Browsing by Subject "Inclusivity"

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
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    Amplifying Counternarratives: Institutionally Supported Student Voice(s) and the Impacts on E12 Practices & Policies
    (2022-05) Walsh, Shaun
    Over the past two decades, efforts to amplify student voice have proliferated as a project or process to increase institutional engagement with young people. Institutionally supported student voice is generally distinguished from, yet not independent of, student activism and youth activism. The designs, outcomes, and impacts of student voice efforts vary across institutions and systems. In many instances, young people are tokenized by student voice efforts that essentialize “student” as a monolithic identity, dictate adult-controlled input, and lack power-sharing. In other spaces, efforts to systematically amplify student voices actively resist essentialization and tokenization while attempting to collaboratively build inclusive institutional policy and practices. In rare moments, institutionally supported efforts to include student voice may facilitate a strategic disruption of existing power structures, whereby young people and adults co-construct meaning to dismantle systemic educational oppression. This paper assumes that the goal of institutionally supported student voice projects is not simply to increase student engagement but rather to proactively alter the logic and system of schooling. Existing literature falls short of examining the dynamics of student voice by essentializing student subjectivity and maintaining binary concepts of power.Through a unique case study of an institutionally supported student voice effort, this paper analyzes constructions, intentions and perceived impacts of publicly presented student counternarratives. This paper applies relationality, as the embedded theoretical framework to provide greater insight into the complexity of institutionally supported student voice(s) as a response to, or interruption of, schooling as a saturated site of power. This study illuminates how one counternarrative can be carried forward, re-told, amplified and re-framed to challenge multiple aspects of schooling as a saturated site of power. Further, findings from this study suggest that amplifying student voices through institutionally supported structures, coupled with adult willingness to share power, can influence change toward more equitable, inclusive and just educational institutions.
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    Claiming Space: Older Adult Students’ Lived Experience and Sense of Belonging on an Age-Friendly University Campus
    (2023-07) Baig, Farah
    The over 65 population will reach 77 million by 2034 in the United States—a mere eleven years from now (Vespa, 2018). Aging demographics in the United States is part of a much larger global phenomenon of population aging. As such there has been a universal push to meet the specific needs of older adult learners (UNESCO Institute for Lifelong Learning, 2022). This dissertation, using a multi-methods case study approach, examines the intergenerational learning experiences of older adult students at a large public Age-Friendly University (AFU) in the midwestern region of the United States, the University of Minnesota. The goal of this research is twofold, namely 1) to facilitate a greater understanding of the lived experiences of these older adult students (primarily aged 62+) who have chosen to enroll in classes alongside 18–22-year-old students and 2) to determine, from the perspective of older adult students, the university’s progress toward realizing two of the ten age-friendly principles outlined by the AFU Global Network. The two principles I focus on are 1) to encourage the participation of older adults in all the core activities of the university, including educational and research programs and 2) to promote intergenerational learning to facilitate the reciprocal sharing of expertise between learners of all ages. Using Strayhorn’s (2019) conceptualization of college students’ sense of belonging as my conceptual framework, I explore the following research questions: 1) How do older adults participating in traditional college/university courses characterize their lived experience on AFU campuses? 2) How do these older students describe their ‘sense of belonging’ to these institutions? 3) What role does a sense of belonging to the campus community play in an older student’s ‘successful’ college/university experience? To date, there remains a significant gap in scholarship that directly engages with older adult students about their experiences on higher education campuses (Cannon et al., 2023; Chesser et al., 2020; Lim et al., 2023). The results of this study help to fill that striking gap in the literature. The study reveals that older adult student success is defined by multiple factors including individual preparedness, intergenerational engagement, experiences of joy, a sense of unbounded opportunity, and institutional supports that foster a sense of belonging to campus. With these findings as a foundation, I introduce the Voices of Older Adult Students (VOAS) action model along with substantive steps that can be adopted by other universities to nurture campus environments that promote older adult students’ sense of belonging and contribute to their overall collegiate success.
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    Engaging Elderly Theatre Patrons: Identifying Strategies that are Good for Patrons and Good for the Theatres
    (2014-06-06) Radis-McCluskey, Holly
    Theatres have a vital resource in elderly patrons, which if properly accessed, leads to assuring the engagement of future generations in the arts. This paper explores the different ways theatres should view elderly patrons and how theatres can engage them through technology and analysis of data. Effective collaboration and inventive methods create an environment enriching these evolving lives. The paper demonstrates the important benefits of art engagement for elderly patrons. My research found a desire among arts organizations to understand that engaging the elderly and leveraging the interaction between technology and arts effectively expands arts’ reach and captures these benefits.