Adult education has often been described as a start and stop process for second chance learners. Hierarchical, decontextualized, and scripted materials remain prevalent in adult education programs. Differences in and among programs often present barriers to participation that profoundly affect adult learners' lives and literacies. Albertini (2009), Hull, Jury, and Sacher (2012), and Street (2004) call for more innovative, tailor-made programs to support adult learners. The Women's Literacy Network (WLN), a literacy and empowerment program for women, is an innovative, tailor-made program that trains adult women with GEDs as literacy tutors and matches them with women working on their GEDs. In this narrative inquiry, I examine the literacy identities of five WLN tutors through the lens of social practice theory. I conceptualize literacy identities as lived in and through participants' storied lives. Constructions of literacy identity are revealed in participants' histories, stories, and practices and the ways in which they enact and express their literacy identities. Participants' stories are told using a braiding of memoir with narrative ethnography. Each woman's narrative centers on a prominent thread that weaves throughout the fabric of her literacy identity. These threads are then connected across the narratives to reveal how the women were positioned by others, their internalization of or resistance to this positioning, and their own positioning in historical time and space. Findings indicate that participants' literacy identities were rooted in a metaphor of "identity-as-difference" (Moje & Luke, 2009, p.421). Isolation was a common theme, as was the need to affiliate and belong. Participants reported gaining confidence and experiencing a sense of community and belonging. Gender mattered; participants stated that "women understand women." Mothers revealed that their learning influenced and shaped their family literacy practices. According to participants, the WLN offered opportunities to build relationships that helped expand their social networks. Frequent, intense interactions were important in keeping participants connected to the WLN, its coordinators, and each other. Participants framed and reframed their literacy identities, re-positioned themselves in their life roles, and came to revalue themselves as literate beings (K. Goodman, 1996b).

This ethnographic study explored everyday lived experiences of a group of Latina women in school and in the community in an Adult Basic Education (ABE) setting. I examined the functions of discourse in ABE in literacy events (Heath, 1983). In this way, I gained insights into literacy practices through ethnography of communication (Heath, 1983; Hymes, 1972, 1977; Philips, 1993; Saville-Troike, 2003). Narratives provided insights about what was communicated in everyday interactions.In a "teaching to the test" ideological environment, the Latina participants in this study shared knowledge and experiences and created a unique sociocultural (Vygotsky, 1978) context for learning. Over time, a community of practice (Wenger, 1998) developed through mutual engagement, joint effort, and shared repertoire which included in and out of school literacies. Salient was the collaborative effort among a local community center, community college, and school district which strived to meet the needs of Latina/o students and their families. These multiple communities of practice provided a support network integral to sustaining a community of learners.The backdrop of this study, an American-Mexican Southwest border region, was the cultural context in which American education and Latinas' Sonora Mexican world views met. This hybrid space or borderlands Anzaldua (1987) described as a place where two cultures merged to form a third culture. In practice, this hybrid space was explored in discursive practices which provided an alternative space, a third space (Moje, Cicechanowski, Kramer, Ellis, Carrillo, & Collazo, 2004) in which identities were negotiated. Participants negotiated to find balance, a synergy between change and maintenance, which was ongoing as they struggled to maintain a traditional world view while accommodating new ideas.Integral to ongoing identity construction were the relationships with language, learning, and conversation. A story emerged from daily acts and events that reflected negotiated individual and social identities in the practice of literacy, teaching, and learning. This study demonstrates the insights ethnographic investigations can bring to understanding the functions of discourse in the construction of identity and socialization into learning.

This dissertation examines the perception and uses of mathematics on the San Carlos Apache reservation. The initial research questions were: 1) To what extent can the identification of Apache mathematics concepts provide a theoretical basis for the inclusion of Apache mathematical knowledge into the classrooms? 2) How will the identification of Apache mathematics use within the community affect the perception of community members' mastery of mathematics in general? Eight enrolled adult Apache community members were interviewed and observed utilizing qualitative and quantitative methods regarding their use and perception of mathematics. The data suggests that the English word "mathematics" represents a narrow perception of mathematics whereas the study interviewees indicated that they engaged in complex mathematical concepts that are identified and discussed as a culturally distinct phenomena, Apache mathematics.

