The purpose of this study is to explore how white anti-racism educators understand and address whiteness in their teaching. This study describes how white anti-racism educators make sense of whiteness as a construct. This includes an exploration of how whiteness is defined, and an elaboration on the similarities and differences between these definitions. In addition, the study explores how white anti-racism educators address the concept of whiteness in their teaching and training. This study follows a phenomenological approach to data collection and analysis with regard to the research question: from the perspective of a white anti-racism educator, what is whiteness and how does it inform my practice? Twelve white anti-racism educators who identify as either university faculty or organizational consultants were interviewed for this study. Several themes emerged describing their interest in anti-racism education and how their journeys as anti-racist educations began with an early awareness that came from spiritual and religious values, family influences, relationships with people of color, and participation in anti-racism training. In describing the meaning of "whiteness," these anti-racism educators talked of whiteness as social construction, culture, power, and privilege. Finally, most of them shared feelings of ambivalence, hope, anxiety, and compassion that were derived from thinking about how whiteness has impacted their lives and how they felt they should teach about it. Important considerations based on this research include the role they play in raising the racial consciousness of other whites, the role of trust in their journey toward being an anti-racism educator, and how high-trust relationships have influenced how they view their work. And finally, they follow a set of principles or guidelines that help them situate whiteness within the context of their anti-racism educational practice. This study concludes with research limitations, as well as future research and practice implications.

It was the purpose of this study to explore and compare the differences in self concept, academic behavior, and self-reported personal experiences, between a group of high achieving African heritage students and underachieving African heritage students. This study was designed in order to better understand the factors that contribute to the success or underachievement of African heritage students who are judged by their teachers to be academically capable of success. This is a comparative study, using a blend of qualitative and quantitative methodologies involving a sample of fourteen African heritage male and female high school students from one central Massachusetts high school. Data was drawn from focus groups, demographic profiles, and a self-concept assessment. This study was an exploratory study designed to identify factors related to black student academic achievement. The significant findings include differences in ethnic and linguistic background, participation in extracurricular activities, parental attitudes toward school, student attitudes toward school, and differences in the formation of goals. Based on this data one can conclude that the high achievers of African descent in this study are motivated and invested in their education as a result of various factors including family influences, self determination, and participation in organized extracurricular activities. One can also conclude that the underachievers in this study have been unable to achieve their full potential as a result of various factors that include family influences, peer influences, previous academic experiences, and lack of self motivation. This research can be beneficial to educators and researchers as they continue to unravel the complexities of academic achievement between and among students of color.

The purpose of this study was to identify, study and implement the characteristics of effective science pedagogy in the multicultural classroom. The ultimate goal was to identify the instructional strategies in the learning process. The scope of the work included the development of wisdom-in-practice by a skillful teacher. A model (KMEEP) was used for describing the processes of learning and teaching within the multicultural classroom. Case studies were written with the goal of using the classroom experiences of the teacher to bridge the gap between theory and praxis.

This study explored the consummations of "The Transitional Approach to Reading" with Puerto Rican native language emergent and second language early emergent readers enrolled in a Transitional Bilingual Education Program of a public school system in Central Massachusetts. The objective of this study was to put forth a paradigm for a new reading approach, "The Transitional Approach", in a Bilingual first-grade class. The intent was to enhance their initiation into English reading. The principal goal was to transfer native language vocabulary whose definitions are the same in both languages (from one language to another) allowing reading comprehension to be achieved. The students were taught to manipulate "transference" in order to reach word comprehension in the second language. The vocabulary learned in native language reading, Spanish, will be transferred from Spanish to English. The study inquired as to whether these students, at the culmination of five months, showed growth in vocabulary attainment in Spanish, in English, and in Spanish and English on the post-approach assessments. No hypothesis was tested. The study was exploratory and descriptive in nature. The following tasks were accomplished: (1) Accumulation of Transfer Word Vocabulary from the entirety of the first-grade curricula: Spanish, Science, Social Studies, Culture, Mathematics, Language Arts, Reading, and English as a Second Language (a total of 235). (2) Assessment in Spanish, first, then in English of 78 Transfer Vocabulary Words: "Yes/No" Match, Pre-Test; and "Yes/No" Read and Match, Post-Test. (3) Observations made prior to, during, and after the implementation of the approach. Fourteen children were chosen to participate in "The Transitional Approach to Reading". The research revealed that the students increased their native and second language transfer word vocabularies and initiated second language beginning reading. "The Transitional Approach" played an important role in the formulation of the child's vocabulary development, reading comprehension, and overall reading development. Knowledge of vocabulary, word meaning, plays an essential part in the first-grade reading curriculum and accounts for about half of reading comprehension.

