<p> In the absence of state and national governments leadership addressing climate change, cities and academic institutions have been taking the initiative to provide direction toward low-carbon transitions. From the U.S. Mayor's Climate Agreement, to the American College and University President's Climate Commitment, voluntary agreements are the only U.S. initiatives to address climate change systematically over the last decade or more. These voluntary agreements constitute a social movement and innovation space, supported through networks of sustainability practice and research. The proliferation of these agreements, the increasing numbers of participating organizations, and a nascent market in businesses providing supporting resources to network members, points to an action space that is a form of transition niche, unusual in that it is not protected or supported at any higher level of governance. Using a combination of social constructivist methods of situational analysis and social network analysis, this dissertation describes and analyzes six purely voluntary university agreements and makes visible their complex interactions. It investigates these voluntary agreements and the universities that are working to transform their operations, practices and curriculums in a collaborative effort to mitigate and adapt to climate change and move toward sustainability. It demonstrates that these networks are part of a larger network of cognitive practice for sustainable low-carbon transitions.</p>

Thesis--University of Wisconsin--Madison. / Typescript. Vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 196-202).

Due to the limitations of the household registration system, rural migrants in Chinese cities are unable to access the same range of rights and benefits as urban natives. This rural-urban segregation has consequences beyond access to political and economic rights and resources; it has deepened to shape cultural and ideological perceptions. This deepening has a profound influence on the children of migrant workers who are moving to study in the city. Though nowadays children of migrant workers can study in urban public schools alongside local students, the rural-urban structural divide still exists and impedes personal and social relations between the two groups. This research investigated the difficulties and opportunities encountered by children of migrant workers after they have entered urban public schools and as the face the realities of contact with urban people. The research also discussed whether educating rural and urban students together can help children of migrant workers’ social adaptation in the city, or whether this studying together model places pressures on rural students which impede their social integration into urban communities. A ‘field-habitus’ analysis framework was used to assess rural students’ social adaptation performances in the city. Research methods including questionnaire surveys, in-depth interviews and focus groups were employed in the study. Besides rural students, urban people such as urban students and teachers whom rural students interact with in schools were investigated in the research. Moreover, to evaluate whether inclusive education in public schools has created an inclusive environment to help rural students’ social adaptation, rural students from private schools, who are receiving an exclusive education that is only for children of migrant workers, were also studied as the reference group. Based on the data analysis, the research found that rural students from public schools are generally well-adapted to their urban lives. Additionally, compared with rural students from private schools, rural students from public schools have more urbanized behaviours and lifestyles. Meanwhile, the research indicated that rural students being educated in public schools suffer from many misunderstandings and conflicts with urban students, which may bring them more pressures related to social adaptation compared with their counterparts in private schools. Rural students’ social adaptation performances were attributed to the dual functions of education, meaning that education in public schools may either improve or impede children of migrant workers’ adaptation to their lives in the city. The discussion on the role of education was mainly based on Pierre Bourdieu’s Theory of Cultural Reproduction and Inclusive Education Model. Moreover, students’ family background was also taken into consideration for a more comprehensive explanation.

<p> Racial microaggressions are present in daily classroom interactions between White teachers and students of color. White teachers, however, may be oblivious to the types of racial microaggressions they exhibit and how they perform them in their classrooms. Using autoethnographic research methods, this study seeks to expose implicit racial bias into explicit moments of teacher decision-making, transform dysconscious racism into conscious and concrete thoughts, and interpret previously unseen racist acts into seen and recognizable activities. The study asks the following research questions: (a) When and how do I permit my racial microaggressions to emerge and transgress in my classroom? And (b) In what ways, if at all, can a White teacher use autoethnography to detect and examine her racial microaggressions toward her students of color? Later, the study explores the ways in which critical self-reflexivity might promote an evolving anti-racist teaching identity. </p><p> The researcher, a classroom teacher, gathered data using daily reflective self-observations, daily reflexive field note journals, and periodic videotaping of her practice. She commenced the study with an introductory culturegram positioning her racial and cultural self-identity and concluded it with a final self-interview to complete the data-gathering. The researcher categorized each microaggressive event by form, medium, and theme using Sue&rsquo;s (2010b) &ldquo;Taxonomy of Microaggressions.&rdquo; Findings reveal (a) uninterrogated Whiteness dominates all aspects of the researcher&rsquo;s classroom, extending from her teaching to her White students&rsquo; behaviors and (b) transitional time, non-academic teacher talk, and other unstructured time remain especially hazardous for students of color in terms of receiving teacher-perpetuated racial microaggressions.</p><p>

