The purpose of this study was to examine the ethnic identity experiences of Caribbean international students in the context of the over-generalized and homogenous aspects of their institutional discourse on international students. It also sought to consider their identification with their native backgrounds and the United States in view of their…

Second-generation Dominicans have been able to make remarkable gains in college completion rates over the last twenty years, and have higher rates of obtaining a bachelor's degree than native-born Blacks and Puerto Ricans who live within their same under-resourced communities (Hernandez and Stevens-Acevedo, 2004). Also, Dominicans are known to…

Research on syllable weight in generative phonology has focused almost exclusively on systems in which weight is treated as an ordinal hierarchy of clearly delineated categories (e.g. light and heavy). As I discuss, canonical weight-sensitive phenomena in phonology, including quantitative meter and quantity-sensitive stress, can also treat weight…

Vocabulary and comprehension are so inextricably linked that it ensures the necessity of researchers and teachers to determine the most effective method of vocabulary instruction. Our nation's children are still victims of what has been termed the vocabulary gap (Biemiller & Boote, 2006). This "vocabulary gap," according to a large…

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationships between the development of employability skills and entrepreneurial innovative attitude in Latin American youth entrepreneurs 18-29 years of age after participating in at least 1 year of an entrepreneurship experience. The design involved analyzing two groups. The first was a coached group…

This study addressed the effectiveness of No Child Left Behind reform in an urban school district. The researcher obtained American College Test composite scores from a diverse, urban, public school district and a private school within the same city for years 2001 and 2008. Statistical tests were run to determine if seniors' scores were…

Parental involvement is an integral part of the educational system in the U.S. Yet, parents from non-mainstream racial/ethnic backgrounds have not fully grasped the nature of parental involvement expectations in the educational process and how these expectations may impact student achievement. The purpose of this study was to identify Haitian…

This study investigates how the Pierre Verger Cultural Space (PVCS), an educational organization dedicated to teaching Afro-Brazilian culture in Bahia, uses music to construct a sense of Afro-Brazilian self. Located in a poverty-stricken neighborhood of Salvador, Bahia, the PVCS sees its mission as "rescuing" ("resgatar") an…

The problem. This study was designed to investigate emotional human, E, technology awareness, T, and knowledge management, K, competences or dimensions of Latin American public post-secondary educational institution departments; specifically how these ETK competences or dimensions affect faculty satisfaction. Method. Three-hundred and…

The usage and disappearance of the Central Ibero-Romance future subjunctive have been extensively researched through Old Spanish texts. Studies on the future subjunctive as it evolved in the farther Western Ibero-Romance languages, represented by Galician and Portuguese, have been scarce, if not incomplete. This dissertation partially fills the…

Motivation to teach is essential to educating all children in the public schools. This study examined the anticipated self-determination of pre-service teachers to teach in classroom settings that varied in the ethnic and racial composition of the students in the classes. Additionally the cultural responsiveness of participants was measured to…

Current initiatives to recruit international teachers are on the rise. Although international teachers have always played a part in educating American students, their presence in U.S. schools have increased over the past few years as a result of overseas recruitment programs (Francis, 2005; Hutchinson, 2007). This increase in the recruitment of…

This research sterns from twelve months of ethnographic research with Haitian migrant women who reside in "Batey Sol", a former sugar-company labor camp located along the "Linea Noroeste" (northwest line) linking the Dominican Rebulic's border town of Dajabon with the urban center of Santiago. The multi-sited study considers…

Building on 18 months of fieldwork in the Bolivian highlands, this dissertation examines how traversing landscapes, through the mediation of spatial practices and spoken words, are embedded in systems of belief. By focusing on "wak'as" (i.e. sacred objects) and on how the inhabitants of the Altiplano relate to the Andean deities known as…

In this dissertation, through semi-structured interviews with 36 female social movement participants and 3 male participants in El Salvador, Nicaragua, Bolivia, and Argentina, I ask, "How do women in Latin American social movements perceive the influence of theology on these movements' pedagogies?" I argue that through this work, the…