This dissertation is an ethnographic study concerning language maintenance efforts at a Chinese heritage language school in a North American community. This research employs the construct of language ideology—members' common sense notions about language and language learning—to explore important aspects of what it means to speak, act, think, and feel like a member of the community. It is argued that the heritage language school is the center of a moral project helping to mediate cross-cultural experience so that children maintain positive social identities. Methodology involves discourse analysis and ethnographic observation. Interviews and texts are transcribed and analyzed to suggest structure and pattern. The analysis finds evidence to support the conclusion that notions of language and language learning reflect traditional patterns of Chinese thought and culture but that these are reconfigured to suit American circumstances. It is suggested that the subject position of Overseas Chinese helps members maintain stable notions of self as Chinese.

This study explored the application of theatre as an educational tool with bilingual children using theatre techniques based on the work of the theatre theorist Augusto Boal. This documentation is important because there are few studies demonstrating how children are affected by drama. Boal developed theatre as a tool for social/political change to transform educational monologue into a dialogue. The objective of this exploratory study was to applied the Theatre of the Oppressed techniques in a Bilingual elementary setting. No hypothesis was tested and the study was exploratory and descriptive by nature. The following tasks were accomplished: (1) Assessment of the use of the Theatre of the Oppressed techniques with Bilingual children. (2) Observation made during the implementation of these theatre techniques. Eighteen children were chosen to participate in the study. The research revealed that Theatre of the Oppressed games and exercises can be use with bilingual children to create a sense of self, sense of the other, sense of community, communication and to empower them. All the previous themes evolved in the study.

This dissertation analyzes a study which focused on the problem of interpersonal relationship development between Japanese hosts and visiting North American exchange students during their one year of studying abroad at a Japanese university. The study identified and analyzed factors that contributed to, or inhibited social interaction which led to effective interpersonal relations. The research described and explained the interpersonal relationship development experience of the research participants. A qualitative interpretive case study, participants included both North American exchange students and Japanese people with whom they developed relationships. Data collection was accomplished over a one-year period utilizing in-depth interviewing and direct behavior observation methods. Results included identification of cross-cultural social-psychological factors which contributed to and inhibited effective interpersonal relationship development. An analysis of cultural value-orientation differences led to the explanation of problems in relationship development. The North American exchange students established cordial relationships with Japanese people and were overall very satisfied with the exchange program and their one-year experience. However, the study concluded that North American students were disappointed with the perceived shallowness of relationship development. This negatively impacted their cultural and language learning. Recommendations were made to study abroad administrators in Japan and North America, as well as to prospective North American exchange students and researchers. These recommendations were in the areas of cross-cultural understanding and orientation, programming, advising and recruitment, and future research efforts. These recommendations are designed to assist in enhancing relationship development effectiveness. The dissertation includes a review of study abroad research literature that focused on social interaction and interpersonal relations.

Historically, the concepts of international development and women in development (WID) have been constructed by white Anglo-Saxon men and imposed on the "Third World" and on "Third World" women. The voice of U.S. government texts is authoritative and presumes to speak for "Third World" women. Although most African women play a pivotal role in the lives of their people, their voices are absent from government development discourse. Most policy makers and planners rely on the knowledge found in texts written by Western, or Western-trained, researchers and experts. This textual knowledge is powerful because it is the "reality" upon which official action is based. The actions of development organizations often detrimentally affect the lives of "Third World" people--particularly women. In this study five African women development workers speak from their life experience and the work they do about what effective development means to them. Their words stand out against an analysis of modernization theories of development and WID discourse found in selected U.S. government documents. Recommendations from the women on how to ensure that development means something positive to people includes the importance of: (1) education for girls and women--including strong, role models of both genders for girls to learn from--that encourages them to be adventurous and courageous; (2) maintaining positive traditional values. Tradition can play an important role in development; (3) listening to the voices of women and youth. The creativity and wisdom of women have often been ignored. A balance must be maintained between respect for the wisdom of the old and the young; (4) changing the definition of what it means to have power, to one that is more popular, participatory and transparent; (5) African countries becoming more discerning about the kind of aid they accept; (6) African intellectuals speaking out against harmful practices of their governments; (7) working as development workers from the outside as communities help themselves from the inside.

