Thesis (J.C.L.)--Catholic University of America, 2001. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 66-74).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Indiana University, 1986. / Vita. Discography: leaf 250. Filmography: leaf 251. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 232-249).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, Irvine, 1990. / Typescript. Vita. "1416"--Lst prelim. leaf. "Order number 9104564"--2nd prelim. leaf. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 181-200).

Thesis (M.A.)--Rowan University, 2006. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--California School of Professional Psychology, Berkeley/Alameda, 1989. / eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (p. 157-170).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of North Carolina at Greensboro, 2005. / Title from PDF title page screen. Advisor: Lauren Haldeman; submitted to the School of Human Environmental Sciences. Includes bibliographical references (p. 111-115).

Thesis (Th. D.)--Concordia Seminary, 1986. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 236-249).

Seven percent of all students are excluded from school every year across the United States for violating school policies and procedures. Exclusion from school causes a number of problems for students such as higher dropout rates, grade retention, more of a likelihood of not graduating from high school, and a widening of the achievement gap. However, the literature review reveals a lack of exclusion research specific to Hispanic students. Therefore, this research study investigated the level of disciplinary referrals leading to student suspensions during the 2013-2014 school year in a southern California school district of 9223 students with a student demographic composed of 39% free-and-reduced meals, 24% English language learners, and 36% Hispanic. The research study analyzed not just referrals but differences between subjective versus objective referrals for Hispanic and White students. Risk ratio results indicated that Hispanic students were more likely to receive referrals that resulted in suspensions from school at two-and-one-half times the rate compared to their White peers for both subjective (RR = 2.572) and objective (RR = 2.600) referrals. While there was no difference, p = .308, between referrals labeled as subjective versus objective, Hispanic students were significantly more likely to receive objective (p = .017) and subjective (p = .041) disciplinary referrals that resulted in suspensions compared to their White peers. The most significant factors that predicted overall student disciplinary referrals were English language learner status and free and reduced meals. In particular, English language status accounted for 60% of all referrals leading to a student suspension. Oppositely, factors that had the least predicted referral infractions were talented and gifted status, parent education level, and special education status. Results from this study provided school district staff with information that helped to revise district policy and procedures regarding the use of the suspension as an enforcement tool in student discipline, with particular focus on subjective versus objective referrals that could lead to student suspension. Implications of this research are discussed in relation to practice, procedures, and policies.

<p> Searching for Form: Mexican American Literature and American Literary History,1959-1990 explores how Mexican American writers advanced notions of literary art to explore the conditions of their self-determination. Rather than stipulating a relatively continuous story of Mexican American &ldquo;culture,&rdquo; however, I show how the very terms &ldquo;self-determination&rdquo; and &ldquo;literary art&rdquo; changed radically from 1959 to 1999&mdash;a change that responded to shifts in the American political and economic scene. </p><p> I start in 1959, with the publication of what was then considered to be the first novel published by a Mexican American, Jos&eacute; Antonio Villarreal&rsquo;s Pocho. I show how Pocho is situated at the intersection between two competing accounts of &ldquo;traditional culture&rdquo; that started to clash at the end of the 1950&rsquo;s: on the one hand, the liberal and sociological critiques of the supposed pathology and anti-individualism of traditional culture, and on the other hand a celebration of longstanding communal resilience found only within tradition. I argue that midcentury American novelists including Villarreal posited the novel as the genre uniquely equipped to explore the possibility of individual freedom in relation to both accounts via a self-determination seemingly made possible through the achievement of the novel as art. Pocho simultaneously dramatizes the tragic conclusion of the type of callow idealism that animates facile understandings of freedom (as freedom from social expectations) while also enacting what a more enduring ground of freedom could be: a disposition toward social engagement&mdash;one of aesthetic distance&mdash;that allows for recognition without distortion, and social participation without loss of individuality, an aesthetic sensibility that enables the exploration of the limits of freedom while imagining, by enacting, its possibility. </p><p> After the Chicano intervention of the mid-1960s, however, such an exploration would have to be understood in communal terms (the &ldquo;I&rdquo; seeking freedom becomes the &ldquo;we&rdquo; of Chicano liberation) and be seen as operating within a Mexican American cultural tradition. Ethnicity was not something to be &ldquo;transcended&rdquo; in art but the very ground of communal self-determination as such. This intervention was in part meant to register the reality of an economy whose treatment of Mexican American laborers amounted to their complete objectification, rendering human life into fodder for agrarian commerce. Villarreal, like his liberal contemporaries, seemed to take for granted the luxury of a relatively stable economy in which one was free to explore his or her &ldquo;individualism.&rdquo; Works including Tom&aacute;s Rivera&rsquo;s &hellip;y no se lo trago la tierra (1971), instead dramatize the historical emergence of a group consciousness that called itself &ldquo;Chicano,&rdquo; a self-awareness that entailed the recognition of one&rsquo;s place in history as part of a people struggling to survive. Instead of advancing the novel as the primary genre, Rivera defines &ldquo;the Chicano&rdquo; as a &ldquo;life in search of form,&rdquo; by which he meant a growing communal self-consciousness that sought to understand itself through art. As Rivera puts it, &ldquo;the Chicano&rdquo; sought to &ldquo;externalize his will through form,&rdquo; which I argue his work performs by being explicitly intertextually related. No longer positing the novel as the central genre, as it was for Villarreal, Rivera instead uses poems, short stories, essays, and a novella in concert&mdash;his oeuvre itself producing (by demanding) the type of reader who does not see the world as composed of discrete, alien objects. Instead, Rivera&rsquo;s reader becomes the type of person who can, as he puts it, seek to understand totality: &ldquo;To relate this entity with that entity, and that entity with still another, and finally relating everything with everything else.&rdquo; </p><p> But if the recognition of oneself as a Chicano was in part the result of a growing working-class consciousness, the sought for permanence of this identity came to be perceived as sclerotic. The response to reification itself had a reifying effect. The explicitly Chicano representational strategies developed throughout the 1970s reached a point of exhaustion during the 1980s. &ldquo;Chicano literature&rdquo; could no longer be presented as &ldquo;representative&rdquo; of &ldquo;a people&rdquo; coming to know itself as such without significant qualification. Work by feminist writers took the question of representation as the very problem to be resolved in their work. Writers including Gloria Anzald&uacute;a, Cherr&iacute;e Moraga, Ana Castillo, and Alma Luz Villanueva experiment with genres (producing a blend of poems, journal entries, and letters) to create representational strategies that imagine the possibility of transcending representation as such. These strategies (which include &ldquo;spectral haunting,&rdquo; &ldquo;blood memory,&rdquo; and photographic indexicality) allowed writers to imagine a literature that did not speak for or represent a community so much as index that community&rsquo;s presence via its textual personification. (Abstract shortened by ProQuest.) </p><p>

<p> Using autoethnographic research for this study, I intimately explore my experiences in school as a Detroit Latino male and the relationship with my family, community, and school and how they intersected and helped me achieve academic success. I excavate the indigenous roots that characterizes my family&rsquo;s way of knowing and explore how that foundation laid the ground work for the values that have shaped my identity. I select a personal narrative that relies on memories, photos, school yearbooks, and news clippings to describe my journey within the southwest Detroit Latina/o community. I identify the community institutions and their influences on me that contributed to my sense of belonging and eventual academic success.</p><p>