Educational policies and systemic inequalities have created “very different educational realities” for African American students and their white counterparts (Darling-Hammond, 2005) resulting in low literacy rates, low test scores, and high dropout rates. Culturally relevant pedagogy has been shown to increase the academic achievement of culturally diverse students (Gay, 2000; Howard, 2003; Ladson-Billings, 1994). However, many in-service teachers struggle to effectively implement a culturally relevant pedagogy (CRP) (Esposito & Swain, 2009; May, 2011; Rozansky, 2010), and limited research has been conducted on professional development aimed at supporting teachers’ knowledge and practices around CRP (Knight & Wiseman, 2005; Milner, 2009). Guided by sociocultural theory (Vygotsky, 1934/1986; Wertsch 1991), critical theory (Freire, 1970), critical race theory (Delgado & Stefanic, 2012; Taylor, 2009) and critical pedagogy (Freire, 1970; Giroux, 2003), this study examined teachers’ changing beliefs and practices as they engaged in professional development on issues related to culturally relevant pedagogy and literacy development. Questions guiding this study were: (1) What shifts do teachers make in their conceptual and pedagogical understandings around CRP when engaged in professional development activities? (2) What factors enhance or inhibit teachers’ ability to implement CRP during literacy instruction? (3) How do teachers navigate contextual constraints to implement their beliefs in relation to CRP? The methodology for this study is formative experiment, as its goal is to bridge the gap between theory and practice, (Bradley & Reinking, 2011). A continuous, teacher-centered professional development focused on CRP served as the intervention for this formative experiment. Data sources include audio-recorded interviews and teacher debrief session, video-recorded professional development sessions, and field notes from classroom observations. Findings of this study indicate that theoretical learning, critical self-reflection, collaboration, and longevity are integral to support shifts in teachers beliefs and practices around culturally relevant pedagogy. Findings also show that the shifting process is dynamic and complex and occurs differently for individuals. Implications of this study suggest that professional learning should be differentiated for teachers as it considers teachers beliefs, experiences, and work context during the learning process. Teachers can form communities of practice to support each other’s learning goals and implementation of CRP.

Thesis advisor: Diana Pullin / In recent years, critical race theory (CRT) has garnered much attention in education scholarship as a way to examine the racialized practices that persist in U.S. schooling. This study was a grassroots attempt at using CRT as the theoretical framework to engage a group of administrators and teacher leaders at one urban school in inquiry-based discourse that focused on raising the educators' race consciousness and co-constructing an antiracist pedagogy. A combined method of action research and critical case study was used as the research methodology. This dissertation reports on three notable findings that surfaced from the study. One, the participants largely perceived racism an individual pathology, not as a system of privilege. Because the participants regarded themselves as educators who were committed to social justice, they were often deceived by their activism to recognize their own complicity in the perpetuation of racist ideologies in their practice. Two, despite the overwhelming criticisms against NCLB in scholarly literature, the participants at this low-income, racially-diverse, urban school were passionately in favor of the goals behind the statute. With the recent push toward the development of common core content standards through the Race to the Top program, increased dialogue regarding what knowledge should be considered "common" and "core" needs to occur in order to breach the impasse between the divergent curricular viewpoints held by all stakeholders. Three, although culturally relevant pedagogy is widely espoused and utilized in educational research and practice, it is often not commonly understood as a conceptual framework that advocates the three-pronged elements of academic success, cultural competence, and sociopolitical consciousness. Findings revealed wide misconceptions and misuse of the theory that stemmed from teachers' cultural bias, the nature of racism in school settings, and the lack of support to adequately implement theories into practice. ` All of these findings revealed issues of power, positionality, and privilege that were deeply entrenched in the policies and practices of the school, which suggested that greater collaboration between scholars and practitioners was necessary in order to engender ongoing critical self-reflection and reconceptualization of theories as viable pedagogical tools to begin the work of antiracism. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2010. / Submitted to: Boston College. Lynch School of Education. / Discipline: Educational Administration and Higher Education.