There are hidden difficulties in teaching a foreign language in a classroom context that have not been examined. Using ethnographic research methods of participant observation, field notes, audio-taping of classroom conversational exchange, and interviews with participants of the interactions, the hidden issues were identified through data analysis focusing on the discourse between teachers and students of Chinese language. While many classroom interaction studies focus on teaching methods or content that should be taught, this research study examines language classroom interactions from a sociocultural perspective. It provides a description of the cultural and social factors that influence the communicative process in classroom interactions. The underlying assumption guiding this study is that effective foreign language teaching and learning is a communicative process that involves more than simply instruction about the formal features of language and cultural knowledge. The purpose of this process is to develop the individual learner's communicative competence. This competence includes not only language competence and cultural competence but also the openness and readiness of the mind and the flexibility of cognition to function in cross-cultural contexts. The study reveals that a central cause of language classroom miscommunication is the difficulty participants have in creating contextual coherence and meaning. This problem is the direct result of the participants' simplified assumptions of cultural and social stereotypes. The stereotyping of individual and power relationships in the classroom hinders the learning process and can lead to underdeveloped perspectives of cultural images and social roles of individuals. With stereotyped cultural images and the narrowly defined social roles of participants in the classroom, the teaching and learning process limits opportunities to actively develop the learners' communicative competence. The practice of teaching and learning thus may reinforce inflexibility in communicative negotiation and in dealing with the cultural, social, and individual diversities in the cross-cultural interactions outside the classroom. Therefore, cross-cultural openness--the awareness of sociocultural and individual diversity in cross-cultural interactions--is significant in language teaching and learning. The significance of cross-cultural openness is that it not only influences the process of language teaching and learning, but also the content of language teaching and learning.

The multicultural and environmental education movements have constituted significant political and educational forces over the last several decades. However, there has been little merger of these in terms of constituencies, ideologies and agendas. In schools, environmental and multicultural education are most often considered occasional additives rather than core curriculum, and rarely are they introduced as interconnected. Educational curricula and programs that support young people, particularly in but not limited to urban areas, in exploring connections between social and environmental issues and becoming knowledgable and conscientious decision makers, leaders and activists are urgently needed. Urban youth involved in environmental issues represent a venue for bridging multiculturalism and environmentalism as change agents who bring multiple cultural perspectives, wisdom, and leadership potential to the discourse. This research study explores conditions that promoted environmental activism and leadership among urban youth. An interview-based methodology was used to gain insights into the experiences and perceptions of twelve young people, male and female, who live in urban areas and are of diverse cultural and ethnic backgrounds. The analysis explores influences such as family, culture, neighborhood and school in shaping the study participants' perceptions and involvement in environmentalism. Their perspectives challenge limited and sterotypical definitions of environmental issues and support the notion that 'environment' is a socially constructed concept. The youth illustrate this in the examples of urban environmental concerns they identify and discuss as important to their lives and communities. Their experiences as youth activists and the nature of their activism is explored, including the importance of adult support and membership in community to sustaining their involvement. Their perceptions of leadership as a collaborative process, informed visions for rethinking schooling, and clarity in terms of educational and career aspirations reinforce their importance as contributors to the discourse on environmentalism. The lessons learned from this research are translated into recommendations for rethinking curriculum development and teacher education from a multicultural environmental perspective, and building alliances between schools and community and national organizations.

