N/A

Research is lacking on Pilipino-American parents' views and involvement in their children's educational and academic trajectories. In light of this, I wanted to understand how Pilipino-American parents utilized their extended familial and community networks in the guidance of their child’s academic trajectory. This is knowledge we can use to inform teachers, counselors and colleges as they reach out to and help this population achieve higher education. I researched the historical and sociocultural aspects of Pilipino parents using the framework of Community Cultural Wealth (CCW) (Yosso, 2005) with two questions in mind: What role do parents play in supporting Pilipino-American students’ academic success in high school, thereby preparing them for entry into higher education? How do Pilipino-American parents’ experiences and insights support their children’s academic success in high school and their future college trajectories? Ten Pilipino parents were interviewed for sixty to ninety minutes about using their experiences, insights, and connections to help their child make educational decisions. I coded their interview responses and found an overarching narrative of the Pilipino community that foregrounded the parents’ immigrant identity in the ways they helped their children succeed in the United States. One main finding was that the parents repeatedly talked about the sacrifices they made to support and help their children succeed in life. Another main finding was the parents’ use of their networks and knowledge of education to gather information and work the system. I then connected these two main themes of sacrifice and working the system to four forms of capital (aspirational, familial, social and navigational) within the framework of Community Cultural Wealth. Finally, I found these Pilipino parents were consciously building, accumulating and utilizing these four forms of capital to support the success of their children in schools and ultimately in their future lives as adults.

There has been a consistent trend in the last twenty years where Black children “continue to lack equal access to a high-quality education and still lag far behind their white peers in reading and math proficiency, high school [graduation] rates, and college completion” (Obama, 2012). Also in the current state of education for Black children, we see disproportionate discipline and SPED identification levels. The perspectives of Black educator-parents are highlighted to answer the following: (a) What are the unique layers of racialization and racism that Black educator-parents navigate in the K–12 educational system? and (b) What are the strategies Black educator-parents employ to navigate and resist the racialized context of schools on behalf of their children? Through the use of Critical Race Theory to ground the study, the analysis shows that while Black educator-parents address racist ideologies and practices in their home communities and school, they can also resist and navigate these stressors in the schooling system. This study has implications for teaching, teacher education, and schooling to benefit the trajectory of education for Black children.

As a response to the national dropout/pushout crisis, alternative high schools were first developed to meet the needs of students that were typically unavailable in traditional high schools (Kelly, 1993). Since the beginning of their establishment, alternative schools gained the reputation of serving as “dumping grounds,” and softer “juvenile detention centers,” for youth labeled “troubled” and “problematic” (Kim, 2011). Scholars have also argued that alternative schools are often “second chance” opportunities that work as “idealistic heavens” for students deemed unsuccessful in a traditional school system (Inbar, 1995; Kim, 2011). Nationwide, traditional high schools are recognized as some of the top feeder schools in the alternative education system, yet there is limited critical research to understand the role of institutional and systemic racism in the overrepresentation (Malagon & Alvarez, 2010) of Black and Latinx students in alternative schools. To hold institutions more accountable for the equitable education of Students of Color, this dissertation calls attention to the policies and practices governing schools that force large numbers of Black and Latinx students into enrolling in alternative schools. Guided by Critical Race Theory (CRT), this study provides a deep dive into the process of school transfer in one California school district to reveal structural flaws and inconsistencies that are often racialized and are supported by deficit framed ideologies that result in internalized racism, anti-black racism, and linguistic racism. Using qualitative methods, this study also draws on counterstorytelling methods to include counter-narratives of student resistance to demonstrate how they rely on their resistant capital (Yosso, 2004) to navigate their transition into continuation high school and defy normalized expectations.

With the continued racism and anti-immigrant rhetoric targeted at the Latinx population, there is a need to further explore the impact that racism has on Latino students' social-emotional health and academic performance. Ample scholarship highlights the ways in which racism in education manifests in the forms of racial microaggressions and toxic campus racial climate that affects students of color (Kohli & Solórzano, 2012; Pérez Huber & Solórzano, 2014; Yosso et al., 2009). However, few studies have examined the ways in which the experiences with racism can contribute to the development of racism-induced traumatic stress (i.e., hypervigilance, lack of sleep, and muscle tension; Akbar, 2017; Carter, 2007; Comas-Diaz, Hall, & Neville, 2019) among K-12 Latino students. This study builds on existing literature on racism-induced traumatic stress by studying the way in which six Latino high school students experienced racism at various levels ranging from structural, institutional, interpersonal, and internal. Interview data describes how frequent encounters with racism took a toll on the social-emotional wellbeing of these students and ultimately impeded their academic success. Lastly, the study results, limitations, and implications for future research are discussed.

Internalized racism describes the conscious and unconscious acceptance of a racial hierarchy where whites are consistently ranked above People of Color. Although scholars across multiple disciplines have discussed this concept, the role of schools in instilling and perpetuating internalized racism within Students of Color has very rarely been examined. This paper is a conceptual piece that utilizes a Critical Race Theory framework to acknowledge the racialized experiences within classroom pedagogy, curriculum, and unequal school resources. We examine how these factors can negatively affect racial group-identity and contribute to internalized racism for Students of Color. Because internalized racism works to sustain educational and social inequity, this paper also explores ways that schools can function to break this cycle.

With the increasingly racialized schooling and social contexts of the ongoing anti-immigrant, anti-Latinx, and xenophobic national climate, there is an urgency to examine how K-12 Ethnic Studies (ES) classrooms can support Latinx students with navigating and confronting racialized oppression in their world(s). K-12 ES has much promise to develop, maintain or extend students’ awareness of racial injustice, but it has been strongly contended in K-12 contexts and there is concern that it will lose its core critical analysis of racism and white supremacy as it is institutionalized. Aligned with sociocultural conceptualizations of literacies that acknowledge their existence within inequitable power relations, this qualitative case study explored how students’ racial literacies—the language and praxis to “read” the existence of institutional racism and to disrupt its effects (Guinier, 2004; Rogers & Mosley, 2006; Sealey-Ruiz, 2013; Skerrett, 2011) were developed, sustained or extended in two 9th grade ES classrooms. With special attention paid to teacher pedagogy, the racial literacy development of Latinx students in ES classrooms at one high school were explored via multiple data sources including, observations, student and teacher interviews, and review and analysis of literacy artifacts. Building on the narratives and experiences of six 9th grade Latinx students and two ES teachers this dissertation study traces a four-stage process of racial literacy development (RLD) for students along with underscoring how racially literacy is embodied in teacher’ pedagogies along four core racially literate stances. Given the significant role that teachers’ racial literacies play in sustaining the revolutionary potential of high school ES, this study has implications for informing the large-scale institutionalization of ES across California high schools by significantly contributing to the ongoing conversation around what types of teachers and what type of pedagogies are needed to teach ES courses effectively. Furthermore, this study extends the concept of racial literacy to encompass the specific racialized socio-political experiences of Latinx students at this historical moment and within the immediate context of a working class predominantly Latinx and immigrant community.