U.S. schools face a well-documented gender gap within some important educational and social indicators. In the United States, boys and young men are significantly more likely than girls and young women to be diagnosed with a learning disability, leave high school without a diploma, receive failing grades in core classes, and be suspended or expelled from school. This study uses an interpretive research framework to investigate the relationship between this gender gap in education and constructions of masculinity, social and cultural capital, agency, caring and resistance in secondary schools. Data collected through interviews with young men who engaged in acts of resistance against schooling yielded three major findings. First, some acts of resistance provided the participants with a means to ease the tedium and stress of academic work and enhance social capital among their male peers. Second, some acts of resistance provided participants with a means to regain personal agency when they felt either marginalized by an oppressive system or generally rejected, ignored, or alienated from the formal schooling environment. Finally, participants expressed an appreciation for authentic relationships with their teachers and stated that they were less likely to engage in acts of resistance with teachers who nurtured authentic caring relationships in the classroom.

Extensive research has documented the experiences and outcomes of women and certain underrepresented racial/ethnic minority groups in STEM educational programs. This paper contributes to current conversations by focusing on the experiences of individuals that identify as both a racial/ethnic and sexual/gender minority (SGM). This paper has two major objectives in mind: (1) provide one of the first empirical studies examining the experiences of SGM students in STEM and (2) interrogate the intersection of racial/ethnic identity and sexual/gender identity within the context of these programs. In order to provide a more robust understanding in these areas, this paper is guided by the following research questions: (1) What are the experiences of students who identify as both a racial/ethnic and sexual/gender minority in STEM educational programs, (2) in what ways do these students' sexual/gender and racial/ethnic identity influence these experiences, (3) do racial/ethnic and sexual/gender minorities feel a sense of belonging within their respective programs and why, and (4) how do racial/ethnic and sexual/gender minorities perceive they are treated by peers, faculty, and staff within these programs. This paper takes a mixed-method approach, incorporating both interviews and quantitative survey data to gain insights into these questions. Upon analysis, major findings demonstrated that students experiences an erasure of student diversity in the classroom, while also experiencing higher salience with their sexual/gender identity when compared to their racial/ethnic identity.

Because the first year of university education is for students a concentrated point of turbulence (in the form of failing, dropping out, changing courses or degrees, making changes in future plans and present priorities, and suffering anxieties about the same), it has been the focus of much study by education specialists, along the lines of "What are we doing wrong?" and "How can we do better?" "The teflon degree" is a metaphor derived from the image of a mess-preventing armour plating. The assumption that turbulence in the first year is naturally a bad thing fits by extension with an idea that turbulence, mess, and so on are to be avoided. Better than avoidance would be the construction of a system which would make it impossible for such things to happen. "The teflon degree" is a fantasy of a program of study that one can embark on, knowing what one will do and how one will do it, and then slide through, essentially unchanged, "augmented" by the acquisition of skills and qualifications. This thesis is a critique of the conceptual underpinnings of such an ideal. It is also an evocation of the qualities in university education which are obscured or harmed by the pursuit of such an ideal, foremost among them being love. I argue that love is not a sentimental afterthought, but an essential component of all genuine learning. This critique is carried out through the conceptual framework established by the work of Gregory Bateson in cybernetics. The empirical component of the thesis is drawn from interviews with individual students; these are intended both to illustrate and to make concrete the theoretical concerns which are its primary focus. With Bateson, both an anthropologist and a philosopher, as my central theorist, I have drawn on both anthropological and philosophical texts in the development of my argument, including Buber, Durkheim, Gaita, Hegel, Murdoch, Sartre, Serres, Simmel, and Weber.