The purpose of this study was to show that ESL students without native-like control of English could be encouraged to write to a real reader by being engaged in pen pal writing activity. Additionally, this study was to determine the effects of the activity of writing to a real reader on the writing skills of ESL students. It was the goal to increase the sensitivity of ESL teachers to realize that their beliefs, role of others, encouragement and positive responses to ESL students' writing affected ESL students' writing development. Also, the importance of creating a social context where ESL students could use writing to communicate and have opportunities to explore uses of print and the complexity of natural communication was discussed. The literature search was centered on two major sections. The first section was the studies of the development of second language writing approaches that established the groundwork for studying ESL writing. The second was about the studies of the perspectives on ESL writing. The review focused on three perspectives from which ESL writing had been examined The study was conducted with fourteen ESL students in an elementary school, age six to twelve. Each of them wrote eight letters in total to their pen pals in a six-month period and received responses for each letter they wrote. A pre-test and a post-test were given to the participants for assessing their development of ESL writing ability (quality of writing and mechanic of writing), the tests were scored by the ESL teachers with the holistic scoring method. To determine the effect of activity of writing to a real reader, the interviews and questionnaires were designed to get information and opinions from the ESL students, pen pals and ESL teachers about this letter-writing activity. Analysis of the data revealed significant differences between the results of the pre-test and post-test. The scores showed that ESL students did much better in quality of writing and mechanic of writing. The data also showed ESL students' improvement in the other areas, which greatly supported the belief that second language learning processes in reading, writing, speaking and listening are developed simultaneously. The results indicated that when ESL students wrote to a real reader with encouragement, their willingness to write was enhanced and their ESL writing abilities improved. ESL students indicated their preference of writing to a real reader and demonstrated their enjoyment of this writing experience during the entire course of this study. This study validates the idea that the students' writing skills develop best when they interact with others and learn from their environment.

Recent research in social psychology has suggested that negative racial stereotypes can have a negative effect on student academic achievement. Although such research has provided experimental evidence on the effect of stereotypes in a variety of different testing contexts, there has been limited research on the effect of racial stereotypes in writing assessments. The purpose of this study was to understand how stereotypes about racially-ordered performance shape students' expectations about the context and consequences of a Placement Exam. The theoretical orientation for this project drew upon Claude Steele's research on stereotype threat, Norman Fairclough's approach to Critical Discourses Analysis, and rhetorical analysis. First-year college students taking a Writing Placement Exam were given a survey that included questions about racial stereotypes and audience expectations. Of the 38% of students who completed the survey (n=1,195), 38 students were finally selected to be interviewed. The results of this research suggest that racial stereotypes do have an impact on students' expectations of writing assessment contexts. Students of color, in particular, expected that their writing performance would be read along racial lines and that they might be graded according to racial expectations for performance. The results also showed that approximately 70% of students in every racial group expected readers to be white. In interviews students said that they based their expectations on racial demographics, stereotypes about college professors, and past educational experiences in English classes. An analysis of student essays was then conducted to determine if students' expectations about stereotypes and readership were evidenced in their writing. A discourse analysis revealed that the primary identity adopted in student essays on the exam prompt "patriotism" was a moderate, unraced American identity, i.e., a cohesive "us." A rhetorical analysis of three essays, written by students who strongly felt that their essays would be graded differently if the reader knew their race, revealed that students used various rhetorical moves to anticipate a potentially hostile audience. The results of this research suggest that racial stereotypes can have an effect in writing assessments and how students rhetorically approach writing assessments. The findings suggest new considerations in test design, test use, classroom interventions, and institutional change.

