Thesis (Ed. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2008. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (D. Min.)--Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, 1993. / Abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 121-126).

This dissertation project is an ethnographic audience reception study that approaches its participants as an interpretive community in order to access their standpoint as young mothers of color on welfare and explore what their media readings reveal about their lives and U.S. society. The project focuses on young (16-21 years old, primarily Puerto Rican and Black) mothers who were students in a series of critical media literacy classes I taught in 2006 at a local social service agency. The classes involved viewing and discussing media products that highlighted race/ethnicity, class, and gender, with the purpose of stimulating social consciousness and revealing central themes in the students' lives. Class discussions revealed that the participants share traditional U.S. values; yet their exclusion from mainstream economic and political resources leads them to find alternative means of actualizing their values, which positions them in opposition to the middle-class mainstream. For example, they value "respectability," however, not having access to traditional means of establishing social respect, they use the means available to them and become "good mothers," which earns them judgment as "social deviants." Thusly judged, their efforts to gain social respect via upward mobility are hampered by a combination of factors that reflect social hierarchies. In the private sphere, they are negotiating the tension between being empowered agents in their social world, in the sense of being physically and emotionally independent of men, and their desire for loving partnerships with men who inhabit a patriarchal social environment in which men establish social respect by denigrating women. In the public sphere, their status as young mothers on welfare renders them vulnerable to public policy and subject to intimate surveillance unheard of among middle-class women. Believing in the "American Dream," the participants eschew a "victim" mentality and—further demonstrating their internalization of traditional U.S. values—adopt the Protestant work ethic: if they work hard enough, they will succeed in their goals. Being low-income single mothers just means they will have to work harder. Implications for advocacy and women of color feminisms and the transferability of the methods to other populations are explored.

The purpose of this investigation is to examine formal and informal resources available for teaching Spanish to health care professionals mainly in the Portland, Oregon area. Seventeen different Spanish-for-health-care-professionals texts are commented on by the author, some of which are the texts used in medical Spanish language classes. The majority of the texts contain little if any instruction on cultural aspects which affect the Latino patient population's health care behaviors and decision making. With the recent growth in the Latino population there is a greater demand for health care services by Spanish-speaking persons of the Latino community. The author discusses at length current information about the health status of this population, factors affecting access to health care, and language barrier. There is a lack of bicultural and bilingual health care professionals to provide needed health care services to Latinos. One factor is that the percentage of Latino medical and allied health providers is a small fraction of the percentage of Spanish-speaking patients in the U.S. Therefore, Spanish language instruction must be provided to medical personnel who do not have the cultural and language background to provide culturally relevant and efficient health care to Latinos. This language training must incorporate instruction on cultural issues that affect Latino patients' health care. At present very few Spanish-forhealth- care-providers texts and courses have this type of focus. Exemplary clinical programs specializing in the medical treatment of the Latino population, both inside and outside of the Portland Oregon area, are noted to highlight that effective and culturally relevant medical treatment is possible with adequate training of personnel. Outstanding courses integrating the instruction of both the Spanish language and culture are discussed. Often these courses are not offered as permanent parts of the curriculum. The author gives examples of some of the cultural issues that need to be addressed in language instruction, and makes suggestions for adapting this focus into Medical Spanish instruction.

Against the backdrop of religious disaffiliation and social fragmentation in the United States, the future of both practices and venues for American religious education is uncertain. In this study of Tapestry, a church-run foster youth mentoring network, and St. Sebastian’s Summer Camp, a predominantly Latinx church-run community day camp, I develop and document one promising pairing in response to this quandary: an adapted form of Digital Storytelling (Lambert, 2012) as a communal spiritual practice appropriate to what I call faith-adjacent spaces. Such spaces are convened by modes of activity separate from formal institutional programs and rituals but still connected to religion in meaningful, visible ways. In this participatory multimodal ethnography, I draw on socio-spatial and narrative analytic frameworks to reveal and explore (1) organizational practices of belonging that already exist at Tapestry, (2) the function of new collaboratively designed Digital Storytelling practices at Tapestry and St. Sebastian’s, and (3) the role of my various researcher-facilitator identities in this work. I present these findings in the form of a four-part audio documentary that interweaves recordings from my ethnographic fieldwork, excerpts from the artifacts that participants and I co-created, audio engagements with academic and practitioner literature, and researcher narrative and analysis. The annotated production scripts for Becoming Tapestry comprise both the bulk of this manuscript and, together with the four podcast episodes themselves, the dissertation proper.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / Hispanic patients receive disparate pain care compared to non-Hispanic White (NHW) patients. Healthcare providers’ ethnic bias may be one reason for pain disparities. This investigation sought to determine the influence of Hispanic ethnicity and ethnic bias on chronic pain management decisions. During an online experiment, 97 medical students made pain assessment and opioid treatment decisions for Hispanic and NHW virtual human patients with chronic pain. They also completed explicit and implicit measures of ethnic bias. Individual-level analyses found that 31% and 36% of participants demonstrated large effect sizes (dz>.50), indicating that patient ethnicity strongly influenced their pain assessment and opioid treatment decisions, respectively. At the group level of analysis, participants’ decisions did not differ significantly between NHW and Hispanic patients (all p values >.05). Participants did not report significant explicit ethnic bias (t[96]=1.88, p=.06; dz=.19; Hispanic mean rating=77.6[SD=18.7]; NHW mean rating=75.2[SD=19.4]) but demonstrated a small-to-moderate implicit preference for NHWs relative to Hispanics (Mean=.31[SD=.41]). Patient ethnicity and implicit ethnic bias had an interactive effect on opioid treatment decisions (F[1, 95]=5.15, p<.05, generalized eta squared =.02); however, the direction of the effect was not as hypothesized. Participants with higher implicit ethnic bias gave significantly higher opioid ratings to Hispanics relative to NHWs (p=.05), whereas participants with lower bias gave marginally higher opioid ratings to NHWs relative to Hispanics (p=.20). Participants with higher vs. lower implicit ethnic bias differed only in their treatment ratings for NHW patients, such that participants with lower bias gave significantly higher opioid ratings to NHW patients than did participants with higher bias (p<.05). This investigation found that approximately one-third of participants made significantly different chronic pain management decisions for Hispanic vs. NHW patients. Participants’ implicit ethnic bias interacted with their opioid treatment decisions but not as expected. Future investigations should measure healthcare providers’ stereotypes about Hispanic patients with pain as this may better predict their pain decisions.

