Theses and Dissertations from UMD
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Item KOREAN IMMIGRANT MOTHERS’ EDUCATIONAL BELIEFS AND PRACTICES: A TRANSNATIONAL PERSPECTIVE(2015) Kim, Ji Hyun; Wiseman, Donna L; Curriculum and Instruction; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This study analyzed the parental involvement experiences of four first-generation Korean immigrant mothers living in a Mid-Atlantic state to expand the research base and knowledge of traditional parental involvement paradigms. The study was guided by two overarching research questions: 1) How do four Korean immigrant mothers understand and perform their roles in the educational experiences of their children?; and 2) How do contexts (i.e. micro, meso, macro, and transnational) influence the mothers’ understandings and performance of their roles in the educational experiences of their children? Multiple concepts and frameworks related to parent involvement and immigrant experiences informed the conceptual framework of this study. They include the parent role construction of Hoover-Dempsey et al. (2005); the minority parent role construction of Auerbach (2007); Cultural Ecological Theory (Ogbu & Simons, 1998); and transnationalism (Itzigsohn & Giorguli-Saucedo, 2005; Portes, 2003). Despite a certain level of variability among the participants’ educational beliefs and practices, they commonly regarded private supplementary education (e.g. hagwon, or Korean style afterschool programs, and private tutoring) as an effective means to give a competitive edge to their children academically, which is largely practiced in Korea. Also, not all mothers placed priority on school-based involvement including school visits and Parent Teacher Association membership. The findings suggest that the mothers’ current perceptions, expectations, and behaviors related to their children’s education are influenced by their upbringing and educational experiences in Korea, continuing transnational interactions with people and culture in Korea, and their racial and ethnic minority status in the U.S. The findings also suggest that a traditional school-centered conceptualization of parent involvement may be limited in capturing immigrant parents’ strong commitment of their children’s education, which may not be congruent with conventional norms of school involvement. As U.S. federal government and local school districts continue to emphasize parents as partners in education, teachers and administrators will benefit from this analysis of one growing population which demonstrates high achievement in the school system. Furthermore, this research challenges and expands a stereotypical and monolithic understanding of Korean immigrants as “model minority” through a detailed case study of one group of mothers.Item Just a Click Away from Home: Ecuadorian Migration, Nostalgia and New Technologies in Transnational Times(2007-05-14) Mejia Estevez, Silvia; Harrison, Regina; Comparative Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Focusing on three different narrations of migration from Ecuador to the United States, Spain and Italy, this documentary video and its study guide explore how new technologies such as the Internet, satellite communications, email, videoconferences, and cell phones have changed the experience of displacement. The two components of this dissertation propose that, due to the encounter with new technologies intent upon shrinking space and time, nostalgia is becoming digital -a quest for continuity of time and space through the simultaneity offered by digital media. Under these new circumstances, transnational businesses profit from nostalgic markets, whereas transnational families and organizations grapple with digital technologies to foment a "globalization of solidarity." As an aesthetic artefact, the project responds to the controversy within film theory regarding subjectivity and fiction storytelling procedures as defining features of documentary, a film genre traditionally marketed as objective and non-fictional. For this reason, the video is composed of what I call not three case studies but three stories of migration. The documentary starts out in Cuenca (Ecuador), where, speechless, Arturo and Mercedes see their children on the videoconferencing screen. It is their first "reunion" since the children left Ecuador and settled in New York City, eleven years ago. In another Ecuadorian city, Gloria -whose husband migrated from Quito to Madrid- promotes Internet access to rescue families torn apart by migration. Finally, we meet Carla, a journalist settled in Milan, who takes advantage of new technologies to report on the Ecuadorian community in Italy for readers far away. With a comparative and translocal approach -and theoretically based on Hall, Appadurai, Boym, Nichols and Portes among others-, this project explores multiple relationships with new technologies determined by gender, age, race, ethnicity, education, computer literacy, geographical situation, and socio-economic background. Through their differing and even contradictory discourses and practices, expressed and lived in geographical locations that coexist and overlap on the screen, the protagonists of this dissertation-documentary video show us to what extent they are inscribed in different places of enunciation that shape their experience of displacement and nostalgia in contrasting ways.Item Sisters in the Spirit: Transnational Constructions of Diaspora in Late Twentieth-Century Black Women's Literature of the Americas(2007-04-24) Minto, Deonne Nicole; Collins, Merle; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation is an interdisciplinary project that draws upon literary theory, diaspora and transnational studies, black feminism, and anthropology. It argues that, in contrast to their male counterparts who produce "high theory" about the African diaspora in the Americas -- a theory that tends to exclude or marginalize women and remains tethered to nationalist constructions -- black women writers use their literary works to unsettle the dominant gendered racial hierarchy, to critique national discourses, and to offer a vision of a transnational Americas. This study invokes an 1891 conception of the Americas advanced by the Cuban revolutionary Jose Marti, and it explores how the vision of these women writers rearticulates Marti's early concept of "Nuestra America" (Our America), transcending geographic, temporal, and linguistic boundaries. Organized around issues of historiography, black cultural formation, gender and sexual politics, and racial spacialization, this project cuts across the North/Central/South/Caribbean division of the Americas, topples the primacy of "America" (read as the United States of America) in diasporic discourses, and engages the writing of black women of the Americas in terms of their literary characterization of the transnational exchanges that have produced and continue to re-articulate diaspora in the region. Furthermore, this study engages and enlarges a notion of a "Dutch pot diaspora," as presented in Maxine Bailey and Sharon Mareeka Lewis's play Sistahs. This transnational conception of diaspora recognizes the persistence of nation and the ways in which black subjects across the Americas negotiate limiting national constructions through transnational identifications. Using poetry, drama, and novels by authors from Canada, the United States, the Caribbean, and Latin America, such as Toni Morrison, Erna Brodber, Luz Argentina Chiriboga, and Tessa McWatt, this dissertation reveals a transnational, diasporic poetics of the Americas.