Racial inequality in education remains an enduring facet of American society. Scholars often point to disparate home, neighborhood, and school environments as the primary drivers of educational inequality. This dissertation contributes to the body of work focused on schools, with an emphasis on examining the racial dynamics of students’ trust in their educators (“student–teacher trust”). Drawing on longitudinal education data from New York City and a yearlong interview study of two high schools, I analyze racial disparities in student–teacher trust, examine the role of trust in student performance, investigate the trust experiences of Black youth, and identify practices designed to enhance relational trust in schools. This dissertation is comprised of three empirical studies on the topic of student–teacher trust. Chapter 1 examines racial differences in student–teacher trust and analyzes how school context shapes the racial dynamics of trust. Findings from ordinary least squares regression models point to explicit racial gaps—with Asian students reporting the most trust in their educators and Black students reporting the least trust. However, my results point to noteworthy intra-racial heterogeneity at the intersections of gender and nativity. Findings from multilevel linear regression models also demonstrate that school racial composition matters for the trust of Black and Latino youth. Chapter 2 analyzes the impact of student–teacher trust on student performance. Results from ordinary least squares and individual fixed effects regressions show that students’ trust in their educators is a positive predictor of standardized tests scores and attendance, and a negative predictor of suspensions. The academic benefits of trust are experienced across all racial groups. Building on the results from the first two chapters, Chapter 3 examines the trust beliefs of Black students and the organizational trust practices of majority-minority schools. This dissertation makes several contributions to the race, trust, and education literatures. First, this research provides new evidence that racial disparities in trust are cemented by early adolescence and identifies trust as a relevant dimension of racial inequality in education. Second, this study connects student–teacher trust with tangible academic outcomes and offers trust as a new measure of teacher effectiveness. Third, by examining the trust perspectives of Black youth, this work elucidates the sensemaking processes of students with the lowest average levels of trust in their educators. Finally, this study provides insight into the contextual school factors that contribute to the racial dynamics of student–teacher trust formation and highlights strategies for enhancing interpersonal and institutional trust in urban schools.

Informed by positionalities theories and narrative inquiry, this dissertation study explored how positionalities of immigrant social studies teachers in New York City influenced their interpretations of citizenship and their instructions of citizenship education. To do so, I used interviews, participants’ photographs and activity-works, and a self-reflexive researcher journal as aspects of my data-generating and data-gathering methods. My interpretations suggested that immigrant teachers experienced subjugation and discrimination as well as a sense of vulnerability due to their lack of legal citizenship, along with their minoritized racial/ethnic/linguistic/religious status in current racist, U.S.-centric, and nationalist regimes. However, instead of being passive recipients of such sociopolitical forces, these teachers took agency and created their own ways to actively influence, change, and subvert their minoritized subject positions through their transnational form of activities and attachment to their home country as well as the affinity, commitments, and sense of belonging they forged in local school communities in the United States. The complicated positionalities of these immigrant teachers further allowed them to imagine and practice multiple and alternative concepts of citizenship education that are more relevant to their students from minoritized backgrounds. By complicating essential, static, and fixed notions of immigrant teachers’ experiences and challenging dominant and normative modes of juridical notions of and national belonging in citizenship discourses through these immigrant teachers’ narrativized experiences, this study offers implications for social studies educators, citizenship scholarship, and teacher education policies and practices.

