<p> This qualitative phenomenological interview study investigated the barriers faced by Latino Spanish speakers with limited English proficiency (LEP) when seeking to obtain a diagnosis and special education resources for their children. This minority population faces several barriers that may be linked to a later diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) among Latino children; however, limited research has focused on the identification of these barriers and factors that contribute to a later ASD diagnosis in Latino families. Five Latina Spanish-speaking mothers with LEP were included in this study. Two 1-hour interviews were conducted per participant. The results showed barriers associated with the health care system, culture beliefs, cultural differences in the view of disability, limited health literacy, LEP, lack of ASD knowledge, and lack of competent interpreters. </p><p>

Latinos consistently have the lowest degree completion rate throughout the United States (Kurlaender & Flores, 2005). At the same time, Latinos are the fastest growing sector of the U.S. population. Taken together, these facts demonstrate an ongoing and growing inequity in educational opportunities and outcomes for a significant portion of the nation’s population. The findings of this study provide additional knowledge regarding how Latino students perceive interaction with faculty and how affirming relationships with faculty can develop Latino students’ sense of belonging. In addition, the study identifies three main support sources for Latino student persistence, which include family support, collegiate self-efficacy, and a sense of belonging to the campus. This study presents five recommendations for policy and practice based upon the findings of this study, for campus leaders to address the low number of Latino students persisting in their college journeys. Furthermore, it provides three suggested areas for future research.

This dissertation explores the topic of migration focusing on science fiction works created by artists from Mexico, Puerto Rico, and the United States during the latter half of the twentieth century. My analysis investigates the four most common science fiction themes used to represent migration: space exploration, alien invasions, dystopian states, and virtual reality. The dissertation is in part a recovery project, demonstrating the significance (and even existence) of science fiction works created by U.S. Latinas/os. The dissertation is also a work of genre historical analysis, locating these Latina/o and Latin American writers and artists in the history of science fiction. Science fiction emerged in its current form during European colonialism-- its exploration, invasion, and colonization of places already settled. In my dissertation I have found that Mexican, Puerto Rican, and Latina/o writers and artists work against the coloniality of science fiction. I argue in my dissertation that the dominant plot in mainstream science fiction arose out of a particular form of colonial literature, the "going native" narrative in which a colonizer adopts characteristics of or is identified with a colonized people. In science fiction, the "going native" narrative is translated into what I call the "going alien" narrative. One can "go alien" in regard to issues other than colonialism, for example, race, gender, or nationality. In my dissertation I explore how Latina/o and Latin American science fiction writers and artists respond to and work against the "going alien" narrative system that has long been the foundation of mainstream science fiction.

While we know about the increasing link between a college education, and social mobility, we are not as informed with who actually makes the transition to college, how they negotiate these spaces, the impact of their secondary education, and the effects of pre-college programs (Louie, 2007).The purpose of this interdisciplinary, narrative inquiry is to fill this gap by presenting a representative tale of how a student experiences her social worlds in relation to school and the impact of college access programs which the researcher administered. This academic year long study builds on a prior action-based ethnographic study and draws on ethnographic approaches. Data collection include four semi-structured 90 minute interviews, field notes, autobiographical and academic written work, as well as personal communication. Critical Race Theory (CRT), Latino Critical Theory (LatCrit), and Critical Race Feminism (Ladson-Billings, 1998; Parker, Deyhle, & Villenas, 1999; Solórzano, 1998; Solórzano & Villalpando, 1998; Tate, 1997), when used as theoretical frames help to expose the ways so-called race-neutral institutional policies and practices perpetuate racial, ethnic, class, gender, and language subordination as reflected in storied experiences. These frameworks help in exploring, questioning and problematizing broader schooling experiences and practices, as well as educational policies rather than just examining the singular dimension of college transition as if social contexts do not play a critical role (Koyama, 2007). This scholarship takes up the complexity embedded in the transition to college by critically analyzing the narratives of a Dominican student's experiences. As sense-making can be seen in part as "dialogic," Bakhtin's concept of "dialogism" is also used when exploring language (Bakhtin, 1981) as "people tell others who they are, but even more important, they tell themselves and then they try to act as though they are who they say they are" (Holland, et.al., 1998, p. 3). Representations suggest that in the process of recounting experiences multiple selves were enacted in relation to various figured worlds where discourses (Gee 1986–2005) serve as mediating tools for negotiation, contestation, and becoming.

