Interpersonal communication practices of teachers have been recognized as having a significant impact on the relational dynamics between teachers and students; however, the specific interpersonal communication practices utilized by teachers of urban students are not well understood. Although teacher-student interactions have been studied for many years, the research has not focused on how confirmation and disconfirmation are perceived in urban classroom environments. Furthermore, minimal research exists regarding how perceived confirmation and disconfirmation impacts urban teacher-student relationships. Using a qualitative approach, this study examines the confirming and disconfirming communication practices of teachers from 4 urban charter high schools. In addition, this study examines how the 22 teacher participants and 26 student participants perceive the communication practices as impacting teacher-student relationships. A finding from the data was respect. Both teachers and students identified respect as being the single most critical factor to building teacher-student relationships. Confirming behaviors like honesty/openness, praise/positive feedback, checking for understanding, and calmly correcting behaviors were identified as having a positive impact on the relationship-building process. Disconfirming behaviors such as disrespect, putting students on the spot, sarcasm, and aggressive tone were identified as hindering the relationship-building process. Descriptions of each theme are provided as well as implications for teacher practice and future research. / Urban Education

This dissertation examined the assumptions and motivations that shape teachers’ participation in a service-learning practice and community of practice and how their participation affects their professional practice and identity. Framed by Santoro’s (2013) model of teacher integrity, defined as an educators’ ability to teach in alignment with their commitments, it presents an understanding of challenges to participants’ integrity, and how they mitigate those challenges. Heuristically, this project can be understood as the study of two components conducted using an ethnographic perspective over the course of 16 months: (1) the study of the community of practice and (2) the study of how its characteristics manifest in practice. It involved 100 hours of participant observation, 31 interviews, and the collection of artifact data. Data promote service-learning as a vital pedagogy by shedding light on its potential to sustain urban educators whose integrity is challenged by discourses, policies, and practices that emphasize competition and social efficiency rather than more holistic understandings of education as a civic and social good. Findings show how and why urban educators’ professional and personal commitments are intertwined with beliefs about social justice and democracy. Because of their work with student populations underprivileged and marginalized by systemic situations, meeting students’ social and emotional needs, honoring student voice, and teaching citizenship skills were important to participants. Conditions in their urban schools— a lack of curricular autonomy; insufficient time and resources to meet students’ needs; and deficient support systems— challenged participants commitments. As a result, participants were pushed to participate in service-learning and a service-learning community of practice. In addition, several characteristics of the community of practice pulled participants to participate: a framework for integrating quality service-learning into school- or school district-mandated curriculum; pedagogical and emotional supports specifically needed by urban teachers; and recognition that countered discouragingly negative perceptions of urban teachers. These resources and supports helped urban teachers’ fulfill their professional and personal commitments, validated their work, and sustained them in the profession. / Urban Education

In "Who are You," I narrate seven vignettes of my lived experiences from childhood through the beginning of my Ph. D. I examine how they directly relate to the relationships I build with my students as a teacher in an urban public high school. I deconstruct how my experiences push me to break standard professional teacher boundaries in order to support and advocate for my students. I discuss the realities of my lived experiences and the impact they have had on me personally, educationally, and professionally. I explain my choice for using narrative vignettes tied to the Lewis Carroll novels Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass and their connection with my adolescent and professional experiences. I explain my choice of autoethnography as my method and how I have come to terms with the vulnerability necessary to successfully use this genre of qualitative research while learning about the difficulties and benefits of the method. In "Where Soul Meets Body," I reflect on occurred during those experiences, and how they shaped the person and the teacher I am today. I reflect on the collapse of family, the effects of divorce on my actions, the seeking of solace and emotional repair, the effects of abusive relationships, the changes in my identity, the rebuilding of my identity, and the impact of my lived experiences on my teaching pedagogy. I reflect on the need for transparency and vulnerability in teaching. I explore how the acceptance and realization of my lived experiences has a deep impact on personal pedagogy, practices, and meaningful relationships with students, specifically in an urban school setting. I explore how my personal experiences intertwine with my students' personal experiences and how all teachers need to acknowledge the importance of transparency and vulnerability in their pedagogy. / Doctor of Philosophy / In "Who are You," I narrate seven stories from my life. I begin with my childhood and continue through the beginning of my Ph. D. I look at how they directly relate to the relationships I build with my students as a teacher in a public high school. I take apart how my experiences help me to support and advocate for my students. I discuss how my experiences influenced me personally, educationally, and professionally. I write about why I chose to use stories and why I used the Lewis Carroll novels Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass to connect them with my adolescent and professional experiences. I explain why I chose to use a research method that is completely a reflection of myself. I also discuss how I have come to terms with being vulnerable necessary to successfully when writing about oneself. In "Where Soul Meets Body," I look at what ac during those experiences, and how they shaped the person and the teacher I am today. I reflect on how my family changed and how my parent's divorce caused a change in my personality and actions. I also look at how I began to look for relationships I thought I had lost due to my parent's divorce. I explore abusive relationships and how I was able to heal from those relationships. I talk about the need for teachers to be open with who they are as teachers. I write about how my life often is similar to what my students experience and how it is helpful if all teachers include self-reflection as part of their teaching practice. urban school setting.

