<p>ABSTRACT Title of Document: HIGH SCHOOL LEADERS? PERCEPTIONS OF PRACTICES THAT INCREASE GRADUATION RATES FOR AFRICAN AMERICAN MALES Linda Snyder Jones, Doctor of Education, 2015 Directed By: Dr. Dennis Kivlighan Department of Counseling, Higher Education and Special Education Research indicates there are significant differences in the academic performance of minorities and whites, particularly at the high school level. On average, Latino and African American high school students read and perform math on the same level as 13-year-old white students and trail their white peers by an average of 20 test points on math and reading assessments (Wiltz, 2012; Education Week, 2011; Education Trust, 2003). White and Asian students are still twice as likely as Black and Hispanic students to take classes that are considered academically challenging. Fewer than 10% of African American students participated in rigorous courses in 2009 (Education Week, 2011; NCES, 2009). Moreover, data show 54% of African Americans graduate from high school, compared with more than 75% of white and Asian students. Educational disparities are especially apparent between African American males and other groups regarding graduation rates. A report by the U.S. Department of Education (2013) shows that graduation rates are at their highest with 76.8% graduation rate in 1973 compared to 81% graduation rate in 2012(NCES, 2009, NCES, 2013). Despite this increase, one million students failed to graduate in 2013 most of whom were minorities (Richmond, 2013). The Schott Foundation for Public Education (2012) documented that in public education, of all ethnic/racial or gender groups, African American males have been least likely to secure a diploma four years after beginning high school. The major research questions guiding this study were: (1) What practices do school-based leaders use to improve the high school graduation rates of African American males? (A) Are there other strategies school-based leaders might consider implementing to continue raising the graduation rates for African American males? Using qualitative methods and an ethnographic case study design, semi-structured interviews were conducted with six high school-based leaders-- two principals, two assistant principals, one guidance counselor and one alternative-1 teacher. Findings revealed seven major themes and three minor themes. Major themes included: student/teacher relationship, mentoring programs, academic support, making school connections, data monitoring/assessment, teacher expectations and teacher professional development. Minor themes were comprised of: student self-esteem, parent involvement and funding for programs.

African-American women (AAW) have had the largest increase in diagnosed diabetes in the US. Few studies have focused solely on dietary changes (one of the foundations for diabetes self-care), particularly in the context of family and the role of AAW. The purpose of this descriptive ethnographic study was to explicate cultural influences on food practices of AAW with type 2 diabetes (T2DM) in order to inform the health care community as well as future development of culturally-tailored interventions. Specific aims were to describe typical daily food practices and identify cultural influences on food practices of AAW with T2DM. Symbolic Interactionism, a sensitizing framework for viewing AAW with T2DM as a subculture, guided this study. Purposeful sampling was used to recruit 20 AAW who: were between 35 and 70 years of age, had been diagnosed with T2DM, shopped and prepared meals for their families, and attended church functions where food was served . Data collection consisted of one-one-one interviews and participant observation of church fellowship dinners, grocery shopping, and food preparation. A social anthropological approach to content analysis was used to describe behavioral regularities in food practices. Trustworthiness was maintained by an audit trail. Findings indicate that for informants in this study, who had diabetes ranging from 2 to 30+ years, there is a constant struggle between cultural food practices and eating healthier because of diabetes, particularly within the home setting where a majority of daily food practices take place. Difficulties in making dietary modifications result from conflicts between the need to change dietary practices to control diabetes and personal food preferences, as well as the preferences of people within the participants' social network. In addition, difficulties derive from AAW's emotional dedication to the symbolism of food and traditional cultural food practices. AAW are the gatekeepers for family food practices and are the keys to healthy dietary practices. This study begins to fill the research gap regarding cultural dietary food practices of this population. With increased knowledge, researchers and health care providers will be better able to improve AAW food practices, and ultimately improve diabetes control in this high-risk population. / text

