Educational reform movements are constantly in the process of trying to improve a fractured educational system. Many scholars contend there is a discrepancy between educational outcomes for White students and students from diverse ethnic backgrounds. Some educators in working class communities of color have begun to infuse elements of students’ social and cultural backgrounds, including popular culture, to create instructional methods that can better engage and pique student interest. Hip-hop Pedagogy is one of the methods, rooted in popular culture, which is being used in classroom settings to increase students’ awareness about the societal constructs and issues in their communities that may affect them. Student access to Hiphop based instructional methods, however, have been limited and virtually absent from elementary education settings. However the consumption of Hip-hop culture persists in urban communities worldwide. This qualitative study implemented a Hip-hop emergent-based curriculum in an elementary school setting, closely documenting the perceptions and responses to the curriculum by four young males students of color. The study consisted of five consecutive classroom sessions, in which the curriculum and dialogue focused on different expressions of Hip-hop culture. Student viewpoints were logged daily in focus groups and the data that emerged from the sessions and focus groups informed the emergent curriculum. Graffiti became the Hip-hop element of focus chosen for deeper exploration by the participants in this study. The study revealed a number of findings that point to the potential value of an emergent Hip-hop curriculum with elementary male students of color.

The concept of self-esteem has so thoroughly infiltrated American education that “most educators believe developing self-esteem to be one of the primary purposes of public education” (Stout, 2001, p. 119). That the available scholarship challenging the validity of self-esteem principles has had little to no impact on schooling and school policy demonstrates the need for more a comprehensive interrogation of a concept that has become so pervasive and commonsensical that many administrators and teachers do not even think to question its place in traditional pedagogy, let alone consider the possibility that self-esteem is a damaging ideological construct. The rhetorical (and impossible) promise of self-esteem as both a quantifiable and fixed human resource has proliferated in educational language as schools continue to promote self-esteem among racialized and poorly performing students, while the structural conditions that negatively impact these students’ performance in the first place remain intact. The legacy of self-esteem in educational discourse requires a critical interpretation, or re-interpretation, by educators who wish to challenge oppressive commonsense assumptions and feel-good principles that covertly help to maintain “dominant cultural norms that do little more than preserve social inequality” (Darder, 2015, p. 1). This study takes a decolonizing approach that involves a substantive interrogation—historical, political, and philosophical—of the Eurocentric epistemological concept of self-esteem, in order to demonstrate the debilitating effects that self-esteem has on students from working-class communities of color. It then suggests an emancipatory understanding of the self and alternative critical pedagogical principles of social empowerment.

Darder (2012), in Culture and Power in the Classroom, argued that a system of educational inequality is promoted through the consistent production and reproduction of contradictions between the dominant culture and subordinate culture. More significantly, she noted that these dominant and subordinate culture contradictions create a necessity for bicultural individuals to navigate the dialectical tensions between dominant and subordinate cultures and the processes by which education perpetuates dynamics of unequal power and reproduces the dominant worldview. Hence, she urged educators to challenge prevalent power structures and re-imagine the process of schooling as a more inclusive form of pedagogy, geared towards establishing and sustaining cultural democracy in the classroom. This study responded to the call to work with a Pilipino/a student organization in creating an inclusive space in the schooling experience. The learning process for many Pilipino/a students has historically been steeped in a colonialist mentality and directed toward assimilating these students into the practices of mainstream culture in order to survive. This qualitative research intended to address the unjust issues rooted in the dominant structure of schooling and the persistence of a form of colonizing education that fails to incorporate Pilipino/a sociohistorical knowledge and practices of knowing. More specifically, it addresses issues and tensions related to the process of biculturalism, which Pilipino/a students are required to manage in order to utilize their voice and lived experiences as a basis for action. The methodology of this study was influenced by Pagtatanung-tanong—a Pilipino/a equivalent to participatory action research. In utilizing this approach, the study was formulated through the voices of Pilipino/a students at a community college engaged in community building actions toward cultural affirmation.

Contemporary Hip-Hop scholarship has revealed that Hip-Hop is a racially diverse, youth-driven culture, and is intimately connected to prior and on-going social justice movements (Chang, 2004; Kitwana, 2002). This study explores its Afro-Diasporic and activist origins, as well as the theoretical impact of Hip-Hop culture on the identity and pedagogy of educators belonging to the Hip-Hop generation(s). This qualitative study also examines how Hip-Hop culture impacts educators’ identity, politics and personal pedagogy, while seeking to create a new model of Social Justice Hip-Hop Pedagogy. This study was produced through twenty-three in-depth interviews with influential Hip-Hop educators (Aberbach & Rockman, 2002) from diverse backgrounds and geographic locations. There are currently limited theoretical and conceptual frameworks in the literature supporting the use of Hip-Hop as Social Justice Pedagogy, yet is currently being used in K- 16 educational contexts throughout the United States and abroad (Akom, 2009; Duncan- Andrade & Morrell, 2008). The results of this study reveal the foundational basis consisting of four primary core functions and seven practical tenets, necessary to negotiate and implement a new and innovative model for Social Justice Hip-Hop Pedagogy.

