AGENDA

Yui Leh Timothy (Tim) Loh

What is the relationship between assistive technologies, disability, and education? This dissertation project draws upon 15 months of anthropological research in Jordan to argue for the importance of situating scientific and technological advancements in their sociocultural contexts. In particular, I examine how deaf Jordanians are engaging with new assistive technologies that have emerged in Amman in the last few decades, including cochlear implants (medical devices that provide their users with some electronic access to sound), provided through a state-affiliated initiative, and a sign language-centered mobile application, produced by a Jordanian-Syrian educational technology start-up. While previous studies have examined these kinds of technologies and their effects on education for disabled students separately (e.g. Valente 2011, Alper 2017), few have done so ethnographically, with an eye to examining their everyday impacts on a granular level, and even fewer have thought about these technologies for deaf people in the same frame, which on the surface seem diametrically opposed. Focusing on three central nodes of biomedical imaginaries, language ideologies, and religious commitments, I use participant observation and qualitative interviews across several sites—the aforementioned start-up, an audiology department and cochlear implantation unit, a deaf cultural center, and a government advocacy body for disabled Jordanians—to examine the cultural politics that undergird the use and production of these different assistive technologies for deaf people in Jordan today. Ultimately, my dissertation aims to shed light on how to meaningfully integrate assistive technologies into education for deaf people, resisting simplistic binaries about whether such technologies are “good” or “bad.”

Lindsay Romano

Teachers are the most important factor in determining student achievement compared to any other aspect of schooling. They operate on the front lines of society?s efforts to promote equity and play a pivotal role as gatekeepers of academic opportunities. Despite good intentions, most teachers, like the rest of society, harbor implicit biases, and studies indicate that teachers often elect harsher punishment for Black compared to White students. Labeling bias also contributes to discipline disparities, as Black students with disabilities experience the highest rates of exclusionary punishment compared to other student groups. The disparities in punitive discipline have notably detrimental effects on student outcomes and school climate, contributing to the racial opportunity gap and the school to prison pipeline. This mixed methods project aims to evaluate the effects of a mindfulness-based intervention on educators? discipline decisions. Specifically, I will test the hypothesis that mindfulness training may reduce the impacts of implicit bias, leading participants to recommend less severe punishments for Black students with disabilities when exposed to vignettes through a randomized controlled experiment. The intervention is theoretically precise, grounded in social psychological research on implicit bias and mindfulness, enabling the causal test of mindfulness training on discipline decisions. Following the intervention, I will conduct interviews with educators to explore how the training translates into classroom instruction. Should this intervention prove effective, it can become a scalable way to embed insights from social psychology into teacher education to reduce the impacts of bias and improve student outcomes.

Roberto (Josiah) Rosario

Black Lives Matter (BLM) as a sociohistorical and sociopolitical moment spurred national and international conversations about the nature of systemic racism. The most recent set of protests in 2020 and the ensuing conversations they sparked intensified an ongoing debate about what young people know and understand about race, racism, and systemic injustice, and the psychological implications of such a context. Drawing from critical theories of human development and education, this dissertation investigates the psychological experience of these hostile contexts for a sample of racially diverse youth. Specifically, I employ a multi-method approach to examine both the top-down influence of this context on students? experiences and the bottom-up influence of students on their learning environments?how and in what ways are students engaging in acts of liberation in the midst of this context? Across 3 experiments (N= 657), I find (a) students think about sociopolitical contexts that are identity-relevant (Study 1), and when exposed to a threatening sociopolitical context (b) question their belonging in school (Studies 2 and 3) and (c) interpret academic difficulty as less important (Study 3). Second, using critical qualitative methods, I conducted 9 same-race semi-structured focus groups (N = 32) with Black, (non-White) Latinx, White, and Multiracial youth and find that there are unique topics young people discuss based on their identities as well as some conceptual overlapping meanings young people associate with the sociopolitical context across racial groups. This dissertation provides theoretical, empirical, and practical insights into the psychological processes associated with hostile sociopolitical contexts.

Kimberly Hess

Research shows that minorities are underrepresented in U.S. social studies education and that nationalist ideas influence education, but how are these two trends connected? How does the process of creating social studies standards in the United States affect their content in terms of minority representation and national identity? How does representation within these standards compare across particular groups, in different states, and over time? Drawing on insights from education research on inclusion in social studies education and sociological research on nationalism and policymaking, my dissertation uses a quantitative and qualitative analysis of all 50 states? K-12 social studies curriculum standards to identify national-, regional-, and state-level patterns in minority representation and portrayals of American identity within social studies education. I utilize in-depth case studies of the creation and revision of standards in six states to explain how this process works and affects the standards? content. So far, I have found that some marginalized groups are more often included than others within these standards overall. At the same time, there are differences among states and over time in terms of how standards include minorities and discuss American national identity. This project contributes to a growing body of education scholarship on inclusion within social studies, as well as the sociological literatures on nationalism and policymaking. This research also has important implications for education policy and state standards themselves and will therefore be of interest to not only academics but also teachers, students, community members, school boards, and government officials.