This study was designed to formulate categories that reflect pupil personnel service providers' and administrators' views of elements associated with effective multicultural perspectives of pupil personnel services and how they rate the importance of these elements. A review of the literature examined how school reform, effective schools, school culture, and multiculturalism have influenced the provision of services by Pupil Personnel Services to a growing culturally diverse population over the last 20 years. Q-Sort was the qualitative methodology used with these professionals from within pupil personnel services. A total of 32 respondents representing five specific professional positions found in most public school environments. The results of the Q-Sort were analyzed from the combined data from all subjects. A similarity matrix was computed and frequencies of co-occurrence were determined for all pairs of items. This provided for the correlation of each person with every other person and, through factor analysis, the number of different Q-Sorts is known and the degree to which there is a high correlation among them or not. In addition, individual participants' matrices were subjected to two-dimensional non-metric scaling. In addition, MultiDimensional Scaling (MDS) was applied to the data to further analyze the categorization process. Lastly, a rank ordering of items provided a rating of items from most important to least important. This last activity provided an overall ranking of the items across all participants and allowed for a comparison of the importance of these statements. As a result of cluster analysis, all items grouped at higher levels of significance agreed with the way the items were placed in categories that the author had established. However, MDS results indicated that the basis for coexistence of items was different from that which the author had used. An examination of a multidimensional configuration of the raters, using a weirdness index table, found school psychologists and administrators differed the most from the average of all of the five groups. Factor analysis and a similarity matrix of the ratings by individuals and groups indicated that there may not be a significant difference between them.

The international Development field has long been critiqued on ideological grounds. This study complements more recent critical analyses which cast Development as discourse, as a system of logic disseminated through power-knowledge strategies which represent “the real” according to its own dictates. The interface between Education and Development, however, has received little scholarly or critical attention to date. Informed by the work of Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, this study employs poststructuralist and deconstructive strategies to investigate the performativity of the discursive formation, (Education for) Development. The author builds an analytics which posits a “problematic” or epistemological framework, comprised of three “regimes of representation”—History, Geography and Governmentality—and two guiding modes of rationality, the “economistic” and “developmentalist,” which underwrite Development's power to constitute “the real.” Analyses of three recent influential texts, the Declaration of the World Conference on Education for All (1990); USAID Technical Paper No. 12 “Education Policy Formation in Africa” (1994); and World Bank (1995) Policies and Strategies for Education destabilize the apparent naturalness and inevitability of (Education for) Development's own account of itself. Problematizing the discourse's claims to objectivity and disinterested technical knowledge, the analyses subvert the logic which makes possible Development's constitution of problems crying out for solutions emanating from its own epistemological universe. The analyses expose the discourse's power to interpellate its subjects (“girls,” “women,” “government,” “the State”) within the limits of its own discursive regimes. Limits to representation proscribe the “girl's” subjectivity, for example, within the confines of childbearing and domestic labor. The discursive formations “Girls' Education” and “Population Education” are shown to perform in the service of Development's normalizing and self-sustaining strategies.

This critical ethnographic practitioner research study explored the ways critical multicultural pedagogies supported students with situated privilege to use critical literacy to understand and challenge heterosexism in a public school. Situated privilege denotes relative privilege in terms of one social identity or group and not necessarily another, so although some of the students in this study did not have privilege in terms of race or ability, they were all identified as heterosexual and thus had privilege in terms of sexual orientation. These students were enrolled in a Contemporary Issues class which I taught where they developed critical literacy strategies and initiated an action project, which disrupted the heterosexism in the school. Through this critical literacy project they held a Day of Solidarity where they made visible the support for people of all sexual orientations and formed a Gay Straight Alliance with other students in the school. I reviewed literature centered on heterosexism in public schools, scholarship on critical literacy theory and applications, and theories of multicultural education and critical pedagogies. Drawing on critical multicultural analysis and critical discourse analysis, I analyzed student writing, transcripts of class discussions, interviews with students and school personnel, students' surveys, and other artifacts along with my fieldnotes to explore the students' development of critical literacy and social justice activism. I found that using critical multicultural pedagogies emphasizing critical literacy can help prepare and motivate students with situated privilege to interrupt their own behavior and reinvent themselves as allies and agents of change. Some of the ways the students developed critical literacy were specific to their situated privilege. These included recognizing their own privilege and role in maintaining oppression, understanding the dynamics of oppression, problematizing their own participation in dominant Discourses, identifying as allies, and developing an awareness and willingness to use their power to take social action.

