Theses and Dissertations from UMD
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Item Rupturing antiblackness in mathematics education research: Blackquantcrit as theory, methodology, & praxis(2023) Turner, Blake O'Neal; Liu, Rossina Zamora RZ; Education Policy, and Leadership; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Antiblackness and white supremacy are embedded in mathematics education, which is (re)produced and justified through epistemic violence in research. Research on the “achievement gap” is one well-known example of epistemic violence in mathematics education research where antiblackness is encoded into statistical archives. These quantitative master narratives position Black doers and learners as mathematically illiterate and normalize ideological discourses about Black inferiority, impacting research, policy, and praxis. Thus, this manuscript-style dissertation aligns with calls to advance mathematics education research, policy, and practice toward liberation for Black learners. The three studies in this dissertation employ two distinct but complementary theoretical frameworks, Black Critical Theory (BlackCrit) and Quantitative Critical Theory (QuantCrit), to advance our understanding of supporting and creating liberatory mathematics education, particularly for Black doers and learners of mathematics. In the first study, “Common Denominators: QuantCrit as a means of contextualizing antiblackness in mathematics education,” I argue for including Black Critical Theory and Quantitive Critical Theory in mathematics education research. This conceptual paper foregrounds the contributions that QuantCrit and BlackCrit provide to larger critical conversations centering race and antiblack racism in mathematics education and provides a primer on how these frameworks could be applied to mathematics education research by scholars. The second study, “Black Mathematics Teachers and the Master’s House: A Black QuantCrit Analysis,” empirically explores BlackCrit and QuantCrit using secondary data on 74 Black mathematics teachers in an alternative certification program and their dispositions towards teaching racially and culturally diverse students. I partitioned the teachers into structurally similar and practically relevant clusters using K-means clustering. The findings reveal four clusters of Black mathematics teachers: Hegemonic Academics, Individual Actors, Disruptive Conductors, and Caring Custodians. The results of this study provide insights into the utility of intraracial comparisons. Additionally, this study complicates ongoing discourses in education about improving the lives of Black doers, learners, and teachers in mathematics by recruiting and retaining more Black teachers. The third study, “BlackQuantCrit as a North Star: Critical race research workshop for Black graduate students in Mathematics Education,” draws on critical ethnographic methods to explore the cultural practices of four Black graduate students whose research attends to mathematics education (BGMER) as they participate in a collaborative research workshop. The Black graduate students participated in six two-hour workshops as they learned about and applied BlackCrit and QuantCrit to their research. Data analysis (e.g., audio transcripts of the six two-hour workshops, field notes, the researchers' analytic memos, and other resources shared during the workshops) identified three salient themes: Antiblackness is Verb, CRT as North Star, and Care is a Verb. The findings in this study illuminated the types of support BGMERs need to become critical race researchers and how they take up BlackCrit and QuantCrit in their work.Item Rules of Engagement: The Role of Graduate Teaching Assistants as Agents of Mathematics Socialization for Undergraduate Students of Color(2023) Lue, Kristyn; Clark, Lawrence M; Education Policy, and Leadership; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The field of higher education has been concerned with the retention of underrepresented students of Color in the science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields over the last few decades. STEM identity development has emerged as a useful analytic framework in this research, as students with stronger STEM identities—students who recognize themselves and are recognized by others as “STEM people”—are more likely to persist in the STEM fields. STEM identity develops through the process of socialization, in which agents of socialization set and maintain the norms, culture, and values that newcomers in the STEM fields should emulate. At institutions of higher education, instructors act as primary agents of socialization, signaling who “belongs”—and who doesn’t—in the STEM fields. Although prior research has identified the ways in which mathematics courses gatekeep underrepresented undergraduate students of Color out of the STEM fields, little research has focused specifically on undergraduate mathematics socialization. Furthermore, the role of graduate teaching assistants (GTAs) as agents of mathematics socialization remains unexamined, despite the large role they play in teaching lower-level undergraduate mathematics courses. This qualitative dissertation, which is grounded in Critical Race Theory and Critical Whiteness studies, utilizes critical ethnographic methods in order to examine the ways in which GTAs at a historically white [college and] university (HWCU) serve as agents of mathematics socialization for underrepresented undergraduate students of Color. Through fieldwork, individual interviews, and a series of focus groups with ten GTAs at a large, public, research-1 institution in the Mid-Atlantic region of the United States (MAU), this dissertation study explored: (1) GTAs’ perceptions of the dominant culture (e.g. values and practices) of the mathematics department at their institution, and whether they sought to align with or diverge from this culture, (2) the opportunities and constraints GTAs faced in breaking from these normative values and practices, and (3) whether