<p> Post-secondary student retention and persistence is on the minds of professionals at various higher learning institutions due to the disparities in educational attainment. These disparities may lead to inhibited social mobility, and lack of cultural and social capital. This study examined what factors Southern Connecticut State University sophomore students perceived as aiding or impeding their degree path. It questioned how underrepresented students shaped their perception on their educational attainment and how this compares to the existing research and literature on the success practices of underrepresented students in higher education. The study was conducted using open-ended semi-structured interview questions administered to second year sophomore students at Southern Connecticut State University. Specifically, they were underrepresented students defined as being low-income, racial minority, and first-generation students. This study aimed to explore the narrative of underrepresented students by exploring why college access doesn&rsquo;t necessarily result in college completion. </p><p>

When a biomedical curriculum is exported from the First World to the Third, what embedded cultural values come along? Do locally specific historical, political, religious, or socioeconomic associations of the “physician” as signifier shape the professional values students take on? Or is professional identity, like most of the rest of the curricular content, imported from the North? To date, empirical research on professional socialization has been restricted almost completely to North America. In the twenty-first century, when biomedicine is learned and practiced worldwide, the universality of socializing processes cannot be assumed. The project described here was collaboratively designed to assess the socializing function of medical education in Malawi. This cross-sectional qualitative research explores the acquisition of professional identity in students at a new medical school in Malawi, documenting changes during medical training in the values and norms that make up professional identity. I used a sequential research method involving focus group discussions, interviews and a questionnaire, moving from open-ended and general to more specific questions. This method was supplemented by archival research and “observant participation” at the university's teaching hospital. The homogenizing process of basic science education during the first two years of medical school in Malawi appears similar to that found by researchers in North America. When students reach their hospital training, however, their nascent scientist doctor identities crash into a clinical reality in which the tools of science are largely unavailable. Responding to the resulting crisis, they may preserve the Northern doctor-scientist identity by seeking a geographic or occupational location in which its execution is possible. They may also reject the identity of detached technocrat to claim instead the dual roles of political activist and loving witness to suffering. I address historical and economic conditions that shape these responses, and discuss their implications for health in Malawi, for medical pedagogy, and for anthropological research on identity in an era of globalization. I use Gramsci's notion of contradictory consciousness to show how discrepancies between hegemonic cognitive frameworks of identity and real conditions of work have the potential to create a revolutionary new consciousness among doctors working in poverty.

This critical case study explores multiple meanings of a small chapel at Concord Academy, a private secondary school in Massachusetts. The relationship between participation and empowerment is explored, as revealed through the chapel and as understood, experienced, and articulated by people involved with the chapel over time. Architecture is considered as a vehicle for democracy--an opportunity for risk, interaction, community, and encounter. Found abandoned in the 1950s, the chapel was rescued by Concord Academy women, girls, and a few men who took the building down, reassembled and refurbished it at Concord, and built huge architectural carvings, pulpit, altar, and steeple. Seniors and faculty soon addressed the school in morning "chapels," which evolved into a "central rite of passage" for students--pivotal, powerful "Who am I?" experiences described as "saying hello to adulthood and good-bye to childhood." The chapel is explored as building project, rite of passage, evolving drama, and forum for community. Questions include what is empowerment and what makes environments empowering, experientially, pedagogically, institutionally and architecturally? What does the chapel mean to those those who know and use it? Issues include: the relationship between individuality and community; what makes places meaningful; the chapel in relation to women; finding and speaking one's own voice; the separation of learning from doing; and intersections of gender, class, race and sexual orientation. Empowerment is considered both as individual self-confidence and efficacy and sociopolitical consciousness and intervention. This study also explores alternative, participatory ways of conducting research and writing a dissertation--more a weaving of stories and an evolving saga than a removed, academic treatise. For me this has been an odyssey, challenging and inviting us to be engaged as full human beings, not just thinkers. Qualitative, ethnographic, phenomenological, and participatory, this study uses interview/dialogues, participation, photography, and interaction as opportunities for participants' increasing involvement, control, and appropriation. The project should interest the public, educators, architects, environmental designers, historians, anthropologists, community activists, and participatory/action researchers. This study is not simply rational. I hope my heart, C.A.'s heart, and the rhythm of the chapel's steady pulse come through.