Research indicates that cultural mistrust can have negative impact on academic attitudes and outcomes for Black American students. However, few studies have specifically investigated the role that cultural mistrust has on student's academic self-concept, or perceptions of their academic abilities. Further, no study has explored to what degree student's perceptions of interpersonal relationships with faculty can impact the link between cultural mistrust and academic outcomes. The purpose of the present study was to investigate the impact of cultural mistrust in education and training and interpersonal relationships on academic self-concept in a population of undergraduate Black American students enrolled at a predominately white university. Secondarily, the study sought to examine whether aspects of student-professor interaction, specifically faculty approachability, caring attitude, and connection, mediate or moderate the effect of cultural mistrust on academic self-concept. Results of this study show that faculty approachability and caring attitude mediate the effect of the interpersonal relationships sub domain on academic self-concept. Student-professor interaction did not moderate the relationship between cultural mistrust and academic self-concept. Results support the need to facilitate and encourage positive student-faculty interactions with Black American university students. Perhaps mentoring initiatives could aim to foster positive interactions with students and promote the recruitment and retention efforts of African American faculty members. / text

This report serves as a first-person account of the conceptualization, pre-production, and post-production phases of my short documentary thesis film. We Will Always Be Here interweaves stories from residents, historians, and grassroots activists in a visual essay about the transforming landscape in the rapidly expanding neighborhood of East Austin. The film explores themes of identity politics and cultural resistance amid the seemingly unstoppable expansion of the city of Austin. / text

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This dissertation proposes to build upon a critical tradition that explores the formation of racial subjectivity in narratives of passing in African-American and American literature. It adds to recent scholarship on passing narratives which seeks a more comprehensive understanding of the connections between the performance of racial norms and contemporary conceptions of "race" and racial categorization. But rather than focusing entirely on the conventional mulatta/o performs whiteness plot device at work in passing literature, a device that reinforces the desirability of heteronormative whiteness, I am interested in assessing how performances of a variety of racial norms challenges this desirability. Selected literary fiction from Herman Melville, Mary White Ovington, Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, and ZZ Packer provides a rich opportunity for analyzing these unconventional performances. Formulating a theory of "black-passing" that decenters whiteness as the passer's object of desire, this project assesses how the works of these authors broadens the framework of the discourse on racial performance in revelatory ways. Racial passing will get measured in relation to the political consequences engendered by the transgression of racial boundaries, emphasizing how the nature of acts of passing varies according to the way hegemonic society dictates racial enfranchisement. Passing will be situated in the context of various modes of literary representation - realism, naturalism, modernism, and postmodernism - that register subjectivity. The project will also explore in greater detail the changing nature of acts of passing across gendered, spatial, and temporal boundaries.

