This thesis focuses on the Centre for Education for Racial Equality in Scotland (CERES), based in Edinburgh, which was funded by the Scottish Executive and Scottish Government to develop several programmes to promote equality in education. Drawing together the disparate approaches to anthropology of organisations, the methodology has included both a focus on a small core group of workers as well as the flow of the materials produced throughout a larger network. Rather than conduct fieldwork at various locations as network or policy studies emphasise, I chose to work for two years with CERES due to their geographic and creational centrality to the ‘mainstreaming equality’ initiative. Beginning at a time when questions of identity in Scotland flourished as a result of devolution, increased immigration and the UK publication of the Race Relations (Amendment) Act 2000, the mainstreaming equality projects signify the Scottish Executive’s attempt to uphold its duty of promoting race equality. CERES managed three of the seven funded mainstreaming equality projects. The production of these resources contributes to a campaign through which the Scottish Government has worked to reformulate understandings of what it means to be Scottish. This is achieved by drawing upon the myths of a new and egalitarian Scotland in order to displace the myth that there is no racism in Scotland. Within this context, the research’s central questions revolve around this creation in the stages undertaken at CERES. Examining the Centre’s daily tasks, this research demonstrates that although commissioned to contribute to the same overall initiative, the way in which CERES depicts equality is ultimately very different than the approaches developed within the government. The materials created by CERES, which unlike One Scotland, do not include national symbols, have engaged with the complexities of equality and discrimination more than the media campaigns yet have had a smaller audience. Once the idea is developed it encounters further manipulation, both physical in the case of teaching tools and ideological in working to make the identities included reflect Scotland through statistics and discussions of subjects already embedded in the national curriculum. From the vantage point of the creation process, this ethnography contributes to the anthropology of organisations and highlights the legal and policy negotiations undertaken across various levels of governance.

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Thesis advisor: Lauri Johnson / The purpose of this individual study was to address the gap in research and answer the following research question:  How do educators of color perceive the evaluation process and its impact on their professional growth and development?  It was part of a larger group case study that sought to capture the perceptions of educators of color related to racial disproportionality and its impact on the educator pipeline and schools.  As educators of color work to maintain a presence within the educational system, it is essential to study how perceived biases related to race may impact the evaluation process. This single case study attempted to capture how five administrators of color and five teachers of color employed by the Cityside Public School District perceived the evaluation process used within their district.  Additionally, a document review of union contracts was used to ascertain the evaluation process used by Cityside. The Critical Race Theory tenets of permanence of racism, counter storytelling and critique of liberalism provided a theoretical framework to analyze the responses given by each participant who participated in semi-structured interviews. Findings reveal that the majority of the participants do not believe the evaluation process has improved their growth and development.  Other findings revealed that the racial identity and the level of cultural competency of the evaluator impacted whether or not participants believed their race was a factor in how they were evaluated. / Thesis (EdD) — Boston College, 2018. / Submitted to: Boston College. Lynch School of Education. / Discipline: Educational Leadership and Higher Education.

The research presented in “Creating Identity” investigates Black identity formation within the Steve Biko Cultural Institute (Biko) in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil, a pre-vestibular – or college entrance exam preparation course – for Afro-Brazilian high school and aspiring college students. The curriculum, Cidadania e Consciência Negra (Black Consciousness and Citizenship; abbreviated CCN) serves as a vital pillar to the institutional approach to Black identity. In a Eurocentric society like Brazil and a world where Black identity is largely discriminated against including in educational spaces, Biko represents a movement to combat the exclusion of Afro-descendant youth from university, improve self-esteem and perceptions of the value of Black identity, and change who graduates from Bahia state universities. Over the course of nine months, in 2015 and 2016, field data were collected in the city of Salvador, Brazil and at the Biko institute. Since the research was cross-linguistic, cross-cultural, and hosted internationally, I assumed a methodologically narrative approach. The research design incorporated a survey, interviews, observations, and document analysis. Forty-two students completed surveys, twenty-six Biko students, staff and alumni participated in interviews, and well over 400 hours of participatory field observation were completed. Policy, demographic and curricular documents were also analyzed. CCN heavily influenced participants’ identity development through student and teacher discourse. The institution is a center of critical activism in the community. Aside from being a major part of the instructional approach to preparation for the college entrance exam, CCN heavily influenced the relationships between participants and their families and friends over newly affirmed Black identities. Although Biko students and alumni became more socially alert to the racial issues in their communities, they remain at risk of being racially profiled. Additionally, understanding blackness through the eyes of participants required an understanding of class and gender structures in Brazil. One major implication of the research for the participants is: blackness is CCN is Biko. Thereby, knowledge production and interaction with universities by Biko students are heavily influenced by Biko tenets and ideologies discussing race and racism, prejudice, discrimination, women’s rights, and economic development.