Kyle Halle-Erby

The Los Angeles Unified School District has undertaken an experiment in the education of recently-arrived immigrant students learning English. Over the 2021-2023 school years, the district opened three new high school Academies explicitly tasked with centering students’ home languages to support their success in school. The students and educators in these Academies are predominately Latinx and 25% of students reported a Mayan language as their home language. Recognizing that Indigenous languages and the home languages of people from racialized communities represent knowledge- and value-systems historically excluded from and suppressed by schools, this dissertation asks what language policy in newcomer schools teaches about the futures we build with and for marginalized young people. Based on two years of ethnographic research across the three new Academies, this study examines the official and practiced policies governing students home languages and the possibilities for college, career, and community participation those policies facilitate or constrain. By analyzing classroom observations, student work, more than 75 interviews with students, educators, and district leaders; and participant- observation in a youth-organizing group, this study argues that embracing newcomer’s home languages is not a best practice to be applied to otherwise unchanged educational programs. Given, the Department of Education’s requested 35% funding increase for its English Language Acquisition program, bringing the total budget over $1 billion, to support English learners through “a greater emphasis on multilingualism that embraces students’ native and home languages,” this study offers practice-based policy lessons about what it means to “embrace” newcomer’s home languages.

Catherine Park

My dissertation examines 1) the trans/national and district-level political and economic conditions shaping the growth of Mandarin-English dual immersion (MEDI) schooling in the US, and 2) how differently positioned educational actors like district and school leaders, parents, teachers, and students come to experience and negotiate globally circulating values and practices around MEDI in urban contexts. In order to weave mutually imbricated macro, meso, and micro levels of analysis, I employ qualitative, discursive, and spatial methods to analyze digital media content, geospatial data, interviews, as well as ethnographic field notes and documents. Dual language immersion programs have proliferated across the US in recent years but there is a dearth of research on MEDI programs. My dissertation first traces power-making projects of the US and China that constitute the market and values around Mandarin-English immersion schooling. Then, through a case of a diverse MEDI school in an urban school district in Northern California, my study illuminates locally contingent MEDI schools as sites where geopolitical, racial, socioeconomic, and linguistic power is (re)produced through interrelated, iterative interactions between differently positioned educational actors. By privileging the variegated experiences of racially, socioeconomically, and linguistically diverse actors, however, this study also extends existing literatures to redraw new lines of stratification vis-à-vis actors? relationship to each other and to resources like Mandarin learning both in and out of classrooms. In so doing, my study highlights complex and nuanced everyday experiences of MEDI at the intersections of political economy, urban sociology, and bilingual schooling.

Lorraine Blatt

De facto racial/ethnic and socioeconomic school segregation present pervasive threats to child development in the United States. Disrupting these threats requires a detailed understanding of associations between segregation and child development that unfold in elementary school, an understudied but critical period when children are most likely to experience segregation. My dissertation study uses multi-level growth curve and mixed effects modeling to examine links between school segregation and children’s academic skills and social development in a nationally representative sample of ≈16,000 children from kindergarten through fifth grade. This study will examine whether these links differ across children’s racial/ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds. Data come from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Class of 2010-11 and Stanford Education Data Archive 4.1. Merging these sources provides a novel opportunity to explore how school segregation at the school, district, metro-area, and county levels relates to individual child-level differences. Investigating segregation at multiple levels will elucidate the varied structural forces shaping children’s educational contexts that are obscured by research examining school segregation at a single contiguous level. Additionally, my study will leverage longitudinal measures to expand our understanding of when during elementary school links between segregation and academic skills emerge. Finally, my study will explore social outcomes rarely considered in segregation research–including children’s prosocial behavior, school belonging, and stress about school. The more we learn about how school segregation shapes children’s development in elementary school, the better equipped we will be to design equitable strategies for integrating U.S. schools in ways that promote child development.

Emileigh Harrison

Curricular materials used to teach children not only impart academic knowledge but also prepare children for citizenship by teaching them about societal values. As a result, it is vital that we understand the messages that are conveyed in the educational content we present to our children. This dissertation focuses on both applying and improving methods of computer-driven content analysis to measure how different topics such as climate change or slavery and different groups such as women or Asian Americans are portrayed in education materials. I will document temporal changes in curriculum content and compare differences across multiple sets of influential curricula including state-adopted textbooks from Texas and California as well as curricula used in non-traditional educational settings such as religious private schools and homeschooling families. I will also examine informal educational curriculum including children’s books commonly found in school libraries and within households across the United States. Using face detection, skin segmentation, and other computer vision tools, I will measure the representation of different genders, races, and skin colors in images. By applying natural language processing tools like named entity recognition and word embeddings I will measure not only which groups and topics are represented in text, but the context in which they are discussed. This work will contribute to our knowledge of what messages are conveyed in the content we use to teach our children and expand the set of tools available for social scientists to measure representation in a variety of contexts.