Abstract not available.

While it is well established that pedagogies purposefully linking subject matter to students’ cultural contexts and prior knowledge can help students learn subject matter, little is known about practices for so doing in undergraduate biology courses enrolling substantial numbers of racially, culturally, and otherwise diverse students. This study sought to understand how four biology instructors of primarily Black and Hispanic students enact a form of teaching that draws out and uses knowledge from and about students’ lives—what I refer to as students’ culturally informed prior knowledge—to help students learn key subject-matter ideas in biology. It also examined how instructors managed their efforts to teach in this way and how they portrayed their reasons for so doing. The study derived several insights. One, instructors can connect important subject-matter ideas, in the study of biology, to facets of students’ daily lives, using the latter to advance students’ understanding of the former. Thus, the teaching of college-level biology with knowledge drawn from students’ lives is more than an aspiration. It can and—per my study—does occur. It is then possible to teach college-level biology with knowledge drawn from students’ lives. Two, to enact such teaching, instructors can strive to draw comparisons between topics that are concrete and familiar to students and new subject-matter ideas to make the latter comprehensible to them. Three, instructors can connect subject matter to their students’ physiological experiences, treating students’ thinking about their bodies as a form of prior knowledge. Four, instructors can call students’ commonly accepted yet incomplete or unexamined ideas and beliefs into question to facilitate their learning of subject-matter ideas. Five, instructors’ efforts to teach using knowledge from students’ lives can include planning and forethought—but also improvisation while teaching. Six, a desire to make the subject matter of their course relatable to students can inspire instructors to teach using knowledge from students’ lives. The study recommends (a) changes in institutional policy toward supporting faculty in efforts to teach using knowledge from students’ lives, and (b) future research into teaching of biology and other STEM subjects that takes into account students’ prior knowledge.

The dearth of K-12 teachers of color remains a resounding issue of equity and social justice. Given that more potential candidates of color are enrolling in Minority Serving Institutions (MSIs) to avoid the negative experiences at Predominantly White Institutions (PWIs) that discourage them from entering the field, this qualitative study explored teacher preparation at two 4-year public Hispanic Serving Institutions (HSIs). The goal was to better understand: (a) how HSIs work against the barriers that have historically excluded teachers of color, (b) how teacher educators at HSIs respond to the diversity of college student abilities and prior academic experiences, and (c) how teacher educators at HSIs conceptualized and taught about the increasing racial, ethnic, and ability diversity of today’s K-12 students. Drawing on data at the individual, classroom, institutional, state, and federal levels, this study both centered the voices of teacher educators and college students of color and analyzed their narratives in relation to larger systems of power and privilege. From this analysis, two broader questions emerged. First, what does it mean to serve historically marginalized students who wish to be teachers? The study demonstrated that even institutional contexts that work to be welcoming spaces for college students of color contend with the historical legacies of whiteness and ability as property in teacher education, as the majority of graduated teachers across both racially diverse schools were white. Second, is there something to “get” when it comes to diversity in teacher education, and how do we know that students “get” it? As teacher educators of color complicated essentialist narratives of urban schools, teachers of color, students of color, and students with disabilities, tensions emerged around the impact K-12 teachers and schools have on society, dilemmas when college students’ needs clashed with their future K-12 students’ needs, and pedagogically sound ways to respond to understandings of diversity that work against equity and social justice. The role of care emerged as essential in simultaneously upholding the democratic ideals of schooling and productively responding to pathologizing discourses about people of color, moving beyond critical critique in teacher education, and (re)prioritizing the humanity of both K-12 and college students.

