Thesis (D. Min.)--Westminster Theological Seminary, Philadelphia, 2003. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 191-199).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 2002. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 420-450).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 2005. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 215-229).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University, 2005. / Available online via OhioLINK's ETD Center; full text release delayed at author's request until 2010 May 24

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Illinois State University, 1994. / Title from title page screen, viewed March 30, 2006. Dissertation Committee: Patricia H. Klass, Kenneth H. Strand (co-chairs), William T. Gorrell, Ronald S. Halinski, Edward R. Hines. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 128-140) and abstract. Also available in print.

Over most of the 20th Century, many educational systems around the world became increasingly secular, notably with lessening involvement of religious institutions. However, what it means to offer secular education to an increasingly diverse student population is emerging as a contemporary international educational issue. The face of immigration, the rights of Aboriginals, and increasingly diverse and individual forms of religiosity and spirituality have implications for secular education today. This qualitative study of Alberta schooling provides an example of a setting that underwent a high degree of secularization in the 1960's-1980's. A litigious but interpretive boundary exists for the extent educationists were to engage students in thinking about religion and spirituality. Yet, teachers operated with a high degree of autonomy. With these contextual factors as a backdrop, this study explored how a hierarchical sample of Alberta policy-makers, administrators, and teachers conceptualized religion and spirituality for secular secondary schools. Results show that Alberta Education conceptualized space for the conservative religious and Aboriginal communities, but not mainstream students. The students operated in a 'leave your faith at the door' secular model, curriculum was rationalized, and the function of schooling was perceived as preparing students for work. Findings show that principals and teachers challenged the lack of space for mainstream students to engage in the concepts of religion and spirituality. They argued the secular model disadvantaged mainstream students in exercising their right to religious freedom and developing religious literacy and sensitivity skills and it also prevented non-religious students from gaining access to religious/spiritual concepts and tools to facilitate wellbeing and resiliency.

This thesis investigates the diverse ways in which social agents construct the relationship between past, present and future through a study of historical consciousness and its role in the negotiation of identity and shifting power relations in the border region of Southwest Serbia. The focus of the research falls on ethnic relations between Serbs and Bosniaks, who predominantly inhabit the area, and the boundaries that they imagine surround the world they live in. The goal has been to trace the life of these ethnic boundaries, and with it the relationships between those who imagine them by following their transformations in history, as well as to inquire into elements of social patterns that may be discernable within a contextualized and historicized analysis of the region. In order to achieve this, I have analysed the diverse pasts and futures that coalesce in the many 'time spaces' that Southwest Serbia's social actors inhabit in any present moment and from which they (re)construct these boundaries and their identities. The research has been situated within the wider anthropological discussion about the relation of culture (memory) and history and draws on insights made by relevant studies and ethnographies conducted on the territory of the former Yugoslavia. The data presented demonstrates that ethnicity and nationality are not fully crystalized as concepts in Southwest Serbia, their contents are imagined in inconsistent ways in and between social groups, while ethno-national identities and histories are not on the whole felt to be crucial to one's personal sense of self, but are perceived and put to use as malleable political resources. As a result, the most dominant allegiance in Southwest Serbia is to one's family, the only group whose 'essence' escapes political malleability and whose members share a common cross-temporal vision.

No description available.

This thesis focuses on the dynamic interplay between race and social ties. Even though in sociological studies, race is usually treated as a cause of social segregation, we argue that this is a two-way process. Our approach distinguishes between racial self-identifications and racial perceptions. In the first part of the thesis, we focus on the joint effects of these aspects on the prevalence and emergence of social ties in secondary school communities. The second part investigates social effects on racial perceptions. For the analyses, we take a social networks approach, estimating exponential random graph and stochastic actor-oriented models. First, we take a look at the state of racial segregation in friendships and negative ties within communities, and we investigate the dynamic processes that have led to the described state. We also take endogenous network mechanisms into account. We provide evidence that given an initial state of segregation, reciprocity and clustering can maintain the relative infrequency of cross-race friendships in the group, even without (additional) same-race preference. Further, we find that negative ties describe interracial segregation better than friendships: majority students tend to dislike their minority peers, but no such tendencies were found for friendships. Second, we find that minority students tend to overperceive their friends' similarity to themselves in terms of race. Moreover, there is evidence for social influence: classmates tend to accept each other's, especially their friends', opinions about their peer's race. Altogether, both empirical parts of the thesis suggest a hierarchical relationship between the majority and the minority groups: besides majority students' tendency to exclude their minority peers, those who try befriending majorities - but get rejected by them - are more likely to be perceived as minorities. There are also indications of some minority students showing outgroup preference, while others seem to compete against the majority group. This can contribute to the observed emergence of enmity between minority students.

The ethnic-racial relations in Brazil are contained in unequal contexts that reflect the ways in which the country was formed from enslavement. Thus the country was marked by racism and especially the exclusion of blacks. Thus, social institutions, especially the school is not exempt from this reality, since the racial conflicts are present in society due to the inheritance of a past forged by our shared values and habits in a process that favors a single racial segment. Therefore, the school is a space in which they live subjects of different ethnicities, genders and subjectivities. In this perspective we can observe the importance of checking the relationship of students from a public school in order to analyze how they relate to other subjects in the school environment, given the racial differences, since through coexistence develop actions in this space. Thus, the purpose of this work is to investigate the ethnic-racial relations experienced in the daily life of a classroom of 5th year of elementary school of a state school in Maceio, in order to analyze the relationships between black students in the everyday classroom in order to identify racist and prejudiced manifestations. The results indicate that black students are daily oppressed in school, discrimination and racism manifest through name calling, teasing and depreciation. / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior / As relações étnico-raciais no Brasil estão contidas em contextos de desigualdades que refletem as formas pelas quais o país se constituiu desde a escravização. Diante disso, o país ficou marcado pelo racismo e, especialmente, pela exclusão dos negros. Desse modo, as instituições sociais, especialmente a escola não está isenta desta realidade, visto que os conflitos raciais estão presentes na sociedade devido à herança de um passado forjado por hábitos e valores pautados em um processo que privilegia um único segmento racial. Logo, a escola constitui um espaço no qual estão inseridos sujeitos de diferentes etnias, gêneros e subjetividades. Nesta perspectiva, observa-se a importância de verificar as relações dos alunos, de uma escola pública estadual com o intuito de analisar como estes se relacionam com os outros sujeitos do ambiente escolar, diante das diferenças raciais, já que, por meio da convivência, desenvolvem ações neste espaço. Dessa forma, a finalidade desta dissertação é investigar as relações étnico-raciais vivenciadas no cotidiano de uma sala de aula do 5º ano do ensino fundamental I, em uma escola pública estadual de Maceió, com o propósito de analisar as relações dos alunos negros no cotidiano da sala de aula, a fim de identificarmos manifestações racistas e preconceituosas. Os resultados obtidos apontam que os alunos negros são oprimidos cotidianamente na escola, a discriminação e o racismo se manifestam por meio de xingamentos, gozações e depreciações.