UMD Theses and Dissertations
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Item The Black Power Classroom: An Ethnomusicological Approach to Teaching African Heritage Awareness Through Music Education in Botswana and African America(2019) Cunningham, Maya; Witzleben, John L; Music; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The Black Power Classroom uses ethnomusicology to understand how culturally responsive music education is used to teach African American and Botswanan children their African heritage. I first interrogate the coloniality of minstrelsy and the distortion of Black America’s African heritage that warrants the need for African heritage to be taught to Black American children. I then overview the historical/contemporary agendas for Black education, and how music education fits into these agendas, by comparing those of African Americans to those of the “The State,” which operates as a colonial actor. I then analyze the use of culturally responsive instruction in a music program for African American fourth graders in Washington DC, drawing from Gaunt’s theory of kinetic orality. Finally, an analysis of how traditional music is used to teach cultural identity in Botswana elucidates the key components of a culturally responsive music education model that could be effective for African American students.Item Octavia's Brood: Riding the Ox Home(2016) Bowden Abadoo, Meghan Kamiche; Phillips, Miriam; Dance; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Octavia’s Brood: Riding the Ox Home was an evening-length dance concert performed October 15 and 16, 2015, at the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center in partial fulfillment of the Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of Maryland’s School of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies. Inspired by the prophetic envisioning of Harriet Tubman and Octavia Butler, it explores race, otherness, ownership and story-telling from the perspective of Black women’s dancing bodies and histories. Borrowing its title from Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements, it utilizes visionary story-telling, where science fiction provides a foundation for imagining socially just worlds inhabited by richly diverse protagonists. This paper is a written account of the research by which I composed this immersive dance event, leaping back and forth through time, landing between antebellum Maryland of the mid-1800s and an unknown place at an unknown date of a foreseen future.Item The Contributions of Expectancy-Value Theory and Special Education Status to Reading Achievement of African American Adolescents(2011) Andrusik, Katryna Natalya; Speece, Deborah L; Special Education; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In light of concerns about decreased academic motivation among adolescents and the subsequent lack of achievement, particularly among African American students and those with learning disabilities, this study examined adolescent motivation for academic achievement and future course enrollment intentions. Expectancy-value motivation has been extensively explored with European American adolescents without learning disabilities; the associated constructs of this theory are positively correlated with GPA, classroom-based assessments, and future course enrollment and employment. Limitations of the extant literature included homogeneous samples, limited reliability and validity of academic achievement measures, and a lack of control of extraneous variables. Using exploratory factor analysis and structural equation modeling, I found that the expectancies for success/perceived ability, importance value, and intrinsic value latent factor models of expectancy-value motivation for a sample of urban African American adolescents do not differ from those for their European American peers; however, the constructs themselves have different relationships with the two dependent variables, reading achievement on a standardized assessment and future enrollment intentions. Motivation latent factors did not predict reading achievement when SES, prior achievement, and gender were in the analysis. However, all motivation constructs were significant predictors when enrollment intentions constituted the dependent variable. Additionally, the IEP reading goal variable (learner status) was not a significant predictor of either dependent variable. These results are discussed in light of the limitations of the study. Finally, areas for further research are suggested.Item Embracing mathematics identity in an African-centered school: Construction and interaction of racial and mathematical student identities(2010) Nyamekye, Farhaana; Chazan, Daniel; Curriculum and Instruction; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)ABSTRACT Title of Document: EMBRACING MATHEMATICS IDENTITY IN AN AFRICAN-CENTERED SCHOOL: CONSTRUCTION AND INTERACTION OF RACIAL AND MATHEMATICAL STUDENT IDENTITIES Farhaana Nyamekye, Ph.D, 2010 Directed By: Associate Professor of Mathematics Education, Daniel Chazan, Curriculum and Instruction This dissertation is a report of a multiple case study of eight seventh grade African American students attending an African-centered school. This African-centered school is attended solely by children of African descent and adheres to a system of African cultural values, focusing on culture, relationships, and academic excellence. The report provides in depth case analyses of two of these students as they navigate their multiple identities. The foci of the analyses are on the students' construction of their math learner identities and racial identities and on their construction of both of these identities taken together. Phenomenological variant of ecological systems theory illuminates the challenges and supports that these students encounter in constructing their identities. The mathematics and racial socialization practices within the school and within the students' home environments are documented within this report as support mechanisms that provide opportunities for the students to construct identities as African American mathematics learners. The findings suggest that academic spaces that reduce the stress of racism and help students to value their racial identity may be particularly important spaces for other African American mathematics learners. The findings also have positive implications for the implementation of African and African American cultural practices and programs that can help other African American learners to positively construct identities as both African Americans and math learners. The documented findings raise critical questions about whether other African American learners that share the historical legacy of enslavement with the students in this study would benefit from African-centered schooling, despite the heterogeneity within this population.Item FROM HOMEBOY TO AMERICAN ICON: IMAGE TRANSFORMATION OF MALCOLM X, 1965-1999.