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.
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Item The Development of Students' Understandings of Identity, Inequality, and Service during a Critical International Service Learning Program in the Dominican Republic(2022) Gombin-Sperling, Jeremy Ryan; Klees, Steven J; Education Policy, and Leadership; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)International service learning programs have continued to rise in popularity across U.S. institutions of higher education as a way of offering students comprehensive formats to engage with communities in other countries, learn how social issues of inequality impact people around the world, and strengthen student learning on global issues. However, many of these programs lack a critical perspective, and often struggle or avoid conversations on the power dynamics of service, and, therefore, the potential harm that international service learning courses can cause and reproduce. At the same time, programs that do promote a critical approach to service abroad, fail to address the vital role that social identity plays in these programs (e.g., race, gender, sexuality, nationality, social class, etc.), and often ignore how those dynamics impact the differentiating experiences of students, and how they connect to the social issues community partners face. This dissertation study is an attempt to analyze a critical international service learning program to the Dominican Republic that I and a colleague co-led from 2018-2020. This program intended to offer intervention to both issues of critical awareness and identity dynamics through our integration of intergroup dialogue pedagogy and theory into all aspects of the program. Utilizing qualitative case study methods such as participant interviews, document analysis, and participant observations, I look at the impact that the 2020 version of the course had on 8 of the 11 students that year by analyzing their evolving learning in the areas of social identity, structural inequality, and service, as well as the program components that influenced this learning. Findings from the study overall suggest that participation in the program helped push students to reevaluate numerous aspects of their identity across areas such as race, gender, and SES/social class, and also better identify different forms of inequality and their impact – mostly in the context of the Dominican Republic and to an extent in the United States. With that said, learning outcomes were deeply tied to the positionality of students and their preexisting level of engagement with course themes. Generally, it seemed that students of greater racial and/or financial privilege were less willing to think critically about their positionality within systems of inequality and therefore their connection to the phenomena we observed abroad. This differed from students of less declared privilege who approached course materials through the intersection of social identity and inequality. Despite these gains, findings suggest that the course reproduced power hierarchies between our service group and community partners and within our group. Implications for research and theory include the need to further study the integration of intergroup dialogue in international service programs, the impact of greater community partner collaboration vis-à-vis dialogue and program involvement, and the exploration of increased affinity group work within service learning programs to better attend to student needs, especially those of students from marginalized positions.Item Intergroup Dialogue and Religious Identity: Addressing Christian Privilege and Religious Oppression in US Higher Education(2014) Edwards, Sachi Teresa; Lin, Jing; Education Policy, and Leadership; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Interfaith initiatives are increasingly prevalent on college and university campuses around the country. In large part, this trend responds both to ongoing religious violence throughout the world and to increasing religious tension in the United States. The goal of these interfaith initiatives is to increase awareness of different religious identities and to bolster interfaith collaboration. For this research, I analyze a campus-based, curricular interfaith dialogue program that utilizes the Intergroup Dialogue (IGD) pedagogy to increase student understanding of privilege, oppression, and social injustice pertaining to religious identity. This project represents one of the first known empirical studies of religion-themed IGD, as current literature predominately focuses on race and gender. Using qualitative research methods including participant-observation, in-depth interviews, informal interviews, and document analysis, I present a multiple case study of three undergraduate interfaith dialogue courses. Findings suggest that (a) religious minority students are easily marginalized in the IGD process; (b) Christian privilege is a difficult concept for both students and dialogue facilitators to comprehend, even for those who readily recognize other forms of privilege (i.e., White, male, heterosexual); and (c) religious identity is also a difficult concept for both students and dialogue facilitators to understand because they think of religion as a set of philosophical beliefs, rather than as a social identity deeply intertwined with one's culture. Implications for research and theory include (a) the need to further advance theoretical discourse related to Christian privilege and religious identity, (b) the importance of expanding educational initiatives seeking to promote awareness and understanding of these issues, and (c) the obligation for interfaith dialogue practitioners, faculty, and other higher education professionals to be more sensitive to the experiences of students with minority religious identities.Item Asian American Racial Identity Experiences in Intergroup Dialogue: A Narrative Study(2011) Mac, Jacqueline; Quaye, Stephen J; Counseling and Personnel Services; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The purpose of this constructivist narrative study was to explore how Asian American students experience their racial identity in intergroup dialogue. This study addressed the following guiding research question: how do Asian American students experience their racial identity in the context of intergroup dialogues? Two Asian American students from two intergroup dialogues participated in this study. Data collection included semi-structured individual interviews and course documents, such as journal reflections. Data were analyzed using a hybrid narrative approach that combined the analysis of the content as an entire story (inductive case analysis), of the content of themes within each story, and of the structure of a complete story (cross-case analysis). Full restories of each participant's story were provided. Four themes emerged from these restories to illuminate how students experienced their racial identity in intergroup dialogue. First, racial identities were experienced in a complicated manner that conflated race and ethnicity, within and outside of intergroup dialogue. Second, the salience of racial identity impacted how and what participants shared about their experiences. Third, both participants shared stories of internal conflict related to their racial identities, which were illuminated by their experiences in intergroup dialogue. Lastly, participants shared similar experiences participating in intergroup dialogue, which included holding back, taking risks, and responding to stereotypes. However, these experiences varied in the ways they were explicitly connected to participants' racial identity.Item From dialogue to action: The development of White racial allies(2010) Alimo, Craig John; Inkelas, Karen K.; Counseling and Personnel Services; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The Supreme Court rulings of Gratz, et al. v. Bollinger, et al. and Grutter, et al. v. Bollinger, et al. (2003) legally affirmed the relationship between positive student learning outcomes and the presence of racial diversity on college and university campuses (Gurin, Dey, Hurtado, & Gurin, 2002). Institutions of post- secondary education are poised to leverage the presence of racial diversity to engage and educate for social change. The purpose of this study is to examine how a race/ethnicity themed intergroup dialogue facilitates the development of confidence and frequency of White college students' engagement in actions that are congruent with the development of White racial allies. Variables measuring confidence and frequency of action engagement included: (a) self-directed, (b) other-directed, and (c) intergroup collaborative actions. Participants were part of the Multiversity Intergroup Dialogue Research (MIGR) project that included nine college and universities. Using an experimental design with stratified random assignment, three MANCOVA analyses were used to determine the differences in dependent variables between experimental dialogue and waitlist control groups. Covariates included pretest responses repeated survey measures and college involvement variables. All three analyses yielded multivariate group differences. Univariate ANOVA analyses revealed group differences for only the frequency subscales.