<p>This exploratory qualitative study investigated the experiences of California community college undocumented students and their career development processes and issues. Twelve undocumented students from multiple backgrounds participated in semi-structured interviews. It was evident from the students' backgrounds that being undocumented was not just a Latino issue. Students identified career development barriers such as financial hardship, lack of support, and limitations in career related opportunities. Though these barriers were initially disruptive to the participants' career development, the same barriers eventually became an important part of the participants' identity as undocumented students. Making progress despite the barriers created learning experiences that enabled the students to garner support and ultimately forge forward. The idea of hope was a critical component of this process. While a faint sense of hope allowed participants to enter the community college, as they faced these barriers their sense of hope and resiliency was strengthened. An emerging theory of undocumented students' career development was presented as a result of the findings. </p>

<p> There is continued pressure for girls to formulate a positive identity in a society that privileges specific identity constructions along the lines of race, class, gender, ethnicity, sexuality and religion. This difficulty, however, may be even greater for a teen girl who also juggles the additional challenges of being Arabic and Muslim. Living in a country where their values, practices and beliefs are not the norm amongst the dominant culture in which they are surrounded contributes to this difficulty. Much research has been done about the Muslim population in general. However, narratives of young Muslim females telling their specific life stories, in relationship to the challenges they may have faced or currently face negotiating their identities in and out of public schools in the post-9/11 era, have not been addressed. In addition, although there have been studies done about Muslims' negotiation of identities, no study has related their negotiations of these identities to life's opportunities. In other words, to what extent do/did Muslim girls need to negotiate multiple identities, which is defined here as to give up and/or alter some cultural and/or religious practices and/or adopt others, in the American public school system and in places of employment in relationship to their perceptions of life's opportunities both while in high school and present day. This study seeks to tell the stories of young, female Muslims, stories about their identity negotiations in public high schools and present day in a post-9/11 world. Only through in-depth examinations of these women's lives can their stories be shared.</p>

<p> By 2030, older adults will comprise more than 20% of the population and include 80 million adults age 65 and older (U.S. Census, 2010). A corresponding increase is predicted in the number of older adults in need of mental health counseling (American Association of Geriatric Psychiatry, 2010). According to the Institute of Medicine, in 2012, nearly one in five older adults had one or more mental health and/or substance abuse conditions. There is an emerging demand for counselors who specialize in gerontological counseling to meet the mental health and substance abuse needs of older adults. Despite the anticipated demand to increase the workforce with counselors who specialize in gerocounseling, research has shown that students in the human service professions are not interested or prepared to work with older adults (Institute of Medicine, 2012). This lack of interest and preparedness does not bode well for meeting the future needs of this population. If there is a genuine lack of interest in counseling older adults among counseling students, particularly the youngest to enter the profession, then it is important to explore their perspectives to understand them and design training strategies to prepare them for meeting the mental health needs of older adults. </p><p> This exploratory study used qualitative description to capture the perspectives of eight millennial counselors-in-training (CITs). Data and findings were organized to construct analysis of the themes that emerged. The framework of critical gerontology was used to examine findings. Participants identified primarily with their own aging family members to describe their age-related perspectives. Findings suggest that CITs struggled with their own privileged status as younger adults as they described their perception of how older adults were devalued by society. Evidence revealed a tension as they realized that they will likely counsel older adults regardless of their area of specialization. Students wanted age-related foundational knowledge to help their own aging family members, to work with clients being raised by grandparents, and to assist families in accommodating their aging family members but experienced systemic and structural obstacles that might prevent them from acquiring this knowledge. This research has critical implications for the field of counselor education.</p>

