Adoption has been an important way to create families over the years. While there has been a shift in recent years to encourage open adoptions, where the biological and adoptive families stay in contact after the adoption, many adoptees are coming from closed adoptions, where there is no contact or information shared about the biological family…

This naturalistic inquiry case study examined the experiences of five college men participating in a two-week, summer study abroad course administered by a Midwestern, public land-grant university. The short-term program model is popular with students and universities in the United States as an affordable and convenient way to increase the number…

This dissertation explores language as a resource for the formation and expression of ethnic identity among the members of an Asian American college sorority. As a community of practice organized around ethnicity, the sorority provides an excellent site to examine the mutually constitutive relationship of language and ethnic identity. Two features…

This dissertation presents findings from an ethnographic study of students with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) enrolled in a specialized postsecondary education program at a public university in North Carolina. Specifically, it discusses how 10 students engaged in postsecondary education activities and developed student…

This qualitative interpretive study explored how former newcomer English Language Learners (ELLs) in Boston Public Schools (BPS) made sense of their transmigration experiences through a digital storytelling project. The study fills a gap on transmigration experiences in the context of English-only learning environments, with a particular…

Diversity is valued and promoted in contemporary public discourse, but on the other hand, there is a strong tendency to homogenize differences in society. The tension between diversity and homogeneity is palpable on U.S. college campuses as the number of international students has been ever-increasing. A more nuanced approach is needed to grapple…

This study dealt with the experiences of immigrants from Latin America, specifically Mexico, who speak indigenous languages. This study was guided by a theoretical framework in terms of issues such as power struggle, cultural hierarchy, and identity ambiguity, which are social realities of indigenous people who have immigrated to the United…

Through analysis of a qualitative online ethnography in an Internet text-based website message board database called "WidowNet" (http://www.widownet.org/wnbb3), I studied online text conversations of adults who lost their life partners to death. This online autoethnographical research investigates how and why online widows/widowers perform their…

This research explores issues involving gender, education, and learning/using English as a second/foreign language (ESL/EFL) by investigating three Japanese women's experiences of fashioning their lives in ways that made them feel satisfied and happy. In order to develop an "emic" point of view--one derived from grounding myself as…

This dissertation employs data collected from multiple sites in Southern California over a period of nine months. Several in-depth ethnographic interviews and participant observations were conducted with Pakistani Muslim women (age 17-22) and their parents in an effort to better understand the influence that parents and ethno-religious communities…

The urgent environmental issues of today require science-literate adults to engage in business and political decisions to create solutions. Despite the need, few adults have the knowledge and skills of science literacy. This doctoral dissertation is an analytical case study examining the science-learner identity development of Exploratorium Field…

An avatar is a representation of an identity in an online virtual world. Most virtual environments provide options for avatar customization. This means that a person can either create an avatar from an existing selection of body parts and apparel or design an even more personalized image. Second Life, the investigative site for this study, is a…

How do we Christian educators help children live their lives holistically? The purpose of this study is to address this question and to examine a method for children and Christian families in Korea to form Christian faith through daily rituals at home. Using participant observation and focus group interviews, I examined what the children and…

The goal of this qualitative study was to explore the nexus between second language acquisition, identity, and the beginning second language classroom. Using a social constructionist framework, the study utilizes ethnographic methodology incorporating both narrative and autoethnographic elements. Specifically the author acted as a participant…

Since the 1990s, the federal government required public state universities in Mexico to recruit full time faculty members with doctoral degrees and research productivity to increase the academic competitiveness of higher education. After two decades of the implementation of federal mandates, public state universities have not improved their…