Education Studies

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Open Access
A Molecular Sociology of Student Success in Undergraduate Education
(University of Oregon, 2018-09-06) Smithers, Laura; Mazzei, Lisa
This study explores the promise of student success in undergraduate education that exceeds its standard definition and measurement as retention and graduation rates. The research paradox framing this dissertation is: In what ways can universities support conceptions of undergraduate student success that escape measurement? This paradox is explored through two analytic questions: What do the orientations of student success in the American higher education literature produce? and What does the map of student success at Great State University produce? To explore these questions, this study utilizes assemblage theory, a theorization of the composition of the conditions that produce our social fields to develop a molecular sociology, the methodology by which this study opens up the determinate world to the map of the assemblage. A genealogy of the undergraduate education literature explores what the orientations of student success produce. This section first destabilizes the notion that student success is a collection of literature that moves forward linearly with the march of scientific measurement. Second, it provides the orientation of the current student success assemblage in American higher education, data-driven control. A cartography of student success at Great State University next maps the orientations and disorientations of the first year of GSU’s student success initiative to data-driven control. In this mapping, we explore the initiative’s continued production of the in/dividual student: the dividual, or data point subject produced by data-driven control through the justification of student-centered practices. We also explore the moments that escaped the capture of data-driven control, or liberal education. Through a compilation of cartographic locations, we come into relation with student success at GSU as an assemblage of indeterminate molecularities productive of determinate reality. This study concludes with a call for a fractal student success, a student success incommensurate with itself and its locations. This expansive success is fostered by critical methodologies and practices. Narrow policy changes suggested by many organizations active in student success serve to re/produce data-driven control. Change in our students’ lives and possibilities will come from unyielding experimentations in research, practice, and policy to warp and overthrow data-driven control, and all assemblages that follow.
Open Access
“ADULTS SEE EVERYTHING AS DANGEROUS EXCEPT THEMSELVES”: A CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS OF SAFETY, POLICING, AND PROTECTION IN SCHOOLS
(University of Oregon, 2024-08-07) Springer, Shareen; Sabzalian, Leilani
This study explores ideologies, discourses, and representations of school safety and policing within the United States educational system, motivated by the imperative to understand the transmission and impact of these ideologies on the broader societal constructs of safety, punishment, and mass incarceration. Drawing from the frameworks of corpus-assisted discourse studies (CADS) and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), three central research questions guide the investigation: 1) How do different educational community members (students, policy makers, and community) define school safety (safety for whom, safety from what)?; 2) How do different educational community members (students, policy makers, and community) discursively produce police as safe or unsafe in schools?; 3) What do discourses of school safety and policing show us about the ways students are positioned as dangerous (and by whom), which students are positioned as dangerous, and who must be protected and from what within schools? Analyzing multiple datasets, including school board meetings, online public comments, and conversations with students, the study uncovers both commonalities and tensions within educational communities regarding representations of policing, schools, and students. It identifies shared discursive strategies alongside ideological tensions, highlighting the perpetuation, privileging, and challenging of certain beliefs about policing and about young people that move across contexts and social histories. A significant finding of the research is the central role of adultism in maintaining the interconnectedness between the school and prison systems, thereby perpetuating mass incarceration. This revelation prompts the introduction of YouthCrit as a framework to explicitly address adultism as a unique form of oppression intertwined with other institutional subjugations, and to disrupt carceral logics rooted in colonialism and heteropaternalism. Ultimately, this study advocates for a deeper understanding of the school-prison nexus and emphasizes the importance of challenging deficit representations of students. It calls upon scholars, educators, and practitioners to center the voices and agency of young people in research, interventions, and social movements for community safety.
