This case study explored the negotiation of identities of American-born Mexican descent high school students in a US-Mexico border region. These students resided mostly with their parents and families on the Mexican side, and having legal American status, crossed the border daily to attend high school on the U.S. side. This qualitative study was informed by social and historical perspectives, and emphasized the identity of border crossers, examining the question of how they positioned themselves when faced with Americanization on the U.S. side and Mexicanization on the Mexican side. The study included a total of 19 participants: 3 students of primary focus, and 16 secondary participants (6 other high school students, 6 educators and 4 parents.) This sample of convenience was recruited at Isler High School, the researcher's place of work. Interviews were conducted with each participant, and the three focus students kept a month-long journal. Finally, some students in the secondary group provided valuable information through focus group discussion. Using Gee's (2001) theoretical framework that proposes four perspectives for viewing identity (Nature, Institution, Discourse and Affinity), the researcher found that the focus participants, each one bilingual, considered English an instrument to become American and be recognized as such. However, each "confessed" to code-switching, but preferred to avoid it. The three focus students self-identified as either Mexican or Mexican and American. One strongly rejected the possibility of being ascribed the identity of a Chicano. The study showed that student border crossers are perfectly fluent in both English and Spanish, contrary to commonly held belief, and that they identify with Mexico, but also with the United States.

The goal of the study was to investigate the impact of English text difficulty on English learners' math word problem solving. Booklets containing eight word problems and 5 point Likert-type rating scale items were given to 41 students. The students were asked to solve 8 math word problems written in English, and varying in grade level readability (vocabulary and grammatical complexity) as well as in the math operation (e.g., arithmetic, simple algebra). The researcher provided the students with hints as needed to ensure that students found the correct solution. The results showed that both English difficulty and Math level difficulty contributed to the students' poor achievements. Based on the results, some suggestions for improvements to an existing Web based math instructional software aimed at helping ELL students (called Animal Watch) have been made.

Preservice elementary teachers often have concerns about teaching science that may stem from a lack of confidence as teachers or their own negative experiences as learners of science. These concerns may lead preservice teachers to avoid teaching science or to teach it in a way that focuses on facts and vocabulary rather than engaging students in the doing of science. Research on teacher identity has suggested that being able to envision oneself as a teacher of science is an important part of becoming a teacher of science. Elementary teachers are generalists and as such rather than identifying themselves as teachers of particular content areas, they may identify more generally as teachers of students. This study examines three preservice teachers' identities as teachers of science and teachers of students and how these identities are enacted in their student teaching classrooms. Using a narrated identity framework, I explore stories told by preservice teachers, mentor teachers, student teaching supervisors, and science methods course instructors about who preservice teachers are as teachers of science and teachers of students. Identities are the stories that are told about who someone is or will become in relation to a particular context. Identities that are enacted are performances of the stories that are an identity. Stories were collected through interviews with each storyteller and in an unmoderated focus group with the three preservice teachers. In addition to sorting stories as being about teachers of science or students, the stories were categorized as being about preservice teachers in the present (actual identities) or in the future (designated identities). The preservice teachers were also observed teaching science lessons in their student teaching placements. These enactments of identities were analyzed in order to identify which aspects of the identity stories were reflected in the way preservice teachers taught their science lessons. I also analyzed the stories and enactments in order to determine which storytellers were significant narrators for the preservice teachers' identities. The findings from this study show that significant narrators vary among the preservice teachers and include artifacts such as curriculum materials and instructional models in addition to people who are expected to be significant narrators. Furthermore, differences between preservice teachers' actual and designated identities influence opportunities to learn about what it means to be a teacher of science and students. This took different forms with each preservice teacher. In one case the preservice teacher worked to enact aspects of her designated identity and reflected about how she was not quite able to be the teacher of science she wanted to be as a novice teacher. Another case showed how the gap between actual and designated identities could limit opportunities to learn when the preservice teacher's strong actual identity as a novice led her to consider certain aspects of her designated identity as things which could not even be tried at this point. Finally, in the third case the preservice teacher's strong actual identity limited opportunities to develop a designated identity because she did not see herself as being a different kind of teacher of science in the future than she was right now as a student teacher. These findings suggest that supporting preservice elementary teacher identity development as teachers of science is an important part of preparing them to teach science in ways that engage students in scientific practices. Additionally, it is essential to examine identity stories and enactments in concert with each other in order to gain deeper understandings of how identities are developed and put into practice in classrooms.