the ways in which GTAs described trying to break from these practices reinforced the systematic exclusion of underrepresented undergraduate students of Color in their mathematics department. Key findings include four major themes: a culture of individualism and the hidden necessity of social ties in the mathematics department at MAU, the valuation of teaching as a means of doing research, attempts by GTAs to shift normative narratives of mathematical success, and identity tensions in supporting underrepresented undergraduate students of Color. These findings highlight the importance for agents of mathematics socialization to explicitly center race, racism, and power when trying to be inclusive of underrepresented undergraduate students of Color in university mathematics settings. Without doing so, racism and whiteness are reproduced and perpetuated in the mathematics socialization of underrepresented undergraduate students of Color, despite good intentions.Item A Model for Embedded Anti-Racism Instruction in an Undergraduate Technology Design Course(2022) Duffy, Pamela Chamblee; Kules, Bill; Library & Information Services; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Racism and other forms of bias in technology design have significant social ramifications. Decisions made, technology developed or not, the inclusion or exclusion of minoritized and marginalized voices in design and user testing – impact society and individuals. Understanding the impact of systemic racism and personal bias on decisions made by individuals with the knowledge and skills to create, manipulate, and control technology is imperative to the welfare of minoritized and marginalized individuals and the broader society. Ensuring that professionals are well-trained and understand their responsibilities and the power they wield is the purview of university Information Science programs.By creating and implementing a suite of course materials, this study seeks insight into student engagement with anti-racism instruction to understand better the efficacy of this type of instruction in practice. The study has the potential to identify new methods for the instruction of anti-racism and other anti-bias topics in technical courses. In doing so, we can combine the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) concept of “design for all” with the Critical Race Theory (CRT) idea that it is not enough to understand the social situation; we must strive to change it, to improve it. Keywords: anti-racism, critical race theory, embedded instruction, narrative, storytelling, systemic racism, technology designItem Strengthening High School Transition and Attendance: Exploring Multi-level Risk and Protective Factors for Chronic Absenteeism Among African American Adolescents(2021) Holder, Sharifah; Green, Kerry; Public and Community Health; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Chronic absenteeism is a growing problem in the United States and is associated with poor educational and health outcomes including high school dropout, criminal justice system involvement, chronic disease, mental health concerns and early death. African American children in low income, urban areas are at elevated risk for chronic absenteeism based on factors at all levels of the social ecological model including mental health concerns, systemic and individual racism, parental, peer, and teacher relationships, school and neighborhood climate. The transition to high school is a critical moment when absenteeism rates increase dramatically. This study used a mixed method approach to better understand chronic absenteeism in urban high school settings. A survey gathered data from a cohort of ninth grade students transitioning into high school and regression analysis was used to identify risk and protective factors that may explain chronic absenteeism (n=216). A total of 30 in-depth qualitative interviews were conducted with five chronically absent and five regularly attending ninth grade students from a predominately Black school. Critical Race Theory was used as an analytic lens for the thematic analysis of the semi-structured interviews. Participants discussed challenges and opportunities that arise when transitioning to high school including finding a friend group, coping with anxiety, planning for the future, navigating a new school environment and maintaining ties to rapidly changing communities. Findings suggest that African American students possess many strengths including skilled navigation of social situations, adaptive coping strategies for emotional distress, creating a team of adults and peers for motivation and support, aspirational planning for future goals, and vocal resistance to oppression that can be further developed or cultivated to support positive attendance behaviors and contend with the impact of systemic racism that can sometimes be disregarded in predominately Black schools. Implications include the increased need for student voice in decision making processes, enhanced curriculum that addresses social emotional learning and gives students agency in determining individualized learning plans, school discipline reform, and community engagement. These findings are critical to transforming dominant narratives about chronic absenteeism in low income, African-American communities and providing feasible recommendations to improve educational and health outcomes.Item AGAINST ALL ODDS: ACCESS AND ACHIEVEMENT OF AFRICAN AMERICAN ADOLESCENT MALES IN ADVANCED SECONDARY MATHEMATICS(2019) McCarter, Darrian Tyron; Brantlinger, Andrew; Curriculum and Instruction; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Adopting a critical race theory stance, this study examined the intersectionality of race, class, and gender and their influence on the educational outcomes of six African American males, who against the odds, have demonstrated success in advance secondary mathematics. Consistent with critical race theory, the purpose of the study was to create counter narratives that push back against