This case study examined how a 14-year-old youth and eighth-grade student named Kendra (pseudonym) mobilized restorying to (re)center her experiences in horror fiction. I asked how she conceptualized horror and monstrosity in a 6-week English language arts unit, and how she (re)centered her life experiences within horror fiction through restorying…

Political polarization in the United States has made many environmental issues strongly partisan, with Democrats largely receptive to environmental messaging and Republicans commonly pitted against it. This phenomenon may have meaningful implications for how environmental education is conducted for people from different sociopolitical contexts. We…

In the United States, the two main political parties, Democrats and Republicans, have become increasingly polarized, including with regard to environmental issues. As part of a national study of environmentally focused single-day field trips for early adolescent youth in 2018, we conducted exploratory research to examine how outcomes differed for…

Background: We examine the development of youth sociopolitical consciousness and agency in an eighth-grade science classroom as students of color engage in critical speculative design activities, exploring the multi-scalar, racial realities and possibilities of the science and engineering of pervasive digital technologies--specifically involving…

Understanding why women are consistently underrepresented in STEM fields has been a constant puzzle, with a consistent feature of the puzzle being performance in math. This study uses data from TIMSS exams to investigate cross-national gender differences in math-related affect, more precisely liking mathematics, confidence in mathematics, and…

In this dissertation, I address the issue of social inequalities in education and the role of the education system in confronting them. The project involves two main parts, one empirical and the other conceptual. In the first part--chapters 1 and 2--I address the practical dimension of how to reduce social inequalities in education by exploring…