Educational leaders of diverse student populations that traditionally struggle academically are charged with implementing transformative leadership practices to build strong effective teams that produce results for all students no matter race, socioeconomic status, language, at-risk status, etc. (Donohoo, Hattie, & Eells, 2018). Traditionally…

This pilot project analyzed 185 children's picture books, published 2018--2020, that feature members of the LGBTQIA + community as primary, secondary, or background characters. In developing a framework that builds upon classifications from Diverse BookFinder, the Cooperative Children's Book Center, and the Rainbow Book List, the purpose of the…

Racial disproportionality in school discipline is an enduring systemic problem whose patterns change from one context to another. In order to develop systemic solutions that are responsive to local contexts, school stakeholders' collective, agentic actions toward systemic changes are essential. Utilizing a participatory systemic design process led…

Like other colonial state structures, the education system in China aims to manufacture regime loyalty and cultural conformity among its 125 million minority nationalities. The Party-state's lessons in 'being Chinese' begin by nullifying traditional languages, cultures and lifestyles, which are deemed primitive and uncouth, and then remould…

It would be unjust to claim that trauma response is a shared and equal responsibility of all educators without also acknowledging that the unequal share of emotional labor currently falls to the BIPOC and LGBTQ+ colleagues. The authors recognize and condemn this dynamic and aim to provide all educators with the awareness and tools to respond to…

Belonging matters in early childhood. Despite its importance, the majoritarian conceptualization of belonging is seldom problematized. In the US, the politics of belonging draws racialized lines of inclusion and exclusion, (re)inscribing longstanding racialized systems of inequity and injustice. Through critical race and Latina feminist…

For young adults entering college, social pressures can exert significant psychological stress. For Caribbean nationals, these challenges can be exacerbated by experiences with the U.S. racial binary framed by the rule of hypodescent --the one drop rule. Using testimonio as method and borrowing elements of critical autoethnography, I delve into…

Sociology plays a key role in empathy development, which is central to addressing complex social problems. However, little is known about what types of courses work best to enhance empathy. In parallel, sociological animal studies (SAS) has evolved as a relatively new subfield focused on assessing human and animal relationships. SAS research…

Peggy McIntosh's ("White privilege and male privilege: A personal account of coming to see correspondences through work in women's studies," Working Paper 189, Wellesley Center for Research on Women, 1988) list of 50 racial privileges, which purportedly benefit persons of white skin colour, has had enormous impact on social science…

This study explored the experiences of inclusion and exclusion of African academics in Norway in various sectors of the society and their participation in these sectors. Using a mixed method research approach, 166 African academics completed a 20-item questionnaire entitled Perceived Exclusion Scale (PES) and two open-ended questions about their…

Using quantitative and qualitative methods, we explore students' engagement with critical feedback in an authentic university setting. Findings support the centrality of strong relationships in the feedback process. Study 1 was the first conceptual replication and extension of Yeager et al.'s (2014) wise feedback intervention to test the…

This study investigated heritage language (HL) maintenance and ethnic identity among Korean heritage speakers in the Pacific region (Australia, New Zealand, and Hawaii), an understudied population in the field. It focused on patterns of language use and factors (i.e. age at immigration (AI), self-rated language proficiency, and frequency of…

The present investigation aims to identify best practices to design virtual reality (VR) story-worlds to promote prejudice reduction and foster prosocial attitudes toward under-represented groups. Past research shows that VR, which allows the simulation of scenarios that would otherwise be prohibitively difficult or impossible in real life, can be…

For centuries, the Bajau people sailed the seas between what we now refer to as Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines on houseboats of their own construction. Adept sustenance divers, they forage the sea floor for sea cucumber, fish, black coral and more, often spending over 60% of their working day underwater. On a single breath, the best of…

This dissertation examines the impacts of a last-dollar promise program on high school-to-college enrollments at a very large community college (VLCC) district in Texas. The research intends to add to the current literature on the growing popularity of promise programs at two-year community colleges. Specifically, this quantitative study examines…