dominant narratives about the academic abilities of African American males, specifically in mathematics. This study explored the ways in which this historically marginalized student group self-identify and communicate their social, cultural, emotional, and academic experiences and the development of strategies to navigate environments in which they are underrepresented. At the broadest level, the African American male participants individually and consistently addressed the following four themes in their semi structured interviews: (1) inequitable [institutional] practices rationalized by the dominant narrative, (2) caring and influential relationships, (3) early access to enriched and accelerated mathematics curricula, and (4) intrinsic and extrinsic motivators for success. First, the participants collectively spoke of a range of racialized and sometimes gendered barriers (e.g., teachers and peers who doubted the abilities of Black learners) that they faced as African American male learners of mathematics. Second, and in response to these racialized-gendered barriers, they each reported drawing on relationships and positive interactions with their parents, teachers, peers, and African American male role models. Third, all six participants communicated the value added of exposure to high quality schooling experiences to include early identification as strong mathematics students, enrollment in specialized schools and programs, early exposure to rigorous mathematics content, and active participation in extra/co-curricular opportunities. Fourth, and mediated by their relationships and early exposure to advanced mathematics, they all reported developing intrinsic and extrinsic motivations that sustained their success. In terms of the last point, and in their own ways, they were motivated, in part, to push back on dominant, racist narratives regarding the academic abilities of African American males as they navigated implicit racial bias from their teachers, peers, institutional practices, and the larger society.Item MULTICULTURAL POLITICS AND NATIONAL BOUNDARY MAKING IN KOREA: Mapping the intersectional dimensions of nation, gender, class, and ethnicity in state policy and practice(2019) Yu, Sojin; Marsh, Kris; Sociology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation examines the conception and implementation of state multicultural policy to analyze how migrants are received and incorporated within South Korea, a newly emergent migrant receiving country in Asia. To this end, I conducted ethnographic research at two Centers established to enact governmental multicultural policy, focusing on the separate accounts and experiences of ground-level policy practitioners (Koreans) and targeted recipients (migrants) in relation to the policy implementation and its ‘real world’ effects. The results show the varied and conflicting perspectives of those involved, and how they are informed by the intersecting social constructs of nation, ethnicity, gender, family, and class. These intersectional workings and effects also contribute to the unequal social relations between Koreans and migrants, especially in shaping a particular national form of ‘racism’ against migrants, and helping to maintain the previously unchallenged formation of national identity in Korea. Three thematically arranged analysis chapters discuss specifically how these social processes serve to form and naturalize social hierarchies and powers in Korea, with each chapter examining a specific intersectional circumstance: The intersection of gender inequality and nationalism; the intersection of class and nation(ality); and, the emphasis of joint Korean nationality and ethnicity in the multicultural policy. Each chapter illustrates the predominance of nationalism, as the critical mechanism and rationale behind Korea’s contested multicultural politics, and the central axis to connect with other dimensions of power including gender, class, and ethnicity. The combined research outcomes reveal the complex ways in which the inter-group relations and hierarchies are organized, through the state policy, bureaucratic practice and individual agency.Item Invisible Men, Invisible Women: Labor, Race, and the (re)Construction of American Citizenship in New Deal Post Office Murals(2019) Yasumura, Grace Sayuri; Mansbach, Steven; Ater, Renee; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Invisible Men, Invisible Women: Labor, Race, and the (re)Construction of American Citizenship in New Deal Post Office Murals is a meditation on the historical construction and persistent importance of race in the formation of American national identity and citizenship. Centering on an institutionally marginalized and academically neglected aspect of American art, this dissertation explores the depictions of non-white laborers, from images of African American sharecroppers to Mexican American migrant laborers that appear in scores of Treasury Section post office murals across the United States. Organized around three case studies, this work explores the different ways racialized identities were created, contested, and consolidated within the context of larger debates surrounding the relationship between labor and citizenship in the 1930s. This dissertation reads the murals produced under the Treasury Section as part of the New Deal’s epistemological regimes of intelligibility. In other words, these murals are to be understood as sites where collective identities are visualized and “correct” codes of social conduct are shaped in order to foster a particular vision of the citizens-subject. Treasury Section post office murals are therefore interpreted as part of a complex set of instruments deployed by the New Deal government as it sought to translate ideology into practice and thus actualize codes of racial and gendered conduct and ultimately modes of ideal citizenship.Item INVESTIGATING THE POSTWAR DECLINE OF RACE IN SCIENCE(2016) Fobia, Aleia Clark; Kestnbaum, Meyer; Sociology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Race