This exploratory study provides an interpretive framework and empirical evidence supporting the proposition that internet forums devoted to intentional self-injury may fruitfully be conceptualized as communities of social-cognitive literacy practice. This conceptualization may facilitate the development of theory, research, and clinical practice involving individuals for whom the practice bears psychological meaning, while also providing theoretical surplus value for research into psychology, digital media, critical pedagogy, and the study of virtual lives. I present a selection of discussion threads drawn from seven of the most visible Internet forums devoted to self-injury, providing a range of ethnographic and social-cognitive observations concerning the forms and apparent functions of these sites, as articulated by their members. The guiding theoretical framework emerges from points of instructive overlap between social- cognitive psychology and the developing field of digital media and learning. Forums appear to offer members interactive, real-time community as well as a shared, dynamic repertoire of social-cognitive constructs with which to interpret lived experiences and explore their implications for socialization and identity development. Through ethnographic observation and discourse analysis of forums and discussion threads, I reveal forum discussions to be social and cognitive ecologies in which members represent and reflect collectively on experiences, thoughts, and social categories, but in which such discussions tend to remain at a generally concrete level of cognitive operations.

Learning to read marks a critical transition in a child's educational trajectory that has long term consequences. This dissertation analyzes how California's current policies in beginning reading instruction impact two critical conditions for creating opportunity - access to qualified teachers and rigorous academic curriculum - by examining the enactment of a prescriptive core reading program disproportionately targeted at "low-performing" schools. Although prescriptive curricula attempt to ensure achievement, classroom implementation is mediated by teachers exercising professional prerogative. The quality of these mediations may be determined by a teacher's expertise in negotiating the tensions between fidelity of implementation and adaptation to local context. Through classroom observations and teacher interviews, this multi-case study illuminates fundamental issues of teacher quality as they are realized by experienced teachers exercising professional prerogative with prescriptive curriculum in order to be more effective with their students. The findings indicated that instructional decisions and strategies of effective teachers were driven by a clear definition of equity based on a theory of action that included mechanisms for both expanding access and achieving desired outcomes. These theories of action allowed teachers to exercise professional prerogative to utilize content and pedagogy both within and beyond the prescribed curriculum.

Contemporary conversations about digital tools in education tend to focus on technology integration and notions of “digital transformation” without careful attention to pedagogy or sociocultural ecosystems related to education. Before COVID-19, prevailing conversations of educational technology left largely unaddressed digital divides and associated impacts on nondominant communities. This dissertation study focuses on one year (Year 3, or Y3) of a 3-year course redesign organized around principles of equity, design, and community participation to mediate literacy teacher candidates’ preparation to center sociocultural knowledge in their use of digital tools. Building on earlier foundations of Learn, Tinker, Create/Share of the two previous iterations, Y3 uniquely featured a digitally-networked community of learners that included pre-service and in-service teachers. The study employed qualitative methods of multi-sited ethnography and digital ethnography to investigate teacher candidates’ (n=10) meaning-making in participatory networks, their expansive learning related to Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) and their development, revealing, and applications of sociocultural knowledge across their designs of digitally mediated learning. Data sources included blog posts, Twitter posts, participant coursework, digitally-mediated learning designs (e.g. lesson plans, tool tutorials, and flipped instruction designs), multimodal compositions, all of which were created with free web-based ICTs. Findings from this study lay the groundwork for humanizing, critical digital pedagogy—a term coined to identify digital pedagogy that honors the lived subjectivities of nondominant communities and centralizes humanizing critical sociocultural knowledge throughout. The findings have research and practice implications related to teacher learning and collegiality (including in digital environments), critical digital literacies in teacher education, and pedagogical design. This vision of humanizing, critical digital pedagogy positions teachers as not only pedagogical designers, but also digital designers who can shape educational technology design cycles toward socially just futures through their uniquely intersecting knowledge domains.

