Most educators enter the profession with a strong sense of purpose, often connected to a love of children and hope for the future, a desire to make a difference and give back to the community, or a belief in education as a catalyst for social justice. However, competing educational goals and purposes, as well as current educational reforms rooted…

Neoliberalism continues to exacerbate systemic racism and restricts efforts to address racial and social justice issues. Consequently, there has not only been an increase of public concern, but students are constantly driven to organize around their experiences. Asian American students are currently and have historically been one of these…

Today's elementary teacher candidates (TCs) are entering a world of public education decimated by decades of neoliberal education reforms (Kumashiro, 2010; Lipman, 2012) exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic (Giroux, 2021) and the current white-supremacist, heteropatriarchal backlash (Pendharkar, 2022). For justice-oriented TCs, finding agency in…

Democratic engagement and socially just leadership education are emergent approaches to community engagement and leadership education. Three critical and timely tensions set the stage for this study: tensions between higher education's exclusionary roots and public purpose; tensions between leadership education's neoliberal foundations and social…

Since 2008 high school students in Buenos Aires, Argentina have consistently occupied their schools to criticize budget cuts to public education, demand repairs to deteriorating buildings, slow the standardization of their curriculum, and foster their inclusion in the educational decision-making process. By 2012, over 30,000 students occupied more…

This study expanded the understanding of the experiences and perspectives of faculty of color within the community college system. Through a qualitative research design, the study drew insights from interviews with 14 self-identified faculty of color and a review of institutional documents from a single community college. A framework that…

The purpose of this study was to conduct a critical discourse analysis of media produced by higher education institutions. The study aimed to uncover how universities manifest diversity, social justice, and neoliberal discourses in their marketing efforts. Diversity discourses differentiate from social justice discourses in that they do not…

This case study attempts to better understand the nuances of charter school impact by documenting the story of the Board of La Escuela Freire (the Board), a group attempting to open a democratic, social justice charter school in Santa Ana, California. In asking the question: "What has been the development process of La Escuela Freire?",…

The scholarship on school privatization and market-oriented reforms has demonstrated the negative effects on segregation and inequity triggered by this model, not only in Chile but globally. Less is known about how to transition toward a democratic-oriented education approach after decades of embedding the values rooted in a competition-based…

In Social Foundations classrooms, social justice approaches to questions of difference are certainly part of the curriculum. After teaching numerous Social Foundations courses, I encountered several issues related to the way rigid identity categories were complemented by neoliberal narratives that seemed to limit class conversation in troubling…

This dissertation focuses on a pedagogical analysis of the intersections of white racial identity, nationalism, and neoliberalism as they manifest and impact teachers and teacher education. After first detailing how my own family became white, I discuss my method in this work in two ways: first, as a form of Freirean Critical Study (an elaboration…

This dissertation examines representations of black lives in adolescent speculative fiction and explores what the genre offers to anti-racist teacher education. Situating my study at the intersections of literacy education and children's literature studies, I interrogate assumptions surrounding genre conventions adopted in multicultural education.…

Looking through the philosophical lens of love, this study seeks a deeper understanding and appreciation of how postsecondary social justice educators use storytelling, in the context of critical peace education, to create social change. This research explores the guiding question of how storytelling is used to encourage social change and to…