Anxiety and depression have increased for adolescent youth, particularly since the pandemic. For certain students, this anxiety and depression connects to trauma because of inequity and bias in schools. This qualitative study examined successful urban middle school teachers and their perspectives on conditions they created for hope in their classrooms and ways they created hope for themselves. Eight middle school teachers who taught humanities shared their insights through semi-structured interviews. Findings aligned with pedagogical practices the teachers used that centered hope and voice for students: culturally responsive practices, relational practices, and justice-oriented practices. These specific teachers cared deeply about their students and worked to create classrooms that were safe and grounded in community. Participants also cultivated specific personal practices as a way to remain hopeful.

Stereotype threat (Steele & Aronson, 1995) refers to the risk of confirming a negative stereotype about one’s group in a particular performance domain. The theory assumes that performance in the stereotyped domain is most negatively affected when individuals are more highly identified with the domain in question. As federal law has increased the importance of standardized testing at the elementary level, it can be reasonably hypothesized that the standardized test performance of African American children will be depressed when they are aware of negative societal stereotypes about the academic competence of African Americans. This sequential mixed-methods study investigated whether the standardized testing experiences of African American children in an urban elementary school are related to their level of stereotype awareness. The quantitative phase utilized data from 198 African American children at an urban elementary school. Both ex-post facto and experimental designs were employed. Experimental conditions were diagnostic and non-diagnostic testing experiences. The qualitative phase utilized data from a series of six focus group interviews conducted with a purposefully selected group of 4 African American children. The interview data were supplemented with data from 30 hours of classroom observations. Quantitative findings indicated that the stereotype threat condition evoked by diagnostic testing depresses the reading test performance of stereotype-aware African American children (F[1, 194] = 2.21, p < .01). This was particularly true of students who are most highly domain-identified with reading (F[1, 91] = 19.18, p < .01). Moreover, findings indicated that only stereotype-aware African American children who were highly domain-identified were more likely to experience anxiety in the diagnostic condition (F[1, 91] = 5.97, p < .025). Qualitative findings revealed 4 themes regarding how African American children perceive and experience the factors related to stereotype threat: (1) a narrow perception of education as strictly test preparation, (2) feelings of stress and anxiety related to the state test, (3) concern with what “others” think (racial salience), and (4) stereotypes. A new conceptual model for stereotype threat is presented, and future directions including implications for practice and policy are discussed.

Effective school leadership is at the center of educational reform in urban environments. Constituents expect school leaders to transform under-performing schools. However, the educational leadership field relies on traditional ideologies that largely ignore Black principals’ experiences and exclude their voices from politically engaged conversations on leadership. The purpose of this qualitative study was to explore four contemporary Black school leaders’ perspectives of their practices in urban environments. Cultural Historical Activity Theory and Distributed Leadership Theory informed the multiple case study. I employed ethnographic data collection methods of prolonged engagement, interviews (formal and informal), shadowing, documents and artifacts, on-line discussions, field and reflexive journals, and memos, which allowed for crystallization of the data. I adopted and adapted grounded theory and analytic induction to interpret and re-present the Black school leaders’ educational philosophical beliefs, perspectives of traditional preparation, and conceptualizations of leadership that influenced their practices. The findings revealed that the four contemporary Black school leaders from middle and high schools held belief systems that challenged traditional structures and differed from White majority leaders’ beliefs, which aligned with white supremacy and deficit ideologies. The participants thought differently about the purpose of education for all students, especially marginalized groups. These thoughts helped shape their conceptualizations of effective school leadership as an alternative to traditional canons. Their leadership ‘model’ afforded them the ethical latitude to challenge the political sociocultural structure of ‘minimum competency’ standards to afford their students ‘high performance’ school communities. The findings also highlighted traditional leadership programs as ineffective and irrelevant for preparing aspirants to affect substantive changes in contextualized school environments, particularly when the classroom discourse obfuscates issues of equity, race, class, and cultural diversity. Furthermore, the findings revealed participants’ practices, undergirded with moral imperative, humanism, and social justice perspectives, were strategically implemented to dismantle unjust structures. In so doing, they were able to provide students equitable school conditions that allowed them to learn to their highest capacities. Indeed there is the urgent need to include race, ethnic, class, and culturally diverse perspectives in program preparations, policies, and theoretical paradigms to help shape how we think and thus practice school leadership.