Thesis (MTech (Graphic Design))--Cape Peninsula University of Technology, 2018. / This research is an investigation into how Graphic Design, a visual communication subject is taught and learnt at Cape Peninsula University of Technology in light of the dynamics that cultural semiotics present. There is a need to equip students with the cultural awareness to design communication that is sensitive to the varying needs of their consuming audiences. By its very nature, visual communication is vulnerable to an unintended array of misinterpretations because of the audiences’ differing semiotic backgrounds. The pedagogic duty of academy is to equip communication students in this case Graphic Design students with adequate tools to facilitate the understanding of their audiences, the communicative purpose of their designs is compromised. Vygotsky’s (1978) learning theory is therefore applied to examine the role of culture in the teaching and learning of culturally diverse students. Concepts from JoAnn Phillion’s (2002) Narrative Multiculturalism are also used to understand how the narratives collected from the respondent students, lecturers and an industry expert in this study offered guidelines for the effective teaching of Graphic Design. To investigate the teaching and learning of Graphic Design holistically the research employed a mini-ethnographic case study method. Data for this research were obtained through participant observations, semi-structured informal interviews of participants narratives and document analysis. The findings point to a lack of a cohesive and coordinated approach to teaching and learning, which in turn reflects a lack of sensitivity to cultural diversity in the Graphic Design department at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology. This is evidenced in the unreformed curriculum and a culturally unbalanced staff complement. Industry’s lethargic participation also seems to have done nothing to ensure the standardisation of the curriculum to align with industry demands nor guide the career paths of students. As a result, the gap in these areas may leave some historically vulnerable students feeling excluded and despondent about both their academic and career prospects.

This dissertation study explores the relationship between Ladson-Billings’ (1992, 1994, 2006) early scholarship and work with Culturally Relevant Pedagogy (CRP) frameworks and the literacy practices of the multilingual students in my community college classroom. This qualitative, interpretive case study draws upon CRP and sociocultural frameworks to specifically investigate the visual, media, and technological literacy (multimodal) practices in a community college developmental English class for multilingual students. When visual, media, and technological literacy practices are purposefully included in a CRP framework and curriculum, it helps to reposition both teachers’ and students’ conceptual understanding of language acquisition. Two important aims of this study are to fill an existing gap of literature around the CRP theoretical framework and strengthen it with the specific inclusion of college-level, multilingual student’s use of visual and technological literacy practices for the acquisition of English literacy. This in turn helps to legitimize the inclusion of visual and technological literacies into curriculums designed especially for multilingual students which are also adaptable for any class. In this study, my classroom serves as the primary unit of analysis (Merriam, 2009). I present the multimodal practices of four student participants as “cases” or portraits to illustrate the study’s findings. I am interpreting/defining the multimodal productions my students create as their observable literacy events (Barton & Hamilton, 2000; Heath, 1992) and their literacy practice is the ongoing act of creating and engaging with visual, media, and other related technological literacy practices. The act of students creating multimodal productions, “visual interpretation,” is the specific visual literacy practice this study investigates triangulated with students’ interactions on a group Facebook page and digital story compositions. Using a reflexive model (Luttrell, 2010b) of research and additional grounded theory methods (Charmaz, 2008, 2010; Corbin & Strauss, 2008) to analyze data, findings for this study reveal that a curriculum utilizing multimodal literacy practices promote Ladson-Billings’ (1992, 2006) three tenets of CRP: academic excellence, cultural competence, and sociopolitical consciousness in the following ways: First, the curriculum acknowledges students' multiple literacies and cultural backgrounds. Second, the curriculum enables students to become personally invested and more engaged in their academic participation, productions and achievement. Third, the curriculum raises students' competencies in reading/writing comprehension, deconstruction, and production of subsequent multimodal texts as it privileges students’ own literacy practices. Therefore, visual literacy practices should be a mechanism for achieving and representing these tenets of a Culturally Relevant Pedagogy inside college classrooms with curriculums designed for multilingual students.