College reading programs are traditionally remedial or developmental in nature and often take a decontextualized skills based approach to reading and to supporting college readers (Holschuh & Paulson, 2013). Skills oriented deficit-based approaches to reading provide deficit-based frameworks for readers to construct self-perceptions. TLS 239 Literacy Tutoring is an undergraduate service-learning course where students learn about reading process and theory and develop strategies to tutor in community schools for twenty-four required hours. Coursework frames literacy as a socially constructed process and students engage in a miscue workshop, strategy presentations and in exploring the reading process. In this study, I examine the coursework of 38 students enrolled in TLS 239 and students' reports of shifting their perceptions and self-perceptions of literacy through coursework that challenged their literacy conceptualizations. In this study, I conceptualize Ken Goodman's (2003) theory of revaluing as restorying through a construct of story (Bruner, 2004; Short, 2012) and a semiotic theory of inquiry (Peirce, 1877), a process of fixating new belief. This struggle, or inquiry into reading provides a framework for students to renegotiate and restory their perceptions of literacy and their self-perceptions as literate. Findings indicate that conceptualizing reading as a socially constructed process including the construct of a reading transaction (Rosenblatt, 1994) and the construct of miscue (Goodman, 1969) was anomalous to college students' perceptions of literacy and caused students to doubt previously held misconceptions about reading. Students reported shifts towards conceptualizing reading as the construction of meaning, shifts towards positive self-perceptions as readers, and shifts in their literacy engagements. Students reported an increase in confidence, reading differently, reading more effectively, becoming metacognitive, reading more assigned readings in college, reading more for leisure and feeling more actively engaged in their other courses. Implications include conceptualizing literacy learning as social and emotional learning and the pedagogical implications of literacy instruction framed within a construct of inquiry.

Play in the school setting is a highly contested issue in today's restrictive academic environment. Although many early childhood educators advocate the use of play in their classrooms and emphasize the importance of play for children's learning and development, children beyond the preschool and kindergarten years are not often afforded opportunities to learn through play in their classrooms. This eight-month study, conducted in a first grade classroom in the outskirts of the Phoenix Metropolitan area of Arizona, analyzed young children's playful responses to literature as they read various books together in the classroom context. The purpose of this study was to develop deep understandings about the affordances of play in response to text within a first grade classroom and to investigate the ways that children utilize play to respond to literature and to construct meaning. This dissertation is informed by these guiding research questions: What are the affordances of play for responding to text in a first grade classroom? 1. What are the sociocultural resources that children use to respond to text? 2. In what ways do first graders incorporate and utilize play to make meaning with texts and each other in the classroom? In order to answer these research questions, I utilized several theoretical frameworks including: sociocultural theories of learning and literacy, the role of play and imagination in development, funds of knowledge, and reader response theories. This study was also informed by recent research findings in the areas of play and culture and play and literacy. I implemented a classroom Reading Center wherein I studied children's cooperative reading transactions and play as reader response. I collected data through classroom observations and field notes, videotaped and transcribed transactions, audiotaped and transcribed conversations and interviews, artifact collection, teacher observations of responsive play, family home visits and interviews, and the use of family story backpacks. This data, analyzed through thematic analysis, the constant comparative method, and grounded theory, revealed rich information about the ways that children utilize play to respond to literature in the classroom setting. The findings of this study provide evidence to suggest that through their play as reader response, their responsive play, children create a social space in the classroom which connects official school literacy practices and academic instruction with their social play practices. In this new space, children's play and talk take central roles in their explorations and uses of literacy. Findings further suggest that play can be seen as a generative source of academic learning, that the notion of response in research and practice be reconceived in the field to include play as a valid and valued form of reader response, and suggest that further research be conducted on children's responsive play.