Open Access
Anti-Racist Teacher Well-Being and/as Curricular Praxis
(University of Oregon, 2024-12-19) Cartee, MaryJohn; Mazzei, Lisa
This dissertation explores the well-being of public K-12 teachers in the United States who explicitly identify as anti-racist and/or anti-colonial teachers. Well-being has traditionally been conceptualized as attached to single human individuals in most Western academic scholarship. However, drawing on insights from the posthumanisms, community psychology, Critical Race Theory, and Indigenous studies, this dissertation argues that these teachers’ well-being is not only influenced by the larger institutional, political, and environmental contexts in which they live and teach; it is co-constituted with them on the level of ontology. In order to explore these teachers’ well-being, this study draws on immersive cartography (Rousell, 2021), a posthuman methodology that centers affect (Gregg & Siegworth, 2010), process, and emergence. While methods were also borrowed from traditional, qualitative, humanistic methodologies (i.e. interviews and focus groups), process, relationality, and emergence were centered. Four interviews and one focus group were selected for the dissertation based on affective resonances. Together, these interviews and an instance from a focus group map a terrain of anti-racist, anti-colonial teacher well-ill-being which co-constitutes with multiple temporalities from teachers’ pasts, collective histories, and multiple environments. Many teachers had deep personal connections of many types to various forms of oppression, and these histories informed their willingness to question societal common sense—including their own. Furthermore, the Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) teachers in the study found themselves resisting or circumventing the white, feminized position of “footsoldier of colonialism” (Leonardo & Boas, 2021) in the teaching profession by doing work outside the classroom, or by leaving the traditional classroom for other work in the broader field of education. Implications of this work include a need to address the dividual—as opposed to individual—character of ongoing anti-racist, anti-colonial teacher education, particularly its hidden curriculum. The dividual substrate of the hidden curriculum of ongoing teacher education is aggregate, continuous, and pre-personal, and includes racist affects, gendered embodiment, and collective histories. Changing this dividual substrate is perhaps more challenging than changing individuals; nonetheless, anti-racist, anti-colonial teachers discussed being sustained in community with students and with other teachers similarly oriented.
Open Access
Beyond "Business as Usual": Using Counterstorytelling to Engage the Complexity of Urban Indigenous Education
(University of Oregon, 2016-02-23) Sabzalian, Leilani; Rosiek, Jerry
This dissertation examines the discursive and material terrain of urban Indigenous education in a public school district and Title VII/Indian Education program. Based in tenets of Tribal Critical Race Theory and utilizing counterstorytelling techniques from Critical Race Theory informed by contemporary Indigenous philosophy and methodological theory, this research takes as its focus the often-unacknowledged ways settler colonial discourses continue to operate in public schools. Drawing on two years of fieldwork in a public school district, this dissertation documents and makes explicit racial and colonial dynamics that manifest in educational policy and practice through a series of counterstories. The counterstories survey a range of educational issues, including the implementation of Native-themed curriculum, teachers’ attempts to support Native students in their classrooms, challenges to an administrator’s “no adornment” policies for graduation, Native families’ negotiations of erasures embedded in practice and policy, and a Title VII program’s efforts to claim physical and cultural space in the district, among other issues. As a collective, these stories highlight the ways that colonization and settler society discourses continue to shape Native students’ experiences in schools. Further, by documenting the nuanced intelligence, courage, artfulness, and what Gerald Vizenor has termed the “survivance” of Native students, families, and educators as they attempt to access education, the research provides a corrective to deficit framings of Indigenous students. Beyond building empathy and compassion for Native students and communities, the purpose is to identify both the content and nature of the competencies teachers, administrators, and policy makers might need in order to provide educational services that promote Indigenous students’ success and well-being in school and foster educational self-determination. This research challenges educators to critically interrogate taken-for-granted assumptions about Native identity, culture, and education and invites educators to examine their own contexts for knowledge, insights, and resources to better support Native students in urban public schools and intervene into discourses that constrain their educational experiences.
Open Access
Bodies and Texts: Race Education and the Pedagogy of Images
(University of Oregon, 2018-09-06) Franklin-Phipps, Asilia; Goode, Joanna
This dissertation is an exploration of how teaching and learning about race and racism happens in the context of a particularly racially charged political and cultural climate—Black Lives Matter rallies and activism, the Presidential Election and subsequent election of Donald Trump, and shifting racial discourse and logic. Using a 2016 course on racism as a site of inquiry, I consider how experimental and arts-inspired approaches to pedagogy open up new possibilities for how teaching and learning about race can happen. The course, made up, of undergraduates in their senior year, planning to become elementary school teachers resisted dominant discourse about becoming anti-racist as became a space for young, white, mostly women to learn through encounters with texts, moving their bodies through space in ways that they might have otherwise avoided, and participating in ongoing, persistent, nuanced race dialog through a variety of modes—digital, art, music, film, literature, and public events. This learning was often not conclusive but provided ongoing practice for engaging race in ways that allowed for meaningful shifts in how they notice and know the world, implicating how they imagine becoming a teacher in a raced world.
Open Access
Boys in General, Country Boys in Particular: The County Young Men's Christian Association
(1909-02) Wheeler, Harvey Arnold
In this paper, consisting of three parts, we shall seek to discover (1) the needs of boys in early adolescence by studying their natural instincts as manifested in their play and other activities in which they take part; (2) with this better understanding of the boy in mind we shall see how these natural instincts social and individual may be directed, and are being directed into channels which make for the development of the boys; (3) We next deal with the country boy, observing what his needs are and what is being done for him by the County Young Men's Christian Association.