This dissertation studies how immigrant-origins mother combine their mothering with their civic engagement. Framed from the theoretical lenses of critical motherhood studies, it zooms in into the everyday lives of four migrant mothers looking to get a better sense of how they create and share knowledge about their daily experiences, and of how they build senses of home and community for themselves, their children, and others in their communities. It aims to shed light on ways to be civically engaged that go beyond voting and protesting. While civic life is usually understood in dictionaries as having to do with the rights and duties of citizens, the civics and mothering praxis that emerges from this study is a praxis rooted in love and care. Methodologically, this study combines multimodal, participatory, and poetic tools with Latina and Chicana feminist approaches to testimonio, to co-narrate the portraits of motherhood that are at the heart of this dissertation. Through storytelling that is attentive to ways of knowing and being that are rooted in our communities, these portraits aim to theorize mothering as action and to open space for mothers to express their voices and agency. Therefore, taking the lead from the immigrant-origin mothers with whom I work, this study proposes that the ordinary ways in which they impact the civic life of their communities through their labor of love sets the ground for a conception of citizenship that links transnational communities and exists across borders. What they do also stresses a dialectical praxis of civics that happens between mothers and their children, who are active agents and political beings; a praxis with implications that has political and theoretical implications for how we conceive motherhood, and that can also directly impact early childhood education and research. Throughout, the aim of this dissertation is to make care a central principle of research by creating spaces for support and healing in which mother’s agency and creative is valued. Research as a form of civic engagement that opens spaces to nurture and include our body-mind-soul connection.

This study examines the embeddedness of Spanish delivering technologies in networks constructing Latina/o linguistic and racial identity. It assesses potential impacts of technology on linguistic diversity, cultural continuity, and racial divides in the post 9-11 American context. Applying autoethnographic, multi-sited methodology, it critically examines discourses generated at (a) the SpeechTek tradeshow, and (b) three non-profit agencies in Holyoke, MA. Drawing data from participant-observation and structured interviews, it found residents of racially and linguistically endangered Holyoke had diminished access to these technologies, and they employed innovative cultural logic to reconstruct them as English language learning tools by opting instead for English. Implicated in white technological space, middle-class Spanish application producers attempted cultural brokerage. The study posits Spanish options as a contested digital borderlands, contact zone, dialogue, and cyborg technoscientific landscape where rhetorics of power pit Anglo-European universalist genres of language, race, and technology against hybrid voices of excluded populations of color.

This dissertation examines how the work of four Puerto Rican poets – Julia de Burgos, Clemente Soto Vélez, Martín Espada, and Naomi Ayala – demonstrates a poetics of resistance. While resistance takes a variety of forms in their poetic discourse, this project asserts that these poets have and continue to play an integral role in the cultural decolonization of Puerto Rico, which has been generally unacknowledged in both the critical scholarship on their work and the narrative of Puerto Rico’s anti-colonial struggle. Chapter One discuses the theoretical concepts used in defining a poetics of resistance, including Barbara Harlow’s definition of resistance literature, Edward Said’s concepts of cultural decolonization, and Jahan Ramazani’s theory of transnational poetics. Chapter Two provides an overview of Puerto Rico’s unique political status and highlights several pivotal events in the nation’s history, such as El Grito de Lares, the Ponce Massacre, and the Vieques Protest to demonstrate the continuity of the Puerto Rican people’s resistance to oppression and attempted subversion of their colonial status. Chapter Three examines Julia de Burgos’ understudied poems of resistance and argues that she employs a rhetoric of resistance through the use of repetition, personification, and war imagery in order to raise the consciousness of her fellow Puerto Ricans and to provoke her audience into action. By analyzing Clemente Soto Vélez’s use of personification, anaphora, and most importantly, juxtaposition, Chapter Four demonstrates that his poetry functions as a dialectical process and contends that the innovative form he develops throughout his poetic career reinforces his radical perspective for an egalitarian society. Chapter Five illustrates how Martín Espada utilizes rich metaphor, sensory details, and musical imagery to foreground issues of social class, racism, and economic exploitation across geographic, national, and cultural borders. Chapter six traces Naomi Ayala’s feminist discourse of resistance that denounces social injustice while simultaneously expressing a female identity that seeks liberation through her understanding of history, her reverence for memory, and her relationship with the earth. Ultimately, this dissertation argues that Burgos, Soto Vélez, Espada, and Ayala not only advocate for but also enact resistance and social justice through their art.