Several studies and local accounts have documented elevated levels of air pollution and toxics on or near US public schools. The low cost of brownfield lands and lands near major sources of air pollution have made siting schools on these areas enticing. Histories of using toxic chemicals in building materials explain their presence in school environments. The impacts to academic achievement associated with air pollution and exposure to lead as well as the health implications of regular, high exposure to air pollution and toxic chemicals necessitate policy changes. In this paper, the extent of these health and achievement impacts will be analyzed along with the current work being done by government and nongovernmental organizations to mitigate pollution in public schools. This study will also offer policy recommendations to address these issues and advance environmental equity in public schools.

The purpose of this qualitative study was to explore how youth culture influences the attitudes and motivations of African-American junior college students who have aspirations to complete postsecondary credentials to advance their socioeconomic status but do not persist. In this study, youth culture was defined as the values, norms, and practices shared by African-American youth between the ages of 18-24, indicative of the way they chose to live life and make decisions. The independent variables were Academic Self-Concept, Student Educational Experience, College Bridge Programs, Academic Advisement, Faculty Involvement and Interaction, Extracurricular Activities, Youth Culture, Family Support, Socioeconomic Status, Black Media, and Social Media; the dependent variable was student persistence. The specific tradition of inquiry was the comparative case study approach because it dealt with the exploration of cases in a real life setting over time through detailed, in-depth data collection involving multiple sources of information. The researcher also utilized interpretive/theoretical frameworks to guide the study. The study took place at two public colleges within the University System of Georgia, one rural and the other urban. The participants included 12 students, 2 academic advising directors, and 2 faculty members. The study consisted of three types of instrumentation—interviews, direct observations, and focus groups. To analyze data, the researcher interpreted and coded statements from the interviews and focus groups from which themes were developed. Significant statements were also clustered into defined themes. The results substantiated and expounded upon the relationships between the independent and dependent variables. Using the qualitative data collected, the researcher created an Analysis Matrix organized with the three data sources, 20 themes and 5 categories. The researcher found that youth enrolled in college have a strong desire to persist but encounter many internal and external pressures which make persistence to graduation challenging. Although colleges may be equipped with the tools and resources necessary to promote persistence, many are deemed inappropriate to the needs of African- American students. The conclusions drawn from the findings suggest unlike their majority counterparts, many of these students spend their first semester trying to untangle feelings of belonging and fitting into college culture.

This qualitative study examined principals’ and teachers’ perceptions regarding retaining teachers in a large urban school system. This study was based on the premise that once teachers are recruited into an urban school, genuine support (conceptual and instructional) is needed for them to be retained in that type of setting. Retaining highly qualified teachers in urban schools is integral for student achievement and can relieve the financial strain for school districts. Studies have found that when teachers reach their fifth year of teaching, many leave the profession for various reasons, and most never return. To ensure the validity of the study, the triangulation method was deemed most appropriate and the instruments used to gather the data were; questionnaires and focus groups. The study was conducted in one of the largest urban school districts in the metropolitan Atlanta area. Three elementary Title I schools with relatively low (CCPRI) scores per Georgia’s Department of Education and similar demographics were selected to participate. The study required that all participants have more than two years of experience in an urban school. Collectively, 3 principals and 82 teachers responded to the questionnaires and 18 teachers participated in the focus groups. Based on the findings, teachers leave the large urban school system because of the lack of quality instruction feedback, teacher support, and teacher classroom management in their schools. It was found that it is difficult to retain teachers of a demographic (age and gender per the study). Data collection also revealed that intensive induction/ mentoring programs provided throughout the school year should be offered by the district. The conclusions drawn from the findings suggest that principals and teachers have contrasting perceptions of why teachers leave their schools. Principals felt that they were working to build capacity in their schools to improve professional relationships with the staff, to increase cultural awareness, provide meaningful and authentic teacher quality instructional feedback, and effective teacher support. Teachers felt the need to have additional necessary resources (mentors from the district and funding for targeted professional development) to retain them in urban schools.

The goal of this study was to ascertain student and teacher perceptions of positive behavioral interventions and supports (PBIS) effectiveness as based on PBIS tiers and other select variables: school discipline, school safety, school climate, student acceptance of PBIS reward system and administrators’ implementation of PBIS policy. Through a Pearson r correlation, analysis of variance (ANOVA), and regression test based on survey results, this study revealed which variables have the greatest significance on PBIS effectiveness. Based on the findings, it was concluded that all variables: school discipline, school safety, school climate, student acceptance of PBIS reward system had a significant effect. Qualitative data of this study supported the findings of the strategical results. Also, it is noted that administrators’ implementation of discipline policy shown to be significant as a result of the qualitative data. Recommendations were suggested for school leaders, district leaders, policy makers and future research.