Browsing by Subject "Critical Pedagogy"

Now showing 1 - 7 of 7
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    Discussing race and culture in the middle school classroom
    (2009-08) Flynn, Jill Ewing
    While many educators recognize the need for multicultural education in today's diverse schools, some teachers have struggled with how to meaningfully center culture in their teaching practices. This dissertation examines what happens when issues of race and culture are productively taken up in secondary classroom discussions. Eighth grade students of various racial, cultural, and socioeconomic backgrounds were the focus of the research, a year-long qualitative study of English and Social Studies classes with two white teachers where students did work related to race, culture, power, and privilege. To begin, I show how two middle school teachers structured a critical multicultural curriculum. I then explore in greater depth how students responded to this curriculum, particularly a unit called the "Race Discussions." Finally, I closely examine an interaction that occurred during this unit to illustrate the complexities and difficulties of teaching, learning about, and researching matters of race, culture, power, and identity. Findings reveal that as students worked through units defining culture, studying cultural conflicts, and understanding cultural resolution, many of them were able to come to a greater understanding of themselves as racial and cultural beings and of the institutional forces that influence our society. Trends emerged across racial groups; as evidenced in their class participation, interviews, and work samples, African American and bi/multiracial students tended to respond positively, valuing the chance to discuss race and racism with their white peers and share personal stories of discrimination. The reactions of Latino, Asian American, and white students were more varied, ranging from resistance to the idea of white privilege; to feelings of exclusion and guilt; to a sense of racial awakening, including the acceptance of responsibility and empowerment to act. The efforts of these teachers and their students contributes to a growing and important research and teaching dialogue around the successes and dilemmas of critical multicultural practice, helping us to consider how we may--that we must--enact this work in our own ways, in our own classrooms.
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    Educational Expectations in an Urban American Indian Community: A Phenomenological Investigation
    (2017-05) Vertigan Swerdfiger, Jacqueline
    Educational Expectations in an Urban American Indian Community: A Phenomenological Investigation. This investigation uses narrative to explore the educational experiences and expectations of 10 urban, Midwestern United States American Indians. Results include insights into community-based evaluation, suggest an emerging field of Indigenous Educational Evaluation, and offers a model and suggestions that may help guide future evaluations of educational programs serving American Indian students.
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    Educational Migrations: A Critical Narrative Study of Educational Movement in a Rural Southeast Michigan Community.
    (2019-07) Joubert, Ezekiel
    This dissertation is on the formation of educational movement in a rural Southeast Michigan community. I examine black community strategies for engaging in educational processes that involve student movement, to better understand historical struggles for equal education and interrogate the educational structures that reproduce racial capitalist social relations. Drawing from critical educational scholarship, black intellectual thought in education, spatial-economic theories, critical narrative and African American and black studies, I document how twenty black rural residents, ages 21-96, engaged in and imagined school related migrations. I used interviews and locally sourced archival materials to trace the impact of schooling in a racial capitalist society (Robinson, 1983), at the intersections of the rural question, race/racism, social mobility and labor, in a region central to the national imagining of American progress and development. Shaped by the Great Migration and deindustrialization of Metropolitan Detroit, their critical narratives (Goodson & Gill, 2014) demonstrate how school district remapping, choice reforms, vocational training and tracking (ostensible solutions for marginalized communities) contribute to further segregation and structural inequality. I contend that their organizing, collaborations, and art/literary practices provide insights for developing and employing cooperative and collective educational responses to the ways schools participate in social stratification, racial-spatial discrimination, and the uneven redistribution of resources. This research offers pedagogical and curricular implications for transforming and complicating educational discourse and practice that simply associate the movement of predominantly poor and/or black children across neighborhood, district, and county borders with equality and upward mobility.