Race and racism inform our subjective realities and structure unequal material relations in contemporary society. While researchers have developed substantive theories to explain racism as systemically pervading institutions within society and permeating our consciousness, studies must also examine how people with privilege deny or admit the existence of racism within their institutions in different environments. Studies of how educators understand racism have been emerging; however, there remains a paucity of scholarship addressing this topic in the Canadian Prairies. In this thesis I use discourse analysis to investigate how prairie teachers negotiated the troubling topic of racism in their schools. The data was collected through open-ended surveys and focus-groups exploring teachers understanding of racism and anti-racism within two mid-sized prairie city high schools. First, exploring survey responses, I use text-based discursive analysis techniques to analyze how participants minimize the unsettling presence of racism in the school. In their responses, teachers used techniques of individualization, blaming the victim, displacement, and situating racism as a student problem to avoid implicating themselves or their school within racism. Teachers preserved the colour-blind image of education, maintaining the benevolence of the educational institution and its employees. However, different images of education emerged from focus-group discussions with educators interested in exploring anti-racism in the school. Focus group participants shifted from minimizing racism to problematizing privilege and power within the building. Multicultural, psychological, and institutional approaches to anti-racism emerged, emphasizing the need to engage individuals, cultures, and institutional structures. Exploring how teachers articulated different versions of the school environment, the identities of students, and their own identities within and between these different anti-racist discourses exposed how versions of each approach could be constructed to situate racism as external to education, and how critical conceptualizations of the school opened opportunities for individual, cultural, and institutional change within education. This research develops the understanding of race in the Canadian Prairies, discourse analysis within geography, anti-racist education, the geography of how teachers situate racism, and how teachers construct the relationship between school, teacher identity, and racism.

Race and racism inform our subjective realities and structure unequal material relations in contemporary society. While researchers have developed substantive theories to explain racism as systemically pervading institutions within society and permeating our consciousness, studies must also examine how people with privilege deny or admit the existence of racism within their institutions in different environments. Studies of how educators understand racism have been emerging; however, there remains a paucity of scholarship addressing this topic in the Canadian Prairies. In this thesis I use discourse analysis to investigate how prairie teachers negotiated the troubling topic of racism in their schools. The data was collected through open-ended surveys and focus-groups exploring teachers understanding of racism and anti-racism within two mid-sized prairie city high schools. First, exploring survey responses, I use text-based discursive analysis techniques to analyze how participants minimize the unsettling presence of racism in the school. In their responses, teachers used techniques of individualization, blaming the victim, displacement, and situating racism as a student problem to avoid implicating themselves or their school within racism. Teachers preserved the colour-blind image of education, maintaining the benevolence of the educational institution and its employees. However, different images of education emerged from focus-group discussions with educators interested in exploring anti-racism in the school. Focus group participants shifted from minimizing racism to problematizing privilege and power within the building. Multicultural, psychological, and institutional approaches to anti-racism emerged, emphasizing the need to engage individuals, cultures, and institutional structures. Exploring how teachers articulated different versions of the school environment, the identities of students, and their own identities within and between these different anti-racist discourses exposed how versions of each approach could be constructed to situate racism as external to education, and how critical conceptualizations of the school opened opportunities for individual, cultural, and institutional change within education. This research develops the understanding of race in the Canadian Prairies, discourse analysis within geography, anti-racist education, the geography of how teachers situate racism, and how teachers construct the relationship between school, teacher identity, and racism.

This dissertation breaks new ground in qualitative educational research by looking closely at the community and curricula of a well-resourced seven-year-old public high school in a New York City borough, which I call the Legal Studies Academy (LSA). This school created its own nonprofit organization in order to accrue private donations. Its most important “funder and founder” is an elite Manhattan law firm. The relationship between the firm and the school is emblematic of the direction that many urban public schools in the United States are moving: toward increased dependence on private funds to secure the resources deemed necessary for quality twenty-first century education (Anyon 1997; Lipman 2004; 2005). My project explores how the privatization of public institutions affects definitions of social justice and good education in the United States. I document the ways that students and teachers in the LSA community both reproduce and contest school norms. My methods in this two-year study included: teacher-research, participant observation of teachers and students, extensive interviews with teachers, students and parents, conduct of a summer book club / cultural circle, and analysis of data from a schoolwide student questionnaire. I also examine materials the school uses to solicit donations from its funders in relation to cultural constructions of urban students and their teachers in literature and the media. I explore what students’ and teachers’ daily practices of resistance or conformity to these cultural constructions might reveal about the place of democracy, humanization, character education, and critical pedagogy in U.S. public schools that depend on private or corporate philanthropists for resources. This ethnography nuances the often polarized debate around issues of achievement in education in the context of the demands of a global economy by documenting how the daily practices of students, families and teachers reflect on a social structure of education and achievement that, in the United States, ever more unequivocally aligns one’s identity and success with marketability. On a larger scale, it inspires critical questions about the place of democracy and citizenship as juxtaposed with inequities furthered by global racial capitalism. / text

This study explores a link between "stereotype vulnerability" and the documented under performance of African American students on standardized tests. The subjects were 41 third grade African American students matched according to language arts grades with 41 third grade Anglo students. The students were from predominately middle class suburban schools, with similar educational experiences. The data suggest that third grade African American and Anglo students from predominately middle class schools, with approximately equivalent language arts grades and similar educational experiences, will score comparably to one another regardless of testing conditions. The data also suggest that this sample of third grade students are confident in their academic ability and are not affected by negative stereotyping.

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