Thesis advisor: Martin Scanlan / While the U.S. student body is increasingly racially, ethnically, culturally, and linguistically diverse, the teaching population itself, however, does not mirror this same diversity. As such, there is an urgent need for teachers who can adequately meet the needs of an increasingly diverse student population (Sleeter, 2001). Some teachers are undeniably more successful at the task of educating diverse student populations than others. How then - are these teachers in particular - successfully able to effectively teach students across various lines of difference? The purpose of this qualitative individual study is to explore teachers’ views on how they have developed their cultural proficiency. How do teachers who have been identified by school leaders as particularly effective at teaching diverse student populations develop their culturally responsive practice, and more pointedly - their capacity to effectively teach students from historically marginalized groups (i.e. students from racially minoritized groups or socio-economically disadvantaged groups)? Utilizing a sense-making framework, and gathering information using methods including semi-structured interviews, teacher questionnaires, and reflective journaling, this study uncovers emergent themes and trends in how individual teachers within a diverse Massachusetts school district make sense of the process by which they developed their culturally responsive teaching capacities and practice. If educational leaders form a better understanding of how teachers effectively develop their cultural competencies, then principals and district leaders will be able to use this information to more effectively design professional development programs that sustain teachers’ cultural proficiency and better equip them to successfully serve the increasingly diverse student population. / Thesis (EdD) — Boston College, 2020. / Submitted to: Boston College. Lynch School of Education. / Discipline: Educational Leadership and Higher Education.

abstract: This study utilized a Culturally Responsive Teaching training and bi-weekly collaboration sessions to improve the connectedness between teachers and their Latino male students. Three first-year teachers and 21 students participated in this study to learn how teaching practice and student classroom experiences changed as a result of the innovations. The findings showed teachers modified their planning and teaching and demonstrated more frequent culturally responsive teaching behaviors at the end of the implementation period. Participating students also showed increased classroom engagement and stronger relationships with their teachers, in addition to feeling more valued and included in the classroom. This study highlights effective structures and practices in areas such as cultural responsiveness implementation, teacher collaboration processes, teaching evaluations, and professional development models. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Curriculum and Instruction 2019

The purpose of this study was to explore foundation phase teachers' perceptions of the way in which supportive school environments are being created for children from same-sex parented families. It focused specifically on how foundation phase teachers perceive their role in accommodating, including, and positively representing the same-sex parented family in their classroom practice. Current literature highlights the negative experiences of homophobia and heteronormativity in schools, together with the need to create more supportive school environments for children from samesex parented families. The increasing prevalence of same-sex parented families in South Africa has created the need for extended research in this regard, and yet there is a gap in national literature on the school experiences of children from this nontraditional minority family form. Foundation phase teachers play a central role in teaching their young learners to accept and celebrate diversity. However, no research has been done in South Africa to explore foundation phase teachers' perspectives on their role in interrupting heteronormativity in their schools and classrooms. This study was approached from an interpretive paradigm and qualitative methods were employed to collect and analyse the data. Individual interviews were conducted with four foundation phase teachers, and interpretive thematic data analysis techniques were used to analyse the data. Culturally responsive pedagogy was used as a framework to explore barriers to inclusion, and to recommend ways in which foundation phase teachers in South African schools can be supported in creating safe, positive and counter-heteronormative school environments for children from same-sex parented families. / Dissertation (MEd)--University of Pretoria, 2016. / Educational Psychology / MEd / Unrestricted

University writing programs increasingly serve student populations of growing diversity: more international students, first-generation students, disabled students, racial and ethnic minority students, and LGBTQ+ students, for example. Instructors thus teach in classrooms with many cultures and subcultures represented. Amid increasing demographic diversity, many writing programs seek to internationalize. In this dissertation, I investigate the current state of Culturally Responsive Teaching (CRT) in a university writing program as a potential avenue for internationalization. Culturally Responsive Teaching (CRT) is a social-justice-oriented, transformative approach to education that views cultural diversity as a resource, restructuring education settings to affirm students’ identities and home cultures. I evaluate CRT among a sample of 10 instructor participants and their students, propose a CRT assessment method, and suggest implementation of CRT as a sustainable, just, and resource-efficient method for writing program internationalization. I implement a mixed-methods research design that draws on both observational and self-report measures of CRT. Results indicate that instructor capabilities for CRT fall along a developmental spectrum. This developmental spectrum provides a useful model for assessment of CRT in a writing program context, as well as a basis for developing the CRT capabilities of instructors at both individual and programmatic levels. <br>

