Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / The purpose of this research was to investigate the social and cultural constructions of leadership and how search committee members evaluate candidates for leadership positions. Moreover, how they conceptualize, measure, and evaluate leadership potential of candidates. To explore this issue, the following research questioned were answered: How do members of an executive search committee construct their views of leadership?; In what ways do the individual, social, and cultural constructions of leadership held by search committee members influence behaviors and outcomes of a search committee? In this study, I investigated how members of a search committee constructed their views of leadership and in turn how this influenced the search process for an executive leader. In order to explore this issue, this study is approached through the constructivism paradigm and informed by critical inquiry, using case study methodology. I followed one executive search process from the charge meeting until the committee made its recommendation to the hiring authority. The unit analyzed in this search employed a leadership competency model and tools which mapped to this model, in an effort to mitigate the influence of bias. I used semi-structured interviews with committee members to understand their views on leadership. I supplemented interviews with observations and document analysis as means of collecting data for the study. Three findings emerged through data analysis: the role of background and identity on views of leadership, the influence of personal and societal constructions of leadership on individual behaviors and search outcomes, and the application or utility of using a leadership competency model. Through my findings, I demonstrated how individual’s background and identity shaped their perceptions of what it meant to be a leader. Additionally, how they rated and talked about candidates matched their individual views about leadership rather than the leadership competency model they were asked to use. More specifically, analysis illuminated that minoritized search committee members had drastically different beliefs about leadership and experiences serving on the search committee. I concluded the study by outlining implications for policy, future practice, and future research, including offering a conceptual framework and tools for an equity-minded search process.

Sexual minority adolescents and adults experience higher rates of psychological risk factors and mental health disorders than their straight peers. As theorized by the minority stress model, this increased distress may be related to both external stressors (including discrimination and violence) and internal stressors (concealment, expectation of rejection, and internalized homonegativity). For some sexual minority individuals who also hold religious beliefs, conflict between their sexual orientation and religious beliefs may act as another stressor. Sexual minority adolescents and adults present to therapy at higher rates than their straight counterparts, and clients seeking help with religious and sexual conflict make up some portion of this distressed group. We qualitatively explored the therapy experiences of religious sexual minority college students using CQR methodology. Specifically, we investigated the role therapy plays in helping clients navigate conflict between their sexual orientation and religious belief. Fourteen participants completed 60-90 minute interviews that included questions about their therapy experiences. Themes emerged representing both helpful and unhelpful aspects of group and individual therapy. Helpful group themes included "learning from others,""connecting with others," and "a supportive environment;"and unhelpful themes included "not connecting with others," and "discomfort with group content." Helpful individual therapy themes included "processing and exploration" and "a supportive environment;" and unhelpful themes included "problems with the therapist" and "problems with the therapy process." Connections to Yalom's "curative factors" and common factor theory are discussed, as well as special considerations when working with a religious sexual minority population.

Efforts to increase enrollment in engineering and enhance the participation and proficiency of engineers have long been priorities, as emphasized by the National Academy of Science and the National Academy of Engineering. This imperative underscores the need for both a greater quantity and a higher caliber of engineers—colleges and universities are charged with helping students successfully progress through their programs to earn a degree. Existing research predominantly focuses on specific academic interventions or discrete support factors in attempts to understand how to best support academic success. My work, on the other hand, takes a comprehensive examination that quantifies students' perceptions of support across a wide range of sources and explores the relationship between these perceptions and student engagement in different activities. Utilizing student support data collected from undergraduate students in Engineering, Science, and Mathematics at nine institutions during the spring of 2019, the study embarks on a multifaceted exploration that unfolds in three interconnected parts. The first part employs multiple comparison analyses to unveil distinct differences in perceptions of support among different student subpopulations. The second part delves into the relational dynamics between support perceptions and students' participation in co-curricular activities using binomial regression. The third part, employing multiple linear regression, scrutinizes this relationship from a reverse perspective, acknowledging the potential bidirectional nature by examining how the level of student engagement in a range of co-curricular activities relates to their perceptions of support. The findings continue to establish further validity evidence for the newly developed STEM-SPSI tool. It also has the potential to offer valuable insights for educators, administrators, and policymakers intent on enhancing the inclusivity and efficacy of their programs. This study's potential implications underscore the importance of targeted support factors in fostering a more enriching and equitable co-curricular experience for undergraduate students. Embracing a more integrated perspective, this research contributes to evidence-based practices aimed at fostering the success and retention of students in STEM fields. / Doctor of Philosophy / Efforts to increase the number of engineers and improve their preparedness are a national priority, as emphasized by organizations like the National Academy of Engineering. Colleges and universities play a critical role in helping students succeed in their programs and earn degrees in engineering. Although most research has focused on specific academic programs or single support services, my study takes a broader look at how students perceive support from multiple sources and how these perceptions relate to their participation in activities outside the classroom. Using data from undergraduate students in engineering, science, and mathematics at nine universities in 2019, the research examines three key areas. First, it compares how different groups of students perceive support in their academic institutions. Second, it looks at how students' participation in co-curricular activities relates to their feelings of support. Lastly, it explores the reverse: how students' levels of engagement in these co-curricular activities relates to their support perceptions. The findings provide additional evidence of validity of the newly developed STEM-SPSI questionnaire, which measures student support. This research can help educators, administrators, and policymakers create more inclusive and effective programs that enhance students' overall experiences. By examining support and student engagement together, this study contributes to practices that can improve student success and retention in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields.

