UMD Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/3
New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a given thesis/dissertation in DRUM.
More information is available at Theses and Dissertations at University of Maryland Libraries.
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Item "You Can't See Me By Looking at Me": Black Girls' Arts-based Practices as Mechanisms for Identity Construction and Resistance(2021) Kaler-Jones, Cierra; Galindo, Claudia; Education Policy, and Leadership; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation explored how eight adolescent Black girls (co-researchers) used arts-based practices in a virtual summer program as mechanisms for identity construction and resistance. Theoretically grounded in Black Feminist Thought, Black Girlhood, and Black Performance Theory, I designed and implemented a virtual summer art program aimed at co-creating a healing-centered space to engage in critical explorations of history, storytelling, and social justice with Black girls. The co-research team participated in the 5-week Black Girls S.O.A.R. (Scholarship, Organizing, Arts, Resistance) program as part of the study. At the end of the program, co-researchers took themes from the sessions and created artwork to present a Community Arts Showcase to their loved ones. I combined performance ethnography (Denzin, 2008; Soyini Madison, 2006) and integrated aspects of youth participatory action research to answer the following research questions: 1) How, if at all, do Black girls use arts-based practices as mechanisms for resistance and identity construction? and 2) What specific attributes of Black girls’ involvement in arts-based programs foster identity construction and acts of resistance? This study employed “two-tiered” (Brown, 2010) qualitative data collection. For the first component, co-researchers and I collected our conversation transcripts from the sessions to create a collaborative artistic production. The second component included my concurrent collection of session observations, field notes, pre-and-post interviews, and artwork to document the co-researchers’ experiences in the program. The data showed that Black girls used arts-based practices to 1) rewrite singular historical narratives of Black history in the standard curriculum; 2) share counter-narratives; 3) heal in and build community out; and 4) dream a better world into existence. Additionally, Black girls named 1) showcasing their work to loved ones; 2) being supported by other Black girls; 3) learning about self and communal care; and 4) reexamining history by centering Black women’s resistance as specific attributes of their involvement in the program that contributed to their identity construction and resistance. This study offers much-needed data on the power and potential of culturally-sustaining, arts-based pedagogy in virtual educational spaces, as well as contributes to the growing body of literature that centers Black girls’ epistemologies in education research.Item PLACE VALUE: A QUALITATIVE STUDY OF BEING A BLACK GIRL IN URBAN MATHEMATICS CLASSROOMS(2020) Fair, Camille; Clark, Lawrence M.; Education Policy, and Leadership; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This qualitative study documents and examines what it is like being in a Black girl body while learning math in urban schools. The ten participants in this study self- identified as Black and female, and they graduated from three high schools in an urban school district in the Northeast between 2017 and 2019. Despite demonstrating excellence in and out of school, participants’ stories were burdened by experiences of exclusion, marginalization and oppression in their K-12 math learning. Drawing on Critical Race Feminism (CRF), a framework used to theorize interlocking oppressional forces, I designed this qualitative study after conducting a pilot program to improve Black girls’ math experiences. Preliminary findings from the pilot study suggest that Black girls’ math experiences and performance outcomes are largely shaped by the extent to which they are given or denied social place and intellectual value in math classrooms. I appropriate the math concept of place value, and I use it as a metaphor in a framework I developed called Human Place Value. This study examines three questions to understand Black girls’ lived experiences in urban math classrooms: 1) How do Black girls face exclusion, marginalization, and other forms of oppression in math classes? 2) How do Black girls identify and recognize negative attitudes and beliefs about their identity in math classes? 3) How do Black girls respond to and navigate their experiences in math classes? I collected personal data about my participants through background questionnaires and one-on-one semi-structured interviews. I analyzed the data using tenets of CRF and classroom interaction frameworks to distill three themes across social place and intellectual value: visibility, positionality and knowledge production. Key findings from the study suggest that being in a Black girl body renders students particularly vulnerable to math marginalization in the form of hostility, maltreatment and instructional neglect. The data collected from the ten participants tell a collective story that warrant consideration for the role Human Place Value plays in teaching and learning that yields disparate mathematical outcomes. This study concludes with a presentation of counternarratives from two participants and cross-case insights that detail implications for theory and practice.