African American students' severe underachievement in mathematics in comparison to their peers has been framed as an achievement gap that continues to widen despite the efforts of many education scholars and leaders. Throughout history in the United States, mathematics education has been designed, developed, and delivered within a Eurocentric philosophy. Consequently, African American students have been at a systemic disadvantage in terms of perceiving the cultural relevance of mathematics; which has served as a detriment to their academic success. By merging ethnomathematics and culturally relevant pedagogy (CRP) into a theoretical framework, this study investigates these issues and proposes a shift in mathematics education toward a more culturally aware approach. In this study, it is argued that implementing a multicultural education approach such as ethnomathematics into the mathematics curriculum coupled with employing culturally relevant pedagogical practices will increase relevance in the mathematics education for African American students. The purpose of this study was to gain African American high school students’ perception of mathematics, as well as their cultural awareness and its relation to mathematics education. To gain students’ perceptions about mathematics education from a cultural respect, 375 students in grades 9-12 completed three online surveys which were (1) a four-item demographic questionnaire (age, gender, grade, ethnicity), (2) the 40-item Attitude Towards Mathematics Inventory (ATMI), and (3) the 12-item Students Perception about Cultural Awareness (SPCA) survey. This study incorporated a quantitative, correlational research design. To address research questions one and two, Pearson correlations were conducted to examine the associations between the variables of interest which were (1) Value, (2) Enjoyment, (3) Sense of Security, (4) Motivation, and (5) Cultural Awareness. Variables (1), (2), (3), (4) were derived from the ATMI survey through factor analysis while variable (5) was constructed from the SPCA survey. To address research question three, a MANOVA was conducted to assess for differences in attitudes toward mathematics and perceptions of cultural awareness by ethnicity. For research questions one and two, it was found that there was a statistically significant correlation between the variables of interest. For research question three, it was found that there was not a statistically significant difference in the variables of interest by ethnicity. In further analysis of the data, it was found that many African American students have a substandard attitude of value, enjoyment, sense of security, and motivation toward mathematics. Nonetheless, these students had a high sense of cultural awareness and cultural pride. Generally, the students felt that the incorporation of culture into mathematics would assist in raising their achievement to some degree. This study highlights recommendations to educational leaders to learn about the culture of their students, allow that data to inform policy decisions, and lead a shift to the approach of mathematics education toward the theories of ethnomathematics and CRP.

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.

In contrast to the diversity of students, the implementation of federal policies has created a push for standardization in pedagogy and curriculum that serve culturally and linguistically diverse students. Effects include narrowing of curriculum and pedagogy, proliferation of prescriptive literacy programs, increased high-stakes testing, and negative effects on teachers’ identity, autonomy, and desire to teach. Simultaneously, teaching prospective teachers how to construct culturally relevant curriculum and pedagogy is emphasized as a vital part of teacher preparation. However, research shows that even when teachers leave programs with preparation for culturally relevant teaching, initial jobs and local contexts shape and constrain teachers’ ideologies, agency, goals, and practice connected to teaching diverse students. In response to research, this study was designed to investigate how novice Teach For America teachers with an espoused culturally relevant pedagogy ideology implement a scripted literacy program in urban classrooms. A multiple case study design guided data collection and analysis. Data collection included interviews, observations, observation debriefs, visual representations, documents, and teaching artifacts. The data were analyzed using a constant comparative approach and Grounded Theory techniques. These teachers were constrained and influenced by several institutional and contextual factors, yet were able to negotiate their educational beliefs with the requirements of their mandated scripted literacy program to enact tenets of culturally relevant teaching. The findings suggest teacher preparation programs need to have a conceptual framework embedded in coursework and field experiences that empowers beginning teachers to negotiate the sociopolitical constraints of their school context to meet the needs of students.