(2010) Gill, Lisa Marie; Parks, Sheri L; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation examines and analyzes the transformation of Malcolm X's image from the representation as the "Angriest Black Man in America," to the intellectual, political American leader of the 1990s. Malcolm was recognized for his outspoken defense of oppressed black and poor people, his leadership in Islam, and transformation from an ostracized political figure to an authority on the plight of black Americans. Recently, X has become a symbol of American individuality, a champion of human rights. Seen by contemporaries and future admirers as the quintessential black man, X's image has been appropriated to represent facets of black male identity to mainstream culture, rendering it consumable to a variety of groups. This dissertation contributes to the evaluation of Malcolm's work in the civil rights movement and his resulting image. It does so in two important ways; first, it positions X as a theoretician on the black diasporic experience and secondly, it significantly cites the importance of X's connection to the African diaspora and his work to connect blacks to that diaspora. By accounting for the images produced by Malcolm himself, it then chronicles the materialization of new images by black nationalists, scholars, black youth culture of the 1990s, Spike Lee, the Shabazz family, and mainstream popular culture beginning shortly after the assassination of Malcolm in 1965 and continuing until the end of the twentieth century. Unlike the images of other civil rights leaders, X's image was contested when appropriated by the mainstream. Analysis of major developments, (X, the postal stamp of 1999, material produced during the 1990s, etc.), will demonstrate how the image circulated from the sole possession of the black community to American mainstream culture. The battle for control over the representations of his image and its meanings can be construed as the struggle between retaining a black champion and creating an American icon. Ultimately, the goal was to establish Malcolm as the ideal black man, who not only predicted the trajectory of the movement, but also established and demonstrated racial pride in black American manhood, in spite of the toll that this position took on his life.Item Spirituals And Gospel Music Performance Practice: A Dual Curriculum That Bridges The Cultural Divide(2010) Jefferson, Robert Lee; Mabbs, Linda; Music; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This study explores methods in which the teaching of Gospel Music and Spirituals can be used as a conduit to bridge ethnic, cultural, and racial divides that are often found in American society. After working with various cultural and racial groups within religious and secular circles, the researcher has observed that individual cultures can have very distinct and opposite approaches to learning music, even in the United States, which some consider to be a cultural "melting pot." More specifically, there are cultures that embrace the written or visual learning tradition, while others lean more heavily toward the aural or oral learning tradition. As a result, the perceived differences deriving from these two opposite learning traditions can often create both unconscious and conscious divisions among various cultural and ethnic groups. However, using teaching techniques and performance practices related to both Gospel Music and Spirituals (which use different although related learning approaches), one can create an opportunity to bridge the gap between the aural and visual learning traditions and can create an environment ripe for intra-cultural and cross-cultural communication. This dissertation studied two separate groups of individuals; one group from the visual cultural learning tradition and one group from the aural cultural learning tradition. Both groups were taught music through the process of either an aural or visual process (or in some cases, by a combination of both), and their behavioral responses were observed during rehearsals. The results of these observations are used to create an outline for curricular approaches to teaching groups from opposing learning traditions, utilizing the opportunity that this presents not only to bridge the divide which often exists between individuals from different learning traditions, but also to offer a way to address ethnic and cultural divides.Item Girlhood in African American Literature 1827-1949(2010) Wright, Nazera Sadiq; Washington, Mary Helen; Peterson, Carla L; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)ABSTRACT Title of Dissertation: GIRLHOOD IN AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERATURE, 1827-1949 Nazera Sadiq Wright, Doctor of Philosophy, 2010 Dissertation directed by: Professor Carla L. Peterson Professor Mary Helen Washington Department of English This dissertation examines African American literature through the social construction and the allegorical function of girlhood. By exploring the figure of the black girl between 1827--when the nation's first black newspaper, Freedom's Journal, was published and slavery was abolished in New York--and 1949--the publication date of Annie Allen, Gwendolyn Brooks's Pulitzer Prize-winning collection poems, I argue that representations of the girl in African American literature are based on behavioral codes that acquired political meaning in print culture before and after Emancipation. In the canonical and rarely-read texts I examine, the varied images of the black girl as orphaned and unruly, educated and mothered, functioned as models for black citizenship. The Introduction argues that Lucy Terry and Phillis Wheatley become foundational models of intellectual achievement through their growth from slave girl to poet. Chapter One, "Antebellum Girlhood in African American Literature" argues that articles selected by black male editors of Freedom's Journal and Colored American, and works by black women writers, such as Maria Stewart's "The First Stage of Life" (1861), Harriet Wilson's Our Nig (1859) and Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) adopted the black girl from the LucyTerry/ Phillis Wheatley paradigm and appropriated her image to represent their own, specific citizenship pursuits. In Chapter Two, "Black Girlhood Post-Emancipation," the racially-indeterminate girl figure in Christian Recorder stories, Mrs. N. F. Mossell's advice columns published in the New York Freeman, and Frances Harper's depiction