This study looked at the transition from preservice teacher to teacher by considering novice teacher success stories. This investigation rested on the presumption that the first year of teaching may be a struggle for some. This claim was underscored by the prevalence of the sink or swim metaphor in discourse related to induction. To understand how novice teacher success stories can inform teacher education, narratives were captured using task-oriented, semi-structured interviews deliberately designed to elicit authentic responses. Iterative analysis of the narratives yielded two profiles and 10 stories that are presented in a combination of vignettes written in the voice of the participant and expository comments. Iterative analysis of the 10 stories using the features or elements of story (setting, character, tone, and theme) yielded a number of patterns. In sum, consideration of these findings informs a deeper and richer understanding of induction through the experiences and perspectives of the purposively and conveniently selected participant in this study. Her case supports the rationale for this inquiry. She demonstrated a keen awareness of the struggles novices face. Yet, she self-identified as successful and her administration concurred. The overarching finding is deep insight into the persona of the participant--a survivor that understood successes as a novice teacher to be occurrences marked in sometimes minimal relief upon a context of struggle.

Despite recent science education reform documents citing evolution as a core concept to be taught in grades K-12, research shows problems with how it is currently taught. Evolution is often avoided, teachers minimize its importance within biology, infuse misconceptions, and/or interject non-scientific ideologies into lessons. My research focused on how teachers in two geographically and culturally distinct school districts in the southwestern U.S. negotiate dilemmas during an evolution unit. One school district was rural and had a large population of Mormon students, while the other district was urban, with a large majority Mexican/Mexican-American students. Using a case study approach, I observed three biology teachers during their evolution lessons, interviewed them throughout the unit, co-planned lessons with them, and collected artifacts from this unit, including anonymous student work. I also included data from four genetics lessons for each teacher to determine if the issues that arose during the evolution unit were a result of the general practice of the teacher, or if they were unique to evolution. Findings showed teachers' backgrounds and comfort levels with evolution, in addition to their perceptions of community context, affected how they negotiated pedagogical, conceptual, political, and cultural dilemmas. This study's findings will inform in-service teachers' future practice and professional development tools to aid with their teaching-this may include methods to negotiate some of the political (e.g. state standards) or cultural (e.g. religious resistance) issues inherent to teaching evolution.

School choice is touted to alleviate inequities in students' schooling experiences. It is seen as a way out of under-performing neighborhood schools. However, it can be challenging for marginalized students to leave their neighborhood school and transfer into a school of their choice. The reason for this challenge is the inequitable opportunities surrounding school choice, such as elite charter schools located outside of city centers and credit-recovery schools targeting marginalized youth (Garcia, 2008). As marginalized students try to navigate the school choice landscape, they may engage in sequences of transfers increasing the chance that they will ultimately drop out. Since most school choice research explores student experiences using quantitative research, general school mobility patterns and outcomes are understood. What is not well established is the individual student's more nuanced experiences engaging in school choice, the choices they make, and the resulting outcome, particularly for marginalized youth. Additionally, little research has explored the impact of transferring on students' mathematical learning. This dissertation examined how highly mobile, marginalized youth described their experiences transferring schools and learning mathematics. This study used an analytic framework that foregrounded students' empowerment, their ability to achieve their goals. The framework focuses on agency and opportunity structures as key components of empowerment. This framework was used to examine three highly mobile, marginalized youths' experiences engaging in school choice and learning mathematics. This analysis of empowerment highlighted the challenging opportunity structures these youth faced when engaging in school choice and the assets they utilized in making decisions. It also identified important opportunity structures that supported, or hindered, these students' mathematical learning. Finally, the resulting empowerment (both mathematical and school choice empowerment) that these students' experienced was examined. The findings demonstrate the complexity of engaging in school choice and reveal both challenges and successes engaging in school choice and mathematical learning. The school choice findings indicate that students may be falsely empowered when engaging in school choice, they may engage in new chance transfers offering them a new start, and/or they may increase their mobility by "trying on schools" for a good fit. The mathematical findings suggest that students may experience mathematical learning empowerment and/or earning empowerment, and that recognizing this difference is important; develop a procedural understanding of mathematics that may create further challenges as highly mobile youth transfer schools; and experience productive opportunity structures that may be essential in supporting students' mathematical empowerment. The findings suggest important implications for highly mobile marginalized youths' mathematical achievement, school choice policy, and further research. Specifically, the findings suggest the importance of using a framework that examines opportunity structures, assets, and empowerment to better understand and support students' engagement in school choice.

Science education reform in the United States has been slow to reduce the troubling science achievement gap between students from mainstream and non- mainstream backgrounds. Recent data suggest the gap persists in spite of improved attention to the multicultural education of teachers, and in spite of recent, more culturally inclusive and responsive curricular materials and instructional recommendations.In this study, I examine the cases of two European American male novice science teachers in middle schools with highly diverse populations, exploring their perceptions of the necessity of adapting their instructional approaches and the science curricula in order to meet the needs of their predominantly Native American, Mexican American, and African American students. Two theoretical frameworks inform this study, Rodriguez's (2005) sociotransformative constructivism, and Freire's critical pedagogy.I apply a qualitative case study method, to better understand and analyze the classroom setting and power relations of the context. Data consist of semi-structured interviews with each teacher, classroom observation and other field notes, the science curricular and instructional materials, and teachers' lesson plans.Each teacher acknowledged the ethnicities of students positively and noticed distinctive ethnocultural features (e.g., quinceañeras, Mexican Americans). Yet, their teaching approaches were primarily teacher-centric and monocultural. Each followed the book, usually lecturing, and striving dutifully to "cover" the topics. They did not solicit students' knowledge or engage them in dialog to explore their thinking. Even when the curriculum guide detailed relevant science knowledge students of some culturalgroups might have, both teachers declined to use it. These well-meaning teachers did not fully perceive that students whose culturewas different from their own might have different and relevant knowledge, experiences, or histories which were resources for learning. As a result, even when the teachers tried more student- centered, inclusive strategies, such as implementing authentic science activities, they did not support students' construction of knowledge through responsive dialog.Teachers assigned to ethnically and culturally diverse students must be helped to fully understand that learners from other cultures have differing knowledge resources. Science teachers in particular must recognize the social and ideological landscape in which their teaching take place.