Open Access
Centering the Indigenous in science education: Possibilities and limitations of decolonizing the academy
(University of Oregon, 2020-09-24) RunningHawk Johnson, Stephany; Goode, Joanna
The current public schooling system in the United States attempts to remove culture and values from science education. Science is completely entwined in the culture, art, languages, and everyday lives of Indigenous peoples; therefore it is not a discreet knowledge or entity. A narrative of failure is being produced that falsely portrays Indigenous students as ‘underperforming’, not ‘good at’ science, and that perpetuates the perception of an achievement gap. However, the real problem is the way we look at, think about, consider, and teach science in US public schools, particularly for Indigenous students. Curriculum and pedagogy that present science education out of cultural context is problematic. Indigenous students need to learn science in Indigenous ways, and then the in western paradigm. In this study I employed a qualitative design, consisting of interviews and observations with students and their instructors. I conducted a semi-structured interview with each participant, then, based on an initial analysis, chose three students for in-depth case studies. I attended a number of science courses with the students and faculty, and conducted interviews with two main faculty members. I presented my initial analysis and invited my participants to give further feedback. There are possibilities for doing decolonizing work within the academy. We need more Indigenous folx as professors, and we need non-Indigenous faculty to apply decolonizing and indigenizing curriculum, pedagogies, and practices. Examples of this can include bringing students together with Elders and other tribal experts, employing place-based educational practices, intergenerational learning, learning through story, and oral traditions. Supporting community and reciprocity is also important for our Indigenous students. Faculty face tensions in doing good work with and for their Indigenous students, including the challenge of how to adequately address the field’s expectation of students while still being responsive to student needs. Instructors also talked about balancing their connection to students with maintaining appropriate boundaries, and one instructor shared insight regarding gender differences and imbalances. These instructors voiced the desire and need to enhance their teaching skills and requested training in how to teach effectively and in a caring way for their specific communities.
Open Access
The Concepts of Democracy of Certain of the Founders of American National Government
(1939-06) Small, Lyle L.
Embargo
Cultural Competence, Race, and Gender: Portraits of Teaching in High School College Access Programs
(University of Oregon, 2017-09-06) Brooks, Spirit; Goode, Joanna
Low income and under-represented minority students face multiple kinds of barriers that limit their access to higher education. In the interest of increasing access to college, pre-college bridge programs exist throughout the United States to serve students from low socio-economic status families. This study examines teaching by women in the Advancement via Individual Determination (AVID) program. AVID is a middle school and high school intervention program that helps middle-achieving low income and under-represented minority students with college access. Critical Portraiture methodology is used to examine the ways that female AVID teachers teach students more than just academic skills that increase access to higher education: the framing of student success, the negotiation and justification of upholding the myth of meritocracy in the classroom, the internalization of parental roles with students, and the navigation of race.
Open Access
Curriculum as Agent: Analyzing the Case of Curricular Racism
(University of Oregon, 2022-10-04) Pratt, Alexander; Rosiek, Gerald
As teachers engage with what is taught, rather than a sense of the distribution of inert knowledge, there can be a feeling that the “what” is moving and adapting with them. This is especially true when teachers are working with topics like anti-Black racism. The what being taught, or the curriculum-as-a-whole has been analyzed by cutting it apart into many different aspects including the planned, the assessed, the learned, the hidden, the null, and the enacted. This dissertation focuses on the enacted curricula specifically as it is co-produced in the class and highlights how the teacher is not the only aspect of that class with the agency to shift the enacted curriculum. These conclusions are based on four case studies of enacted antiracist curricula. The enactments of these curricula were undertaken by elementary, middle, and high school teachers in three different cities and were re-storied in a series of interviews with the author. This dissertation concludes that anti-Black racism is always already influencing the curriculum as it is conceived, planned, enacted, and re-storied, though it is particularly influential in the liminal spaces.
Open Access
Development of Social Intelligence Through a Proposed Civics Course in Senior High School
(1938-08) Cash, Alvin Burleigh
Embargo
Digitally Supported Critical Pedagogy: Educational Technology Perspectives of Pre-Service Teachers in a Social Justice Teacher Education Program
(University of Oregon, 2015-08-18) Henderson, Jonathon; Goode, Joanna
The connection between educational technology and critical pedagogy has not been greatly explored. This yearlong research study was conducted with pre-service teachers as they progressed through a teacher licensure program. Data collection included the use of focus groups, individual interviews and participant journals. In addition, this study explored the personal and technology identity of the participants. The results led to a greater understanding of how pre-service teachers view the connection between educational technology and critical pedagogy.
