Ethnic minority groups are societally defined groups that exist as psychological and/or numerical minorities, and whose members presumably share biological and/or cultural heritage (Markus, 2008). Although religious and national minority groups clearly are defined by culture, racial minority groups (which psychologists have tended to regard as defined by biology; Fairchild, Yee, Wyatt, & Weizmann, 1995;Yee, Fairchild, Weizmann, & Wyatt, 1993) similarly are defined by culture (Jones, 1997). In turn, culturally diverse families are defined by the presence of one or more family members who are members of racial, religious, or national minority groups within a given society (Gaines, 1997). According to Erving Goffman (1963), stigmatization toward members of ethnic minority groups not only can affect those individuals but also can affect the individuals' families. Within the U.S.A. and other Western nations, majority group members as well as minority group members in interracial marriages often are acutely aware of the transmission of stigmatization throughout entire families (Gaines & Ickes, 2000). However, the transmission of stigmatization can occur in all families in which one or more members belong to racial, religious, or national minority groups (Gaines, 2001). In the present chapter, we draw upon Goffman's (1959, 1963) symbolic interactionist theory in examining support communication within culturally diverse families. We pay particular attention to Goffman's (1963) concept of stigma as applied to members of ethnic minority groups and as applied to their families. Moreover, we focus on specific forms of support communication (following Mickelson & Williams, 2008; Williams & Mickelson, 2008) that members of ethnic minority groups may use to obtain social support from family members and, thus, counteract the potentially negative effects of stigmatization. In addition, we consider the utility of Claude Steele's (1997) concept of stereotype threat in explaining the potential lack of generalizability of support communication processes across ethnic (and especially racial) groups.

The term ‘Economy’ is often framed in relation to money, GDP, industries, businesses, waged labor and market etc. This narrow portrayal of economy excludes all the diverse activities and practices that people perform in everyday life as a part of the economy. J.K Gibson- Graham reframes economy in the book ‘Take back the Economy’ by presenting it as an ‘Iceberg’. While the tip of the iceberg is the visible capitalistic economy, the base underneath is formed with wide range of activities, places and people. These activities ranges from household works, bartering, sharing, recycling, self-employments, social co-ops, volunteering, peer to peer production, reproduction to different forms of local transactions and exchanges which takes place within families, neighbors and communities. In spite of seeing economy as a self-regulating machine the authors introduce the concept of ‘diverse economies’ in which people participate and influence economic actions.The predominant focus on capitalistic economy can be seen in the practice of urban design as well. Urban spaces are designed to foster economic growth as higher GDP rather than socio-environmental wellbeing. The insatiable growth has not only depleted the nature but also created power hierarchy and inequalities in different geographical and temporal level. The diverse economies are often undervalued and obscured eventhough it contributes a great deal in socio-environmental wellbeing. Focusing on the diverse economic activities can help to understand the local practices and resources, and can open up the possibility to empower the community.The thesis explores the theory of ‘diverse economies’ in relation to migration and gender discrimination. In the crisis of mass migration, unemployment, constraints in social welfare different forms of diverse economic practices help the society to sustain well. This thesis investigates the area Hovsjö in Södertälje which is often discussed for its unemployment, segregation, unrest and lack of democratic participation. The aim of the project is to make the diverse economies in Hovsjö visible and scale it up to perform collectively for socio-environmental wellbeing.4| reversing the 'icberg' | 5KTH- sustainable urban planning & design

