<p> This study advances the premise that African-American parents are deliberately involved in their children&rsquo;s education; however, many educators may not recognize their involvement because it may not always align with dominant cultural expectations. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to explore beneficial social capital and cultural capital that low-income African-American parents use to involve themselves in their children&rsquo;s suburban school education. Data was collected for this study, in a suburb outside of a large metropolitan city, through the use of a World Caf&eacute; (a type of community discussion group) and semi-structured interviews. Using portraiture research design, the findings of the study are highlighted through six participant portraits, which narrate their involvement in their children&rsquo;s education. </p><p> In summary, all of the participants utilized both social and cultural capital to become involved in their children&rsquo;s education. Generally, each interview participant&rsquo;s family cultural capital motivated her to participate in her child&rsquo;s education, in a manner unique to her own educational experiences. In addition to understanding and utilizing valuable dominant forms of cultural capital (attending parent-teacher conferences, volunteering, and communicating with the teachers, working with children at home, and having educational expectations), participants in this study also referenced the use of culture-specific forms of capital, such as: family cultural capital, family networks and church, teaching cultural knowledge, community collective beliefs, and African-American networks. Additionally, participants used the following forms of social capital to benefit their children&rsquo;s education: relocating, hiding poverty, utilizing community service resources, and using intergenerational closure. </p><p> Suggestions are made for educators to recognize and honor these non-dominant social and cultural forms of parental involvement, so that low-income African-American parental involvement can benefit their children&rsquo;s education. Participants called for more supportive social and cultural African-American parent networks to be created within schools, to help parents feel more welcome and supported in the schools, and become more knowledgeable about the schooling process. </p><p>

This dissertation describes and examines the fictional representations of friendship between middle-class boys at all-male public boarding schools during the nineteenth- and early twentieth-centuries in England. In the texts under consideration, romantic friendships embody educational, social, and spiritual ideals; readings of sermons, letters, memoirs, and book illustrations contextualize these ideals and suggest that they mirror a broader ideological framework in the culture. Thomas Hughes's Tom Brown's Schooldays (1857) and F. W. Farrar's Eric (1858), which consolidate the tropes of the schoolboy narrative, self-consciously reflect the philosophical and educational standards of Thomas Arnold, Headmaster at Rugby School from 1828 to 1842. For Arnold, highly emotional friendships, based on Christian values, helped to develop piety and to reflect, in earthly terms, the spiritual brotherhood that all "men" share with God. Friendships in Charles Dickens's fiction also conform to many of these narrative and ideological constructs. Nicholas Nickleby (1838-9) represents the comforts of compassionate friendship, while David Copperfield (1849-50) illustrates the torturous complexity of the schoolboy romance. In Our Mutual Friend (1864-5), Dickens alludes parenthetically to Mortimer and Eugene's school days in order to evoke the history and depth of their adult friendship. Edwardian fiction presents a revised discourse on schoolboy friendship, with expressions of affection breaking through a strenuous emotional reserve. In E. M. Forster's A Room With a View (1908), the schoolboy Freddy Honeychurch invites George Emerson to share an uninhibited bond (the "Sacred Lake" bathing scene) that both contrasts with the atomized heterosexual relations in the novel and presages their eventual brotherhood (when George marries Freddy's sister Lucy). The animals in Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows (1908) inhabit a homosocial society modelled on Grahame's fantasy of the public school. E. F. Benson's David Blaize (1916) dignifies friendship between boys in spite of the political, intellectual, and aesthetic breakdown of male identity and relations that resulted from the oppressive traumas over masculinity indicative of the fin-de-siecle.

The purpose of this study is to listen to teachers’ stories and reconstruct their classrooms in the midst of the global upheaval of people’s movements in the 1960s-70s through teachers’ narratives. The primary research questions are: How did social movements in the 1960s-1970s influence their teaching practices? What was their intention and how did they carry out their daily teaching practice? In the educational research field, narrative inquirers explore teachers’ stories, their life experiences and teaching practices, in order to understand how teachers view the world. I collected stories, through in-depth interviews, of ten Japanese teachers who taught in Japanese public school system, and were active in social and educational movements during the 1960s-70s in order to understand how teachers understood and resisted dominant oppressive forces which create and perpetuate social inequality. Teacher narratives were analyzed using two complementary methods: contents analysis and interactional positioning theory. First, stories of teachers’ struggles in their classrooms and schools were contextualized in a wider social struggle for humanity and a more just society, in order to explore teachers’ understanding of social oppression and their resistance, and multiculturalism in Japanese classrooms in the 1960s-1970s. Through their stories, an indigenous multicultural nature of Japanese classrooms was revealed, even before the multiculturalism became an imported educational topic in the 1980s. Furthermore, using interactional positioning theory, I discussed how teacher activist identities were constructed during the narration, at the same time, uncover how social stigma of being an activist possibly suppressed the participants overtly constructing an activist identity in narratives.

Thesis (M.Phil.)--University of Hong Kong, 1974. / Also available in print.

Thesis (doctoral)--Universität, Trier, 2007. / Includes bibliographical references and register.

Dissertation (Ph.D.)--The University of North Carolina at Greensboro, 2010. / Directed by Glenn Hudak; submitted to the Dept. of Educational Leadership and Cultural Foundations. Title from PDF t.p. (viewed Jul. 7, 2010). Includes bibliographical references (p. 167-173).

The adoption of Free Primary Education in 2003 has expanded access to millions of children in Kenya. However, large numbers of children are still out of school. The majority of the out-of-school children belong to ethnic minority groups and the rural and urban poor, who live in abject poverty. This situation is disturbing given that free primary education was intended to universalize access to primary education, particularly for the poor. In Kenya, where gender parity has been achieved in primary education, gender disparities become obvious when analyses include geographical region and high levels of poverty. The degree to which gender parity is met varies from region to region and across ethnic groups. However this experience is not unique to Kenya. Recent global assessments of education reveal that out-of-school girls are disproportionately represented in excluded groups. But what helps explain this disproportionate representation of poor marginalized girls among those who are out of school? Understanding and addressing discrepant rates of participation requires close examination of factors underlying poor educational participation among those at the margins of society. However, such investigation must take into account the unique ways in which culture, poverty, ethnicity, and gender interact to affect educational processes. This study adopts a feminist theory of intersectionality to argue, based on the experiences of urban poor and rural girls in Nyanza Province of Kenya, that the educational marginalization of poor girls can be understood as an outcome of intersecting, socio-political and economic processes that emerge from their social locations within sexism, poverty, ethnic chauvinism, classism, and the simultaneity of oppression related to multiple discrimination. Based on the perspectives of the poor girls themselves, the study argues that greater acknowledgment be given to the intersectional framework within which educational exclusion occurs, paying particular attention to the interactions of culture, economy, home, and school as domains of intervention.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Western Sydney, 2009. / A thesis presented to the University of Western Sydney, College of Arts, Centre for Educational Research, in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Includes bibliographies.

Thesis (M. Phil.)--University of Hong Kong, 1980.

Thesis (M.A.)--Ohio University, June, 2008. / Title from PDF t.p. Includes bibliographical references.