This study investigated pedagogy for Taiwanese students in mainstream Australian secondary school classes. The aim was to explore the construction of pedagogy for these students within the communicative contingencies of both the classroom and the community of talk around the classroom. Accordingly, the study documented and explicated the ways in which teachers adapted geography lessons for Taiwanese students, and further, the fit of teachers' descriptions and explanations of those adaptations within broader school community debate over provision for ethnic minority students. The significance of the study resides in its contribution to educational research, policy and practice in conditions of cultural diversity and formal cultural inclusion. The study's contributions arise from its attention to the forms of teacher-student interaction that are often considered to be a major point of difference between pedagogy in Australia (and other Western nations) and in Chinese (and other Asian) contexts. The focus is on the degree of teacher-directedness or student-centredness, as demonstrated by such factors as rote learning and participation in whole class spoken activities. Review of the current literature indicated that such dispositions may not only be brought to Australian pedagogic contexts by Chinese students, but may also be constructed within these contexts themselves. Analysis of theoretical perspectives on culture and pedagogy that were of high profile in Australia during the 1990s indicated that the investigation of this possibility requires an approach that makes it possible to attend to the structuring of such contexts. Accordingly, this study was conducted from a perspective that made it possible to document and explicate the construction of socialising conditions within the communicative particularities of lessons for Taiwanese students as pedagogic practice enacted in classrooms, and of debate amongst those interested in the education of the students as pedagogic talk within a school community. The theoretical framework of the study drew primarily on Basil Bernstein's sociology of educational knowledge. This perspective provided the fundamental concepts for describing the categorisation of Taiwanese students in the teacher-student interaction of the classroom and in school community talk about such. Analytic concepts developed by researchers concerned with classroom talk were specified in Bernsteinian terms to facilitate the translation between these theoretical objects and the sets of lesson and interview data examined in the study. These concepts made it possible to describe the pedagogic activities of teachers and students, and their constituent social actions, as enacted in the lessons, and as constructed in the interview talk of school community members. The two data sets were produced and analysed by methods derived from the Bernsteinian perspective. The aim was to: i) test the generic and formal Bernsteinian sociology of educational knowledge; and ii) produce findings generalisable to culturally diverse Australian school settings. One of the main findings of the study was that the adaptation of geography lessons for Taiwanese, Chinese, Asian and other ESL students produced a more constrained and teacher-directed form of pedagogy than that which was provided for other students. The other main finding was that the geography teachers described and explained these adaptations by categorising the students as 'reluctant' in whole class spoken activities and 'dependent' in written seatwork activities. Other school community members interested in the education of Taiwanese students evinced substantial agreement in this regard. However, these interviewees constructed the 'reluctant' speech and 'dependent' seatwork of the students from complex collaborative and competitive positions available in professional-academic talk. This pointed to struggles amongst those who would inform the provision of pedagogy for Taiwanese and other Chinese, Asian and ESL students. The study's theoretical significance resides, in part, in its capacity to describe the moment-by-moment classroom interaction of Taiwanese students without pre-empting the empirical salience of categories of cultural identity. Rather, attention is focused on the ways that students are categorised according to their capacity to undertake particular communicative interactions, categorisations in which cultural identity is not necessarily made overtly salient. In this way the study refined and tested the Bernsteinian model of classroom practice, while also locating analytic tools for describing classroom talk within broader relations of social power and control. Methodologically, the study's significance arises from its capacity to generate descriptions of the particularity of classroom practice, and talk about such, as pedagogic practice and talk. For policymakers the study points to the professional-academic discourses that need to be made available to teachers if they are to engage in the conversations about pedagogy that are central to emergent, second-wave conceptions of cultural equity in the state of Queensland where the study was conducted. For practitioners questions arise from the possibility that the dispositions of Taiwanese and other Chinese, Asian and ESL students to teacher-directed forms of pedagogy may be constructed in Australian contexts. These pertain to the desirability of the outcomes of adaptations undertaken in the name of cultural equity, in addition to the implications of teachers' own professional-academic socialisation for debates over 'who' should get 'what' pedagogic provision. The thesis concludes with a discussion of the utility of the study's perspective and findings given current developments in the racial and cultural politics of Australian educational institutions.

