This ethnographic case study investigates the diverse means and processes by which environmental identities were produced by five first grade students as they participated in an emergent, public school garden space. The children's histories, choices, personal and social experiences, expressions, and corresponding narratives are explored alongside the garden structure and social context to unpack the individualized and layered nature of children's environmental identity and care development. To locate and analyze children's engagements in the garden space, ethnographic, discourse, and narrative analysis methods are employed. The figured world concept is used to theorize and study the caring, environmental identities taken up and enacted by the children in this context. Through participation in emergent provocations, the creation and leveraging of garden artifacts, and investments in caring relationships, the children in this study shaped and cared for the garden space while it simultaneously shaped and cared for them. The environmental identity stories presented in this work broaden the definition of environmental identity to be more inclusive and less normalizing, thus, creating new spaces and moments for children to identify as environmentalists. The stories also raise implications for environmental education researchers to utilize more rigorous frameworks for investigating environmental care and identity development in the field. Findings from this research indicate that emergent garden spaces are potential sites for children to build relationships with nature in the public school. This is a significant practice for schools, as children today lack spaces in which to form environmental identities that implicate environmental care behaviors. / Ph. D.

This study is a qualitative examination of second language (L2) learning processes by four advanced learners of Japanese in the community of a summer intensive full-immersion program in the United States. Using L2 socialization theory as a theoretical framework, this study conceives of L2 learning as a process of social participation in a community of practice and examines L2 learning processes by four learners, focusing on the dynamic interplay between the affordances of the social community and the agency of the individual learners. The purpose of this study is twofold: (a) It investigates the ways in which the four learners exercise their agency to pursue their goals of learning Japanese and (b) it documents how the different ways in which the four learners exercise agency form different trajectories of learning and create different experiences of L2 socialization. This study has adopted an ethnographic case study approach to the investigation of research inquiries. Through the analyses of data obtained from multiple sources, including interviews with the four learners, observations of their engagement in the community of practice of the summer intensive full-immersion program, their audio-recorded conversations with other members of the community, and various artifacts, this study explores the role of L2 learner agency in the process of L2 socialization and describes in depth their experiences of learning Japanese from their emic perspectives. The case studies of the four learners have highlighted the different ways in which they engaged in the community of practice, understood their tasks of learning Japanese, interpreted the affordances of the social community, negotiated the meaning of their participations, defined and redefined their sense of self, and eventually achieved their L2 learning goals. The findings suggest that the richness and effectiveness of a social environment are not characterized by the physical and academic affordances of a social community alone; rather they are constructed in a dynamic relation between the affordance structure of a social community and the L2 learners' agency in the pursuit of the joint enterprise of making L2 learning happen. With regard to the role of L2 learner agency, the study has foregrounded the important role of the aspirations of the four L2 learners for personal transformation and negotiation of the meaning of self of the past, the present, and the future. The findings suggest that L2 learners' diverse and complex social and personal desires for learning an L2 may not be able to be explained using the notion of investment (Norton, 1995, 2000) alone. Since the SLA debate initiated by Firth and Wagner (1997, 2007), SLA research has begun to reconceptualize L2 learners as socially situated beings with diverse needs, wants, and identities. This study presents four portraits of L2 learners who engaged in the enterprise of learning Japanese, as a means of contributing to this reconceptualization, and explores for these four learners what it meant to learn Japanese in the summer of 2010.

