiltrated American education that “most educators believe developing self-esteem to be one of the primary purposes of public education” (Stout, 2001, p. 119). That the available scholarship challenging the validity of self-esteem principles has had little to no impact on schooling and school policy demonstrates the need for more a comprehensive interrogation of a concept that has become so pervasive and commonsensical that many administrators and teachers do not even think to question its place in traditional pedagogy, let alone consider the possibility that self-esteem is a damaging ideological construct. The rhetorical (and impossible) promise of self-esteem as both a quantifiable and fixed human resource has proliferated in educational language as schools continue to promote self-esteem among racialized and poorly performing students, while the structural conditions that negatively impact these students’ performance in the first place remain intact. The legacy of self-esteem in educational discourse requires a critical interpretation, or re-interpretation, by educators who wish to challenge oppressive commonsense assumptions and feel-good principles that covertly help to maintain “dominant cultural norms that do little more than preserve social inequality” (Darder, 2015, p. 1). This study takes a decolonizing approach that involves a substantive interrogation—historical, political, and philosophical—of the Eurocentric epistemological concept of self-esteem, in order to demonstrate the debilitating effects that self-esteem has on students from working-class communities of color. It then suggests an emancipatory understanding of the self and alternative critical pedagogical principles of social empowerment.

Asian, Black, Indigenous, Latine, and Pacific Islander students have increased their enrollment in private schools (2012–-2020) (NCES, 2021a) and have become the majority population in American public schools (NCES, 2021b), yet many educators are not adequately prepared to teach students from diverse backgrounds (Ladson-Billings, 2017; Paris & Alim, 2017). Within the field of choral music education, preservice choral educators are mostly prepared to teach Western European classical repertoire and bel canto vocal technique, both based on a Eurocentric paradigm (Good-Perkins, 2021b). This paradigm, however, is unlikely to be appropriate for students who are versed in diverse musical cultures (Carlow, 2006; Gustafson, 2008). The resulting cultural rift between students and choral educators can lead to student exclusion, cultural assimilation, and silencing (Bradley, 2015). Culturally sustaining pedagogy (CSP) is a theoretical construct focused on cultural and linguistic plurality in the classroom. CSP can address the potential cultural rift between educators using Eurocentric teaching paradigms and students’ unique cultures and ways of knowing music, sustaining students’ cultures and thereby preventing student silencing and assimilation (Good-Perkins, 2021b). Therefore, the purpose of this study was to discover the ways, if any, in which three high school choral educators—with multiple musical-cultural proficiencies—enacted culturally sustaining pedagogy in the choral classroom and student perceptions of their teaching. To address the purpose of this study, a multiple case study research method (Stake, 2013) was used. The themes that emerged upon completion of within case and cross-case data analysis included: musical-cultural alignment, importance of cultural dexterity, code-switching, and style shifting, interstitial space between styles, and developing connections. The implications of this research pertain to proposed changes in music teacher preparation and in-service music educator professional development. These changes could positively impact the skills and interests of the future pool of music education program applicants. The potential result of such changes at the K-12 and tertiary levels could be an increase in the diversity of music educators.

Thesis advisor: V. Paul Poteat / Sexual and gender minority (SGM) youth and young people have a significantly higher prevalence of mental health challenges than their heterosexual, cisgender peers (Jonas et al., 2022). These disparities are largely linked to disparate experiences of victimization, discrimination, and microaggressions (Meyer, 2003; Mongelli et al., 2019). While most of the literature on this association between minority stress and mental health outcomes focuses on direct experiences of minority stress such as discrimination and victimization, less attention has been given to indirect experiences of minority stress, such as reading about SGM-directed violence on the news or in social media (Hatzenbeuhler et al., 2019; Hicks, 2019; Hughto et al., 2021). Understanding the effects of these vicarious minority stressors, or instances of discrimination and stigma inflicted on someone who shares a minority identity, not in the presence of the individual and without directly targeting the individual, seems increasingly necessary. Recent studies suggest that vicarious experiences of discrimination affect SGM mental well-being across the country (Maduro et al., 2020). The current study sought to extend and test minority stress theory by assessing the impact of minority-specific vicarious stressors - in this case reading about an instance of identity-based community violence - on young peoples’ processing styles and mental health outcomes. In part 1 of the current study, I used an experimental design and quantitative text analysis to assess whether a diverse sample (N = 575) of SGM participants ages 18 - 24 (M = 22.45, SD = 2.22) exhibited differences in affect and processing style when asked to read and respond to a short passage depicting violence directed toward an individual who shares their SGM identities as opposed to those in the control, who read an identical passage with a heterosexual, cisgender subject. Results indicated a greater increase in negative affect, greater likelihood of using negative emotions and anger words, and greater use of self-reference words among participants exposed to the vicarious minority stressor. In part 2, I used structural equation modeling to assess whether self-reported past experiences of minority stress, identity affirmation, and critical consciousness predicted negative affect change and processing style among exposure group participants (N = 402), and whether these in turn predicted depressive symptoms. I found that negative affect change negatively predicted depressive symptoms and use of negative emotions words positively predicted depressive symptoms. Minority stress, identity affirmation, and critical consciousness positively predicted negative emotions words and indirectly predicted depressive symptoms via negative emotions words. Critical consciousness also positively predicted negative affect change and self-reference words, and negatively, indirectly predicted depressive symptoms via negative affect change. Implications to minority stress theory and therapeutic intervention are discussed. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2024. / Submitted to: Boston College. Lynch School of Education. / Discipline: Counseling, Developmental and Educational Psychology.

Enforced disappearances has been used as a repressive strategy by numerous Latin American states against tens of thousands of presumed political opponents and adversaries, starting in the 1960’s in Guatemala. In contemporary Latin America, Mexico holds the record for disappearances, both politically and non-politically motivated, with more than 30 000 cases reported since the beginning of the drug war in 2006. In response to the silence and impunity from the state, family members have been forced to organize in order to advance in the search for their relatives and for justice. Most of these family members are women. The aim of this study is to analyze women’s experiences of organizing as relatives to the forcefully disappeared in Mexico to explore possible connections between organization and empowerment. Empowerment is here understood from a feminist perspective, as a transformative factor that gives women increased feelings of ‘power to’, ‘power with’ and ‘power within’. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with five women organized in four different family members’ organizations in Mexico. The results were analyzed against a theoretical framework consisting of previous research and theories on women’s organizing in Latin America, focusing on strategic and practical gender interests and theories on women’s empowerment, from a feminist and sociologist perspective. The analysis revealed that through the process of organizing, women developed a critical consciousness and access to new skills and resources that resulted in the women becoming more active, political and empowered subjects. The results also showed that despite women’s reasons for organizing being originally practical, to find their loved ones, during the process of organization, these reasons became more strategic and political, as a result of the empowerment process. The study concludes that women’s collective action is a source of empowerment even within organizations that does not have this as an outspoken aim and that the collectives of family members have provided a space for women to become active, conscious and critical citizens.