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Browsing by Subject "Critical ethnography"

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
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    Expectations, socialization and safe spaces: an exploration of the experiences of middle school students with disabilities
    (2014-05) Johnson, Lisa Ann
    Historically, disability has been understood as a strictly individualized medical experience and considered a deficit. The person with a disability needed to be treated or rehabilitated by professionals. Recently, the social model of disability has offered a different perspective, one that situates disability within a social context. The "problem" of disability does not reside within an individual but instead within the social structures, policies and environment that create unnecessary barriers for a person. These barriers certainly can be found in our schools, and this study explored how one rural middle school, recognized regionally as "doing great things for students with disabilities," responded to the social and academic needs of its special education population. This year-long ethnographic study began in the summer of 2011 when I began meeting with school personnel to learn the norms of the special education program. During the school year, I was present four to five full days per week. Data collection methods included participation observation in formal spaces (classrooms) and informal spaces (cafeteria, hallways, recess and field trips), individual and small group interviews and document collection and analysis. While many students and staff made this study possible, my focal participants included 18 students in grades five through eight, four parents, many teachers and aides and two school administrators. I focused on three areas of interest. The first was related to the school's use of formal curriculum for educating "about the other" (Kumashiro, 2002) that took the form of a disability unit. Students "put on" disabilities during simulations, completed research and gave speeches related to the medical nature of disability. This succeeded in reaffirming traditional stereotypes of disability as a strictly medical problem or personal tragedy. A second focus was on the ways expectations for students with disabilities were communicated through the students' access to meaningful, high quality instruction and in the ways staff talked to and about students with disabilities. In many instances, students experienced "dumbed down" instruction, if they received instruction at all, that did not meet their individual needs. In other situations, students were talked about in violent ways that indicated some teachers' perceptions that students with disabilities were not capable of a meaningful existence. A final area of focus explored the unlikely safe space that occurred in a detention classroom. Students gathered, by choice, to support one another and figure out what it meant to be marginalized in this school. This work responds to a call for research done by researchers who are themselves disabled with children and teens who are disabled and has implications for how we think about and teach students with disabilities in our schools.
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    Remnants of Hope: (Re) member, (Re) claim, (Re) new
    (2023) Kpetay, Shakita
    School closure is one of the most controversial issues in education. Cities such as Chicago, Philadelphia, Detroit, New York City, and New Orleans have closed a large number of schools at one time while opening the doors of many charter schools (Buras, 2013; Lipman, 2012; Stovall, 2016; Watkins, 2012). Remnants of Hope: (Re) member, (Re) claim, and (Re) new is a critical ethnohistorical study that centers the experiences of students and educators who attended a public school that experienced school restructuring and later closure. Drawing from the Black heretical tradition, neoliberalism, and school closures, this dissertation examines how students and educators make sense of the school restructuring, closure, and highlights the ways that the political economy continues to shape education opportunities for Black/African American communities. Through archival analysis and interviews with students and educators who attended or worked at a school that was impacted by school closure, I explore the processes and problems associated with teaching and learning in these communities. I found that school closures are not just a one-time occurrence. It is a process that is impacted by race, gender, class, and geography. These closures can also lead to a disruption of community bonds and increased violence. I argue that scholars, educators, and policymakers need to ignite their critical historical collective consciousness and use intersectionality in the form of memory work to understand modern-day school closures and their impact on students and educators, more specifically Black/African American communities.
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    Schooling culturally relevant pedagogy: one story about tension and transformation
    (2013-05) Mason, Ann Mogush
    The need for multifaceted analyses of the relationship between how the United States acknowledges racism and how schooling can be structured to mitigate its negative impacts has never been greater, especially given the rising and often simplistic attention to the racial “achievement gap.” In suburban, elite Pioneer City, a series of initiatives I refer to as “the transformation” aimed to eliminate the racial achievement gap in that school district through simultaneous efforts to redistribute students from a racially and economically isolated elementary school and to train all district staff in a particular brand of culturally relevant pedagogy (CRP; Ladson-Billings, 1995). In this yearlong study, I used critical ethnographic methods to explore some tensions between a goal of systemic change and the reproductive forces at play in schools. My findings complicate preexisting ways of theorizing how CRP can be part of practical efforts to transform schooling and they identify new possibilities for CRP as a way to reenvision teaching and teacher education toward deep and enduring change.