Youth experiences with digital technologies demonstrate untapped potential for informing school-based learning responsive to adolescent identity and socialization practices (Ito et al., 2008). This study presents the formation of a collaborative model for appropriating youth and digital practices for developing new literacies with high school students in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands (New London Group, 1996). The research incorporates diversity in technology access and participation of predominately Latino students in English classrooms as a resource to engage literacy development across multiple discursive domains and challenge deficit discourses for Latino youth.The participatory approach combines interventionist research, in the cultural historical tradition of expansive learning (Engeström, 1987) with ethnographic methods for informing curricular practice (González, Moll,&Amanti, 2005; Lee, 2007) and new literacies pedagogy stressing collaborative, critical, and multimodal semiosis infused with Freirian praxis (Coiro et al., 2008; Freire, 1999; Lemke, 2003). Research involved co-developing, co-teaching and daily participant observation within the multiple online and offline spaces of a high school writing course, a weekly after school club begun with students from the class and several additional classrooms. A variety of data illustrates tensions and synergies of migrating practices across systems of activity represented by teacher, researcher and student standpoints. The research maps how socio-spatial relationships among academic and youth discourses, modalities, and participants' classroom positions were reconfigured through the use of digital tools joined with pedagogies responsive to adolescents' social and digital practices.An afterschool group's wiki participation extended students' oral and visual literacies into written expression and gave other participants a model of collaborative practice to guide classroom interaction. Engaging familiar and new tools for inquiries based on youth interests and complementary analytical concepts emphasized the primacy of the social and pedagogical aspects of technology. Students' agency in theorizing identity and developing representational spaces (Lefebvre, 1991) emerged as a key mediator for expanding their literacies across personal and academic contexts. In the collaborative process, participants forged new, hybrid genres, audiences and identities for distributing and developing their literacy practices across false dichotomies of home/school and online/offline spaces, and for reconfiguring normative school literacy regimes.

The North Carolina Public Schools, like other schools in the southeast, have experienced phenomenal growth in their ELL student populations in the last 15 years. This fairly recent influx of ELL students raises questions about the extent to which the schools, and more specifically, the teachers, are prepared to meet the needs of their linguistically diverse students. Unfortunately, few studies to date have investigated how teacher education programs (TEPs) and professional development opportunities are addressing this aspect of teacher preparation. This dissertation addresses the lack of current research as it pertains to both TEPs and professional development experiences of middle school working in the North Carolina Public Schools. Using a mixed methods design that combined survey research with open-ended interviews of focal participants, the author revealed that teachers had had limited preparation experiences at both the TEP and professional development levels. However, those who had had these experiences overall did exhibit some capacity to adapt instruction and relate to their ELLs in positive ways. The preparation, however, also lacked sociolinguistic awareness and awareness about the theoretical foundations that underlie these practices. The author concluded by relating the findings to the current research and discussed recommendations and implications for TEPs and professional development in North Carolina and the southern context.