<p> Trends throughout my graduate research in education include educational transformation, critical pedagogy and cross-cultural, globally oriented competencies for educators. These threads have woven their way into my lens on the world, prompting questions about educational and curricular policy and reform, particularly challenging the ubiquitous Euro-centric platform from which most schools in the United States operate. In June and July of 2012, sponsored by the United States-Colombian Fulbright commission, 16 educators had the professional development opportunity to study in Mexico and Colombia, all with the charge to develop authentic multicultural curricula for the benefit of students and teachers in the United States. Through documentation of the Fulbright-Hays 2012 participants' reflections, the study addresses the scope of the Seminar's transformative impact on teachers and subsequently students, supporting its relevancy as a government social-service program. The study examines the larger impact of the Fulbright-Hays Seminar on educators' pedagogical and philosophic orientations to their work in the classroom. This research may be utilized internally by the Fulbright-Hays commission for evidence of transformational experiences starting with seminar participants and, ideally, filtering down to students of diverse demographics. The development of culturally representative and responsive curricula is a pressing area of need in the United States, both in public and private spheres. Work in this field could contribute to social change and equity-driven reform within the educational sphere: pedagogically, methodologically, and philosophically. The study analyzes the development of teachers with increased cultural competencies, understanding of cultures outside their own culture (and yet often represented in their classrooms), therefore being poised to create more inclusive, anti-biased atmospheres for their students.</p>

<p> This critical ethnographic collective case study examined the process of becoming a teacher in the context of visual art education. This longitudinal study was grounded in larger educational concerns regarding the preparation of teachers for socially and culturally diverse U.S. public schools. This framing of teacher learning went beyond traditional dichotomies in educational research that maintain an artificial boundary between learning to teach content and learning to teach all students effectively and equitably. </p><p> In order to re-integrate the study of teacher learning, this research foregrounds the transactional relationship between a preservice art teacher&rsquo;s social locations (e.g., race, class, sex-gender, language) and how s/he makes sense of what it means to be an &ldquo;art teacher.&rdquo; Specifically, the study asked (a) how preservice art teachers negotiated their emerging art teacher identities in a university-based teacher education program, (b) how their social positions were implicated in that process, and (c) how their teacher identities were meditated by cultural narratives, artifacts, and practices. This approach eschewed simplistic and reductive analyses of teacher identities in order to attain a nuanced understanding of the multiple, sometimes contradictory social processes involved in becoming a teacher.</p><p> This collective case study centered six preservice art teachers with varied racial, class, gender, and sexual identities, all of whom attended the same undergraduate teacher education program in the southwestern U.S. Social practice theory of identity, and critical curriculum and cultural theory were employed in constructing a multi-leveled relational analysis of the commonalities and divergences in participants&rsquo; self-understandings over time.</p><p> Findings showed historical patterns of institutionalized racism, as well as complex class and sex-gendered meanings of art. These inequitable norms were reproduced in ways distinctive to the asocial and apolitical &ldquo;common sense&rdquo; knowledge that was mobilized within the world of art teacher education. Some participants experienced alienation and marginalization based on their social positioning in relation to the world of art education. The findings also illuminated the polyvalent nature of identity through the coexistence of hegemonic identities as well as counter-hegemonic agency. Implications and possibilities for generating more critical, equity-oriented teacher education and art education research, practice, and policy are considered.</p>

<p> This study is aimed at analyzing how contemporary urban Aymara youth hip hoppers and bloggers are creating their identities and are producing discourses in texts and lyrics to contest racist and colonial discourses. The research is situated in Bolivia, which is currently engaged in a cultural and political revolution supported by Indigenous movements. Theoretically the study is framed by a multi-perspective conceptual framework based on subaltern studies, coloniality of power, coloniality of knowledge, interculturality and decolonial theory. Aymara young people illustrate the possibility of preserving Indigenous identities, language, and knowledge while maximizing the benefits of urban society. This challenges the colonial ideology that has essentialized the rural origin of Indigenous identities. Moreover, this research argues that the health of Indigenous languages is interconnected with the health of the self-esteem of Indigenous people. Additionally, this study provides information about the relation of youth to the power of oral tradition, language policies, and the use of technology.</p>

<p> Colleges and universities are responding to the force of globalization by encouraging faculty and administrators to develop programs that support students in the global worlds of work and of citizenship. Through a partnership with the Salzburg Global Seminar's International Study Program (ISP), San Jos&eacute; State University (SJSU) is making efforts to "globalize the campus" through institutional change. The ISP draws on the Salzburg Global Seminar's experience with the Universities Project and with other institutions of higher education in the United States to create the desired change. This paper examined the progress of the SJSU Salzburg Program (the Program), drawing on a framework for success created by the Universities Project and on the author's experience as a participant in the Program.</p>

