Teaching, Learning, Policy & Leadership Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2759
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Item WHO AM I?: MEDIA INFLUENCE ON THE GENDER CONSTRUCTION OF ADOLESCENT GIRLS(2018) Lawrence, Angela S; Valli, Linda R; Curriculum and Instruction; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)While gender construction and identity occur across many years of childhood and early adulthood, it is in the adolescent stage when children ask the question, “Who am I?” In this study, I examine the ways media, as well as parents and peers, influence adolescent gender construction. Because of my interest in environments that seek to minimize media exposure, I situated the study in an alternative school setting. My main research question asked, “In what ways do students perform gender in a school environment that shapes interactions with media in particular ways?” To ensure that the investigation considered multiple perspectives, I examined students’ use of media at home and at school; how parental values regarding their children’s media use related to gender performance, values, and ideals; and, lastly, how gender performance at the school compared to what we know about gender performance in traditional environments. Previous research has examined messages students receive about expectations for gender performance in typical, media-saturated environments, but there is little on gender performance in alternative educational settings, a gap this study seeks to fill. Moreover, this study aims to advance the understanding of gender performance in a setting which encourages minimal exposure to media, defined for the purposes of this study as television, videos, movies, computers, gaming systems, radio, CDs, books, newspapers, and magazines. I employed an embedded case study method to examine gender performance as the overarching case, situating the media habits of six student participants as well as parent and staff perspectives as the sub-cases. Data collection included interviews, document collection, anecdotal notes, and classroom observations. Findings from the research demonstrate that when students are less attuned to the societal norms and stereotypes as expressed in mainstream media, they are more apt to express their individuality and perform gender in confident, unapologetic ways that felt comfortable and natural to them. I also present findings and implications from the study with regard to the ways student participants utilize media for socialization and skill-building purposes and the ways parents and students navigate differing opinions on appropriate and inappropriate media content.Item WIDGETS AND DIGITS: A STUDY OF NOVICE MIDDLE SCHOOL TEACHERS ATTENDING TO MATHEMATICS IDENTITY IN PRACTICE(2013) Frank, Toya Jones; Clark, Lawrence M; Curriculum and Instruction; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This is a study of novice middle-school mathematics teachers' attention to mathematics identity guided by three primary goals: (a) to understand how they were conceptualizing mathematics identity, (b) to investigate how they attended to mathematics identity in practice, and (c) to glean an understanding of the forces that they saw as influential in attending to mathematics identity. I explored how these teachers conceptualized mathematics identity and attended to it across four dimensions: ability, importance, motivation, and the nature of mathematical tasks. I used a metaphor of interlocking gears to represent how these four dimensions were interrelated. While each practicing novice teacher (PNT) conceptualized mathematics identity differently, they all viewed it through an ability lens, meaning their attention to mathematics identity was predicated upon how they positioned students as mathematically competent or incompetent. I used qualitative methods to highlight the perspectives and practices of three PNTs novice teachers who participated in an alternative certification program that prepared teachers to teach in a district with a long, documented history of low student achievement. I used Engeström's (1987, 1999, 2001) activity theory to explore how the elements of the teachers' activity systems promoted or impeded their attention to mathematics identity. I highlighted salient themes across all PNTs in a cross-case analysis. The teachers in the study attended to mathematics identity in various ways. I categorized these tools in three ways: (a) attention to mathematics identity via instruction, (b) attention to mathematics identity via planning, and (c) an emergent sociopolitical stance. I used the cases to provide illustrative examples of what attending to mathematics identity in each category looked like in practice. Across all of the PNTs, the rules at multiple levels (classroom, school, and district) that governed their activity systems were similar in nature. Their test-driven (Valli, Croninger, Chambliss, Graeber, & Buese, 2008) contexts shaped instructional decisions. At the classroom level, classroom management also proved to be a force that either supported or impeded the PNTs' attention to mathematics identity in practice. With the findings and analysis in mind, I present implications for teacher education, data collection, and theoretical considerations.Item Positioning and Identity in the Academic Literacy Experiences of Elementary English Language Learners(2011) Hickey, Pamela J.; Martin-Beltran, Melinda; Curriculum and Instruction; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This study investigates the academic literacy experiences of elementary English Language Learners (ELLs) in first grade, fourth grade, and sixth grade. Participants included students as well as their reading/language arts mainstream teachers and their English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) teachers. Informed by both cross-sectional cross-case study and narrative inquiry methodology, this study used positioning theory and identity theory as complementary analytic lenses. Students' positionings, both reflexive self-positioning and interactive positioning by others, were identified and named through analyses of their interactions in academic literacy events during reading/language arts. In order to consider the ways that students' positionings may afford or constrain their access to and engagement with academic literacy events, the researcher created an analytic framework naming student positions. Additionally, positions were considered in light of the ways that they mediated students' levels of engagement as literacy events unfolded. To investigate the construction of students' literate identities, the researcher examined students' patterns of positioning during literacy events and considered interview data from students and teachers as well as field notes that documented conversations with participants. The researcher also gathered two self-portraits from student participants, including one self-portrait showing the student engaged in an academic literacy task at school and one showing the student engaged in a fun activity outside of the school context. The study demonstrated that students' positionings, both positive and constraining, may work to construct and re-construct students' literate identities even as students' literate identities may inform the ways that students take on and negotiate positions in a recursive process. The study also found that students with strong literate identities bridging home and school contexts took on more positive positions thus engaging more deeply with academic literacy tasks than students with striving literate identities. Students with striving