Presently, over five million English-language learners (ELLs) are being educated in U.S. schools, and by the year 2020, more than half of the public school system population in the U.S. will be from families whose native language is not English (National Center for Educational Statistics, 2005). Culturally relevant pedagogy (CRP) (Ladson-Billings, 1995) provides a framework for classroom teachers to meet the needs of diverse learners. This ethnographic case study describes what CRP looks like for young ELLs and how a pre-kindergarten school teacher and her bilingual paraprofessional successfully implement CRP. This study: (a) examined the manifestation of culturally relevant pedagogy in a pre-kindergarten classroom for English-language learners, and (b) investigated the ways two teachers promoted three central tenets of CRP in their pre-kindergarten classroom: (1) academic success; (2) cultural competence; and (3) critical consciousness. The research questions were explored by collecting fieldnotes during 20 classroom observations, 3 individual interview transcripts, 3 individual member-checking transcripts, and 15 classroom documents. Findings were based on an open-coding analysis process and a priori coding to demonstrate examples of culturally relevant pedagogical practices and beliefs. The data suggests five major principles of CRP for young ELLs: (1) Oral multilingual classroom language experiences for young children occurred frequently; (2) Monolingual and bilingual teacher collaboration was beneficial for teachers and young children’s language and cultural development; (3) Children’s funds of knowledge were employed and integrated into classroom learning experiences; (4) Peer-to-peer interactions promoted language learning, literacy, and cultural understandings; and (5) Teachers’ and children’s acknowledgement of cultural similarities and differences were built upon. Furthermore, teachers promoted academic success by not accepting student failure and making students responsible for the academic success of their peers; cultural competence is established when teachers encourage children to interact effectively with others from different cultures; and critical consciousness is fostered when children know their authentic stories, are able to stand up for themselves, and ask questions about the world around them. These findings provide a greater understanding of CRP for young ELLs, specifically in a pre-kindergarten context, and hold important implications on future research on CRP.

This thesis is about the process of becoming, or not becoming, a primary school mathematics teacher. The aim is to understand and describe the professional identity development of novice primary school mathematics teachers from the perspective of the novice teachers themselves. The study is a case study with an ethnographic direction where seven novice teachers have been followed from their graduation and two years onwards. The ethnographic direction has been used to make visible the whole process of identity development, both the individual and the social part. The empirical material in the study consists of self-recordings made by the respondents, observations and interviews. The empirical material is analysed in two different but co-operating ways. First a conceptual framework was developed and used as a lens. Second, methods inspired by grounded theory are used. The purpose of using them both is to retain the perspective of the respondents as far as possible. At the time of graduation the respondents are members in a community of reform mathematics teaching and they want to reform mathematics teaching in schools. In their visions they strive away from their own experiences of mathematics in school and practice periods. Four cases are presented closely in the thesis as they show four various routes into, and out of, the teaching profession. These four cases make visible that the respondents’ patterns of participation regarding teaching mathematics changes when they become members in new communities of practice with mathematics teaching as part of the shared repertoire. But, the four cases also make visible that the existence of such communities of practice seems to be rare and that the respondents’ different working conditions limit their possibilities of becoming members in those that exist. During the time span of this study, the respondents hardly receive any feedback for their performance as mathematics teachers. Even if they teach mathematics they don´t teach it as they would like to and they don´t think of themselves as mathematics teachers. Two years after graduation none of the respondents has developed a professional identity as primary school mathematics teacher. A primary school teacher in Sweden is a teacher of many subjects but they are the first teachers to teach our school children mathematics. For the respondents to develop a sense of themselves as a kind of primary school mathematics teacher, mathematics teaching has to become part of their teacher identities. For this to become possible, mathematics must become a part of their image of a primary school teacher as an image of a primary school mathematics teacher. Furthermore memberships in communities of practice with mathematics in the shared repertoire must be accessible, both during teacher education and after graduation. Then professional identity development as a primary school teacher would include becoming and being a teacher of mathematics.

This thesis examines the applicability of pre-dominantly Western theories of inclusive school development in countries of the Global South. Firstly, the findings of a review of research literature are used to develop a typology to describe the common features of inclusive schools, incorporating ways in which they might be supported. This typology was then used to explore the ways in which schools in the Lao People's Democratic Republic and Thailand developed inclusive practices. Engagement with school systems in these countries over a period of six years between 2003 and 2009 provided opportunities to work at several different levels with schools that in some way defined themselves as being 'inclusive'. Using data generated through field work with schools in an Inclusive Education Project in Laos and one school in Thailand, tensions were identified between the theoretical framework and my initial research findings. A revision of the typology was undertaken, drawing on a wider literature to take account of additional factors such as local and national culture and the impact of the policy context in these countries. The researcher often had the role of consultant, creating tensions in the way he constructed his position and also in the schools’ response. Reflecting on these tensions became a productive process in terms of understanding the factors which effectively promoted the development of inclusion in these different contexts. In particular, the process highlighted the relatively neglected significance of local context and knowledge and the way in which these factors impact on inclusive school development. In order to explore these issues in greater detail, further research was then undertaken in one school in Laos, creating a case study developed over four years. This detailed engagement revealed more clearly the limits of typologies in general and of Western theories in particular. Whilst they may offer a lens for examining inclusive school development they do not 'adequately' account for variable factors rooted in the local context. In conclusion, policy initiatives designed to support the development of more inclusive schools must allow for the creation of space at local levels for meanings to be constructed which will support teachers in developing their own sense of agency and making changes in their practice of which they have ownership.