Restorative Practices is a behavior management system that focuses on root cause analysis and repairing harms caused by those infractions. This study focused on the correlation between the knowledge that stakeholders possessed regarding Restorative Practices and their perceived impact on the school disciplinary program. In addition, the study sought to determine which aspects of Restorative Practices were most effective as well as examine the viewpoints of disciplinary stakeholders regarding Restorative Practices as a large, urban school district in central Florida. Recent literature shows that punitive and exclusionary discipline practices have an adverse impact on minoritized populations as the students are often penalized more harshly than their white peers for subjective infractions such as insubordination and disrespect. Zero-tolerance discipline policies came on the heels of the zero-tolerance gun laws from the 1990s, increasing the number of students suspended within schools and strengthening the school-to-prison pipeline for minoritized populations (Katic, Alba, & Johnson, 2020). The study was conducted as a mixed-methods study using a Pearson correlation and a Casual- Comparative analysis. The study focused on school leaders and discipline stakeholders from a large, urban school district in central Florida and was conducted through an electronic survey with 23 Likert- scale type questions, and four open-ended responses. It is anticipated that the results will provide insight into the correlation between the knowledge possessed by the stakeholders and their perceived impact on Restorative Practices as well as the mor productive strategies and effects of implementation and insight into how schools can improve implementation at their schools.

There is a stone in Muxía, a Galician seaside village, called the Waving Stone. It used to move and produce a loud and easy-to-identify sound in that process. However, it broke during a storm in 2017, forcing the place to adapt to its new characteristics: the value of that object in the landscape is not anymore its motion but the memory of that movement that people in the area keep and transmit.  Both this essay and the exhibition it accompanies use this story as an analogy to talk about the linguistic transmission break of the Galician tongue and of the minoritized culture of which it is a part. Thus, the work research how the young generation who is used to hear Galician but to talk in Spanish relate to its own culture from a forced distance, making us need to do a big effort to relearn our own language. Distorted representations we received or artistic expressions that we couldn´t experience make it more difficult for us to see how a minoritized culture is never an image but an event, being constantly broken and rebuilt. Like a huge stone on the coast that, even silent, is still able to make a group of people identify around it.

First-generation students are frequently underrepresented minoritized (URM), low-income students (Douglas, 2019; Postsecondary National Policy Institute [PNPI], 2021). They are often highly motivated (Haney, 2020) but frequently experience unique or exacerbated challenges in post-secondary education (Moore et al., 2018; Soria et al., 2020). These challenges may continue into online spaces. In the first paper of this dissertation, we performed a scoping literature review and uniquely identified and categorized the challenges of these students in the online environment. We placed these challenges within the model of student engagement by Borup et al. (2020) to offer theoretical perspective for potentially better student support. In the second paper of this dissertation, we captured the experience of a partnership between a university and nonprofit organization, formed to improve the support of first-generation and URM undergraduate student success. Through semistructured interviews of eight university and nonprofit representatives, we found a reflection of best practices and student needs, as well as perspectives on how partnerships can collaboratively support student success. In the third paper of this dissertation, through semistructured interviews, we explored the perspectives of 12 first-generation and URM undergraduate students experiencing a unique set of supportive interventions. These student perspectives are essential to ensure not only that student support programs are optimal, but also to make certain that institutions avoid no-impact, low-impact, or even negative-impact interventions.

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Secondary administrative and leadership teams continuously search for practices that bolster cultural proficiency to address increasingly diverse student cohorts. This qualitative case study identifies the culturally responsive school leadership (CRSL) behaviors and expressions of 24 high school administrative and leadership team members in a suburban school district in Utah. Data reveals how each team demonstrates the behaviors and expressions of CRSL framework and how these behaviors and expressions position each school on the culturally proficient continuum. Superimposing the CRSL behaviors and expressions on the cultural proficiency continuum provides a current reality for administrative and leadership teams to assess their tipping points and how to move toward cultural proficiency.

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This project entails a critical examination of the race/culture divide in human services from the vantage point of middle women non-professional grassroots advocates who emerged in the 1990s to address inequities that minoritized immigrants experience with main stream human services in Canada. The race/culture divide denotes critical race theorists' critique of a focus on cultural difference that obscures racism. Shaped by critical race theory and critical research methods, and drawing on interviews and participant observation involving 25 middle women, my findings reveal that the middle women's articulations of barriers and gaps as systemic inequities are at odds with main stream services' tendencies to focus on cultural challenges. This tension results in the discursive production of a cultural niche, a gendered space of exploitation of a culturally defined Middle Woman, who is thus rendered perpetually immigrant. The study illuminates how the Middle Woman navigates a complex and perilous tension between jeopardizing relationships with main stream organizations and simultaneously resisting what she experiences as disrespectful, unacceptable, unethical and overtly racist interfaces with human services. Although the middle women recounted numerous, visceral and detailed culturalist-racist interfaces in systemically racialized human service systems, they were equivocal about naming racism until I raised it directly. They gave meaning to "in Canada" experiences through their particular pre-migration realities in a process of continuous comparison between "back home" and "here," positioning them differentially in relation to Canada, and therefore also to the possibility of naming racism in Canada. The middle women engage in a continuous process of discerning racism, always weighing it against other explanations for inequitable treatment. The project thus draws attention to the toll that navigating the race/culture divide takes in embodying the sensed and draining the spirit. It draws attention to the process through which I, as a white researcher, came to see the workings of our racialized society. My research contributes to the literature on the race/culture divide and whiteness studies, and has implications for research on racism, dialogue about cultural competence and anti-racist practice, and conceptualizing settlement and responsive human services.