Kristy Ulrich Papczun

Building on Eve Ewing’s work, my dissertation re-examines the stories of two public schools that were closed in Chicago using Fine’s critical bifocality theoretical lens partnered with Yosso’s concept of community cultural wealth. I engage with the histories of closed schools, contextualizing the stories to analyze the racialized hierarchies that are maintained through our educational system in the U.S. Using portraiture as a methodology, I have developed five phases for the project: Phase One is a longitudinal demographic analysis at the macro level of the schools, district, and city to contextualize the study. Phase Two shifts into the archives at the micro level to find palimpsests—or traces of the stories left behind— of the schools. In Phase Three, I restory the data collected into visual art pieces called Palimpsest Portraits. Through my art in Phase Four, I engage with community members using collective remembering techniques that honor community knowledges through conversations. In Phase Five, I produce the final product through a synthesis of the previous phases—aesthetically rich, written narrative portraits of each school. The re-presentation using storytelling and visualization invites people to pause and reflect on school closings.

This project works against the deficit-based dominant narrative that underpins school closings, troubling the “commonsenseness” that districts engage in when facing challenges, while also calling into question how we, as researchers, further the deficit-based discourse with the stories we tell. Using an artistic approach provides broader engagement and unique insight, with promising conceptual and methodological application beyond the current study.

James Bridgeforth

Recent recordings of contentious school board meetings demonstrate the growing frequency with which K-12 school board members publicly navigate racial crises. Examples of such crises shown in the media include teachers being photographed in blackface, racist social media posts, and intense debates regarding race and racism in curricula. Yet how many board members have been formally trained to lead a district through a racial crisis? This organizational disconnect is a critical area for research as board members are directly responsible for developing district policies in response to incidents of racism in schools. Guided by insights from the theory of the political spectacle along with critical theories of race and racism, my dissertation study employs elicitation interviews with school board members, focus groups with racially minoritized community members, and school board meeting records to better understand how school board members conceptualize and enact effective racial crisis leadership. This work also interrogates how board members’ conceptions of solutions compare with those of communities of color in order to identify potential inconsistencies between what educational leaders believe is effective racial crisis leadership and what the communities most at risk of being harmed by racial crises would identify as effective racial crisis leadership. By better understanding how both K-12 school board members and racially minoritized communities conceptualize effective solutions to racial crises, I hope to develop inclusive approaches for racial crisis leadership that can ensure that the needs of the communities most often harmed by racial crises are centered in the policy development process.

Saloni Gupta

Higher-order skills like innovation and teamwork have gained importance in the education policies of many countries today. While innovation is considered a central driver of a country?s economic growth, team skills are critical for today?s workforce. However, evidence of how schools can teach these skills is scarce. I am conducting a randomized evaluation of a program called ?Think and Make? (TM) in India, which works with eighth-grade students from marginalized communities in eighty schools to develop innovation and collaboration skills. Students participating in the TM program work in teams to identify local community problems in the health, agriculture, environment, and education sectors, develop prototypes of their ideas and build potential solutions. I use four methods to measure innovation skills in these children, including a novel measure of innovation developed with the help of real-world innovators. The other three methods involve ? investors? grants, user feedback, and a laboratory game for individual innovation skills. Participating students belong to marginalized indigenous communities in highly remote areas that are less socially and economically integrated with the rest of India. The outside world has a limited understanding of the problems of these communities, and the Think and Make program enables the children to solve these problems by using a pedagogy that promotes a deeper understanding of the needs of their communities. By making this program a part of their formal education in school, state policymakers are making their education system more inclusive and equitable, and this dissertation research can contribute to informing those decisions.

Julio Alicea

In a matter of decades, South Central Los Angeles has transitioned from 80% Black to nearly 70% Latinx. This development is linked to many sociospatial factors, including shifting immigration patterns, political economic restructuring, and Black displacement. My research examines the relationship between such sociospatial forces and the organizational dynamics of one high school in the heart of the community. As a longitudinal ethnography, the project includes participant observation, in-depth interviews, historical analysis, and qualitative spatial methods. The study utilizes data from four consecutive school years to show how one school’s politics and pedagogies evolved over time as racial landscapes changed and new crises emerged to shift organizational priorities. It argues that self-described social justice schools serving exclusively students of color can and still do perpetuate racial stratification; this is most evident in the real tensions that exist between antiracism and the work needed to undo anti-Blackness.

Upon its completion, this dissertation will offer myriad contributions to the sociology of education, racial and ethnic studies, and urban studies. In the sociology of education, it offers insights into school-based mechanisms of stratification between racially minoritized groups, including via relational processes of opportunity hoarding and the decoupling of organizational values and practices. In racial and ethnic studies, it reveals the limits of coalitional racial politics before and after George Floyd and the ways in which those limitations shape diversity, equity, and inclusion work at the K-12 level. Lastly, in urban studies, it provides an expanded analysis of racial formation as a regionalized phenomenon.