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    Entwined in the Complex Tapestry of Schooling: The Experience of Being Somali Newcomer Students in Outstate Minnesota High Schools
    (2015-06) Moriarty, Sheila
    Abstract The lives of Somali born high school students are complicated by intersections with both race and religion. They often carry refugee histories of trauma and displacement that are further exacerbated during the resettlement process. Schools are struggling to make the kinds of accommodations that will honor the Somali Muslim identity. This study uses hermeneutic and post-intentional phenomenology to look deeply at the lives of these young people. Bachelard's reverie is used to place the researcher critically within the analysis in an attempt to create a transparent and meaningful look at understanding the complexity of their experiences. Educators are called upon to recognize the hegemonic forces that marginalize these students as well as recognize how these forces are traumatic in their lives. Educators are also encouraged to adopt critical pedagogies that open themselves up to the life experiences of their Somali born students. Keywords: Somali, high school, refugee, critical pedagogy, adolescent trauma, cultural humility, intersectionality, hermeneutic phenomenology, post-intentional phenomenology, Bachelard's phenomenology of the imagination
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    Experiences and Tensions in Justice-Oriented Teacher Education
    (2020-11) Kiesel, ryan
    This paper investigates and interprets the experiences of university students participating in a teacher preparation undergraduate major and initial licensure program. The program contains a mission statement focused on developing a “justice-orientation” in its participants. Through qualitative and interpretive research methodology the researcher and the participants examined moments of tension and conflict experienced in program participation.
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    Page, Stage, Engage: Spoken Word as a Tool for Creating More Critical , Engaging, Social Justice Education Programs
    (2016-05) Tran Myhre, Kyle
    Spoken word and slam poetry - as both practice and culture - share with critical pedagogy an emphasis on asking questions, cultivating dialogue and counter-narratives, critical thinking, valuing personal experience and narratives, making the invisible visible (especially with regards to power), relationship-building through honest and authentic engagement, and collectively creating the community in which we want to live. I am interested in how all of these concepts function within social justice education spaces: first-year orientation and "welcome week" programs, corporate diversity trainings, bystander intervention presentations, online "thinkpieces" and video blogs, and beyond. More specifically, this project explores how spoken word can be a creative intervention to help make social justice education programs not just more engaging , but more critical.
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    Staging education: practices, problems, and potentials of theatre in education.
    (2012-02) Adams, Charles N., Jr.
    Theatre in Education (TIE) emerged in England in 1965 as a complex convergence of conditions that propelled theatre-based performance practices into school settings, ostensibly as a means for enabling radical educational transformation. However, as a set of practices, TIE exists within a set of contradictions, problematics, and occasional lack of reflexivity that can evacuate its potential for radicality. This historical and historiographic study explores the educational terrain in which TIE navigates, the conditions of its emergence and dissemination, and the narratives that frame its repertoire of practices in order to articulate the problems and problematics that make TIE a risky endeavor. Focusing on four aporias of TIE, the study asks if TIE is worth pursuing in the historical conditions of the United States and other nations in the 21st century, particularly in school(ing) sites that employ high-stakes standardized testing as a Foucauldian form of discipline. The study then makes several proposals for directions TIE practitioners must consider if it is to remain relevant as a transformational practice of theatre and education, including a constant engagement with a postmodern notion of ethics, a focus on a Freirean critical performative pedagogy, and the consistent activation of ludic play and ludic space. While looking to numerous TIE programs that span the history of TIE practices for examples and critiques of the problems and potentials of TIE’s practices from a bricolage of critical lenses including performance studies, historiography, postcolonial theory, Foucauldian analysis of power relations, and critical pedagogies, critical analysis in this study is chiefly rooted in specific case studies, including Pow Wow (1973)and Homelands (1984) from Coventry Belgrade TIE, The Giant’s Embrace (2006), Pow Wow: The Power of the Circle (2005), and Living with Macbeth (2002) from Theatr Powys in Wales, With These Wings I Will … (2007) from the Creative Arts Team in New York, and Parry Jus’ Once (1998) from Arts-in-Action in Trinidad and Tobago.