Diversity in the judiciary is essential to ensure impartiality, public confidence, and the perception that all members of society are represented on the bench. Minorities and women are significantly underrepresented as judges in Florida in proportion to their numbers in the general population. Because we live in an increasingly global world, diversity is best described when people of different races, colors, ethnicity and genders work to develop a mutual respect for each other. It was important to use diversity in this research because it required recognition, understanding, and acceptance of the special contribution that each member of a group can make. The documentation review method was used to measure the data collected in this research. The advantages for using this method were first, to obtain comprehensive and historical information that already exists and secondly, to obtain data which demonstrates few biases about the information. I used correlation as a non-experimental, description method because the variables are not directly manipulated, as they would be if used in an experimental method. This method of research is really more of a mathematical technique for summarizing data. This study was designed to determine the degree and direction of relationship between two or more variables or measures of behavior. Diversity in 2004 judicial appointments is a high priority in Florida's present administration. Their goal is to have a judicial system composed of judges who reflect the people they serve. Since judges have so much influence over the lives of people of the state, it is important that all Floridians perceive the judiciary legitimate. Having a diverse judiciary serves the goal. The Bush/Jennings team appointed; 1) the first African American woman, Judge Peggy Quince to the Florida Supreme Court (with the agreement of Governor Lawton Chiles); 2) minorities to 53 judicial positions including the first Hispanic Supreme Court Justice Raoul Cantero to the Supreme Court; 3) 26 African American, 26 Hispanics, 1 other); 4) women to 66 judicial position; and, 5) the first Haitian-American judge, Judge Fred Seraphin to the Miami Dade County Court. The judicial system has an obligation to provide equal opportunity to the extent that females, minorities, and people of color have the temperament, the legal educational background, the skills, and the abilities necessary to sit on Florida's bench. The legal profession also has an obligation to encourage more minorities and women to consider a career in law. The governor's most recent selections indicate that he is serious about improving diversity on the Florida bench.

<P> With the rise of globalization, international assignments and multicultural teams, managing cultural diversity has become essential to organizations. As managing cultural diversity in team work has historically been a challenge (Earley & Gibson , 2002), academics and practitioners have directed resources toward enhancing understanding of how best to manage team diversity and improve effectiveness of international assignments (Tsui et al, 2007). Cultural Intelligence (CQ) is the abi lity to behave effectively in culturally diverse situations (Earley & Ang, 2003). Theory and research suggest that cultural diversity within teams often relate negatively to team member experiences of team processes, thereby negatively impacting team outcomes. The current study relies on similarity/attraction theory (Byrne, 1971 ), social identification theory (Turner, 1982) and self-categorization theory (Turner. 1982) to evaluate the relationship between cultural diversity and team processes (cohesion , participation, relationship and task conflict) and team outcomes (performance and satisfaction). The moderating effect of Cultural Intelligence on the relationship between cultural diversity and team processes was also explored. Data were collected from fourth year business school students working in teams of four to six to manage a virtual company competing with other teams in a stimulated market. A significant negative relationship was found between cultural diversity and team cohesion and participation; and a significant positive relationship was noted between cultural diversity and both team relationship conflict and task conflict. Furthermore, team satisfaction correlated positively with team cohesion and negatively with both types of team conflict while team performance was unrelated to team cultural diversity and perceptions of team processes. Finally, team members' CQ positively moderated the relationship between team cultural diversity and team processes (cohesion, participation and relationship conflict), where the team was comprised of two different cultures only. Where teams were comprised of members from more than two cultural groups, the moderation was negative. </p> / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

