Disp., Uppsala universitet, 2008.

Doctor of Philosophy / Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Social Work / W. Richard Goe / It has been assumed that community college students are comprised of students who are either not ready for the rigors of a four-year college experience and/or students who are only interested in receiving a degree in a technical field. With concerns of rising debt, largely associated with colleges being forced to turn to tuition as a major revenue source, the validity of these assumptions merits a better understanding to how the economic atmosphere has changed the demographics of students at a two-year institution, let alone the demographics of an honors student population. Further, little-to-no analysis has looked at the effects of the ascriptive characteristics of students beyond parent’s income and occupation in determining academic success in a two-year honors program. To answer these concerns, I examine how institutional, family, and individual level factors affect the successful completion of an honors program by students attending a two-year junior college. It is the objective of this research to arrive at a better understanding of two primary questions: first, what are the characteristics and backgrounds of honors students at a two-year college; second, what are the determinants of academic success at a two-year honors program? It is hypothesized that exposure to cultural capital by students, prior to and while attending junior college, is important in facilitating academic success. Quantitative methodology is used to examine the research questions and test the study hypotheses concerning the effects of cultural capital on successful completion from a two-year college honors program. Data were collected from college students enrolled in the honors program at Tyler Junior College, a two-year college located in Tyler, Texas. The findings report that exposure to culture capital does have a positive effect on students’ graduating from a two-year college honors program.

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This thesis explores the role of foreign cultural capital, that is, Western knowledge, skills, dispositions and qualifications obtained through various modes of UK international tertiary education in facilitating social reproduction and mobility. The focus is on Malaysian young adults from middle-class backgrounds. It offers a critical exploration of the intricacies and contradictions surrounding the applicability of Bourdieu’s concept of cultural capital in explaining occupational and status distinction across different geographical and socio-relational contexts in Malaysia and the UK. Drawing on interviews with three samples of Malaysian students and recent graduates of UK tertiary education, I explored the anticipation and experiences of the rewards and disadvantages of undertaking international education in the UK and Malaysia. I investigated the planned and executed strategies to secure superior employment and status. I studied the intersection of class with age, ethnicity, gender, nationality and religion in structuring educational and occupational choices, practices and experiences. I explored perceptions and feelings of worth that surrounded planned and actual practices of translating cultural capital to economic and social privileges. Studying overseas in an elite UK university was believed to offer the most privileged opportunities to gain better quality education, experience a higher valued culture, lifestyle, social mix and physical landscape in the West and independently embark on a journey of personal growth and self-discovery. Graduates who studied physically in the UK were generally confident of their labour market and status advantages and saw themselves as more knowledgeable and globally exposed than those pursuing UK education in Malaysia. The latter believed that their relative labour market strengths lay in their enhancement and appropriation of more common local cultural capital in the forms of local knowledge, interaction skills and cultural sensitivity. Flexible and moderate personalisation of foreign and local cultural capital embodied in the self, alongside appropriate deployment and adornment of the physical body, provided the solution for the participants to overcome the relative limitations of the knowledge, skills and dispositions acquired through their respective modes of UK studies. Age, ethnicity and gender were perceived and experienced as significant factors shaping inclusion and exclusion in the Malaysian labour market. Nationality and ethnicity were the significant factors for labour market inclusion and exclusion in the UK. There was a general desire to convert enhanced cultural capital into occupational and status opportunities that allowed for work-life balance, personal contentment, religious fulfilment, emotional security and contribution to society. The thesis contributes to problematising the taken-for-granted singularity of cultural capital practices, showing that their associated benefits and shortcomings do not transfer smoothly across different place, situational and interactional contexts. It challenges the assumption that the scarcity and exclusivity of foreign cultural capital bring labour market advantage in the home context and it highlights the functional value of more common local cultural capital. It accounts for instrumentality and deliberateness in capital accumulation strategies as well as casts light on the principles, values and preferences which set limits to strategies of maximising material gains. It pieces together the practices, relations and feelings occurring at different points of the academic and occupational trajectories for the diverse Malaysian foreign student and graduate middle-class. It essentially adds depth and complexity to the investigation of intersecting individual, socio-relational and structural factors that shape perceived possibilities and experienced actualities of middle-class social reproduction and mobility among Malaysian students and graduates of UK international education. The thesis has important policy implications for the development of an equitable opportunity system in Malaysia and the socially responsible marketing and provision of international tertiary education in Malaysia and the UK.