AbstractCracking the Code: Chief Admission Officers’ Solutions for Inclusive STEM Admissions in Public Research Universities

byOlufemi A. Ogundele Doctor of Education University of California, Berkeley Professor Jabari Mahiri, Co-Chair Professor Lisa García Bedolla This study examined the role of chief admission officers (CAOs) in Research 1 (R1) public flagship institutions and how they understand and address the misalignment between admission criteria to STEM majors and the disparate access to STEM opportunities for diverse students in the applicant pool. The research questions this study explored were (a) how the case CAOs characterized and analyzed the challenges that underrepresented minority (URM) applicants face in the admission process to STEM majors and (b) what strategies CAOs employ to overcome these challenges and provide access to STEM majors for URM students. Guided by critical race theory in education and anti-deficit theory to interrogate the STEM admission pipeline and excavate strategies that provide access to STEM majors, qualitative data was collected at six R1 public flagship institutions. This qualitative study explored various data sources, including a leadership questionnaire, and semi-structured one-on-one interviews with chief admission officers, as well as an examination of institutional admission websites and publicly available admission data. The study’s findings reveal that CAOs characterize the challenges as institutional and environmental factors contributing to an admission pathway that disproportionately keeps URM students from pursuing STEM majors. Institutional factors include interpretations of the public flagship missions and current enrollment goals that are at odds with diversifying STEM and the additional admission criteria for STEM applicants. The study also highlights the significant impact institutional faculty have on setting admission guidelines. Environmental factors that impact college admission include varied educational contexts of the applicant pool, academic opportunity gaps amongst students, and other neighboring institutions. To address the misalignment of college admission requirements and the lived experiences of their applicant pools, CAOs employ strategies like pipeline development, nuanced application evaluation, and embedding equity values in admission staff. After examining the history of exclusion in higher education and current college admission practice, this study concludes that while the STEM admission pipeline to public universities is skewed to keep URM students from participating, CAOs have strategies to ameliorate the impact. With implications for policy development, best practices, and future research this study provides insights for public university faculty and admission professionals to reconsider admission policies, definitions merit and meritocracy in admission.

This study investigates how classified staff across one school district are experiencing communication from the district’s school leaders. Classified staff are essential personnel in terms of school districts achieving their overall educational goals. Their roles in the district are mediated through communication with district leaders, however, effective communication is often not taught as a leadership skill. Through a qualitative single case study within a Bay Area school district, I explore how classified staff perceive communication with their supervisors, examining the impact of these perceptions on their roles, work efficacy, inclusion, and sense of belonging within the school culture. I conducted a demographic questionnaire and semi-structured interviews with 18 classified staff members across this Bay Area school district during the summer and fall of 2023. Findings revealed a unanimous sense of exclusion among all participants concerning professional development and a perceived lack of acknowledgment or appreciation from administrators. Findings also revealed that peer dynamics among classified and certificated staff were generally positive, with classified staff holding certificated staff in high regard. Finally, classified staff reported experiencing inequitable treatment based on racial factors, leading to the resignation of staff members from diverse backgrounds.

The study suggests the need for targeted staff development programs tailored specifically for classified staff, and for adoption of an equity-centered communication channel that facilitates interactions in multiple languages. District policies and practices should incorporate distributed leadership strategies and foster an inclusive staff culture that values the contributions of classified staff. Given the limited research on the experiences of classified staff in schools, future research endeavors could focus on exploring distributed leadership in depth, amplifying the voices of classified staff, and gaining a more profound understanding of their unique experiences.

This qualitative study conducted over a 14-month period examined how teachers and students' identities influenced their learning and implementation of design thinking processes in conjunction with their technology use in urban classrooms. Design thinking is a learning approach through which students engage in hands-on project-based activities that solve complex problems (Carrol, et al., 2010). This research was an examination of teachers' professional development with design thinking principles to understand 1) how teachers' identities influenced their learning to use tools afforded in training, and 2) how teachers' took up the use of digital technologies in classroom practice. Additionally, this work examined 1) how access to technologies influenced 60 predominately Latino/a and African American students' identities and 2) how it also influenced these students' developing new and critical literacies. Findings revealed how teachers' identities differentially affected their learning of design thinking principles and how they facilitated the use of technologies in their classrooms. This work also revealed that students transformed negative self-perceptions by designing digitally mediated projects that facilitated the development of more positive identities. Finally, this work found that students' developing new and critical literacies were influenced by their lived experiences because students evidenced a predilection for making digitally mediated projects that relevantly connected to their personal lives. Implications of this work are that both teachers and students' identities play integral roles in how they learn and utilize principles of design thinking as well as digital technologies such that identity connections need to be much more central to the processes of learning for both teachers and students.