This study examined the influence of television viewing and interpersonal contact on young adults' stereotypes towards Hispanic Americans. White American undergraduate students (N = 231) at a small private university in the western United States completed an anonymous self-administered group questionnaire. Regression analysis revealed that the Hispanic negative index is highly positively correlated with White Americans who perceive that they learn about other races from watching TV and positively correlated with White Americans who identify with many TV portrayals. Regression analysis also revealed that the Hispanic positive index is highly positively correlated with White Americans who evaluate their contact with Hispanic Americans as very pleasant and positively correlated with White Americans who talk with Hispanic Americans very often. The study shows that television viewing has a significant impact on White Americans' negative stereotypes towards Hispanic Americans when White Americans perceive that they learn about other races from watching television. Also, the contact hypothesis has strong support in this study. Talking to Hispanic Americans was found to have an impact on White Americans' positive stereotypes towards Hispanic Americans and evaluation of contact was found to have a significant impact on White Americans' positive stereotypes towards Hispanic Americans. These results suggest that television viewing and interpersonal contact may have a significant influence on stereotype development towards Hispanic Americans.

Central Americans now represent the third largest Latinx demographic in the United States and the number is growing (Noe-Bustamante, Flores & Shah, 2019). Central America and those of the Central American diaspora are frequently featured in policy discussions, the media, and even Hollywood, but Central Americans themselves are often absent from such discussions and representations. Further, little of this work highlights the history of American imperialism in the region and how such actions have contributed to the instability and corruption now experienced in many Central American countries (Chomsky, 2015; Frank, 2019). The effects of such intervention and exploitation contributes directly to the displacement and northern migration of many from the isthmus to the United States, who then are confronted with xenophobic rhetoric and policies (Garcia, 2006). Still, despite the close and often intertwined histories between the United States and Central America, as well as their position as one of the largest immigrant groups entering the United States, little social studies research has focused on the teaching of their histories and experiences (Alvarenga, 2019; Bermudez, 2020). Few have used the study of the relationship between Central America and the United States as an opportunity to reconceptualize immigration, especially those from historically exploited countries, as inherently linked to American empire and imperialism. This qualitative research project, grounded in Latina/Chicana epistemologies and LatCrit, fuses together elements of narrative inquiry, through pláticas and testimonios, with participatory 3 action research. It explores how Central American teachers engage with testimonios, both as a process as testimonistas and as listeners of testimonios by reading collectively a set of testimonios written by Central American migrant youth. Through a series of pláticas and curriculum dreaming and building encuentros, our aim was to explore how testimonio could serve a disruptive pedagogical and curricular practice for the teaching of immigration, empire and Central America. The results demonstrate that the impact of American empire and imperialism in Central America has long-lasting and far-reaching implications for Central Americans living both within and outside of the Isthmus, which manifests in silences in both our homes and in our schools and which drastically affect Central Americans’ sense of belonging in our schools. Despite these silences, the teachers in this study, all of Central American descent, reveal how they grew to claim and be proud of their Central American identity. Further, this study illuminates how these experiences with empire-induced migration and displacement then affects who they are as educators, as well as their pedagogical and curricular decision-making.

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Looking for best teaching practices has always been an important issue for educators. Teacher education programs, school districts, and researchers have gone to great lengths to train teachers to teach "better." Yet, students are still not performing well in school, specifically minority students. The achievement gap and dropout rates only get larger between Latino students and their White peers. According to National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES, 2002), in the United States the drop out rate for Latino students is 23.8% compared to 6.8% for White students. With such disparities occurring, what is being done to address this large, under-performing population? What do Latino students need in order to succeed in the American school system? One of the known ways to help Latino students succeed is culturally responsive teaching (Banks, 2006). Are culturally responsive teaching practices the best pedagogical approach for Latino students? And if so, do teachers understand what these practices entail? This inquiry was a qualitative study highlighting the teaching practices of three self-identified culturally responsive teachers working in an inner-city school that is predominately populated by low performing Latino students. This study involved observations and interviews with three teachers and employed ethnographic methods highlighting not only what culturally relevant teachers in classroom practices with Latino students, but also how these practices help teachers' efficacy improve.