The impact of neo-liberalism on education policy and practice in England means that assessment at GCSE is higher stakes than ever, not just for the students, for whom it determines access to courses and jobs, but for teachers and schools under ever-increasing pressure to meet performance targets. Given the published evidence regarding the strong relationship between family background, academic achievement and future income, this research considers how the GCSE English assessment contributes to the maintenance of the status quo with regards to advantage and disadvantage. The details of the assessments, the structures of the assessment systems as well as the impact of those systems on schools, teachers and students are matters of policy, hence this research is within the tradition of policy scholarship. In it I set out to engage with and understand policy, and to reveal its impacts through the lens of Bourdieusian thinking. I use interview data from students, teachers and examiners as well as documentary analysis of examination papers and mark schemes in order to give voice to those with lived experiences of the assessment and to explore the case of GCSE English assessment from multiple perspectives. I use the data to examine the ways in which the assessment privileges a culturally specific form of English in a way that necessarily includes and excludes particular groups of students. I reveal how the assessment advantages students with wide world knowledge and privileges the ability to instinctively access formal discourse. Through examining the ways in which teachers, students and examiners conceptualise English GCSE I reveal the relationships between assessment, curriculum and classroom practice and thus uncover the impacts that policy is having on teaching and learning and on teachers and students. As a result I recommend changes in policy as well as in teaching and assessment practices: I recommend that awarding organisations review their procedures to ensure that a greater range of voices informs assessment procedures; I recommend a shift in emphasis in the GCSE English assessment to focus on an understanding of language and the relationships between discourse and power; I recommend that teachers find ways within the classroom to enable students to use their funds of knowledge; and finally, regarding policy, I recommend an open conversation about what is taught, assessed and measured and for what purposes.

Mathematics teacher identity has emerged as a topic of discussion amongst contemporary researchers in the effort to enlighten, impact, and reform professional practice. There has been little examination, from a personal point-of-view, of how competent mathematics teachers are and how they may use a combination of educational resources, skills, intellect, and practice to gain classroom success. The purpose of this dissertation was to take a critical look at my identities as an African American, female mathematics teacher and investigate what drives me to possess high expectations, motivate learning and foster positive learning environments, support parents, and encourage peers to illuminate success in the classroom. The research questions guiding this dissertation were: 1) How do I, a female African American mathematics educator, use autoethnography as a reflexive process to investigate cultural capital? 2) How do these factors contribute to my evolving identity? As the researcher and subject of this qualitative body of work, identity was investigated using autoethnography as a research methodology that functioned as an approach to research and writing that sought to describe and systematically analyze personal experience in order to understand cultural experience. This dissertation uses the tenets of cultural capital (Bourdieu, 1986; Yosso, 2005) as a framework, along with intersectionality (Crenshaw, 1989; Collins, 2000; Banks, 2009) as a critical lens through which to understand the multiple identities that are central to this dissertation . I utilized personal narrative through storytelling as the chief method of data collection. I also utilized external data sources like the literature review, conversations, documents, journals entries and dialogue to inform my search of self. The results indicated that I am directly affected by the cultural capital that I employ to navigate educational spaces. The findings from this research revealed four major themes that contributed to how being reflexive through autoethnography helped to investigate cultural capital: a) teacher empowerment vs. authority, b) teacher identity as cultural capital, c) teacher resiliency, and d) teaching for social justice. A major implication in the research is that the transformative nature of autoethnography allows opportunities to scrutinize and critique teacher interactions that are important to educator growth.