as a biological category has a long and troubling history as a central ordering concept in the life and human sciences. The mid-twentieth century has been marked as the point where biological concepts of race began to disappear from science. However, biological definitions of race continue to penetrate scientific understandings and uses of racial concepts. Using the theoretical frameworks of critical race theory and science and technology studies and an in-depth case study of the discipline of immunology, this dissertation explores the appearance of a mid-century decline of concepts of biological race in science. I argue that biological concepts of race did not disappear in the middle of the twentieth century but were reconfigured into genetic language. In this dissertation I offer a periodization of biological concepts of race. Focusing on continuities and the effects of contingent events, I compare how biological concepts of race articulate with racisms in each period. The discipline of immunology serves as a case study that demonstrates how biological concepts of race did not decline in the postwar era, but were translated into the language of genetics and populations. I argue that the appearance of a decline was due to events both internal and external to the science of immunology. By framing the mid-twentieth century disappearance of race in science as the triumph of an antiracist racial project of science, it allows us to more clearly see the more recent resurgence of race in science as a recycling of older themes and tactics from the racist science projects of the past.Item (inter)FACE: A Study of Black Families Advocating for their Children’s Education(2016) Morant, Tamyka; Brown, Tara M; Curriculum and Instruction; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Black students are consistently overrepresented in categories of academic underachievement. Parent engagement has long been touted as an effective strategy for improving the educational outcomes of Black children. However, most parent engagement research reflects deficit based perspectives frame Black parents as problems that must be fixed or mitigated before they can positively contribute to their children’s education. Consequently, parent engagement research and frameworks ignore the perspectives of Black parents and the assets they use to participate effectively in parent engagement. In this case study, I draw on individual and focus group interview data, documents, and observations, to examine how fifteen Black families, collectively known as FACE: 1) define and participate in parental engagement, 2) experience barriers to and opportunities for engagement, and 3) experience benefits of engagement for their children and their own personal development. Guided by Black Feminist and Critical Race Theories, I show how Black families in this study used a myriad of engagement strategies to improve their children’s educational experiences which were invisible to schools and how they used school-sanctioned engagement activities to meet their own objectives. Ultimately, I argue that school-centered parent engagement frameworks and models are ineffective for empowering Black families and accounting for the essential ways that these families contribute to the well-being of their children. Based on my findings, I discuss implications for theory, practice and policy, and research, and make recommendations for a more family-centered approach to parent engagement.Item Poetry, Prose, and Portraiture: Voices of 21st Century Black English Teachers on Impacting Black Student Achievement(2012) Carrol, Summer; MacDonald, Victoria-Maria; Curriculum and Instruction; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation study utilized Critical Race Theory (Ladson-Billings & Tate, 1995) and Portraiture (Lawrence-Lightfoot, 2005) to investigate five African American English teachers' perceptions of how they impact Black student achievement. Study participants included teachers who taught in two neighboring school districts located in a large metropolitan area in the mid-Atlantic region of the United States. Teachers' years of experience ranged from 2 to 15. Data collection methods included journal writing, focus groups, one-on-one interviews, and a questionnaire. Findings are presented in the form of individual poetic portraits for each teacher (Childers, 2007; Hill, 2003, 2005; Schendel, 2009) and emergent themes (Lawrence-Lightfoot & Davis, 1997). Teachers viewed themselves as impacting Black student achievement by employing a more-than-content teaching philosophy that emphasized helping students develop life skills and knowledge that would be beneficial post high school. Teachers found it difficult, however, to positively impact Black student achievement because of frustrating situations they faced in their school settings. Teachers' frustrations are organized into five categories: institutional frustration, pedagogical frustration, relational frustration, positional frustration, and cultural frustration. Situated within the literature on Black teachers published post-1970, the findings add complexity to the common portrayal of Black teachers as culturally-synchronized (Irvine, 1990) othermothers (Foster, 1993; Irvine, 2002), mentors, and role models (Irvine, 1989) for Black students. Findings also deepen the scholarly conversation surrounding the negative, unintended consequences the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas (1954) court ruling had for Black teachers and Black students. The study's implications call for intra-racial professional development workshops and teacher education initiatives designed specifically for African American teachers; long-term ethnographic studies investigating the experiences and relationships between Black teachers and Black students in contemporary resegregated schools; policy initiatives aimed at creating a Brown v. Board of Education agenda for contemporary times; and theories that reconceptualize racial uplift pedagogy for 21st century schools.