One of the most prominent traditions associated with the Southern Appalachians is the art of weaving. Extensive research has focused on the history of Appalachian weaving, but there is little on the current weaving community. Today, the region still serves as an axis for weaving, and many practicing weavers, weaving instructors, and learning institutions can be found in Southern Appalachia. The core of this study is the interviews with ten weavers that reside and practice their work in Appalachia. Using concept coding, the transcripts of the interviews led to the development of four major themes that highlight the weavers’ discovery of their weaving passion, what continues to be a source of motivation for weaving, how today’s weavers use weaving as a source of income, and how weaving continues to be deeply connected to Southern Appalachia’s art and craft making traditions.

This critical ethnographic collective case study examined the process of becoming a teacher in the context of visual art education. This longitudinal study was grounded in larger educational concerns regarding the preparation of teachers for socially and culturally diverse U.S. public schools. This framing of teacher learning went beyond traditional dichotomies in educational research that maintain an artificial boundary between learning to teach content and learning to teach all students effectively and equitably. In order to re-integrate the study of teacher learning, this research foregrounds the transactional relationship between a preservice art teacher’s social locations (e.g., race, class, sex-gender, language) and how s/he makes sense of what it means to be an “art teacher.” Specifically, the study asked (a) how preservice art teachers negotiated their emerging art teacher identities in a university-based teacher education program, (b) how their social positions were implicated in that process, and (c) how their teacher identities were meditated by cultural narratives, artifacts, and practices. This approach eschewed simplistic and reductive analyses of teacher identities in order to attain a nuanced understanding of the multiple, sometimes contradictory social processes involved in becoming a teacher. This collective case study centered six preservice art teachers with varied racial, class, gender, and sexual identities, all of whom attended the same undergraduate teacher education program in the southwestern U.S. Social practice theory of identity, and critical curriculum and cultural theory were employed in constructing a multi-leveled relational analysis of the commonalities and divergences in participants’ self-understandings over time. Findings showed historical patterns of institutionalized racism, as well as complex class and sex-gendered meanings of art. These inequitable norms were reproduced in ways distinctive to the asocial and apolitical “common sense” knowledge that was mobilized within the world of art teacher education. Some participants experienced alienation and marginalization based on their social positioning in relation to the world of art education. The findings also illuminated the polyvalent nature of identity through the coexistence of hegemonic identities as well as counter-hegemonic agency. Implications and possibilities for generating more critical, equity-oriented teacher education and art education research, practice, and policy are considered. / text