This study is significant because U.S. schools are continuously being transformed due to the increasing numbers of linguistically and culturally diverse students, in particular Latina/o youths. Therefore, this qualitative dissertation study explored and described ways three Latina Tejana Maestras utilized Culturally Responsive Pedagogy (CRP) during literacy learning as they integrated students’ knowledge about their social and cultural environment, including their native language repertoire, while developing and implementing instruction. This study used sociocultural and borderlands theoretical construct to explore and describe ways the Maestras enacted and sustained CRP during literacy events. The sociocultural perspective is a fitting lens because it takes into account how knowledge is constructed in and through social interaction. Borderlands is also a fitting lens because it takes into account the Tejana Maestras borderlands identity of straddling simultaneous worlds — two languages, two cultures. Sociocultural theory and Borderlands theoretical lenses were complemented by CRP, a teaching approach that not only fits the school culture to the students’ culture, but uses the students’ culture as the basis for students to understand themselves and guiding them to becoming academically successful. The two questions used to guide this dissertation were: What culturally responsive pedagogical knowledge and practices do Tejana Maestras enact in bilingual classrooms? Second: How do Tejana Maestras acquire knowledge about the culture, language, and background experience of their students when planning and implementing instruction? The research revealed three themes, a) the presence of Building a Bilingual Classroom Community (BBCC) that was continuously evolving, and seamlessly functioning, as a system was clearly evident in each of the three classrooms, b) the Tejana Maestras notion of agents of change that guided their pedagogical literacy practices, and c) the notion of centering Mexican American students’ values, beliefs, and norms into the pedagogy and curriculum responsive to emergent bilinguals was recognizable. Six findings developed from the data; a) Tejana Maestras foster cultural awareness, b) embrace Latina/o bilingualism, c) employ a menu of culturally responsive literacy practices, d) learn from their students e) are conscious of their identity, and f) teaching philosophy. Due to U.S. schools being transformed by the increasing numbers of linguistically and culturally diverse students, the study demonstrated that it is important to conduct research about Tejana Maestras to learn the ways they are effectively meeting the needs of bilingual students by using CRP to promote academic success. / text

This case study provides empirical evidence of the master and counternarrative described by Critical Race Theory (CRT) and seeks to understand the impact of these narratives in educational policy and practice. In 2010, Arizona passed A.R.S. §15-112, a law that was designed to eliminate the Mexican American Studies (MAS) program in the Tucson Unified School District. Utilizing the literature on culturally-relevant pedagogy and leadership, this case study uses a CRT theoretical framework and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) methodology to analyze the narratives of 26 participants. While the program was under investigation by the State for violation of A.R.S. §15-112 all of the teachers involved in MAS participated in qualitative interviews. In addition, this case study analyzes the narratives of two student focus groups, school administrators, and district governing board members well as the written findings of two former State Superintendents of Public Instruction both of whom found the program in violation of the law. By specifically focusing on the styles and genres described in a CDA methodology the findings provide evidence of both the master and counternarrative but also a spectrum of discourse in which other forms of narrative reside. Implications from this research include a more complex theory of discourse beyond the dichotomy of the master and counternarrative, the application of a new methodological tool in CRT, and recommendations for educational leaders and policy makers interested in advocating for a culturally relevant approach.

ABSTRACT THE REVOLUTION BEGINS AT 3PM: A QUALITATIVE STUDY OF A STATEWIDE 21ST CENTURY COMMUNITY LEARNING CENTERS PROGRAM by Corrie L. Davis The purpose of this qualitative case study was to explore how teachers and staff members demonstrated caring toward their students within a statewide 21st Century Community Learning Centers (21st CCLC) afterschool program. The participants in the study included 17 program directors, 22 site coordinators, 16 teachers, 3 paraprofessionals, 11 parents, 11 principals, and 18 other stakeholders associated with the program. This multi-site case study utilized the naturalistic paradigm of qualitative research. The data collection process included 98 semi-structured interviews, 22 participant observations, 112 photographs, and document analyses with materials from the 20 grantees selected in the sample. The qualitative software program, Atlas.ti: The Knowledge Workbench (2003) assisted with the management and analysis of data during the coding, categorizing, and interpretation process. Findings from the study revealed 3 central themes: (a) staff members that care about the whole child educate the whole child, (b) using culture as an asset increases students’ desire to learn and (c) building character promotes positive change. By incorporating these attributes, the program’s staff demonstrated their commitment to the academic and democratic advancement of the students in their care. This study will help inform policy makers, afterschool advocates, and 21st CCLC stakeholders about the importance of incorporating caring, culturally relevant pedagogy, and character education within local and national afterschool programs.