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A number of studies have examined how counselor educators can facilitate counselor development of multicultural competence within the context of graduate counseling programs (e.g., Chu-Lien Chao, 2012; Constantine, 2001; Constantine, Juby, and Liang, 2001; Dickson and Jepsen, 2007; Sodowsky et al., 1998). Much less research has focused on counselor development occurring in students' personal lives, yet some evidence has shown that students report the impact of extracurricular experiences on counselor development (Coleman, 2006; Furr and Carroll, 2003; Rønnestad and Skovholt, 2003). Many qualitative studies have demonstrated positive effects of cultural immersion experiences, yet much less research in this area has utilized the quantitative measures related to cultural awareness. Few studies have also examined the effects of living among a different culture instead of visiting a different culture short term. After a thorough review of the literature on cultural immersion experiences, this study was designed to fill the gap that presently exists in quantitative findings exploring differences in multicultural competence and universal-diverse orientation, which is an awareness and accepting attitude for those who come from diverse backgrounds. The sample for the study consisted of students experiencing cultural immersion by means of relocation for their graduate training program. Additional analysis examined how universal-diverse orientation and duration of graduate training predicted multicultural competence scores. The results were not significant showing any differences in either multicultural competence or universal-diverse orientation scores based on cultural immersion. Similarly, no differences were found for either of these variables based on amount of multicultural training either. One finding that was statistically significant was a strong, positive correlation, as well as predictive ability, between universal-diverse orientation and multicultural knowledge and awareness. Implications of the findings could be applicable to clinicians and counselor education programs. By fostering more universal-diverse orientation, counselor educators could work towards increasing multicultural competence as well. This study was found to have some limitations, primarily a small sample size for quantitative analysis. These results do have implications for future research to continue studying multicultural competence, universal-diverse orientation, and cultural immersion. / Doctor of Philosophy / Much research has examined how people who train mental health professionals can facilitate counselor development of multicultural competence, an awareness for cultural differences and an ability to work with people from many cultural backgrounds. Much less research has focused on counselor development occurring in students’ personal lives, yet some evidence has shown that students report the impact of events in their personal lives on counselor development. Many studies have demonstrated positive effects of cultural immersion experiences, in which participants immerse themselves in a different culture for a time period. A few studies have also examined the effects of living among a different culture instead of visiting a different culture short term. After a thorough review of the literature on cultural immersion experiences, this study was designed to research how living among a diverse culture could result in differences in multicultural competence and universal-diverse orientation, which is an awareness and accepting attitude for those who come from diverse backgrounds. The study focused on students who moved to live in a different culture as part of their graduate training program in a counseling related field. The researcher also explored the relationship between universal-diverse orientation and multicultural competence scores. The results were not significant showing any differences in either multicultural competence or universal-diverse orientation scores based on whether or not participants had experienced cultural immersion. Similarly, no differences were found based on amount of multicultural training either. One finding that was significant was a strong relationship between universal-diverse orientation and multicultural knowledge and awareness. Implications of the findings could be applicable to counselors and counselor education programs. By fostering more universal-diverse orientation, counselor educators could work towards increasing multicultural competence as well. This study was found to have some limitations, primarily having few participants take the study’s survey. These results do have implications for future research to continue studying multicultural competence, universal-diverse orientation, and cultural immersion.

Paraphrase sparsity is an issue that complicates the training process of question answering systems: syntactically diverse but semantically equivalent sentences can have significant disparities in predicted output probabilities. We propose a method for generating an augmented paraphrase corpus for the visual question answering system to make it more robust to paraphrases. This corpus is generated by concatenating two sequence to sequence models. In order to generate diverse paraphrases, we sample the neural network using diverse beam search. We evaluate the results on the standard VQA validation set. Our approach results in a significantly expanded training dataset and vocabulary size, but has slightly worse performance when tested on the validation split. Although not as fruitful as we had hoped, our work highlights additional avenues for investigation into selecting more optimal model parameters and the development of a more sophisticated paraphrase filtering algorithm. The primary contribution of this work is the demonstration that decent paraphrases can be generated from sequence to sequence models and the development of a pipeline for developing an augmented dataset. / Master of Science / For a machine, processing language is hard. All possible combinations of words in a language far exceed a computer’s ability to directly memorize them. Thus, generalizing language into a form that a computer can reason with is necessary for a machine to understand raw human input. Various advancements in machine learning have been particularly impressive in this regard. However, they require a corpus, or a body of information, in order to learn. Collecting this corpus is typically expensive and time consuming, and does not necessarily contain all of the information that a system would need to know - the machine would not know how to handle a word that it has never seen before, for example. This thesis examines the possibility of using a large, general corpus to expand the vocabulary size of a specialized corpus in order to improve performance on a specific task. We use Seq2Seq models, a recent development in neural networks that has seen great success in translation tasks to do so. The Seq2Seq model is trained on the general corpus to learn the language and then applied to the specialized corpus to generate paraphrases similar to the format in the specialized corpus. We were able to significantly expand the volume and vocabulary size of the specialized corpus via this approach, we have demonstrated that decent paraphrases can be generated from Seq2Seq models, and we developed a pipeline for augmenting other specialized datasets.