This study explored Anglo-American and Puerto Rican teacher's perception of independence, attention and potential for achievement based on two sets of an Anglo-American and a Puerto Rican parent-child interaction. It was hypothesized that teachers would perceive this interaction in a manner that is consistent with their own cultural script and their expectations about a child's behavior. The study examined whether two samples of teachers perceive (a) the child to be independent or dependent, and (b) how they perceived the pattern of attention displayed by an Anglo-American and a Puerto Rican child. A sample of sixty teachers, thirty Puerto Rican and thirty Anglo-American teachers participated in this study. They were shown two 8 minute segments; one an Anglo-American and another of a Puerto Rican parent child interaction. Both set of teachers completed three questionnaires designed to capture their perceptions of independence, attention and potential for academic achievement. The first video portrayed the Anglo-American dyad and the second video with English subtitles the Puerto Rican dyad. Raters were asked to rate a set of 22 items for both questionnaires. The third questionnaire contained 25 questions; the last three were open questions designed in order to capture meaningful themes that reflected the behaviors observed. The results suggest that both sample of raters perceive certain behaviors in a different manner in both parent-child interactions when they are compared. Both samples perceived the Anglo-American mother's parenting style as allowing more independence, less controlling in the interaction and using less verbal directions and guidance or structure to the child. They differed in their interpretation and perception of the child's level of independence as workers and also in terms of the child's contribution in the decision making process. These findings seem to indicate that as the mother is more verbal or directive or in control of the interaction, the child would depend more on the mother's direction and guidance to be involve on the task. The raters also perceived a different pattern of attention management in both children. The Anglo-American teachers perceived the Anglo-American child as more focused than the Puerto Rican child while the Puerto Rican teachers perceived the Anglo-American child as more easily distracted. There seemed to be different perceptions about which parenting style encourages to pay attention to more than one thing at a time. Anglo-American teachers perceived the Anglo-American mother as the one encouraging this skill, while Puerto Rican teachers thought that both parenting style encourage this skill. Anglo-American teachers were more likely to indicate that the Anglo-American mother would influence achievement more positively than the Puerto Rican mother. Many of the responses suggest that the Anglo-American mother allowed more independence and gave less guidance or structure to her child. Puerto Rican teachers were more inclined to predict both children as achieving equally in the classroom. The findings of this study provide insight into teacher's perceptions and cultural variations in parenting style and how children's behavior mirrors their cultural scripts.

This study examines the philosophies and practices of moral education of three groups of thinkers, two classical and one modern. To attain this goal, it first compares the philosophy and practice of moral education of Confucius and Mencius of Chou China with those of Socrates and Plato of Athens based on the Confucian Four Books and the Platonic Dialogues. Then, it examines the theory and practice of moral education of Lawrence Kohlberg of the United States in light of the classical wisdom of the Chinese and the Athenian thinkers. The ultimate purpose of this study is, first, to see the similarities and differences in their approaches to moral education and secondly, to gain some fresh ideas to suggest for the improvement of our own approaches. The first five chapters are devoted to the study of the two classical groups. Chapter 1 surveys the histories of Chou China and the City-State of Athens to see what existing human conditions prompted our thinkers of two separate worlds to found moral education, and explores their reasons for thinking that moral education was the only way to improve their worlds. Chapter II studies the Confucian and the Socratic/Platonic conceptions and analyses of human nature and their theories on man's educability in moral excellence. Chapter III examines the aims of moral education given by both groups and their justification for designating moral education a special education in moral excellence. Chapter IV studies certain qualities and qualifications identified by both groups as essential in their teachers and students for moral education. Then, it compares the methods they used and their reasons. Chapter V examines the curriculum selected by each group and the reasons for including only certain courses in it. The chapter also examines many virtues defined and discussed by both groups. Chapter VI explores the theory and practice of moral education of Lawrence Kohlberg against those of the classical thinkers. It also assesses Kohlberg's contributions to modern day moral education. Chapter VII summarizes the study and offers my own conclusion.