Open Access
Divesting from the Patriarchal Dividend: Participant Experiences of the Creating Allyship Through Gender Education and Dialogue (CAGED) Program
(University of Oregon, 2021-04-29) Dean, Allyson; Goode, Joanna
Perceptions and expectations of masculinity in the United States create difficult conditions for men to discuss the pressures they feel around performing masculinity practices. By remaining relatively silent about these pressures, men secure greater access to material and ideological benefits promised through the patriarchal dividend. The patriarchal dividend, however, does not always pay out and leaves men to grapple with gender difficulties in silence. The purpose of this study was to examine what is produced when individuals, primarily men, come together to dialogue about gender more explicitly through the Creating Allyship Through Gender Education and Dialogue Program, a dialogue program conducted within a prison. Program participants examine socio-cultural influences affecting their understanding of gender at structural and personal levels. The study uses Critical Participatory Action Research and collaborative ethnography as feminist methodologies, engaging incarcerated men in both designing and participating in the research focused on gender. The research results explore how expectations around gender influenced participants’ relationships, identities, and commitments. Further, it examines what is possible through dialogue as a way to develop critical literacies about gender.
Embargo
English Learner Education: Examining Policy Decisions and Their Impact on Student Outcomes
(University of Oregon, 2024-12-06) Vazquez Cano, Manuel; Umansky, Ilana
This three-article dissertation examined how policy choices in three key policy areas – initial enrollment, service provision, and reclassification – impact English learner (EL)-classified students. The first article examined the national landscape of state statutes, regulations, and state education agencies' (SEA) guidance that support districts in implementing procedures to award credit to secondary newcomer students for prior learning experiences. The findings reveal a lack of education statutes and regulations, and limited implementation guidance from SEAs to support newcomer credit transfer. The second article zooms into Portland Public Schools in Oregon and examines the causal effect of the district’s dual language immersion (DLI) program. The study found significant positive effects of the DLI program, demonstrating a notable increase in credit accrual, high school graduation rates, and attainment of the Seal of Biliteracy among participating students. The third article investigates the causal impact of reclassification from EL services in 5th and 8th grade on high school graduation and the mediating role of course access. The study does not identify significant effects of reclassification and does not find evidence supporting the hypothesis that early access to English Language Arts and Algebra 1 mediates the potential impact of reclassification. Findings from this dissertation contribute novel evidence to EL education policy and highlight how policy decisions at different entry points can potentially shape student outcomes.
Open Access
Exploratory Data Analysis with Clustered Data: Simulation and Application with Oregon’s Statewide Longitudinal Data System using Generalized Linear Mixed-Effects Model Trees
(University of Oregon, 2024-08-07) Loan, Christopher; Zvoch, Keith
Simulations were conducted to establish best practice in hyperparameter optimization and accounting for clustering in Generalized Linear Mixed-Effects Model Trees (GLMM trees). Using data-driven best practices, the relationship between a 9th Grade On-Track to Graduate (9G-OTG) indicator and observed high school graduation within four years was explored. Data originated from two cohorts of the Oregon State Longitudinal Data System (SLDS) and were joined with external datasets. Restricted to complete cases, the data were comprised of more than 58,000 observations, each with more than 1500 variables measured at student, school, district, and zip code levels. GLMM trees explored heterogeneity in a cross-classified multilevel logistic regression which regressed observed graduation on 9G-OTG, accounting for variance in school- and zip-code-level random intercepts. Subgroups were identified for whom the probability of graduating among on- and-off track students were systematically heterogeneous, relative to the supraordinate group. Results suggest that for most students, 9G-OTG is a potent early warning indicator of graduation, but systematic variation in the indicator’s effectiveness was found along all levels except district. Subgroups were defined by combinations of alternative schools, absences, transferring schools, being enrolled in more than one instructional program, neighborhood unemployment, and sex. Implications and recommendations to measurement, practice, and evaluation are discussed.
