There is both a longstanding legacy of white supremacy in education, and a plethora of resistance movements to white supremacy. Correspondingly, there are scores of teachers who uphold white supremacy at the classroom level (through curriculums, pedagogies, behavior policies, procedures, and more), and many who work to challenge and critically…

This study explores the possibilities and tensions that emerged when preservice teachers integrated both the science of reading and a culturally sustaining framework when learning about and teaching reading comprehension. Utilizing a constructivist grounded theory methodology, this research draws on data from interviews, student coursework…

The United States is experiencing a tremendous shift in the composition of its population. For the first time in history, the overall number of Asian, Latino, and African American students in K-12 public education classrooms is projected to surpass the population of Non-Hispanic whites. The number of Latinos in educational leadership positions in…

Culturally responsive community-school partnerships can help support students' well-being, and the facilitators, barriers, and benefits of community-school partnerships in Indigenous communities may be unique due to historic and contemporary sociopolitical influences. The aims of the current study were to explore facilitators, barriers, and…

The field of adult learning theory, or how adults learn, has exploded in recent years yielding increased knowledge and awareness of how adults learn. While preachers do have a wide variety of ages in their congregations, most of the people they preach to are adults. This dissertation looks at preaching and adult learning theory and what the…

Racial disproportionality in special education reflects the manifestation of modern-day segregation in our education systems (Anyon, 2009; Artiles et al., 2016; Artiles, 2022). Due to their specialized training and positionality as key stakeholders in special education eligibility processes, school psychologists are uniquely suited to impact…

Researchers have long studied teacher burnout and understanding how to prevent it to help teachers avoid the same pitfalls. This study looked specifically at what has helped retain teachers despite teaching through the COVID-19 global pandemic. The study explored the difficulties teachers endured while teaching through the COVID-19 pandemic and…

The U.S. schooling system has a long history of failed reforms that lead to schools consistently perpetuating society's inequities. Rigid organizational structure, built purposely to sustain the life of the institution (as if it, and not the children, were the thing whose life mattered), ensures that even the most well-intentioned transformative…

This phenomenological qualitative study sought to understand reasons contributing to Black or African American students' initial stop out, the decisions that led them to return to college, and the processes used to facilitate their return to college after being away from college for one year or more. This research was guided by the following…

The California Community College (CCC) system is the largest higher education system in the United States and serves diverse students. However, CCC's leadership does not mirror the diversity of its student population. Senior-level positions continue to be dominated by White men, highlighting the lack of diversity among leadership at these…

Hispanic women in higher education are underrepresented as faculty and mid-level administrators and are not ascending through the career pipeline into higher leadership positions at community colleges. The purpose of this dissertation was to explore the experiences of Latinas in a career in academia. This study was conducted as a qualitative…

This qualitative research was conducted with the goals of investigating the experiences of African American male college students who have encountered instances of racial injustice and bigotry on college campuses, as well as investigating the consequences that such incidents have had on the participants' academic performance during their academic…

The study sought to understand the experiences of faculty engaged in curriculum reform to integrate social determinants of health in medical education. The continuing disparities in health are in part a result of lack of education at U.S. medical schools on social and structural inequities as root causes of health disparities. The study used a…

The study abroad experience is an important fixture of American higher education, with politicians, institutions, and mainstream media calling for increased participation. Participation in study abroad can potentially benefit students' personal, academic, and career development. However, historical educational data have shown that some groups,…

This dissertation interrogates the representation of syntactic locality constraints, specifically intervention locality, within child grammar. Our focal point is the Intervention Hypothesis, which suggests that children are governed by a strict version of featural Relativized Minimality, leading to comprehension difficulties when partial featural…