In the community of adoption and throughout its related literature, the needs and experiences of "invisible" or non-adopted children in transracial families have been largely overlooked. This study attempts to address that void by documenting the meaning and influences of transracial adoption in the lives of twelve non-adopted white adults who grew up with a transracially adopted brother or sister. The research used discourse analysis to document the narrative identities of the non-adopted siblings as they were enacted during interviews about transracial adoption. Five composite narrative identities are discussed, with distinctions made between those that were characterized as transracialized or un-transracialized. Transracialization is presented as a participant's active engagement with discourses of race and adoption in ways that may result in "post-white" identities in non-adopted siblings. Transracialization is discussed in terms of its benefit to members of adoptive families and the professionals who serve them, including social workers, psychotherapists, and educators. Implications for the community of adoption and the field of education are offered, along with recommendations for future research.

This dissertation critically examines the autobiographies of ten teachers identified using the community nomination method (Foster, 1991) as exemplary teachers of Latino students to make recommendations for teacher preparation programs preparing educators to work in urban schools. The study is informed by postmodern understandings of culture and identity and draws heavily from Hip-Hop/Urban culture---a site from which, I argue, many urban students draw to create their identities. A review of the literature regarding culturally responsive pedagogies demonstrates the need for teachers to affirm students' cultural identities but also highlights the focus much of the research in this area places on race, thus, possibly contributing to a reification of singular aspects of students' identities. This study seeks to expand the discourse by forwarding cultural connectedness as a framework for practicing culturally responsive pedagogies in ways that do not essentialize culture and are informed by the multiple sites from which students draw to create hybrid cultural identities. It also stresses the potential for teachers who are not members of the same racial or ethnic group as their students to become "culturally connected" and improve their practice. Postmodernism and Hip/Hop-Urban culture informed the creation of Represent(ations), a hybrid methodology I created to employ in this dissertation. The findings suggest that teacher preparation programs need to be reconceptualized to include, in addition to content knowledge, a specific focus on teacher identity development and restructured by making changes to the curriculum, recruiting and retaining more pre-service candidates of color, and diversifying teacher preparation faculty to include teacher educators of color and those with teaching experiences in urban settings. Transforming urban teacher preparation based on this research has the potential to cultivate more teachers who "represent" for Latino students.

This dissertation uses poststructural theory and critical discourse analysis to examine school and home discourses and subjectivities for four first-grade, bilingual Latino students. The rationale for the comparative analysis is to reveal sociocultural and sociopolitical influences with respect to classroom literacy learning for culturally and linguistically diverse students. Parent visits to the classroom provided an opportunity for the home subjectivities to be introduced into the classroom culture. When school and home discourses and subjectivities are compared and contrasted, a view of the student as possessing multiple and shifting subject positions comes into focus. Critical discourse analysis was used to reveal the discourses and subjectivities taken up by the students, their parents, and the classroom teacher, as well as revealing the tensions that surfaced as the school and home discourses and subjectivities either collided or colluded. The study's major findings include a conflict between the two school discourses of school reform and progressive literacy pedagogy and the construction of conflicting subject positions for the students and the teacher. During student-teacher interactions, the school reform discourse predominated, fostering the construction of negative and limiting subject positions for the students and the internalization by the students of the beliefs and subjectivities associated with the school reform discourse. During the classroom literacy event of biographical storytelling, the discourse of progressive literacy pedagogy predominated, resulting in a broader range of subject positions for the teacher, the students, and their families. This study shows that a poststructural framework and critical discourse analysis are useful in comparatively analyzing school and home subjectivities and discourses. In particular, critical discourse analysis shows the difficulty of enacting the progressive literacy pedagogy discourse in the context of pressures from the school reform discourse. Through the juxtaposition of school and home discourses and subject positions insights into the possibilities for curricular innovations arise; thus the value in such a comparative analysis for teacher education and classroom practice includes the need to further bring the students' culture and language into the classroom and the need for more classroom opportunities to enact the progressive literacy pedagogy discourse through such events as family visits and family stories. The newfound and broadened curricular space can lead to the taking up of new subject positions by students, their parents, and the classroom teacher.