The communication skills of teachers, their repertoire of discourses and rhetorical tools, are central to successful educational projects. This dissertation analyzes discourses as complex social practices to determine how they contribute to (or inhibit) things like student engagement, effective student learning, and student initiation into professional practices. Through classroom observations and teacher interviews, this qualitative case study illuminates the discourse practices of two teachers at a non-profit youth development media program. It considers how these teachers negotiate the intersectionality of professional radio discourse with other youth discourses to facilitate student learning of complex content as well as technical and journalistic skills. I propose the term Global Emergent Discourse to capture the mixture of diverse cultures and of global and local identities reflected in the classroom communication of these students and their teachers. This is a hybrid discourse that results from the colliding mixes and collages of their lived experiences. The findings of this study indicated that the deployment of discourse by the teachers in this setting was the enactment of an invented hybrid that was neither formal professional English nor the primary community discourses of the students in the two classes. It was a mixture that marked points of unity as well as steps towards induction to new discourses that reached across different generations and different local experiences within the complex web of Global Emergent Discourse. This hybrid discourse allowed these two teachers to effectively engage students in a complex curriculum of journalism, media literacy, and technical skills. It also marked a validation of the perspective and values of both the teachers and the students and stood in contrast to and critique of the one way transmission of knowledge and framing of educational goals that is often reflective of schooling in the United States.

ABSTRACT

It’s NOT Whatever:

How teacher leaders and novice teachers develop as

“politically determined pedagogues” within an urban high school

by

Gerald Tiglao Reyes

Doctor of Philosophy in Education

University of California, Berkeley

Professor Jabari Mahiri, Chair

Implementing effective teacher development is one of the most critical aspects of school improvement. This study examines the cultural and structural nature and eventual outcomes of a politically relevant teacher development process in an urban high school that has a specific mission for its teachers to become humanizing, critically conscious, intellectual, and reflective practitioners. This critical participant research examined how three teacher leaders and three novice teachers of color representing English, social studies, and Science departments were facilitated within the school to make sense of and develop as what came to be termed “Politically Determined Pedagogues.” Data utilized for this study included existing school documents from the site, participant meetings, participant narratives, observations of participants during school organized teacher collaborations, participant interviews, field notes, and memos. Data was analyzed by initially coding to develop specific categories and eventual themes to capture the nature of focal participant activities within and across several cycles of the teacher development process. The findings illuminate a dynamic and systemic process of teacher development as humanizing, critically conscious, intellectually engaged, and reflective practitioners within the context of a School Cohesion Container as a framework. Within this framework, nurturing teachers’ political perspectives as Politically Determined Pedagogues was operationalized in a way that could be adapted for teacher development in other urban schools as well as for teacher preparation programs.

This study examines a project through which elementary school and high school students collaborated with university Architecture/New Media students in building models of virtual, immersive libraries. It presents the project in the context of multiple and cross-disciplinary fields currently investigating the use of virtual and immersive environments for learning. Focusing on two groups, a fifth/sixth grade "Structures/Architecture" class, and three twelfth grade English classes, this study examines the multiple ways youth represented their design ideas, the non-school activities that influenced their contributions and the changes in literacies that their participation heralds. Consideration of the affordances as well as the barriers to implementation of virtual and immersive environments in school settings, contributes to the beginnings of a framework on which researchers, educators and designers might develop an enhanced understanding of learning and literacy in the digital age.

STEM education has been reliant on axioms and purported facts that for far too long have been delivered in a banking or absorption model that is, arguably, anti-critical. Unsurprisingly, this pedagogical approach to STEM education has failed large segments of students; and, this is especially true of African American males. This study investigated the potential inroads and vistas of a Saturday Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) program, Male Aptitudes Nurtured for Unlimited Potential (MAN UP), designed to foster interest and competence in STEM subjects by middle school African American males. Critical pedagogical perspectives were central to the program’s design and implementation as was the intent to increase their STEM competency in conjunction with developing STEM identities that are informed by social justice perspectives. Data collection covered the implementation of this program with first year MAN UP students for two or three Saturdays per month for a full academic year. Data included pre and post and focus group interviews with the entire first year cohort, participant observation in a focal class, classroom observations of the cohort’s two additional STEM classes, video tapes of cohort students’ project presentations, their online reflective journals, as well as interviews with their STEM instructors along with the instructors’ online learning designs and reflections. This study significantly illuminates and documents viable approaches to increasing the interest in, competence with, and potential for socially just applications of science, technology, engineering, and math by students who are often marginalized in these subjects.