Browsing by Subject "Suburban"

Now showing 1 - 2 of 2
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    Culturally Responsive School Leadership: Educational Leaders' Reflections on Equity Behaviors in Predominantly White Schools
    (2022-04) Krebs, Joshua
    The purpose of this study was to explore school leaders’ perceptions regarding behaviors need to lead change for equity in predominantly White suburban schools. The study was carried out by interviewing 14 school leaders in predominantly White suburban schools with public statements in support of equity. The semi-structured interviews were created using the framework of Culturally Responsive School Leadership (CRSL) behaviors identified by Khalifa, Gooden, and Davis (2016) in their synthesis of the literature. Five themes emerged: (1) Communities Divided, (2) Inappropriate and Ineffective use of Data & Feedback, (3) Structural Barriers to Equity, (4) Staff Resistance, and (5) Whiteness Protecting the Status Quo. The author recommends that school leaders focus on three areas to lead toward a more equitable learning environment: (1) Improving community relations by embracing their role as a public intellectual (Khalifa, 2018), countering false narratives, information sharing, and understanding Whiteness, (2) Using data, community feedback, and student voice more effectively by investing in training, countering deficit ideologies with a focus on cultural strengths, taking direction on needed change from historically marginalized groups, equity audits, and tracking racial harm, and (3) Creating more inclusive policies and practices through professional development that is consistent and comprehensive, proactive messaging, CRSL teams for collaborative walkthroughs, and moving away from traditional grading practices to minimize or eliminate subjectivity.
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    Spaciousness & preference: a study in the perception of density in the suburban residential built environment
    (2013-06) Lilli, Erin Elizabeth
    As the country's population increases, it is worth determining what types of residential settings people currently residing in the low density suburbs environments would prefer- simply because those environments would need to increase their density to mitigate sprawl. To inform the creation of high density residential living, this study seeks to identify specific characteristics of a dense settlement most acceptable to people wanting suburban living. Residential suburban communities, as in the United States, often have low dwelling unit densities, as antidote to the congestion and crowding of the urban core environment. Primarily consisting of single family homes on individual plots of land with private yards and wide streets; these developments are becoming more ubiquitous despite the role of both the automobile and land conversion as major contributors to the high concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The question this study asks is, `what residential physical and spatial configurations are a preferred environmental quality and/or are perceived as low density by people currently living in low density suburban environments?' In other words, can we design a desirable environment that is perceived as low density, while actually utilizing less land area, thus being denser than existing low density counterparts? To investigate this question four residential elements (housing typologies street width, set back depth, and tree coverage) were systematically configured in images of a street scene. These images were the subject of a survey sent to 400 randomly selected inhabitants of Beaverton, Oregon who were asked to choose the images they felt were the most spacious and most preferred from a sets of scenes using discrete choice modeling. Results indicated that the strongest predictors of preference and spaciousness lie in the relationship between tree coverage and setback depth- thus the areas where housing design may be used to increase density.