The current study examined educators' perceptions of liberatory spaces in higher education. The literature review delves into an analysis of power and oppression in higher education, a description of liberatory spaces in the academy, and outcomes of those spaces, specifically self-empowerment. The methodological approach for the current study was…

A phenomenological qualitative research study was conducted to answer the research question: How do first-generation college students experience ambiguous loss towards their cultural identity because of cultural mismatch? To what extent do first-generation college students experience ambiguous loss of their cultural identity? The researcher…

This dissertation seeks to design an applied form of Dialogue Education with Chinese Characteristics to be used in the house churches of Northwest China to facilitate missional engagement of Post-2000s generation university students. This study emerged from the gap between the storied Chinese house church revival and the lived experience of…

Disability is a common phenomenon globally, an experience that comes with many challenges and stress. This study focused on culture's role in the well-being and education of children with disabilities within a Nigerian cultural context. The specific problem this study addressed is that the well-being and education of children with disabilities…

The 20th century brought about the development of an increased climate of capitalist influence on every aspect of American life, including and especially on higher education. Simultaneously, as more and more purposes of higher education have come to reflect values of capitalist culture, a movement towards new ways of teaching and learning has…

While it is well established that pedagogies purposefully linking subject matter to students' cultural contexts and prior knowledge can help students learn subject matter, little is known about practices for so doing in undergraduate biology courses enrolling substantial numbers of racially, culturally, and otherwise diverse students. This study…

This dissertation uses the Conceptual Blending Hypothesis from the socio-cognitive method presented and refined by Kecskes (2002, 2004, 2007, 2010, 2020) to explain how the lexical choice of bilinguals differs across sociocultural situations. Quantitative (lexical density, lexical diversity, and lexical sophistication) and qualitative (lexical…

While previous researchers investigating the competitive environment at the highest levels of academic scholarship (e.g., Deresiewicz, 2014; Pope, 2001) have concluded that students buckle under an unbearable amount of stress as a result of over-achievement and narrow conceptions of success, they have left the construct of "success"…

This dissertation explores the experiences of middle childhood pre-service teachers (PST) across two academic years as they learn to teach English language arts to diverse students from conflicting sociocultural contexts. To help PSTs navigate the tensions across contexts, this study introduced culturally relevant (Ladson-Billings, 1995; 2014) and…

Theories of privacy and identity in relationship to the use of Information Communication Technology (ICT) have been a topic of research for decades. However, little attention has been paid to the perception of privacy and identity from the perspective of Muslim Arab technology users. Privacy and identity in the context of the Arab world is highly…

This dissertation examines the use and linguistic behavior of the "al-raqs ala ru'oos al-tha'abeen" "dancing on the heads of snakes" metaphor and metaphors about unity in pro-government and anti-government discourse in Yemen. It adopts an intertextual, discourse-based approach that, following Oakley and Coulson (2008),…

Biometric technology is rapidly gaining popularity as an access control mechanism in the workplace. In some instances, systems relying on biometric technology have not been well received by employees. One reason for resistance may be perceived privacy issues associated with biometrics. This research draws on previous organizational information…

Despite years of efforts by dedicated volunteers, local organizations, and government agencies, poverty remains a persistent and problematic phenomenon within society. Indeed, U.S. Census data show a steady increase in the rate of poverty over the last several decades. The persistence in poverty has led to the development of federal programs…

Issues concerning global virtual collaboration have received considerable attention in both the academic and practical world; however, little research has been conducted on knowledge-sharing activities in global virtual collaboration, which is a key process to achieve collaboration effectiveness. Due to national culture having been seen as one of…

Similar to its neighboring countries of China, South Korea, and Japan, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) (also known as North Korea) has made English a compulsory subject for middle school to university level students, and teacher training programs based on the Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) approach have also been…