College of Education
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The collections in this community comprise faculty research works, as well as graduate theses and dissertations..
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Item Beyond Diversity As Usual: Expanding Critical Cultural Approaches to Marginalization in Engineering Education(2017) Secules, Stephen; Elby, Andrew; Gupta, Ayush; Education Policy, and Leadership; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In general, what we think of as "diversity work" in undergraduate engineering education focuses in the following ways: more on the overlooked assets of minority groups than on the acts of overlooking, more on the experiences of marginalized groups than on the mechanisms of marginalization by dominant groups, more on supporting and increasing minority student retention than on critiquing and remediating the systems which lead minority students to leave engineering. This dissertation presents a series of arguments which push beyond a status quo understanding of diversity in engineering education. The first approach the dissertation takes up is to problematize educational facts around failure by interrogating their roots in interactions and cultural norms in an engineering classroom. In another argument, the dissertation places the engineering classroom cultural norms of competition, whiteness, and masculinity in a critical historical context of the discipline at large. Finally, I demonstrate how engaging students in a critique of marginalizing educational culture can be an important source of agency. In addition to applying and demonstrating the value of specific novel approaches in engineering education, the dissertation contributes to the research community by discussing the respective affordances between these and other possible scholarly approaches to culture and marginalization in education. I also suggest how a consideration of the taken-for-granted culture of engineering education can be an important tool for instructors seeking to gain insight into persistent educational problems. In addition, this dissertation makes implications for diversity support practice, envisioning new forms of support programming rooted in intersectionality and critical praxis.Item DEFINING AND ASSESSING PARENT EMPOWERMENT AND ITS RELATIONSHIP TO ACADEMIC ACHIEVEMENT USING THE NATIONAL HOUSEHOLD EDUCATION SURVEY: A FOCUS ON MARGINALIZED PARENTS(2012) Kim, Jungnam; Bryan, Julia; Counseling and Personnel Services; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Marginalized parents experience multiple and complex challenges in terms of social isolation, exclusion, and powerlessness. This empirical study investigated the effects of parent empowerment on academic outcomes using a large national representative sample and should provide insights about the importance of parent empowerment in education and counseling. Further, the study investigated the effect of the intersectionality of race/ethnicity, home language and income on parent empowerment. This first attempt at analyzing intersectionality in the context of parent empowerment may provide some guidance for future researchers in addressing the complex nature of intersecting identities. This study was a correlational study that used data from the Parent and Family Involvement Survey of the National Household Education Surveys (PFI-NHES: 2007) to investigate the relationship between parent empowerment and academic achievement as measured by parents' reports of students' grade point average(GPA). Using multiple linear regression and logistic regression, the findings of the current study demonstrated that some aspects of parent empowerment were related to children's academic achievement, namely, parents' competence, self-determination, community belonging, and community participation. Interestingly, parents' sense of meaning and consciousness were not related to children's academic achievement. Moreover, intersections of race/ethnicity, home language and income were also related to parent empowerment. The results are significant in that they provide empirical information for school counselors, teachers, administrators and counselors for working with parents. Furthermore, these data may begin to provide support for the conceptual framework of parent empowerment provided this study in order to guide future research and practice.Item Beyond "No/Homo": An Institutional Ethnographic Exploration of Teachers' Understandings of Gendered Harassment Policies(2012) Chen, Elke; Mawhinney, Hanne B; Education Policy, and Leadership; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This institutional ethnography explored how teachers who attended district-sponsored professional development workshop(s) on sexuality or gendered harassment came to understand their school district's gendered harassment policies. The goal of the project was to explore how teachers constructed and understood homophobic harassment, sexual harassment, and harassment for gender non-conformity, in order to examine their understandings of those policies and how they incorporated them into their daily work. The study is an institutional ethnography in which I explored the interactions between organizational practices, policies, and the experiences of six health and physical education teachers. This sociological approach involves an explication of how complex human actions, in this case, teachers' understandings of gendered harassment policies, are coordinated by various kinds of texts, policies, and procedures. In particular, I investigated how standards-based accountability and its accompanying school practices coordinated the activities of health and physical education teachers and their understandings of their school district's gendered harassment policies. The social relations of standards-based accountability and physical education generated an empirical ground for the analysis of how gendered harassment policies in a school setting are organized. By inquiring into the activities of health and physical education teachers in a school setting, I explicated how these teachers' knowledge of gendered harassment and gendered harassment policies is socially organized.