The aims of this study were to define an Australian boarding school, provide a summary of international and Australian boarding school literature, and complete a small-scale qualitative investigation of students' views in a co-educational boarding school. At first glance, it appeared that contemporary Australian boarding schools were a reproduction of the influential public boys' schools of Great Britain. Although there have been a number of histories of Australian independent schools, the boarding element has often been portrayed as Dickensian and remains an overlooked area of educational research. In particular, the literature available about Australian residential schooling over the past 20 years has been limited to a handful of significant studies by Cree and Trimingham Jack. In this study 45 Australian and overseas students were asked to write memoirs of 4-5,000 words about their boarding experience emphasising their thoughts, feelings and aspirations. The limitation was that all respondents were full-time boarders for at least one year when the questionnaire-survey was completed. The memoir-based humanistic approach of the Polish- American sociologist Florian Znaniecki, as developed for the analysis of personal and group social systems in the culturally diverse context of Australia by J. J. Smolicz, was employed to interpret the memoir data. The memoir method has been well documented in Australia, as a means of collecting and analysing concrete and cultural facts, mainly in relation to the study of minority ethnic groups and their cultural actions. The humanistic approach emphasized that the researcher must accept cultural phenomena from the viewpoint of its participants and not from that of an outside observer. In the present study, this approach permitted the researcher to understand the experiences and attitudes of individual students towards an Australian co-educational boarding education through their own eyes. The memoirs analysed were generated from 26 concrete questions, which revealed place-of-birth, ethnic identity, and languages spoken at home. This provided the researcher with verifiable information about the everyday lives of the respondents. The second half of the memoirs required response to 23 questions - these yielded cultural data. These questions required students to reflect on their situation, attitudes and experiences of boarding as a system of education. This information could only have been provided by the participants themselves and gave the researcher direct access to the memoir writers' individual and group consciousness. The study discovered that a number of the students were in the process of re-evaluating and re-interpreting the advantages and disadvantages of boarding school as a social system transmitted to them by parents, friends, family, and teachers. The respondent's personal statements revealed that the relationships among students and among students and staff in the boarding House tended to be primary in nature, in that they were personal, informal, and involved the entire human personality. From these data, it appeared that the success of a boarding school was determined by the personal atmosphere, support, and comfort of the boarding House. Consideration of the empirical data found that 43 of the 45 respondents' memoirs believed that their overall experiences at the research boarding school were positive. Negative observations stressed the pressures of homesickness, tedium of school life and a lack of freedom thereby supporting Goffman's view of a "total institution". The majority of students' memoirs were ambivalent towards religion at the research school. Nevertheless, 11 stressed its significant implication in their day-to-day lives. The memoirs suggested that an education at the research boarding school was a crucible that forged students through a variety of experiences, positive and negative, individual and collective, for life. Overall, the memoirs support the observation that boarding school acts as a social system for the acceptance of new cultural values, such as the cultural diversity respondents' experienced in their lives at boarding school. The study revealed an attitudinal shift in the group that welcomed the cultural pluralism of the school and recognised the cultural monism of the home. These memoirs revealed that boarding school was a significant factor in fostering independence and embracing cultural diversity as experienced in the crucible of the boarding school. These findings challenged the popular maxim that an Australian residential education was an anachronistic, inflexible, colonial-British model and suggested that it has the potential to act as a system of education that prepares its students for the challenges of life. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--School of Education, 2004.

The purpose of this study was to explore how the pleasure and participation sports model as described by Coakley (2009) was reflected through an Advanced Physical Education course. This included an analysis examining whether the model was supported, expanded, or refuted based on characteristics of the model emphasizing (a) democratic leadership, (b) inclusive participation, and (c) the use of cooperation and competition with others to develop and test skills in a healthy and enjoyable context. A single-site, exploratory, qualitative case study design provided the opportunity to investigate the phenomenon under exploration. A particular Advanced Physical Education course was purposefully selected as the bounded case for the study. Fifteen students and one teacher agreed to participate. Semi-structured, one-on-one interviews (audio taped), observations, and documents provided data sources for information collected between August 2010 and April 2011. Data analysis procedures included a constant comparative method in which conceptually congruent categories were constructed to develop multiple iterations of analysis. Themes that developed based on the data suggested that students experienced a sense of enjoyment, empowerment, and connection resulting from their involvement in the class. From an interactionist perspective, as students found themselves interacting with one another in sports such as archery and kayaking, they were able to prescribe meanings that were often very different than their experiences in traditional sports. Conclusions from the study indicated that the course did reflect the pleasure and participation model. This study suggests that if students interpret their experiences in physical education and sports as positive, then they are more likely to participate. Utilizing Coakley’s model is significant because it provides a framework for considering sports from a broader perspective reflecting the diverse youth population. As a result, the research is beneficial in considering how current opportunities in sport and physical education can be expanded to offer all youth an opportunity to participate and experience sociopositive outcomes. This is also noteworthy since research has indicated the importance of physical activity and that in terms of health, the best physical activities consist of ones which are non-competitive and rhythmic (Chenoweth & Leutzinger, 2006; Curry, Arriagada, & Cornwell, 2002).