Through the years, educational theorists and researchers have been interested in a possible relationship between teachers' effectiveness and their beliefs and expectations. Three concepts underpinned this work: teacher effectiveness, cultural diversity, and teachers' beliefs and expectations. The premise of the study was that the beliefs and expectations of effective secondary choral teachers are related to the social-cultural contexts in which they teach. The study implemented critical discourse analysis as the theoretical framework and the in-depth phenomenological long interview for data collection. Three secondary choral teachers were selected to participate in the study based on the researcher's criteria. The study revealed how each teacher conceptualized student cultural diversity during the teaching experience. Teacher beliefs about effective teaching in culturally diverse settings were described as developing over time in phases along a continuum. The study also confirmed that teachers' beliefs about students can be changed through experiences and reflection. The study revealed effective teachers focused on three different types of expectations in the teaching and learning context and affirmed diverse cultural identities and backgrounds. Recommendations included the development of stronger mentorship programs to increase effective teaching strategies for the secondary choral classroom. The findings of this study support my previous work, which introduces a sequential learning framework for teaching music in culturally diverse schools.

There have been increase in calls for researchers in educational psychology to integrate methods as well as theories across motivation and multicultural education to examine the intersection of culture and diversity with motivational principles. While much work has been done in K – 12 classrooms examining the application of principles related to autonomy – supportive and culturally responsive teachers and classrooms, not much work has been done examining these constructs together in university classrooms. Global and paradigm shifts in higher education coupled with rising tensions of diversity and inclusion on college campuses have catalyzed the need for intentional approaches to cultivate inclusive classroom environments to facilitate students’ development of academic as well as global competencies. This thesis employed a convergent – parallel mixed methods design integrating frameworks from multicultural education with Self – Determination Theory (SDT) to explore the extent to which instructors’ degree of intercultural competence and diversity inclusivity in their courses was related to students’ perceptions of the classroom environment as culturally responsive and autonomy – supportive as well as academic motivation and intercultural knowledge and competence development. A conceptual model for integrating Multicultural Education frameworks and SDT is proposed with theoretical and methodological implications. Practical implications are discussed for researchers, educators and administrators in higher education highlighting the importance of considering both cultural and motivational factors of students and instructors to facilitate enriching teaching and learning experiences in preparation for living and working in a global multicultural society.

Diversity is now an essential matter in US public schools. For the first time in America's history, students of color will constitute a majority of the public school enrollment; on the other hand, most early childhood and elementary teachers remain monolingual, white, middle-class females (Hussar & Bailey, 2019). The demographic mismatch between students and teachers presents a critical concern for teacher preparation programs (Banks et al., 2005; Gay, 2018; Muñiz, 2019). Therefore, this study proposed that understanding the relationship between pre-service teachers' epistemological beliefs and their culturally responsive classroom management self-efficacy illustrated factors that may improve their teaching concept toward diversity. The study also evaluated whether early childhood (PreK-3) pre-service teachers held different personal epistemologies of teaching and culturally responsive classroom management self-efficacy beliefs than elementary (K-5) pre-service teachers. Lastly, the study explored factors that may contribute to pre-service teachers' personal epistemological beliefs of teaching and their self-efficacious beliefs about culturally responsive classroom management. The study used the explanatory sequential mixed-methods design that contained two phases. In Phase I, 111 pre-service teachers completed two surveys: the teachers' Personal Epistemologies of Teaching Scale (PT-PETS) and the Culturally Responsive Classroom Management Self-Efficacy scale (CRCMSE). In Phase II, six pre-service teachers participated in semi-structured interviews. The results indicated no significant linear correlation between pre-service teachers' sophisticated personal epistemological beliefs and their confidence in employing culturally responsive classroom management. In addition, the integration of the quantitative and the qualitative data demonstrated that pre-service teachers held sophisticated personal epistemological beliefs of teaching. They also showed different confidence levels about applying culturally responsive classroom management. A two-way ANOVA revealed that only semester level significantly affected the PT-PETS scores, where pre-service teachers in the seventh semester performed better than those in the fifth semester. The current study illustrated various positive and negative factors that may influence pre-service teachers' epistemological beliefs of teaching and their self-efficacious beliefs in culturally responsive classroom management, which may provide insight for teacher preparation programs.

