Mentoring is a dynamic and multifaceted process that plays a pivotal role in personal and professional development. This paper explores critical variables related to mentoring, including historical context, demographics of mentors (age and sex), mentor training, mentor readiness, mentor benefits, and concerns mentors may have with the process.…

This dissertation research explores the complexity of transformations of academic lives and academic identities along the multiple, non-linear, conflicting, and paradoxical trajectories of the pre-Soviet, Soviet, and post-Soviet times and spaces. Academic literature on the post-Soviet transformations of higher education has usually focused on…

The historic Highlander Folk School has recently been recovered as a unique model of rhetorical education that significantly impacted labor organizing and civil rights work in the United States. While scholarship and mainstream publications consistently celebrate the folk school as a gender inclusive, racial sanctuary, this dissertation reorients…

Fr. Pedro Arrupe, S.J. was elected the 28th superior general of the Society of Jesus in 1965 and served in that role until 1983. As superior general, Arrupe sought to shape the Jesuits in the spirit of the vision of Vatican II, as well as the original charism of the founder of the Jesuit, St. Ignatius. The questions this dissertation seeks to…

Intercollegiate athletics, namely "big-time" athletics, is an enduring feature of American higher education. Its visibility is unmatched by other institutional activities, and its influence reaches far beyond the campus. College athletics' longevity insulates it from the likelihood of elimination, but it regularly earns criticism…

Narratives or Discourses influence how identity is read to such a degree that they serve to equate certain identities or groups of people--African Americans, Latin@s, American Indians, immigrants and women to name a few--with intellectual and academic inferiority despite remarkable performances or significant accomplishments. This is especially…

Information and communication technologies (ICTs) have empowered non-state social actors, notably, social movements. They were quick to seize ICTs in the past (printing presses, television, fax machines), which was a major factor in their successes. Mass email campaigns, blogs, their audio- and video- variants (the podcasts and the videocasts),…

The Settlement House Movement in the United States was a response by progressive reformers to meet the needs of urban poor and immigrant families in the early years of the 20th century. Some settlements were outreach services of churches. There are limited accounts of the experiences of the individuals who used the settlement houses. This study…

This dissertation critically investigates how Advanced Placement (AP) U.S. History textbooks portray key events in Latino/a history. The investigation is made in light of claims made by the College Board, the ACLU, scholars, and federal and state governments that the Advanced Placement program is the path to educational equity for Latino/a…

Although the contemporary commercial urban landscape is often assessed as placeless, this research proposes that even these seemingly anonymous places are repositories of thriving community values and meanings. Seeking a more complex reading, this research extends the scope of analysis from physical space to human use in order to reveal the…

Unprecedented uses of information and communication technology (ICT) and particularly social media (e.g., Wikipedia, Facebook, and Twitter) are occurring in times of crisis. This dissertation investigates the socio-technical practices emerging from the use of social media and how these practices help to "sustain the living heritage" of…

This exploratory study took a post-colonialist lens to record, examine and document schooling experiences of California Indian people across several generations representing three Central Valley tribes: the Mono, the Tachi Yokuts of Santa Rosa Rancheria, and the Tule River Tribe. Past and present perceptions of Indian schooling were elicited…

This ethnographic case study examines the dynamic relationship between culture and environmental education within the context of a specific Florida-based public education program. The School District of Hillsborough County (SDHC) offers the program through a three-day field trip to the study site, Nature's Classroom, and accompanying classroom…

For this dissertation, I carried out a participatory hermeneutic research inquiry on the role race plays in the everyday lives of staff and administrators of color who work at various organizational levels within selected post-secondary institutions. This research explored the current narrative identities of staff and administrators of color…

This study utilizes the basic framework of classical sociology as a foundation for examining the intersection of the structural history of the computer revolution with ordinary, everyday life. Just as the classical forefathers of modern sociology--Marx, Durkheim, and Weber--attempted to understand their eras of structural transformation, this…