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.

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.

This dissertation critically examines the life and teaching experiences of four teachers who use multicultural participatory video projects (PVP) to enrich the learning opportunities of their students. Colleagues and former students recommended the teachers for their experience using PVP and multicultural perspectives. The study is based on a theoretical framework grounded in multicultural education as it relates to teacher transformation, technologically assisted learning, and participatory learning theory. A review of the literature of multicultural education makes evident the need for teachers to transform their cultural awareness and perspectives before our schools can become effective multicultural learning environments. This study seeks to document this need, and to highlight PVP as a tool with the potential to catalyze teachers toward this transformation. The major findings of this study are that the use of participatory video project enriches the life-long development of multicultural perspectives for teachers who actively confirm self-identity through expressive life arts. The findings suggest that PVP taps into many aspects of a teacher's life and teaching experience to increase multicultural awareness and provide "fuel" for the transformation process. They also suggest that teacher education and support programs that advocate for issues of diversity and against issues of injustice and inequity in schools advance the use of PVP in their programs and communities to insure increased multicultural awareness through policy and procedural changes. Transforming schools into multicultural learning environments requires education reform that includes supporting teachers to develop multicultural perspectives.

This ethnographic study focuses on a small group of Iranian young adults, four brothers and recent immigrants living in a small city in New England. I used North American popular texts from a variety of sources as content to assist them in developing English language proficiency. For the purpose of this study, I had a dual role of both facilitator and researcher. I collected data throughout an intensive language course I taught over a summer. In this course, the participants negotiated meanings of signs and texts embedded within broader discourses. These interpretations and negotiations of meanings of texts are the focus of the analysis. Through the sharing of texts and discourses, joint discourses were constructed, which became part of the analysis and findings. In addition, the analysis reflects ways participation structure(s) changed during the course, particularly when participant texts or discourses were related to their sociocultural worlds as opposed to North American texts and discourses. Data was collected for this study using ethnographic field notes, audiotapes of the classes, audiotapes of personal interviews with participants, course materials, handouts, written assignments done by the participants during the course, and reflective evaluations. Analytical tools or constructs---specifically, intertextuality, interdiscoursivity, and identity---were the focus of the analysis of the data (Bloome, et al., 2005). The findings in this study indicate that the use of popular texts as schematically accessible content can be an important strategy for developing language skills of young adults from another culture. The findings also indicate that for meaningful discourse to develop it is important for the participants to be able to make intertextual and interdiscursive connections to their sociocultural backgrounds. When this happens, the findings indicate that the participation structure tended to change to learner-centered as the participants became 'knowledgeable cultural authorities.' When this occurs, interaction increases, and more meaningful texts and discourse(s) are constructed.

Bloom (1981) argued that English has a salient counterfactual marker--the subjunctive to express hypothetical and implicational meanings whereas Chinese has no distinct lexical, grammatical or intonational device to signal entry into the counterfactual realm. He suggested that the lack of a linguistic means to mark counterfactuality in Chinese influences the cognitive behavior of speakers of Chinese: they are less likely to reason counterfactually. To test his hypothesis, he presented stories featured by counterfactuality to both English and Chinese speakers and compared their responses to counterfactual questions. The overall result of his experiment was that his American English subjects scored significantly higher than Chinese subjects. Bloom interpreted his findings as evidence for the weak form of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis: language influences thought and linguistic differences entail corresponding cognitive differences. This dissertation intends to demonstrate, through a survey of literature and interviewing of native Chinese informants, that although Chinese does not have a syntactic means equivalent to the subjunctive in English to mark counterfactuality, it does have lexical devices to express hypothetical and implicational meanings. In addition, there are contextualization cues such as stress, pitch and intonation that make counterfactuality explicit. The fact that some Chinese were reluctant to respond to Bloom's hypothetical questions as he had expected may not be a reflection of differences in cognitive processes, but rather a reflection of differences in cultural values. Data collected for this dissertation also indicate that differences in linguistic categorization are not necessarily paralleled by cognitive differences. The educational implication of this dissertation is: to be a competent speaker in any language it is not sufficient only to learn linguistic forms. It is essential to learn the culture and social norms of a particular society and the use of language in contexts: topic, setting and participants in order to communicate appropriately and effectively.

This study posits that as an academic discipline, Black Studies has as its historical antecedent more than a century of vigorous struggle for interpretive power and definitional control of the Black experience. The demands of Black students on black and white campuses for an education relevant to the needs and aspirations of the Black community shook the foundations of the Academy. Yet the thrust of angry Black students during the late 1960s was not the first serious intellectual offensive launched against white-controlled education. Though distinguished by its passion and polemics, Black Studies was not new. Rather, the Black Studies movement represented a resurgence of Black nationalist sentiment inextricably linked with the quest for the redemption of Black history and its meaningful interpretation. At least a century prior, Dr. Edward W. Blyden of St. Thomas and Liberia devoted his life to challenging the West's racist, ahistorical image of Blacks. An educator, Blyden was profoundly committed to the development of what he termed "the African personality" and politically espoused repatriation of Disasporan Africans. A generation later, his "disciple", Joseph E. Casely-Hayford of the former Gold Coast was equally concerned with the "African nationality" and the appropriate role for the emerging Western-educated elite. In the United States a decade later, Carter G. Woodson, "the father of Black history" grappled with the same issue, charging the West with the deliberate "miseducation of the Negro". This study examines the politics of knowledge in the context of these three Black responses to the West's distortion of Black history and Black humanity. Their indictment of Western education as a retarding factor in racial uplift and the complicity of Western academicians in the perpetuation of racism is central to the focus of this study. It is argued that Afrocentric Black Studies create a constant tension in the Academy due to inherent ideological differences.