Despite considerable interest among South African scholars in learner behaviour management in South African schools, there is little literature on learner behaviour management in the context of cultural diversity. The present study investigates this essentially neglected space by focusing on learner behaviour management practices of teachers in culturally diverse classrooms of a high school in the Tshwane South District within the Gauteng Department of Education, South Africa. Cultural diversity is used as a lens to explore the practices of teachers. The theoretical underpinnings of culturally responsive classroom management are used to describe and to interpret learner behaviour management practices of teachers to determine whether the approaches and the resultant strategies that they use are culturally responsive. A qualitative case study approach was used, and data was collected through semi-structured interviews that included critical incident narratives obtained from teachers, analysis of pertinent documents and observations of 10 culturally diverse teachers who teach the same class consisting of culturally diverse learners, as well as of the Discipline Officer and two additional teachers that were identified through snowball sampling. The findings revealed that learner behaviour management practices of most teachers are not culturally responsive. This is a result of factors such as lack of recognition of their own ethnocentrism and biases, as demonstrated mainly by their unrealistic expectations, pessimistic attitudes and stereotyping perceptions; ignorance of learners‟ cultural backgrounds, as demonstrated mainly by teachers‟ denial and minimisation of the importance of understanding learners‟ cultural backgrounds (leading to misinterpretation of the behaviours of culturally different learners); lack of commitment to building a caring classroom community; lack of consciousness of the broader social, economic and political context of the South African education system; and lack of ability to apply culturally responsive classroom management strategies, which is exacerbated by lack of teacher education and development in this regard. The implication of these findings is that teachers need to possess an ethnorelative mindset, and to be interculturally competent. A key recommendation is that teachers should endeavour to move away from ethnocentrism towards being ethnorelative by developing an inclusive outlook, accepting cultural differences and adapting their perspective to take the cultural differences that influence learner behaviour into account. The study also recommends that teacher education programmes should prioritise teacher development on intercultural issues and the acquisition of intercultural competencies, as these aspects are crucial for teachers to appropriately manage the behaviours of learners whose cultural backgrounds are different from their own. / Thesis (PhD)--University of Pretoria, 2020. / Education Management and Policy Studies / PhD / Unrestricted

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / Many Americans espouse “post-racial” conceptions of race and its role in children’s access to equitable learning opportunities; however, recent studies have illuminated the need to examine the ways in which “new” forms of institutionalized and interpersonal racism continue to hinder the schooling experiences of students in urban schools. Despite that students in urban schools are predominantly African American (27%) and Latinx (41%), the teaching force remains predominantly white (71%). Within these schools, white teachers’ lack of cultural competence and racial literacy marginalize students’ opportunities for social, emotional, and academic development and, thereby, foster racially hostile learning environments. However, cases of teachers in urban schools who create and sustain learning environments in which their students thrive socially, emotionally, and academically exist and need to be studied. This case study investigated the pedagogical beliefs and practices enacted by two highly regarded African American educators who created racially safe learning environments in two racially hostile urban elementary students. Ethnographic data was collected over a five-month period. Using constant comparative analysis within and across both cases, several significant findings emerged. Findings revealed how “new racism” manifested in the discourses, policies, and practices at both schools and, thus, illuminated the ways in which race marginalized not only the schooling experiences of African American and Latinx students, but their African American educators as well. Findings examined how each teachers’ pedagogical enactments aligned with the ideologies, beliefs, and practices associated with African American pedagogy and revealed how they fostered cultures of community, love, and achievement within their classrooms. Findings suggest that their culturally specific pedagogical beliefs and practices have the potential to create racially safe learning environments within, otherwise, racially hostile schools. Although African American pedagogical excellence is often relegated to discussions of practices needed to reach African American students, this study expands the knowledge base needed to center AAPE in discussions of best practices for teachers in urban schools. This study adds critical insights to discussions of race and its role in the schooling experiences and opportunities to learn in racially hostile urban schools.

This mixed-methods study analyzed the effectiveness of the practices and attitudes of selected African American teachers who use culturally relevant and responsive Afrocentric pedagogies as the instructional foundation for improved academic outcomes with their African American students. The theory of Afrocentricity was used as the philosophical framework to study their pedagogy. Afrocentricity is a mode of thought and practice in which in African people are placed at the center of their own history and culture; engages them as subjects rather than objects; and approaches them with respect for their interests, values, and perspectives (Asante 1980, 2003). Concepts employed from this theoretical framework provided a lens for the triangulation of qualitative and quantitative data collected and analyzed. The setting for this study was a private Afrocentric prekindergarten through 8th-grade school. The participants in this study were 3 African American teachers. Data collected and analyzed supported using culturally relevant and responsive pedagogy to produce improved academic outcomes for students of color (Boykin, 1984, 1994; Hale-Benson, 1986; King, 1991; Ladson-Billings, 1994; Shujaa, 1995; Villegas, 1991). Findings suggested that in selected academic settings improved academic performance occurred for African American students when teachers used culture relevant and responsive pedagogy. The following themes were embedded in the pedagogy: self-determination, academic empowerment, cultural empowerment, and family/community empowerment. The findings implied a need for teachers and teacher-training institutions to re-examine, recommit, and reinstitute culturally relevant and responsive pedagogy that respects and addresses the culture, education, and social improvement for positive academic outcomes for all children.