The purpose of this qualitative study was to understand how teachers discuss pedagogy and learning in the context of a professional learning community in an elementary school. This understanding has the potential to assist principals and teachers to establish professional learning communities that use their time productively. Study participants belonged to a fifth grade professional learning community. Data sources included video and audio recordings, transcripts, field notes, interviews and artifacts. The data were examined for Episodes of Pedagogical Reasoning (Horn, 2005) which was the unit of analysis for the study. Episodes of Pedagogical Reasoning are units of teacher-to-teacher talk where teachers show their comprehension of a concern in their practice. One finding from the data analysis indicated that although the professional learning community in the study did not follow the "ideal" PLC model, the teachers used the time they were given to accomplish what they needed to do in the course of implementing the Common Core Standards. Another finding was the teachers use of practical talk (Doyle & Ponder, 1978) in determining how best to implement the Common Core Standards. Their practical talk focused on instrumentality and congruence. Instrumentality is defined as a change proposal that must describe a method in a way that depicts classroom contingencies. If the procedure fits the way a teacher normally conducts classroom activities, then it is congruent.

This research is an exploration of students' meaning making around physical concepts through connections to students' funds of knowledge. This qualitative case study, influenced by Indigenous methodologies, focused on two Native students in a tribal college introductory physics course, exploring the personal, cultural, and philosophical connections that were voiced in dialogic interactions among the students and instructor. The data were collected through audio recordings of class sessions and reflective journaling by the instructor/researcher. Analysis identified dialogues in which meaning making took place, and the funds of knowledge that students brought to bear on these dialogues. The results of the analysis of these meaning-making occasions are presented by physical concept. For both students, the cultural connections they brought in were ways for them to incorporate their out-of-class identities and to consider their cultures from a scientific perspective. The influence of the students' personal connections was just as important as that of the cultural connections; the shared classroom context was also a valuable resource in the for collaborative meaning making. Both students both enjoyed examining the philosophical and spiritual implications of physical ideas; these dialogues provided windows into students' thinking that would not have been accessible in other ways. The students also made meanings about the nature of science that meshed with their identities and created a space for them to identify as scientists, and both came to view science as part of their cultural heritage. Allowing students free reign to make connections and empowering them to make decisions about their own learning were means of encouraging students to develop meaningful conceptual understanding. By investigating the meanings students made around physical content, we can learn about what motivates them, what is important to them, and potentially how to structure curricula that will better support their meaning making in other courses.

My dissertation research explored the experiences of mathematics anxieties in women elementary preservice teachers while learning mathematics as K-12 students and while learning to teach mathematics. Previous studies conducted in mathematics teacher education have emphasized the importance of preservice teachers' mathematical knowledge for teaching, as a confident and competent mathematics teacher is a vital necessity in the classroom (Beilock, Gunderson, Ramirez, & Levine, 2010; Gavin & Reis, 2003; Huebner, 2009). As evidence of elementary preservice teachers' anxiety, I analyzed three women preservice teachers' oral and written narratives about their experiences with learning mathematics and learning to teach mathematics, which I collected over eighteen months at key moments in their teacher preparation program. My findings have revealed that for some women elementary preservice teachers, mathematics anxiety may be an issue or concern that remains consistent and recurs for decades. In fact, the multiple stories that the three preservice teachers had to tell indicated that their experiences in learning mathematics led them to develop a unique coping strategy to deal with mathematics anxiety. They continued to utilize their strategy repeatedly across their experiences as a student learning mathematics and learning to teach mathematics, even when the strategy sometimes failed to protect them from stress, embarrassment, and demoralization. Moreover, these coping strategies appeared to become so powerful that when the women confronted situations in which they felt expected to know mathematical content that they did not understand, they used their unique strategies for coping with mathematics anxiety rather than seriously attempting to learn that content. In this manner, these coping strategies often appeared to have injurious effects on their mathematics learning. Given that my study only included three participants, I suggest future research that mathematics teacher education researchers may want to consider. I also propose ways in which mathematics teacher educators might address issues of mathematics anxiety in elementary teacher preparation programs.