Lisa Delpit points out that when process pedagogues ignore grammar in their teaching of writing, they further the achievement gap between students of a variety of backgrounds. She then argues for a grammar/skills based pedagogy rather than process pedagogy in order to bridge the language differences students bring to the classroom. On the other hand, progressive-minded educators deeply question if skills pedagogy could ever transform unjust social conditions and relationships. Grammar pedagogy may potentially empower an individual's chance at social mobility, but what about the need for social change and respecting language diversity? Both sides of this important debate assume that grammar is a skill and that to teach grammar to writers is skills-based teaching. I challenge these assumptions in my qualitative teacher inquiry, prompted by this question: What difference would it make if the way I practiced grammar became more in tune with my beliefs about critical literacy practice? My dissertation takes up this question by arguing for a curriculum that links grammar and critical thinking and reporting on a qualitative study of this curriculum in action in my Basic Writing classroom. For this curriculum, I consciously engage theoretical micro-perspectives informed by a social semiotic view of grammar and language, explained in my dissertation as Critical Grammar. Such theoretical ground builds on the pedagogical grammars of Martha Kolln and Laura Micciche as well as the critical classroom and research practices of Min-Zhan Lu and Roz Ivanic. I then research Critical Grammar, my theoretical term, through a case study approach to my classroom, specifically through inductive, comparative analysis of how writers discuss sentence-level options and drawn on arhetorical, rhetorical, and critical reasoning in sentence workshops. My case study methodology helps me discover the effects of such discussions on a writer's final draft. Each case traces the process of composing and revising the sentence from first to final draft of an essay, drawing from the writer's process reflections, feedback from me and peers, and class workshop discussions of the sentence. In this way, the mini-cases capture how writers authorized themselves and responded to each other in ethical and resourceful ways. These case studies challenge notions that a teacher's knowledge of grammar should be in service of identifying error patterns and teaching editing skills. In sentence workshops, writers take responsibility for their sentence-level choices and authorize themselves through their ideas, often resulting in dynamic class discussions that inform their writing in a range of ways, the least of which is error reduction. In discussing choices of wording or arrangement, for instance, they would link to issues of a writer's ethos, questions of who/what has the authority for setting language standards, and cultural beliefs. At the same time, based in this research, errors were found to be implicit in Critical Grammar, leading toward further consideration concerning the function of error in Critical Grammar pedagogy. Finally, Critical Grammar was determined to be most successful when it complemented the ideological aspects to an existing curricular perspective on language.

This thesis develops an argument that psychogeography can provide alternative, yet familiar, approaches to social work research and pedagogy. Psychogeography refers to studies of how our psychological experiences, such as our thoughts and feelings, are connected to our being in places. The present study was designed to be a novel application of a psychogeographic exercise in a social work learning context. For this research project, I met with five undergraduate students and interviewed them as we walked through the neighbourhoods surrounding their field practicum placement settings. My interviews with these students focused on the thoughts, feelings, memories, and experiences that they associated with these places. This exercise inspired critical reflection of diverse themes; including the impacts that places of placement environments had on the participants' development of their existential identity and critical consciousness. I argue that psychogeography evokes such reflection because its conception is rooted in efforts to develop creative and participatory engagement in place-based reflection for inspiring social justice activism. As such, the philosophical work of phenomenology and the action-seeking work of critical theorists can orient psychogeographic place studies to be congruent with social work research that aims to develop holistic and critical social justice-oriented education and practice. / Thesis / Master of Social Work (MSW)

The purpose of this study is to examine adult literacy beyond its constraints as a social problem and instead consider the implications of illiteracy as a particular form of lived experience, analogous to women's oppression at large. Through a complex system of meaning making, the knowledge accrued by illiterate adults is qualitatively different, and examining these differences in terms of their correlation to coping mechanisms developed in the face of social alienation and diminished professional prospects yields a greater understanding of class privilege and how nontraditional learners fit into a larger social structure. From the perspective of academic feminism, adult illiteracy presents several problems regarding the scope of an inclusive feminist community that acknowledges privilege and difference. The primary method through which information regarding feminism is conferred is printed materials, which utilize highly specific, specialized jargon, and unwittingly create an exclusive community marred by internalized racism and class stratifications. This study explores other methods through which feminist ideation might theoretically be possible, i.e. cultural "reading" communities and vocational and continuing education programs focused on cultural competencies, as women come out of their imposed silences and become aware of their circumstances in a way that resembles feminist thought, if perhaps without sophisticated language with which to communicate those ideals. In this way, feminist ideation and semiotics tie in together, as attitudinal change may occur without the semantic realization of what this entails. This goal of this paper is also, in part, to justify why acknowledging gendered learning differences and a particular female subjectivity for adult literacy clients will yield better results for their self-valuation, as gender is a component of diversity all but ignored within the scheme of adult literacy pedagogical theory.

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