of Annette in Trial and Triumph (1888-1889) represented the newly emancipated black girl figure and her grooming for racial uplift efforts. Chapter Three, "Race Girls in Floyd's Flowers," argues that in Silas X. Floyd's conduct book, Floyd's Flowers; or Duty and Beauty for Colored Children (1905), black girl figures return to the domestic sphere and defer to black male leadership due to an increase in violence at the turn of the century. Chapter Four, "Black Girlhood in Gwendolyn Brooks's Annie Allen (1949)," argues that Gwendolyn Brooks's modernist poems offer an alternative to the conduct manual by privileging the black girl's interiority and freeing her from an instructive role.Item White Guilt: Race, Gender, Sexuality and Emergent Racisms in the Contemporary United States(2010) Grzanka, Patrick Ryan; Parks, Sheri L; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)White guilt is a culturally and historically contingent emotion rooted in White people's recognition of unearned privileges and collective and/or individual roles in the perpetuation of racism. Situated within the context of neoliberal multiculturalism, this interdisciplinary dissertation investigates contemporary manifestations of White guilt in popular discourse and the lived experiences of young White adults in the United States. As a form of identity-based affect, White guilt may aid in the development of antiracist White people; however, because White guilt retains a focus on the White subject, it may offer limited potential to transform social relationships and systems of inequity. Three interrelated studies compose the methodological work of this project and undertake the task of empirically grounding White guilt so that we may better understand its forms, limits and consequences. The first study interrogates journalists' coverage of three moments of controversy in the early 21st century: Anderson Cooper's "emotional" reporting during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the Don Imus-Rutgers University basketball scandal and Isaiah Washington's firing from Grey's Anatomy after allegedly calling a co-star a "faggot." Reporting on these episodes illustrates how multiculturalism manages and defers racial guilt and shame while simultaneously eliding the intersections of identity that structure experience. The second study is the creation and initial validation of a survey-based measure of White guilt (the Test of White Guilt and Shame or "TOWGAS"), which attempts to reconcile several limitations of extant research on racial affect - namely, the persistent conflation of guilt and shame. The third study centralizes the intersectionality of White people's experiences through in-depth interviews with 10 White college students. A modified grounded theory approach is used to explore how gender, sexuality and race together influence how these White people a) perceive Imus, Washington and Cooper and b) conceptualize their own Whiteness and the feelings associated with racism and inequality. Finally, the concept of "emergent racisms" is posited as a critical, working framework with which to investigate White racial affect. This theoretical approach emphasizes the complex interactions between identity, affect, attitudes and context (i.e., situation) that co-constitute the phenomenology of White guilt and shame.Item Theatrical Militants: Stage For Action and Social Activist Performance, 1943 - 1953(2010) Dail, Chrystyna Marta; Nathans, Heather S; Theatre; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Stage For Action began as "Stage Door to Action" in December 1943 under the leadership of a twenty-three year old radio performer, Perry Miller, along with fellow radio actress Donna Keath, the stage actress Berilla Kerr, and Peggy Clark, a soon-to-be prominent Broadway designer. Officially changing their name in March of 1944, Stage For Action was described in newspapers as a group which "dramatiz[es] current problems and [is] patterned after the Living Newspaper technique." From their original theme of supporting the war effort to tackling post-war issues of atomic warfare, racism, anti-Semitism, and the witch-hunts of the House Committee on Un-American Activities (commonly referred to as HUAC), Stage For Action became the prevailing social activist theatre group of the 1940s. They operated as one of the "opposing currents of dynamic progress and static conservatism...with its militant program...tak[ing] the theatre to the people when the people can't come to the theatre." By the time of Walter S. Steele's July 21, 1947 testimony before the HUAC, Stage For Action had created their own performance aesthetic, operated in at least nine cities, initiated a training school in New York City, and was funded by or had a direct connection to the Jewish People's Fraternal Order, the CIO Teachers' Union, the United Electrical Workers, the Furriers Union, Transport Union, National Maritime Union, and Department Store Workers' Union. This dissertation constructs Stage For Action as a social activist theatre that drew on the practices of the social activist and Workers' Theatres of the 1930s but utilized events specific to their historical moment in order to educate and activate their audiences. The dissertation moves freely between analyses of political, social, and theatrical events in order to address how Stage For Action directly commented on its entire cultural moment, its "norms, values, beliefs, and ways of life"; combating not only fascism and racism, but also the mainstream or commercial theatrical market through its productions.Item GRACIOUS BUT CARELESS: RACE AND STATUS IN THE HISTORY OF MOUNT CLARE(2010) Moyer, Teresa; Corbin Sies, Mary; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Historic plantation sites continue to struggle with the legacy of slavery and black history, particularly concerning their significance in American culture. Although enslaved persons are erased from the contemporary landscape of Carroll Park in Baltimore, Maryland, the historical and archaeological record preserves their importance to the Carroll family and the plantation called Georgia or Mount Clare. I argue that historic preservation is a form of social justice when underrepresented historical groups are integrated into interpretations of historical house museums and landscapes. Enslaved blacks held essential roles in every aspect of Mount Clare from circa 1730 to 1817. They became culturally American at the intersection of race and status, not only through the practice of their own cultural beliefs and values, but those of elite whites, as well. Focus on white ancestors reveals only part of the history of Mount Clare: I demonstrate that blacks' own achievements cannot be ignored.