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Delaware, 2006. / Principal faculty advisor: David Kaplan, School of Education. Includes bibliographical references.

Academic achievement disparities exist across race and ethnic groups. Parents may be a good resource to their children for their educational success. Parental academic involvement is associated with student academic achievement across race and ethnicity. This study explored the relationship between race and ethnicity and parent time-use on children's education. In addition to studying parental academic involvement across race and ethnic groups, the Latino American ethnic group was examined. Heterogeneity exists within race and ethnic groups. Understanding differences in parental academic involvement within the Latino American ethnic group is a step toward addressing education disparities across race and ethnic groups. The last aim of the study was to see if structural differences within families were associated with group differences. The sample was obtained from the 2010 American Time Use Survey and included parents with household children younger than 18 years. Logistic regression results indicated that race and ethnicity was associated with time spent on children's education. However, when the structural variables were accounted for, the race and ethnic differences became statistically nonsignificant. Many of the structural variables were associated with parent time spent on children's education. Parent demographics and other structural variables may make it more or less likely that parents spend time on their children's education. Study findings also showed that for the Latino American subgroup, one group, Central/South Americans, look more likely to spend time on children's education. Puerto Rican parents were statistically significantly more likely to spend time on their children's education for one model tested, but not the other. Controlling for structural variables did not remove the association in the Central/South American group. The results for the Latino American ethnic group analyses differed slightly from the race and ethnic group analyses. The results suggest that there are differences across groups regardless of parent demographics and family structure. The findings also suggest that teachers and school administrators may improve parental academic involvement by targeting programs to fathers and full-time employed Latino American families.

The purposes of the study were: 1) To describe important characteristics of an ongoing, viable "community-based" community education project, 2) to determine whether the critical-principles postulated at the beginning of the study would be illustrated by considering a community-based community education project in one community, and 3) to describe the leadership behaviors utilized in a successful community-based community education project, and 4) to generate hypotheses for future research studies in community education.The data were collected and analyzed using a modified version of Spradley's Developmental Research Sequence Writing methodology, including interviewing participant observation, supplemented with document analysis and surveys.Eight of nine postulated critical principles were present in the organization studied. A partial listing of proposed hypotheses follows:1. The general principles, values, and leadership actions outlined in the agency summary can be successfully transplanted to another community.2. The director of a successful community-based community education agency must be good at controlling the flow of information, adept at negotiating, and politically persuasive.3. A tax levy is a sound, stable means for providing primary local financial support.4. The non-profit corporation is an effective structure capable of building on the resources of the major political bodies (the city council, the public school board, and the township trustees) while maintaining integrity in decision making and service provision.5. The political bodies, the people of the community, and the businesses and community organizations must all be represented in the governing body of a commuity-based community education organization.6. Detailed procedures and policies play a critical role in bridging the transition period when a new director is hired.

This thesis explores three models of a good school: the Modified Academic Index Model, the Demographically-Adjusted Model, and the Equity Model. The Modified Academic Index Model uses test scores, from the Commonwealth Accountability Testing System 2008 and 2009 academic year, to measure good schools. The Demographically-Adjusted Model uses these test scores while controlling for certain demographic variables. The Equity Model uses standard deviations of these test scores to measure quality schools. Rankings of the 228 public high schools in Kentucky are developed for each model. The rankings of the models are then compared.