This thesis explores how the University of Canterbury has responded to the Tertiary Education Strategy's (2002-2007) concerns vis-à-vis declining Maori participation and unsatisfactory rates of retention and completion in mainstream universities. This research is based on the qualitative method of in-depth taped interviews with twenty-five participants enrolled as 'Maori' at Canterbury in 2004. Notwithstanding increased recognition of biculturalism at Canterbury, issues relating to entrenched monoculturalism identified by Grennell (1990), Clothier (2000) and Phillips (2003) appear to be largely unresolved. Participants confirm the Ministry of Education's (2001) contention that Personal and Family Issues, Financial Difficulties, Negative Schooling Experiences, Inadequate Secondary Qualifications, Transitional Difficulties, Isolation, Unwelcoming Tertiary Environments and Inappropriate Support Structures are barriers to Maori success. However, testimonies reflect that these barriers represent exogenous factors derived from state and institutional policies and practices, not endogenous factors attributable to Maori genes, cultural socioeconomic status or engagement with the system. The Tertiary Education Strategy's (2002-2007) devolution of responsibility to institutions to address ethnic disparities in human capital imposes the same structural constraints on Maori that undermine achievement in the compulsory sector. The types of support structures participants identify as conducive to addressing deficit cultural capital and fostering academic achievement are Maori-centred initiatives, devoid of the deficit ideology that underpins mainstream assimilationist interventions; and or institutional provisions that incorporate greater stakeholder input with improved accountability and monitoring mechanisms that safeguard against recourse to deficit rationalizations for underachievement. Maori parity in engagement with the tertiary education sector is contingent upon the state and its institutions redressing the cumulative effects of the colonial and neo-colonial marginalization of Maori in Aotearoa/New Zealand.

abstract: As newcomers to schools in the last thirty years, second career teachers, were studied to better understand this group of teachers within schools. Second career teachers bring professional knowledge that did not originate in the field of teaching to their teaching career such as relationship building and collaboration. The professional perspectives of second career teachers were assessed and analyzed in relation with current professional expectations in schools utilizing an analytical framework built from Pierre Bourdieu's reflexive sociology. Second career teachers and their supervisors were interviewed and their responses were reviewed in relation to the districts' defined professional habitus and the professional cultural capital developed by second career teachers. The results from this study indicate that Second career teachers did have professional perspectives that aligned with the current professional expectations valued within the schools they worked. In addition, their presence in schools revealed alternative viewpoints that were highly valued and sought by others. This study goes beyond Bourdieu's theoretical definitions of capitals to explore specific relationships between embodied and institutionalized capitals that were valued in school settings. The knowledge gained from this study provided insight into the professional habitus defined by teachers within a school district and the relationship of second career teachers to this habitus. / Dissertation/Thesis / Ed.D. Educational Administration and Supervision 2014

Despite natural beauty and strong ties to kinship and community, the Appalachian region has experienced economic and social disadvantages compared to other regions of the United States. Historically rural areas have been left by the wayside with little federal or state funding; rural areas received $401-$648 less per capita than their metropolitan counterparts in the years between 1994 and 2001(Kellogg Foundation, 2004). 42 percent of the population of Appalachia live in rural areas, compared to 20 percent nationally (Gohl, 2013). As of 2014 the poverty rate in Appalachia is 17.2 percent in comparison to the national average of 15.6 percent (ARC, 2016). Consequently Appalachian towns have been privy to anti-poverty policies and development work by the United States government for over half a century (Farmbry, 2014). But the anti-poverty measures did very little to change the region. In order to promote change and prosper as a region, many Appalachian towns have turned to using their cultural capital as a community development resource. As a tool in community building, cultural capital shifts the focus of a community away from its problems, towards its assets (Phillips and Shockley, 2010). The purpose of this study was to explore how two rural Appalachian towns use cultural capital to impact their community's viability. To do so the researcher used qualitative interview methods and focus groups to understand the experiences of three leadership groups in each community. The findings of this study provide insight into how communities identify and operationalize their cultural capital, and what impact it has on their economic and social prosperity. Additional research should be done on community viability in rural areas, including community visioning, and power dynamics of rural spaces. / Master of Science in Life Sciences

Previous research has examined certainty and severity of punishment as serving a deterrent function. This research examines the effects of economic, cultural, and social capital, as well as the effects of certainty, severity, and prior punishment on likelihood of re-offending. Data collected at the Central Mississippi Correctional Facility suggest that traditional deterrence indicators are insufficient for predicting likelihood of re-offending. This research finds that prior punishment increases likelihood of re-offending, a finding completely counter to that of traditional deterrence. Re-offending may be best understood by considering the effects of punishment on increasing prison capital and decreasing real world capital. The argument is that inmates consider their potential in the real world as compared to that in a prison when reporting likelihood of re-offending. Such considerations should better explain likelihood of re-offending as compared to traditional deterrence indicators, such as certainty, severity, and prior punishment.