This dissertation seeks to answer two questions. First, why is an introductory sociology course offered in only some high schools? Second, what are the larger historical, intellectual, and structural forces that have shaped and currently shape the content and objectives of high school sociology courses, and how have they exerted an influence? The first question has been answered only once before and the second has never been asked. Regarding the first, I argue that teacher changes and shortages, students' needs and desires, ongoing curriculum revision, the movement toward standardized testing, and the school budget all play a role in determining whether sociology is offered in a particular school from one year to the next. My attempt to answer the second research question brings together the subfields of the sociology of sociology and the scholarship of teaching and learning. I demonstrate that teachers' decisions about course content and objectives are not entirely idiosyncratic, as is often implicitly assumed in the scholarship of teaching and learning. I show instead that decisions about the content and objectives of the high school course are the products of both individual and contextual factors, thus bringing the sociology of sociology's insights to bear on teaching. Specifically, I document how two groups have tried to shape the high school sociology course. On one hand, teachers have consistently taught social problems with an eye toward developing good citizens. Their formulation of content and objectives has been shaped by the historical and social context, curriculum pressures, the textbook market, students' needs and desires, and the limits of their own backgrounds and educations. Sociologists, on the other hand, have pushed for scientific sociology in the high school classroom, especially since 1960. They have been influenced by the persistent tension within sociology between science and reform, by the New Social Studies movement of the 1960s, and by the activities and position of the American Sociological Association. I conclude with practical recommendations for bridging the historical gap between teachers and sociologists. I also recommend paying more empirical and theoretical attention to the study of teaching sociology generally.

<p> Principals are increasingly responsible for ensuring an equitable learning environment in their schools. The development of a disposition to meet this responsibility is an under-researched area. This study was a qualitative narrative analysis of the stories of five white, female, elementary principals from the same suburban school district who were interviewed to understand where their disposition may originate and how their disposition manifests itself in their self-reported decisions and actions. The following question became the focus of the research: What do principals report are the factors that support or challenge their decision-making regarding students and families with diverse characteristics? A qualitative inquiry method with an emphasis on narrative analysis was used to identify themes. These themes were illuminated using the lens of Bourdieu's sociological theory of habitus and field. Principal narratives of equity fell into two broad thematic areas of capital and management. Principals who participated in this study build social capital, which is then used as a currency to create and support equity with the other habitus and structures on the field. According to the analysis of the data, the stances principals take to provide equity include a managerial orientation. The analyses of the narratives reveal that where principals stand for equity is evident through the stories they tell rather than their statements of what they believe and value. This study suggests that building upon the stories of personal experiences may be a good starting point for professional development around issues of equity. These opportunities could strengthen a principal's ability to both understand and articulate a concrete set of self-expectations for equity. Additionally, Bourdieu's theory of habitus and field presents a way to understand a principal's actions and intentions on their field of work. </p>

<p> Students who are relegated to highly stigmatized, remedial alternative education settings experience forces of school pushout and institutional neglect along their educational and life trajectories. This qualitative research study explores the ways in which former continuation high school students negotiated, made meaning of, and resisted processes of school pushout and broader experiences of institutional neglect. Through life history interviews with recent graduates of a California continuation high school, this study examines the impact of systemic injustice on students&rsquo; educational and life trajectories and highlights the ways in which these students exercise agency and engage in practices of resilient resistance along their path toward high school graduation. Guided by the theoretical frameworks of symbolic violence and Critical Race Theory constructs of student resistance, this study reveals how structures of oppression impact the lives of continuation high school students and illuminates the voices of marginalized students who are seldom heard in the existing body of research.</p>