literate identities often took on positions of constraint in strategic moves that allowed them to get through literacy tasks without engaging deeply. Finally, this study demonstrated the powerful ways that teachers may support students' deep engagement with literacy tasks through positive positioning and following through on their lesson implementation by offering opportunities for re-positioning and the use of scaffolds.Item Grounded Identities, Transient Lives: The Emergence of Student Voices in an Era of Globalization(2008-11-20) Gargano, Terra; Finkelstein, Barbara; Education Policy, and Leadership; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This study offers a rare glimpse into the histories, images, and meanings that inform the experiences of six international degree-seeking undergraduate students at the University of Maryland College Park in the spring of 2007. Specifically, the design and content of this study centers around the recovery of student voices as a way to understand the limitations and possibilities of international education policies and practices. The experiences of these six students in many ways challenge the understanding and categorization of a traditional international student. Focusing almost exclusively on nationality as an organizing agent and bereft of significant and robust concepts that bring into view the content of international student sense-making, international education discourses neglect to explore the complexity and range of meanings students ascribe to educational sojourns, thereby resulting in a series of undocumented generalizations made about students. This study reveals that these twenty-first century students are experienced border crossers with very complex identities. These students engage in diverse constructions of meaning as they negotiate the boundaries of geography and mind that are inherent aspects of crossing borders. The perspectives of these contemporary students suggest the need for a foundational rethinking of the assumptions that ground the international education literature and a reconceptualization of the entire apparatus of thinking about educational sojourns. Through an analysis of how student participation in transnational spaces influenced pathways to the university, how students negotiated identities as international students, and how students envisioned futures, it becomes evident that a new kind of international student is emerging.Item The Teacher's Homecoming: Understanding Vocational Identity Development of Military Career Changers(2008-11-11) Fleming, Kimberly; McCaleb, Joseph; Curriculum and Instruction; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)As increasing numbers of teacher candidates enter the field of education from other careers, teacher educators must consider the complexities of career transition. Insiders' accounts of vocational change can help teacher educators act with tact and authenticity in a way that is sensitive to the experiences of career changers. This study uses philosophical hermeneutics to develop understanding related to the sociocultural process of vocational identity development for two military career changers as they become teachers. The concept of identity is explored, and it is developed both as lived experience in community as well as a sense of self, fashioned through rememberings and imaginings. Two case studies center on Caucasian males with military experience who are transitioning into secondary English teaching positions. Thomas, a 50-year-old Air Force retiree with 24 years of service, is enrolled in a local school system-sponsored alternative preparation program. Rob, a 38-year-old past Verizon employee and current lieutenant in the Army Reserves, is enrolled in a Master of Arts in Teaching program. This study employs a participatory paradigm in which participants serve as co-researchers. The study follows each co-researcher into three communities of practice related to their teacher preparation and/or induction to teaching. Their experiences as persons-in-community are analyzed using a sociocultural perspective. The following constructs are explicated for each community of practice under study: place, social structures, practical tools, conceptual tools, metaphors, narratives, and imagined futures. Each community is shown to promote certain teaching identities while constraining others, although the process of vocational identity development emerges as a negotiation among person and community. In the spirit of Wenger (1998), each individual's nexus of being is then discussed, and vocational identity is explored in relation to coordination and contradiction of multiple communities as well as in mutual constitution with an individual's rememberings and imaginings. A vocational meta-story is told in archetypal language to represent the reverse coming of age which military career changers undergo on their journeys to become and belong as teachers. Finally, a synthesis of understandings related to identity, ways to make meaning, and the needs of military career changers is offered.Item Listening to Adolescent Heartsongs: Phenomenological Possibilities in Teaching Writing(2007-05-29) Hartshorn, Mary Ann M; Hultgren, Francine H; Education Policy, and Leadership; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)ABSTRACT Title of Dissertation: LISTENING TO ADOLESCENT HEARTSONGS: PHENOMENOLOGICAL POSSIBILITIES IN TEACHING WRITING Mary Ann McKenzie Hartshorn Doctor of Philosophy, 2007 Dissertation directed by: Professor Francine Hultgren Department of Education Policy and Leadership College of Education University of Maryland This hermeneutic phenomenological inquiry, is called by the question: What is the lived experience of high school students who share something they have written from the heart? The metaphor of the human heart opens my understanding of the experiences of thirty-two students who write and share their writings in sophomore English class. My understanding of this experience deepens during after-school conversations with twelve of those students. Text, offering words for hermeneutic pondering, was compiled from conversations, journals, student writings and sharing activities. All voices were taped and transcribed to provide a visual remembrance of these lived experiences. The methodology underpinning this human science inquiry, is identified by Max van Manen (2003) as one that "involves description, interpretation, and self-reflective or critical analysis" (p. 4). Through my students' heartfelt words, I see them write their way to self-discovery. The importance of "lived space" (van Manen, 2002, p. 102) is brought forward, and lets me understand that students need to feel at "home" in school if they are to be successful. As we create a sacred space together, my students and I experience safety and freedom. In this space we find our "i-dentities" and hear our heartsongs. When sharing those songs, students announce their fears of failure, death and the swift passage of time; their memories; their longing for communication and disappointment in not connecting. We dwell together in the unique, sacredness of each other, opening a listening space where relationality "allows us to transcend ourselves" (p. 105). It is here that we celebrate more similarities than differences. The valued end of any class should include a place where students feel comfortable with themselves and others. Curriculum should be relevant to each student, providing an opportunity for self discovery and acceptance. Writing of a personal nature must be included across the curriculum so students learn to value themselves, fellow human beings, and the universe.