<p>In a rapidly changing society, education must make adjustments and keep learning focused on the needs of students by providing increased opportunities for success. Classrooms are filled with students of different cultural backgrounds which makes education a challenge to every building leader and teacher. The challenges are how to design instruction and implement it to meet the academic and social needs of all learners. Understanding different lifestyles, languages, word context, body language, traditions, and dress present opportunities for educators to expand their cultural knowledge and create learning objectives for students which ultimately affect student achievement in the educational environment. </p><p> The focus of this study was to determine the characteristics of a successful, diverse school and the training needed for staff to support students and the district. To give educational stakeholders more insight into what characteristics are need to create a culturally proficient environment that creates learning opportunities for children, data was collected, analyzed and coded. The coding revealed eight axial codes and from there four main theories emerged: (a) leadership, (2) instructional model, (3) environment that supports diversity and, (4) parent and community involvement. </p>

<p> As rapid demographic change transforms American classrooms, incongruities between the ways culturally diverse students are accustomed to learning and those emphasized in educational institutions can present barriers to learning. This study investigated culturally responsive pedagogy (CRP), a teaching approach that seeks to ameliorate such incongruities by basing instruction upon students' cultural knowledge, frames of reference, and preferred learning, communication, and performance styles (Gay, 2002). To complement studies that examine teachers' perceptions of CRP, this study sought to illuminate student perspectives. Accordingly, the purpose of this study was to explore adolescent choral students' perceptions of culturally responsive teaching in an urban community children's choir. Research questions focused on how students perceived their choir experiences to be informed by cultural diversity, the barriers to CRP they identified, and how CRP influenced relationships between students' musical and cultural identities. </p><p> A multiple embedded case study design was used to investigate students' perceptions of CRP as practiced in three demographically contrasting choirs within an urban children's choir organization. Within each choir site, one teacher and three student participants framed the analysis. Data generation methods included semi-structured interviews, ethnographic field notes, autobiographical notes, and collection of material culture. </p><p> Students perceived their choral instruction to be culturally responsive in that their classroom experiences promoted understanding and appreciation of their own cultures while broadening their cultural, musical, and intellectual horizons. They identified three barriers to CRP: educators' lack of comfort teaching diverse music, the complexity of students' cultural identities, and the challenges involved in practicing CRP equitably given constraints on instructional time. In one site, experiences with diverse music were peripheral to a Eurocentric core curriculum and did not promote connections between students' musical and cultural identities. There, the discourses associated with Western classical singing defined students' identities and alienated some students from the belief that they were musicians. Two sites incorporated a greater range of discourse norms associated with singing diverse musics and featured greater responsiveness toward the cultural backgrounds of particular students. In those sites, CRP fostered intersections between students' musical and cultural identities by meaningfully bridging their musical experiences inside and outside of the classroom.</p>

<p> When searching for pluralistic models of bilingual education, looking globally for examples is beneficial. The overarching global perspective toward bilingual and multilingual education supports literacy in the student's first, second, and including the possibility of a third or more languages to attain socio-political pluralism. This dissertation project will specifically examine the voices of stakeholders in the local community of Flowers Bay, Roatan, Honduras where the mission of bilingual education is a pluralistic society. The goal of the research study is to examine the perspectives and experiences around language learning within the lens of language as a problem, a right, and a resource of stakeholders in their local community. Chapter I of this dissertation includes the problem statement of the research project, a historical and contextual explanation of the land, people, and social movement toward multilingual education on the Bay Islands of Honduras. Chapter II is a review of the literature surrounding the two frameworks in the research project. The first framework I utilize is the public sphere to describe who is or is not included in the conversations of multilingual education within the community of Flowers Bay, Roatan, Honduras. The second framework I utilize is language as a problem, a right, and a resource to describe and analyze the data collected from national policies, field observations, and stakeholders. Chapter III is an in-depth description of the research design, the demographics of the stakeholders in Flowers Bay, the method data collected and analysis of the data. Chapter IV features the findings from the data analysis using the two frameworks outlined in Chapter II. Chapter V offers a discussion of the frameworks and further research projects inspired by this dissertation project. Three themes emerged from framework of language as a right and resource of stakeholder voices from Flowers Bay, Roatan, Honduras: <i>access, economy,</i> and <i>identity.</i> Two themes emerged from the stakeholder voices not represented in the frameworks: <i>resources needed </i> and <i>parent engagement.</i></p>