Exposure to hate, racism, discrimination, and microaggressions is prevalent on college campuses, and such exposure also occurs beyond the context of the college campus, whether involving police violence against Blacks, in particular, as well as Hispanics. Also, the COVID-19 pandemic year of 2020 saw a rise in hate and violence toward Asians. The present study aimed to identify the significant predictors of a high prevalence of experiences of microaggressions for Black, Latinx, and Asian students enrolled in college during the pandemic whether at the undergraduate or graduate level in the United States (U.S.). A total of 341 participants (mean age=26.62, female=40.6%, Black/Latinx=54.5%, Asian=45.5%, U.S. born=66.9%, ever attended Historically Black Colleges or Universities/Hispanic Serving Institutions (HBCU/HSI)=52.2%) participated online, having been recruited via a social media campaign and asked to complete the I EXPERIENCED HATE Survey. Independent t-tests indicated that U.S. born respondents experienced significantly more microaggressions (mean=1.91, SD=.843) than non-U.S. born (mean=1.62, SD=1.016; t=-2.595, df=190.5, p=0.01), and those who ever attended an HBCU/HSI experienced significantly more microaggressions (mean=1.97, SD=0.705) compared to those who never attended HBCU/HSI (mean=1.65, SD=1.073; t=-3.247, df=275.8, p=0.001). Pearson’s correlations showed that a higher level of experiencing microaggressions was significantly correlated with lower rating of college climate (r=-.185, p=.001), higher stage of change for coping and responding to racism and oppression (r=.182, p=.001), higher or more frequent experiences of hate (r=.397, p=.000), and higher stressful and traumatic impact of hate (r=.325, p=.000). Backwards stepwise regression analysis indicated that the significant predictors for a high prevalence of experiences of microaggressions were ever attending an HBCU/HSI (b=.447, SE=.109, p = .000), more experiences of hate (b=.360, SE=.059, p=.000), and more stressful and traumatic impact from hate (b=.131, SE=.052, p=.013). However, the final model explained 26.3% of the variance (adjusted R2=.263). This suggests that future studies should identify additional independent variables for inclusion. The present study findings supported the initial anticipated findings that Black, Latinx, and Asian students who had more frequent hate experiences and had more and higher negative stressful/traumatic impact from hate experiences would significantly predict the high prevalence of experiences of microaggressions. Implications of findings are discussed.

This study explores the experiences of science and mathematics teachers during the Triple Pandemic: a pandemic of COVID-19, poverty, and racism. The intersection of COVID-19, poverty, and racism created a novel educational context for teachers to navigate. Using an intersectional qualitative case study approach, this study highlights the stories of three middle school science and mathematics teachers as they strove to meet the needs of their students during a time of crisis brought forth by COVID-19 and as pre-existing systemic inequities surfaced during the period of remote learning. Using data collected from an initial and final questionnaire (Likert scale and open-ended), semi-structured interviews, audio journal entries, and a focus group this study sought to capture the teachers’ experiences, their emotions, adjustments to teaching practice, and challenges encountered. Guided by a conceptual framework integrating Sensemaking Theory, Critical Consciousness, Positional Identity, and Science Identity as a Lived Experience, this study further examined the ways teaching remotely developed, shifted, and affirmed their science and mathematics identities and the impact of sensemaking of their experiences had on their educational priorities. The findings highlight the participants' emotionally charged and challenging experiences as they made sense of their roles as science and mathematics teachers and gained an increasing awareness of systemic inequities. The three participants developed a critical consciousness through their confrontation of inequities, increased racial identity, and development of their critical agency. Additionally, the participants’ sensemaking of the educational context produced by the Triple Pandemic resulted in the development of new educational priorities reflecting social justice engagement on micro and meso levels and in identity tensions as science and mathematics teachers.

This study explored the work of critically race-conscious on the front lines of understanding, addressing, and confronting issues of race, racism, and institutionalized systems of power within their school context. Using personal narratives and critical racial reflections as a qualitative research methodology, this research bears witness to four Black principals using the race card to cultivate spaces filled with love, joy, and genius through high expectations and community.

Neoliberalism operationalizes the White Supremacist narrative of meritocracy in spaces like no-excuse charter schools in order to coerce teachers to obediently turn out data that is productive for investors, at the expense of both teachers and Black and Brown students’ humanity. This dissertation defines the coercion teachers experience as a process of mechanization, whereby they are inducted into the narrative of meritocracy and threatened with material loss if they do not comply. However, contrary to current research that illustrates their repeated mechanization, I draw from my own experiences as a teacher at a no-excuse charter school to assert that teachers in these spaces do have the capacity to enact anti-racist teacher agency and resist. This dissertation therefore asks, How do educators at no-excuse charter schools engage anti-racist teacher agency to negotiate mechanization and the narrative of meritocracy? Over the course of 13 months, I engaged with six self-described social justice-oriented teachers from three schools across two New Jersey cities through a methodology I developed called critical storying. Functioning in two parts--The Spiral and Speculation--critical storying first pays attention to participants' affective tensions through dialogic spiraling in order to identify mechanizations they experience, and ways the negotiate those mechanizations. Then, using participants’ own narrative imagining, I wrote each participants’ story centering them as a cyborg protagonist confronting and overcoming a core mechanization. The findings, as well as the framework and methodology developed for this study, contribute to research concerned with no-excuse charter schools, anti-racist teacher agency, speculative fiction, and dismantling White Supremacy from school systems.

