Focus on his biography and his performance in the media has long been the basis of interpretation of Bob Dylan's identity. This has resulted in the accepted critical theory of Dylan's identity as mercurial and lacking a central ipseity. However, as Michael Strachan argues, rock biography is an unstable genre because it treats its subjects as…

It has been documented that American Indians and girls consistently underperform in STEM achievement compared to their European American and male counterparts, starting as early as adolescence. The goal of the current study was to develop a brief intervention aimed at mitigating the STEM achievement gap by shaping ethnic and gender identities to…

Studies indicate that women are poorly represented in school leadership across the various regions of the world particularly in developing countries. Most studies explain this underrepresentation in terms of external or institutional factors that have impeded women's advancement onto school leadership. Such factors include women's lack of…

There is a gap in existence between the number of males and females entering science careers. Research has begun to focus largely on how identity impacts the selection of such careers. While much research has been done to examine the factors that impact student identity, little work has been done to examine what happens to female students who have…

As colleges and universities increase the focus on student learning, faculty development has taken a more prominent role in higher education (Barr & Tagg, 1995; Fink, 2003; Lieberman & Guskin, 2002). While a significant body of work on the practice of faculty development exists, research on faculty developers as professionals is limited. Several…

The purpose of this study is to understand how two African immigrant teachers to the United States experience cultural conflicts and whether/how their cultural and indigenous beliefs are brought forward into science classrooms. While there is a wealth of research conducted on the experiences of various immigrant groups, there is a dearth of…

This qualitative study used a post-structural feminist framework to examine how the literacy and mothering discourses women encountered in a family literacy program assisted or constrained them in enacting agency. Employing a narrative approach, combined with other methodological strategies (ethnographic observations, discourse analysis of program…

This qualitative study examined women's learning in making healthy lifestyle changes after a cardiac event. The study examined how and what learning women identified as important to learning behavioral change and the meaning making experiences that influenced changes in self-perception and outlook. The study also focused on the role of the cardiac…

There are two dimensions of positioning: self-identity (reflexive) and, events and interaction between people (discursive). Positioning may become socially restrictive when disruptive discursive episodes have a negative impact on individual self-identity. An interpretive biographical study of 11 participants in a transitional residency (temporary…

Recent work has shown the importance of identity in language learning and how the desire to belong to an imagined community drives individuals to invest in their learning (Norton, 2000). This work has documented that a mismatch between students' imagined community and the community envisioned by the teacher can have negative outcomes on students'…

This dissertation is an inquiry into the experiences and beliefs of six Russian-speaking immigrant teachers, including myself, about the role of a teacher. We were all brought up and educated in the former republics of the Soviet Union and arrived in the United States at different times after its collapse in 1991. Our experiences of living in…

This dissertation reports on a qualitative investigation of two research questions: What experiences lead secondary social studies teachers to become passionate and committed to teaching toward social justice? How do these teachers conceptualize and practice teaching toward social justice in the social studies? The study, which employed a life…