This research investigated teachers'perceptions, understandings and implementation of education standards in elementary and primary schools in Papua New Guinea. The main research question and two sub-questions were designed to explore teachers' perceptions and understanding of national standards. This exploration engaged teachers in identifying factors which they believed influenced their professional work. This study also explored stakeholders' perceptions of teachers' interpretations of national education standards. This study adopted social constructivist epistemology, symbolic interactionism, and ethnographic case study methodology. This provided the basis for its theoretical framework to purposefully understand human interactions within their culture and context. Social constructivism accommodates situated learning, a conceptual framework which was adapted to interrogate understanding and implementation of national education standards. A variety of research methods were used to elicit teachers' and stakeholders' perceptions and experiences of their professional world. These methods included in-depth interviews, focus group discussions, documentary analysis, field notes and observations. Most of the focus group discussions engaged participants to "tell their stories", thus storytelling became an avenue for eliciting teachers' and stakeholders'perceptions. Workshops conducted for teachers became another important strategy for data collection. Two schools, one rural and one urban, became case studies to understand national education standards as an external phenomenon. A total of 595 participants were involved in this study including teachers and pupils, parents and community members, school board members, members of curriculum committees, and policy makers. The study found numerous contextual factors influenced teachers' understandings, interpretation and implementation of standards at the school level. Foremost, teachers' own knowledge of formal education standards was deficient thus influencing their commitment to and enthusiasm in their professional work. Teachers' content knowledge and pedagogical skills influenced their ability to translate content standards into clear benchmarks for pupils' learning. The absence of effective monitoring systems of teachers' performance contributed to pupils' superficial assessment reports and of uncoordinated mastery of subject content and performance skills. The absence of effective school leadership affected teachers' commitment, attitudes and professionalism. This generated a culture of isolationism acute in both schools. Teachers were performing to hierarchically externally imposed requirements, and in the process, overlooked essential knowledge and skills that were needed to improve quality of students' learning. The national education standards are an inherited policy from the colonial administration. This study found that successful implementation of education standards is highly dependent on the social and cultural expectations of Papua New Guinea's rapidly changing society. At the local level, education standards are highly influenced by teachers' professionalism, provincial education boards and community expectations. This is compounded by the mismatch of priorities and policies between the national and provincial education divisions. Such a practice impacts negatively on the successful implementation of educational reform agendas. The study implies that a reconsideration of national education standards is necessary. This process will involve a rethinking of teacher education programmes, dismantling previous assumptions of national standards and local implementation, and accommodating challenges presented by economic, political, social and cultural change in Papua New Guinea.

<p>“Generation Z” multilingual writers are caught up in a globalized/globalizing and superdiverse linguistic and cultural contact zone as well as a neoliberal political and institutional environment. To understand how they inhabit their idiosyncratic literate worlds and practice their differences, I aligned myself with an ethnographic case study approach and investigated four writers’ ecologically situated and distributed literacy practices and experiences on and off the campus of an internationalized U.S. university. Through a conceptual framework I call “affordancescape” (a spatiotemporally stabilized ecological representation of structural, semiotic, experiential, social, bodily, and material relations that enable the human actors to rhetorically act and react) and methodology I name “trans-scape tracing,” I conducted semi-structured interviews and observations, videotaped writing ecologies, analyzed multimodal artifacts. Then, I reconstructed the four writers’ literate worlds that are always emerging and knotworked, rhetorically powerful, and rich in ecological affordances. These literate worlds define, bound, afford, constrain, tie and untie, mediate and remediate these writers’ practices of rhetorical differences.<br></p><p>The following three overarching research questions guided my data collection and analysis:<br></p><p>1.What does it mean to be “different” in the international multilingual students’ own terms? How do they practice self-perceived differences through various literate activities?<br></p><p>2.What are the ecological affordances that enable these students to practice their differences? How are these affordances knotworked? How do their practices of difference position nd reposition themselves?<br></p><p>3.How do we move toward a new understanding of international multilingual students’ practices of difference through literate activities?<br></p><p>Ultimately, I argue it is imperative to (re)examine international multilingual students’ practices of difference through literate activities against the global context characterized by the resurgence of nationalism and growing transnational migration, and the local institutional context characterized by internationalization and neoliberal corporatization, as the global and local trends deeply affect students’ bodily experiences in small and large ways. In Chapter One, I lay out in broad strokes the global and local contexts, the emerging issues, and the current scholarly responses to the issues. In Chapter Two, I introduce the analytical framework that I call “affordancescape.” Chapter Three is dedicated to the description of the research methodology that builds on the approach of ethnographic case study, which I call “trans-scape tracing,” as well as detailed data collection and analysis procedures. Chapter Four through Seven constitute the narratives of individual cases: Janus, Manna, Bohan, and Yang. In Chapter Eight, the last chapter, I revisit the individual cases through a holistic lens and provide suggestions for a new understanding of students’ practices of difference.<br></p><p><br></p>

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