This study, conducted in a third-grade classroom in Puerto Rico, analyzed the development of literature discussions, in which through dialogues with the teacher and each other, students learn how to discuss, analyze, and reflect upon what they are reading in class, and relate what they learn to their own circumstances. A combination of three theoretical perspectives served as guide: Reader Response Theory (RRT), which addresses how the dialogue featured in literature discussions helped develop understandings about how power, ideology and identity are interwoven in society; Postcolonial Theory (PT) and Critical Race Theory (CRT), which addresses the dynamics and relations of power in neo-colonial contexts, such as Puerto Rico. The research questions were as follows:1. How do literature discussion and critical literacy practices influence students' understandings of social issues? a) How do these discussions about social issues influence students' understandings of Puerto Rican society and identity? b) How do these discussions influence students' understandings of how political relations constitute Puerto Rican reality? c) How do students take action based on their developing understandings of society? I relied on ethnographic methods, such as participant-observation, interviews, and videotapes of literature discussions, to document how the students, with the help of their teacher, develop discourse practices that allow them to reflect, analyze and discuss their readings, and then plan and take social action on the issues they have studied. I used Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) as a central strategy of analysis, identifying three major categories that formed part of a broader Identity Theme: Personal, Gender, and Social. A significant aspect of the study is that literature discussions of books based on social issues provide multiple opportunities to reflect, create dialogue, and build understanding about who we are in our current society, who the others are, and provide spaces to develop as social agents. This production of spaces for reflecting on reality, central to this study, fosters in the students a deep process of constructing meaning, elaborates their skills and strategies in reading for a critical understanding of texts and related social issues, and enhances their taking of action for social change.

This dissertation is a linguistic ethnography of a high school Astronomy/Oceanography classroom in southern Arizona, where an exceptionally promising, novice, white science teacher and mostly Mexican-American students confronted issues of identity and difference through interactions both related and unrelated to science learning. Through close analysis of video-recorded, naturally-occurring interaction and rich ethnographic description, the study documents how a teacher and students accomplished everyday classroom life, built caring relationships, and pursued scientific inquiry at a time and in a place where nationally- and locally-circulating discourses about immigration and race infused even routine interactions with tension and uncertainty. In their talk, students appropriated elements of racializing discourses, but also used language creatively to "speak back" to commonsense notions about Mexicanness. Careful examination of science-related interactions reveals the participants' negotiation of multiple, intersecting forms of citizenship (i.e., cultural and scientific citizenship) in the classroom, through multidirectional processes of language socialization in which students and the teacher regularly exchanged expert and novice roles. This study offers insight into the continuing relevance of racial, cultural, and linguistic identity to students' experiences of schooling, and sheds new light on classroom discourse, teacher-student relationships, and dimensions of citizenship in science learning, with important implications for teacher preparation and practice.

The legacy of historical trauma continues to plague Indigenous populations throughout the world. This theoretical dissertation describes how biology (neurodevelopment, neurobiology and endocrinology) and culture (inter-generationally learned behaviors) are intricately intertwined in the development of dysfunctional coping behaviors that contribute to stress-related chronic diseases (heart disease, obesity, type II diabetes mellitus, depression, neurodegenerative disorders and memory impairment) in some individuals. The primary impact of the many episodes of historically traumatic genocide has been post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and the onset of dysregulation of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis (HPA-axis). PTSD has had a profound impact on relationships and behaviors, while dysregulation of the HPA-axis is associated with pathophysiology. It is well documented that historical trauma has caused a cultural disconnect from traditional wellness and healing practices. Despite incredible resiliency, the result of this legacy has been a genesis of intergenerational, dysfunctional, coping strategies that have become subtly engrained in a viscous cycle of self-perpetuating, self-inflicting, dysfunctional behaviors that have been carried forward into the next generation as "toxic stress" - in the form of childhood abuse, domestic violence, interpersonal violence, and substance abuse. With time, the association to the initial traumatic assault erodes, leaving behind, collectively, a fragmented society that, in many places, has become the basis for a "cultural crisis". The approach presented in this dissertation is founded upon: 1) cultural acquisition theories that describe how existing cultural constructs and traditions are internalized by children and repeated throughout a life-time into the next generation; and 2) understanding the interaction of the autonomic nervous system (specifically, the HPA-axis and its activation by stress) and the neocortex, the basis for higher psychological processes associated with learning and cultural acquisition. This dissertation offers an explanation for the continued impact of historically traumatic events on the contemporary health and wellness of American Indian and Alaska Native people. It is hoped that this approach leads to specific intervention and prevention measures that are culturally relevant in addressing pathophysiology, cognitive-behavioral issues and the collective cultural changes that have ensued as a result of historical trauma.