Research over the last three decades has documented that teacher efficacy has an effect on student achievement (Armor et al., 1976; Bandura, 1997). The literature on culturally responsive teaching (CRT) recognizes teacher efficacy as one of the attributes of successful teachers of students from culturally and linguistically diverse (CLD) backgrounds (Gay, 2000; Ladson-Billings, 1994). Researchers (e.g., Goddard & Goddard, 2001) have also found that collective teacher efficacy (CTE) beliefs can affect teachers’ goal setting, motivation, and persistence with challenging tasks or situations; specifically, the CTE construct not only explains school-level effects on achievement, but also explains effects on individual teachers’ self-efficacy. When CLD students require special education services, their instruction must be equally responsive to their cultural and linguistic characteristics in addition to their educational needs based on the disability (García & Ortiz, 2004; McCray & García, 2002). Consequently, CRT practices are central to improve these students’ learning outcomes (Gay, 2000). The purpose of this descriptive, correlational survey research study was to investigate (a) the relationship between special education teachers’ collective teacher efficacy beliefs and CRT efficacy for teaching CLD students in special education; and (b) the influences of personal and professional background variables on participating teachers’ CRT efficacy beliefs. The survey was sent to 855 special education teachers of CLD students with disabilities in three urban school districts in Texas; 344 complete responses were received, yielding a 44% response rate. The survey consisted of four sections: Background Information, Collective Teacher Efficacy (CTE), Culturally Responsive Teaching Self-Efficacy Scale (CRTSE), and Culturally Responsive Teaching Outcome-Expectancy Scale (CRTOE). Data were analyzed using descriptive statistics, factor analysis, analysis of variance, and multiple regression. The results revealed statistically significant relationships (a) between CRTSE and CRTOE beliefs, with a positive and moderate association; and (b) between CTE and CRT efficacy beliefs (CRTSE as well as CRTOE), but the associations were positive and weak. Teachers’ language characteristics, instructional setting, certification in bilingual education/English as a second language, and their perceptions of the quality of their professional preparation emerged as significant influences on their CRTSE and CRTOE beliefs. Implications for teacher education and future research are presented. / text

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Doctor of Philosophy / Curriculum and Instruction Programs / Socorro G. Herrera / Throughout the last several decades, rises in CLD student populations and teacher accountability have factored in the increased numbers of CLD students being referred for, and placed in, special education. Because traditional evaluation processes do not reliably distinguish student learning problems that result from culturally/linguistic difference from those associated with innate disability, once referred, most CLD students go on to be placed in special education. Since over-referral is a key factor in over-representation, the purpose of this qualitative study was to identify and examine the student and teacher factors associated with referral of bilingual CLD students for special education evaluation. The primary sources of data for this study were school records generated by classroom teachers, and semi-structured interviews with teachers who had referred bilingual CLD students for special education evaluation. Qualitative data garnered from these sources permitted identification and description of CLD student learning behaviors, and teacher interpretations thereof, which factored into referral of these students for special education. Results, obtained through review and analysis of 27 referral records and six teacher interview transcripts indicated that lack of teacher preparation was a significant factor in the teacher's ability to appropriately perceive and respond to CLD student learning behaviors. Most notably, grade-level teachers tended to overrate the CLD student's English language proficiency based upon observations made within the school setting. Once determined to have enough English, the CLD student's language needs were essentially disregarded throughout the pre-referral (intervention) process. Student failure with unaccommodative interventions appeared to reinforce teacher perceptions of prereferral as a confirmatory process rather than the means by which student learning problems could be resolved. These phenomena were compounded by the teacher's expressed deference for psychological test data and preference for special education placement. Teachers form observation-based opinions about CLD student language proficiencies which can derail the instructional and intervention process for CLD students and lead to inappropriate referrals for special education. Further research is needed to determine the reliability of such teacher impressions and methods by which these teachers can better identify and respond to CLD student's language assets and needs.