The aim of this thesis is to examine a degree of tolerance of students of selected secondary schools in the region to ethnic communities. It encounters and considers factors that affect and shape their attitudes. The theoretical part of the thesis deals with analysing and explaining of these terms - multicultural society, development of multicultural society, migration, ethnic community, characteristics of ethnic communities in the Czech Republic, culture, and traditions, coexistence with ethnic communities and integration. In the research part, it concerns with processing of survey attitudes of high school students from ethnic communities, with a focus on the Islamic community, and the current immigration crisis. The investigation focuses on the personal attitudes of students and their knowledge, both through multicultural education at school and through the media and social networks, which now play a major role in shaping the attitudes of young people. The research is completed with short case studies based on open-question questionary Finally, it presents some examples from multicultural education at high school and its contribution to shaping values and attitudes of students. KEYWORDS: multicultural society, migration, ethnic community, tolerance, racism, multicultural education Powered by...

Framed within an Anishnaabe method and an anti-colonial discursive framework, this thesis explores how Aboriginal students confront narratives of colonial violence in the postsecondary classroom while at the same time living and experiencing colonial violence on a daily basis. In order to garner an understanding of what pedagogies might be useful in postsecondary classrooms that cover such curricula, I explored these questions by interviewing 8 Aboriginal students and 5 Aboriginal professors who were taking or teaching courses on Aboriginal peoples and colonial history. I also engaged two Aboriginal Elders in conversations on pedagogy because they are recognized as carriers of Aboriginal traditional knowledge. Drawing on the literature I theorize colonization as violent, ongoing and traumatic. Specifically, I trace how education for Aboriginal peoples has always been and continues to be part of the colonial regime—one that is marked by violence, abuse and a regime that has had devastating consequences for Aboriginal peoples. This thesis confirms that despite some changes to the educational system Aboriginal students and professors interviewed in this research still confront significant challenges when they enter sites such as the postsecondary classroom. The most profound finding in this thesis was the extent of racism that Aboriginal students confront and negotiate in postsecondary classrooms. These negotiations are especially profound and painful in mixed classrooms where the narrative of ongoing colonial violence is discussed. Aboriginal students also employ a number of strategies to resist ongoing colonialism and racism. The narrative of racism is not new but it does reaffirm that colonialism continues to have devastating effects on Aboriginal peoples. It also reaffirms the pervasiveness of violence in our society despite the fact that many would rather ignore or downplay the level of violence that exists. There is no doubt that the Aboriginal students interviewed in this research describe a significant psychological toll in an environment of ongoing colonialism and is especially difficult when revisiting historical and ongoing accounts of violence of their own colonial history. The thesis offers some suggestions for mitigating this impact in the classroom.

Framed within an Anishnaabe method and an anti-colonial discursive framework, this thesis explores how Aboriginal students confront narratives of colonial violence in the postsecondary classroom while at the same time living and experiencing colonial violence on a daily basis. In order to garner an understanding of what pedagogies might be useful in postsecondary classrooms that cover such curricula, I explored these questions by interviewing 8 Aboriginal students and 5 Aboriginal professors who were taking or teaching courses on Aboriginal peoples and colonial history. I also engaged two Aboriginal Elders in conversations on pedagogy because they are recognized as carriers of Aboriginal traditional knowledge. Drawing on the literature I theorize colonization as violent, ongoing and traumatic. Specifically, I trace how education for Aboriginal peoples has always been and continues to be part of the colonial regime—one that is marked by violence, abuse and a regime that has had devastating consequences for Aboriginal peoples. This thesis confirms that despite some changes to the educational system Aboriginal students and professors interviewed in this research still confront significant challenges when they enter sites such as the postsecondary classroom. The most profound finding in this thesis was the extent of racism that Aboriginal students confront and negotiate in postsecondary classrooms. These negotiations are especially profound and painful in mixed classrooms where the narrative of ongoing colonial violence is discussed. Aboriginal students also employ a number of strategies to resist ongoing colonialism and racism. The narrative of racism is not new but it does reaffirm that colonialism continues to have devastating effects on Aboriginal peoples. It also reaffirms the pervasiveness of violence in our society despite the fact that many would rather ignore or downplay the level of violence that exists. There is no doubt that the Aboriginal students interviewed in this research describe a significant psychological toll in an environment of ongoing colonialism and is especially difficult when revisiting historical and ongoing accounts of violence of their own colonial history. The thesis offers some suggestions for mitigating this impact in the classroom.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2009. / Title from PDF title page (University of Texas Digital Repository, viewed on Sept. 9, 2009). Vita. Includes bibliographical references.