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<p> This dissertation examines the art and material culture of the Anglo-American cotton trade in the nineteenth century to consider how these transnational processes influenced different modes of production: artistic, industrial and textile. The Anglo-American cotton trade's importance in the nineteenth century rested on the Atlantic slave trade and its aftereffects. Therefore this study foregrounds the centrality of African American history and culture to the trade's structures of exchange, encounter and transmission as they inflected nineteenth-century British and American artistic production and industrial expansion. In four chapters beginning in 1840 and ending at the beginning of the twentieth century, I juxtapose the work of contemporary artists with historical case studies. I argue that these contemporary artists &ndash; Leonardo Drew, Lubaina Himid and Yinka Shonibare &ndash; offer new interpretive frameworks for approaching the transactional and transnational contexts of nineteenth-century British, American and African American art and material culture.</p><p> Chapter one focuses on the relationship between plantations in the American South and New England, using prints, paintings and textiles that reveal the plantation and factory to be connected landscape. I trace how cotton's movement shaped constructions around place, and materialized connections between communities of labor in antebellum America. Chapter two opens with Lubaina Himid's <i> Cotton.com</i> (2002) and expands the historical relationship of plantation and factory out across the Atlantic. Centralizing Eyre Crowe's <i>Slaves Waiting for Sale, Richmond, Virginia</i> (1861) and the export of printed cotton from Manchester, it examines the convergence of the trade in cotton with the trade in slaves. It considers how these market relations shaped the commodification of the enslaved body, British experiences of factory labor, and Manchester production of printed cloth for consumers across the globe. Chapter three begins with Leonardo Drew's <i>Number 25</i> to consider the tensions between materiality and abstraction in the production and commodification of cotton and art objects. I then examine paintings by Edgar Degas, <i> A Cotton Office in New Orleans</i> (1873), and Winslow Homer, <i> The Cotton Pickers</i>, (1876) to explore how these artists negotiated the status of cotton as a global commodity and grappled with the changing networks, of labor, production and commerce in postbellum America. Eyre Crowe's painting of factory workers in Lancashire, <i>The Dinner Hour, Wigan </i> (1874) concludes this section, which examines how the international market for cotton was influencing the representation and experience of industry in north west England. My final chapter, commencing with an installation by Yinka Shonibare MBE <i>Scramble for Africa</i> (2003), focuses on the commercial logic and visual rhetoric of three Southern international exhibitions. I examine how these exhibitions constructed the South &ndash; through visions of cotton plantations and black cotton pickers &ndash; as a space for domestic colonial expansion. Alongside this I look at the ways Africa was being constructed as a new cotton market &ndash; both as a site of cultivation and a site of consumption. In both sections I underscore how the language of commerce, colonialism and cotton shaped particular constructions of space and meanings around the African, and African American body. I conclude with the work of Meta Warrick Fuller to briefly examine how black Americans dismantled these tropes of exclusion, signified by cotton, to project claims for equality.</p><p> The project argues that the art works under examination here draw on an economic language to visualize particular ideas and constructions around labor, production and race in three ways. It traces the contours of a market-driven aesthetic in the ways cotton was used to illustrate or materialize connections to a circulating economy of goods. It describes how cotton's movement shaped the construction of imagined geographies around sites of labor and spaces of consumption. And it sketches out the speculative vision that emerged throughout the nineteenth century in the material and metaphorical associations of cotton, commerce and African American identity. In revealing the representational possibilities of cotton in this way, this dissertation looks at understudied objects to consider the nuanced ways that local cultural forms have, historically, intersected with global processes in the Atlantic world. It centralizes the experience of African Americans, within an Anglo-American culture of exchange and its relationship to a global network of trade and transmission. In doing so it seeks to reframe the ways we might approach historical processes of visuality and perception in the long nineteenth century in order to create a more global, or at least transnational, perspective on the art of this period. </p>

Several studies have been conducted to determine implicit perceptions of race. The purpose of this study was to determine whether or not individuals, when provided with a limited amount of time and limited information, would rate a borderline aggressive play in an athletic setting as being more severe based on the race of the aggressor. Participants (N = 16) were from one mid-sized, Midwestern University. Data were analyzed using an Three-way mixed effects ANOVA with the level of significance set at .05. Results indicated there was no significant difference between race and perceptions of athlete aggression. Furthermore, no significant relationship was found between the race of the individual being aggressed against and the rating of the aggressiveness of the play. Possible limitations along with recommendations for the future are discussed. / School of Physical Education, Sport, and Exercise Science

According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Office of Minority Health and the Center for Disease Control (CDC), individuals who identified themselves as African-American or Black have the highest rate of obesity in the United States. The higher prevalence of overweight and obesity among the African-American population correlates to an increased risk for a number of diseases (including heart disease, diabetes, and several cancers) and an increased mortality rate for the African American population. Through focus groups and interviews, the research I will present focuses on perceptions of overweight and obesity among African-Americans, including any cultural beliefs associated with overweight, obesity and African-Americans. I examined cultural norms of body image, food preference (including "soul food" and other foods traditionally associated with African-American culture), and access to healthy foods and how the familial unit deals with issues of overweight and obesity. I also explored popular explanatory models surrounding the cultural acceptance of overweight and obesity in the African-American culture. Finally, I attempted to uncover the role that socioeconomic status plays in the acceptance, belief and/or knowledge of these models. A total of 80 participants who identify as African-American or Black were chosen using non-probability sampling techniques to participate in this research. I conducted 3 focus groups and 60 one on one interviews. Each participant in the focus group and one on one interview filled out a brief questionnaire about their perceptions of their own body image in conjunction with their interview. Varying socioeconomic status was sought amongst interview participants while similar socioeconomic status and education level were sought among focus group participants so that each person within the group felt as comfortable as possible sharing their experiences with weight and food. In my paper, I will discuss common themes that emerged in focus groups and interviews regarding perceptions of obesity among my participants.