Open Access
Fostering a Research Practice Partnership to Understand the Community Needs for Addressing Suicide Prevention among Youth in Klamath County
(University of Oregon, 2022-02-18) Thomas, John; Seeley, John
Suicide is the second leading cause of death amongst youth in the United States, and the issue is worsening each year. The issue is particularly prevalent within American Indian communities, where numerous risk factors for suicide are more commonplace than in other groups. To prevent these tragedies from occurring, it is crucial that young people are able to access effective mental healthcare support, and that the educators and community members who regularly work with the youth are able to identify the warning signs for suicide and make the appropriate referrals. All too often, the youth suicide prevention strategies that are in place are not fit for this purpose. The research in this dissertation takes place in Klamath County, an area of Oregon with a relatively large American Indian population, and a suicide rate which is more than triple the nationwide average. A research-practice partnership (RPP) was initiated so that experts from the practice and the academic communities could collaborate to better understand the context around youth suicide prevention in the county, and together formulate an action plan for improving the accessibility and effectiveness of youth mental health services in the area. In total, three pieces of research conducted within the RPP are presented in this dissertation. The first study (the Klamath County Community Needs Assessment) sought to survey professionals’ perceptions of the most urgent youth suicide prevention needs and barriers, their preferences regarding youth suicide prevention training, and their awareness of current youth suicide prevention resources in the county. An online survey was sent to local healthcare, education, and community practitioners, and was completed by 186 respondents in total. The results revealed that there was a particularly strong perceived need for more youth mental health services, and greater access to existing services. The second study (the Klamath County Youth Survey) aimed to survey the youth of Klamath County themselves, to better understand their own views around mental health support and youth suicide prevention. An online survey was sent out at one elementary school and one high school and was completed by 156 children in total. The results showed that the youth tended to have slightly negative views of the mental health services available at their school. Many students were unaware that their school offered mental health support, and others were aware of the support but were afraid to access it due to general anxiety or worries about their family finding out. Finally, the third study was more reflective, and aimed to explore the extent to which the RPP was conducted in accordance with best-practice guidelines. To do this, a content analysis was performed on the meeting minutes and agendas of the RPP, using a recognized framework for RPPs in education as the coding scheme. The content analysis confirmed that the RPP had met the majority of the criteria for effectiveness, although more could have been done to embed a culture of research and evidence use within the practice community. Overall, using the approach of the RPP enabled a reflexive and iterative approach to be taken to address the problem of youth suicide in Klamath County, harnessing the expertise of both practitioners and researchers. The studies have taken into account the perspectives of the intended beneficiaries of the project (i.e., Klamath County youth) as well as the professionals responsible for making referrals to or delivering mental health services in the county, and used this to identify numerous opportunities for improving existing services. The results from the studies have directly informed the creation of an action plan aimed at reducing youth suicidal ideation and behavior in Klamath County.
Open Access
A Historical Study of the Educational Movement in the Portland, Oregon, Young Men's Christian Association
(1951-06) Impecoven, Howard
Open Access
History of the Development of the Guidance Movement in Public High Schools
(University of Oregon, 1940-06) Walker, Doris Elizabeth
The purpose of this thesis is to trace the development of the guidance movement in the public high schools from the last half of the nineteenth century to the present time. It will attempt to show the steps in growth of the guidance program. The changes in the emphasis and concept of guidance and their effects on the subsequent development of the movement will be indicated.
Open Access
A history of the superintendency of public instruction in the state of Oregon, 1849-1925.
(University of Oregon, 1926) Raymer, Robert George
Open Access
“I just want to build a future”: Future Time Perspectives and Case Studies of Refugee Adolescent Girls
(University of Oregon, 2024-08-07) DeRosia, Nicholette; Husman, Jenefer
Refugee girls are underserved in U.S. schools and under-studied in educational and psychological research. Using a feminist intersectional lens and a case study approach, this project sought to illuminate how three high school age refugee girls expressed their intersectional identities and their Future Time Perspectives (FTP; Lewin, 1948) when describing their case studies. It also examined how their intersectional identities showed up in those expressions, and if/how those identities aligned with their learning environment. The study focused on the mismatch between individualistic and collectivist identities interwoven into the other identities of the three girls focused on in this study. FTP should include Collective Time Extension, or an understanding of extending thinking of time into the past and the future, as not just individual, but also inclusive of collective identity. Furthermore, the study interrogated the associated idea of Socioemotional Selectivity Theory (SST), which posits that as life’s perceived time gets shorter that priorities shift from achievement (academic, professional success) goals, to emotional (building relationships, spending time with loved ones) goals (Carstensen & Lang, 1996; 2002; Lang, 2017; Rohr, 2017). Rather than be on one side of a binary of identities that mismatched with the context they were in, they displayed complex capacities to hold and navigate many identities and understandings at once. The girls in this study leveraged their emotional goals and collective identities; to form and make sense of achievement goals in the individualistic systems they were a part of. Keywords: Refugee, Future Time Perspective, Intersectionality, Collective Time Extension