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 Difference Amongst Your Own: The Lived Experiences Of Low-Income African-American Students and Their Encounters With Class Within Elite Historically Black College (HBCU) Environments(2015) Mobley, Jr., Steve Derrick; Drezner, Noah D.; Hultgren, Francine; Education Policy, and Leadership; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The subtle and deeply impactful nuances of Black intra-racial social class differences that manifest amongst students who attend historically Black colleges (HBCU) has remained untouched and understudied in higher-education scholarship. In this phenomenological study, I explore how low-income African-American students encounter social class within elite HBCU environments. The men and women in this study graduated between the years of 2001 and 2010. Contemporary HBCU student experiences are underscored and reveal great tension between self, community, and place. The philosophical works of Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer and Edward Casey are joined with the voices of Black scholars including W.E.B. DuBois, Audre Lorde, Frantz Fanon, bell hooks, and Toni Morrison to provide critical context for the phenomenon being studied. Max van Manen’s key phenomenological insights also provide a methodological foundation for the study. My co-researchers encountered significant shifts and evolved within their oppressed identities during their undergraduate years. During their undergraduate years they felt a difference amongst their own that they still reconcile today. The participants within this study endured feelings of alienation, wonder, and even confusion within their distinct higher education environments. This study concludes with phenomenological insights for myriad educational stakeholders that include higher educational researchers, higher education practitioners, families, and students. I provide pedagogical insights into how elite HBCU environments can not only intercede and provide a more enriching cultural environment for their low-income students, but their families as well. The pedagogical insights that “end” this study also summon the need for future research to continue to explore Black intra-racial differences that are present within both elite HBCU communities and elite PWI institutions as well. Exposure to the pertinent issues that are outlined in this scholarship provide a new entry into critical discourses that must now be had. This dialogue is needed so that students within elite HBCU environments do not continue to suffer in silence within their oppressed identities.Item Exercising Social Class Privilege: Examining the Practices and Processes Defining Upper-Middle Class Swimming Club Culture(2010) DeLuca, Jaime; Andrews, David L; Kinesiology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Cultural theorist Pierre Bourdieu argues that social class is defined by the interplay and operation of various forms of capital and, as such, is thought to be a significant determinant of an individual's everyday experiences, understandings, and identities. He believes that participation in private sport communities, such as swimming clubs, can contribute to one's social standing by positioning "the body-for-others," distinguishing those maintaining a privileged lifestyle, and transferring valuable skills, characteristics, and social connections to children for the purposes of class reproduction (Bourdieu, 1978, p. 838). Drawing on these ideas, this research explores the inter-related social constructs of the physically active swimming body, family, and social class at the Valley View Swim and Tennis Club (a pseudonym), a private recreational swim club in an upper-middle class suburban town on the outskirts of a major mid-Atlantic city. Through four years of ethnographic engagement, including participatory lived experience, observations, and interviews with mothers and children who belong to the pool, this project examines the way in which membership at Valley View plays an integral role in daily and family lives. Invoking Bourdieu (1978, 1984, 1986), I argue that pool participation is illustrative of members taken for granted, lived experience of power and privilege. Valley View operates as a distinctive consumption choice offering families a strategic opportunity to promote, demonstrate, convert, and transmit their varied levels of capital in and through their children, with the goal of expressing distinction now, and reproducing their familial social class position for future generations. Specifically, from the maternal perspective, this research discusses how the pool functions as a physical space for children's acquisition of physical capital and the tools to live a healthy, physically active lifestyle emblematic of social class position; details the way in which pool participation is a constitutive element of the upper-middle class family habitus, and thus offers parents an opportunity to teach their children valuable social and cultural dispositions; examines how Valley View provides children with enriching, intangible experiences characteristic of their class-based privilege; and lastly, explores how club membership is an important feature of these mother's privileged everyday daily lives.Item Class Advantage: Social Class and Knowledge Production In Classrooms Under The New Accountability(2005-04-20) Aaron, Philbert; Selden, Steven; Education Policy, and Leadership; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)ABSTRACT Title of Dissertation: CLASS ADVANTAGE: SOCIAL CLASS AND KNOWLEDGE PRODUCTION IN ELEMENTARY CLASSROOMS UNDER THE NEW ACCOUNTABILITY Philbert Aaron, Doctor of Philosophy, 2005 Dissertation directed by: Professor Steven Selden Department of Education Policy and Leadership This study interrogates the relationship between social class and academic achievement. It examines the ways in which social class and the new accountability policy influence teachers' and students' co-production of knowledge in the elementary school classroom. The study analyzes student and teacher talk in two elementary school reading classrooms in a mid-Atlantic state. The first school is categorized as middle-class, having less than 5% of its student body receiving Free and Reduced-price Meals (FARMs). The second is classified as working-class, having more than 60% of its students receiving FARMs. The study draws upon the work of the British sociolinguist, Basil Bernstein. Bernstein's theory of symbolic control provides both theoretical base and method for the inquiry. Using Bernstein's frameworks for classification and framing, language data on teacher-student pedagogical interaction was collected by note-taking during classroom observation in the Spring of 2004. These data were analyzed using a priori codes, including 'visible' (explicit or traditional) and 'invisible' (implicit or constructivist) practice. The study finds that pedagogical practice in the middle class school incorporated both visible (traditional) and invisible (constructivist) practices, while pedagogy in the working class school is of the purely visible type. In addition, the middle class school also achieves a faster pace of learning than does the working class school. Faster pace is indicated by syntactical (elaborated) text whereas in the working class school a lexical (brief utterances) text is produced. The study concludes that social class has unanticipated consequences for academic achievement under the new accountability. By providing identical policy tools to local schools, irrespective of student class location, the new accountability promotes a visible (traditional) pedagogy. Differences in family cultural, social, and economic capital mean that the working class school does not meet the social assumptions of a visible pedagogy and these differences manifest themselves in differentials in achievement.