Theses and Dissertations from UMD
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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 give thesis/dissertation in DRUM
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Item “In All Their Diversity": Examining Participation, Funds of Knowledge, and Identity Representation in Art-Based Social Media Posts(2024) Hernly, Kenna; Clegg, Tamara; McGrew, Sarah; Education Policy, and Leadership; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Many art museums are currently facing issues of inequity at every level, including in collections, staffing, audiences, and engagement practices. In this dissertation, I hypothesize that one way to address these issues is by altering engagement and learning practices, which are traditionally grounded in didactic, expert-led approaches. In this multiple-method, three-paper dissertation, I use The Museum Challenge (TMC) – a social media challenge to re-create works of art with household materials – as a case study of participatory art engagement. This large-scale, global challenge, which was initiated by the public during the COVID-19 pandemic, relied on participatory engagement practices with digitized museum collection objects. To better understand the implications of TMC for participatory art engagement, I combine quantitative data on 81,086 Instagram posts from the first four months of the challenge and qualitative data from post samples and interviews with participants in TMC. As others who have researched social media use in art museums have found, these platforms can afford visitors and remote users alike the ability to choose what is important to them and to engage with art museum collections in a self-led, playful manner that is not always encouraged by the museum environment, especially for adults (Budge, 2017, 2018b, 2018a; Budge & Burness, 2018; Villaespesa & Wowkowych, 2020). My findings predominantly speak to three things: 1) Participants drew on slow-looking and embodied learning as they re-created art, often in an instinctive way connected to their funds of knowledge; 2) Participants offered their interpretations of artworks, adapting art for our times and in some cases challenging norms to represent their individual and group identities; and 3) Participants found joy in the process, learning and building a positive and supportive community that has had a lasting impact. My research presents an example of audiences showing museums what they want and challenging expert-led interpretations to adapt art for our times and, in the process, representing themselves “in all their diversity” (Wong, 2012, p. 284; Ebben & Bull, 2022).Item Illuminating Children's Scientific Funds of Knowledge Through Social Media Sharing(2019) Mills, Kelly; Ketelhut, Diane J; Education Policy, and Leadership; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The ubiquitous use of social media by children offers a unique opportunity to view diverse funds of knowledge. Connecting learning to students’ funds of knowledge is particularly important for non-dominant learners, who experience tensions between home, community and school science cultures. This study is embedded in a research project which iteratively designed a social media app to be integrated into a science learning program which engaged families in science in their community. I conducted an exploratory case study on children’s use of a social media app for science learning and found that three focal learners (ages 9-14) often shared scientific funds of knowledge through social media in an after-school learning program and in their homes and communities. Their teachers connected some scientific funds of knowledge they shared on social media to formal science concepts. However, other scientific funds of knowledge were not obvious by observing the posts alone. Rather, these tacit funds of knowledge emerged through the triangulation of posts, interviews and observations of their learning experiences in the life-relevant science education program. The findings suggest implications for the design of technology and learning environments to facilitate the connection of children’s implicit and more unconventional scientific funds of knowledge to formal science concepts. I build on these findings to explore how teachers can bridge funds of knowledge shared on social media to scientific practices in formal learning environments with a case study of three teachers from a diverse urban middle school. Using the framework for Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPACK), I seek to understand how to best support teachers to draw upon student’s funds of knowledge through social media sharing and connect them to formal scientific concepts. The teachers struggled to engage in dialogue with their students about their posts, missing opportunities to gain contextual information about students’ funds of knowledge, in order to facilitate connections to science concepts. These findings suggest that aspects of usability, policy and teacher beliefs are necessary to consider in order to promote the recognition of children’s funds of knowledge through social media sharing in formal learning environments.Item EXPLORING FUNDS OF KNOWLEDGE AND CAPITAL: CASE STUDIES OF LATINO IMMIGRANT FAMILIES SUPPORTING THEIR CHILDREN'S EDUCATION, WITH A FOCUS ON MATHEMATICS(2014) Napp-Avelli, Carolina A.; Chazan, Daniel; Curriculum and Instruction; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Latino students are frequently positioned by widespread achievement gap discourse at the bottom of the attainment spectrum. Both students and families are portrayed as inadequate and deficient, and are blamed for their lack of success in mathematics. One recommendation to improve Latino students' educational performance is to increase parental involvement in mathematics among Latinos. However, life conditions of Latino immigrant families include factors that often make it difficult for parents to get involved in the education of their children in the ways that schools expect. This study explores the knowledge and resources two Latino immigrant families have acquired thorough their experiences and how they use them to support their children's education and mathematics education. In order to analyze families' resources, a theoretical framework composed by the concepts of educability, capital, and funds of knowledge and community cultural wealth was developed. The construct of educability, which analyzes the tensions between the limitations that poverty and other life conditions impose on families and the possibilities for students to succeed in school, provides the overarching structure of the framework. Bourdieu's theory of cultural capital and the cycle of reproduction of capital describe why social groups with more capital (middle and upper classes) acquire capital easily, whereas social groups with less capital (low socioeconomic working classes) have fewer opportunities to acquire capital. This piece of the framework explains why it is so difficult for students living in hard conditions to overcome them and succeed academically. The funds of knowledge and community cultural wealth perspectives made it possible to identify the resources and knowledge families have acquired through their experiences and understand their actions and hopes in connection to their life histories. In particular, the study analyzes how families use their resources along three dimensions that affect children's conditions of educability. First, the study looks at how parents influence students' dispositions towards education; second, how parents develop relationships with schools; and third, how parents influence what students do in their leisure time. The researcher's journey as a white middle-class highly educated woman working with Latino working-class families is also analyzed as part of the study.