Art Museum Educators: Unveiling Perceptions of Theory, Method, and Preparation
Year of Dissertation:
2012
Advisor:
Nicholas Michelli
The aim of this dissertation is to contribute to the body of knowledge about art museum educators within the larger ecosystems of art and museum education. This study reveals museum educator perceptions about preparation and professional development experiences, their work with student groups in art museums, and how their understanding of educational theory and method shapes student interaction.
The effects of bilingual instruction on the English emergent literacy skills of Spanish-speaking preschool children
Year of Dissertation:
2011
Numerous studies have shown that early childhood education (ECE) contributes to educational attainment particularly for poor children. Nationally, ECE has gained considerable backing as a viable intervention to propel achievement. As ECE comes to the fore, census figures indicate that Latinos are the fastest growing minority in the United States. Latinos have persistently experienced greater rates of poverty and other risk factors that adversely affect educational attainment.
College Students with Learning Disabilities in New York City: A Mixed Methods Study of Social Class and Success
Year of Dissertation:
2011
This study explores ways in which socioeconomic status and disability shape the academic experience of New York City college students with learning disabilities. Despite laws and policies designed to provide them with accommodations, college students with disabilities do not attain higher education at rates equal to their nondisabled peers (NCES, 2000). This mixed methods study examines policies, practices and perceptions at four-year institutions in New York City, and explores how the socioeconomic class of students affects their experience in schools and indicators like attendance patterns, persistence and graduation.
Education Policy and the Mathematics Curriculum in New York City Middle Schools, 1958-2002
Year of Dissertation:
2011
Education Policy and the Mathematics Curriculum in New York City Middle Schools,1958-2002
Educational and Occupational Aspirations of Undocumented Youth
Year of Dissertation:
2011
Advisor:
Nicholas Michelli
ABSTRACT
Stability and Change in New York State Regents Mathematics Examinations, 1866 - 2009; a Socio-Historical Analysis
Year of Dissertation:
2010
This dissertation illuminates relationships between micro-level practices of schools and macro-level structures of society through the socio-historical lens of New York State Regents mathematics examinations, which were administered to public school students throughout the State of New York between 1866 and 2009, inclusive. Fundamental research questions involved in this study are: 1) How has the classification, framing, and assessment of Regents level mathematics curricula in the public schools of New York changed since 1866?: and 2) How has popularization influenced the contents, structure and academic rigor of Regents mathematics examinations? Basil Bernstein's theory of educational transmissions provides a theoretical framework for the study, as does the lens of credentials theory. Expectations and beliefs based on theory and historical narrative are subjected to critical and empirical analyses using a longitudinal research sample containing 204 Regents mathematics examinations with 5,508 individual problems, representing the entire population of extant Regents mathematics examinations administered in the years 1866, 1870, 1880, 1890, 1900, 1909, 1920, 1930, 1940, 1950, 1960, 1970, 1980, 1990, 2000 and 2009.
Social Capital and High School Graduation Rates
Year of Dissertation:
2011
Social capital theory, and to a lesser extent, cultural capital theory, have become popular theoretical constructs for understanding the replication of SES both in and out of schools. Hundreds of studies have demonstrated connected a student's stock of social and cultural capital and academic success. Fewer studies, however, have analyzed the various dimensions of social capital to gain a more nuanced understanding of how it may contribute to academic success, and fewer still have gone beyond the individual to study social and cultural capital at a school-wide level in order to understand it as the communal property of a group the way that Bourdieu and Putnam have theorized.
Improving Mathematics Teaching and Learning in an Adult Basic Education Program Using Cogenerative Dialogues
Year of Dissertation:
2010
This study explores the use of cogenerative dialogue (cogen) in an Adult Basic Education (ABE) program located in New York City, and the ways in which students and teachers collaborated to cogenerate resources that afforded a positive and equitable learning environment built on solidarity and new perspectives on teaching and learning of mathematics. Cogen was introduced to understand how certain structural characteristics within the classroom environment enable or constrain students' agency and understandings of mathematics. The research presented in this study focuses on improving the teaching and learning of mathematics in a General Education Development (GED) mathematics class from the perspectives of the students--the immediate stakeholders.
Alternatively Certified Teacher and Technology: Agency|Structure Dialectic - Integration of Technologically Mediated Instructions to Improve Literacy by Creating Comic Books in a Special Education learning Community
Year of Dissertation:
2009
The United States Department of Education is increasingly looking toward technology as a means to improve student academic achievements in schools. This auto/ethnographical and auto/biographical brings to the foreground issues of identity, culture, and equity as it documents my collaborative journey as an alternatively certified, highly qualified teacher with Brock and Stewie, students educated in a general education class and receive special education services in a socio economically challenged New York City District 75 school, as they integrate technologically mediated instruction through the creation of comic books as a teaching tool to improve their literacy. By describing and exploring patterns of cultural enactment (and contradictions to those patterns) within our comic book research dialogue group (CBRDG) and school, this study examines how our agency and identity re/construction were afforded or limited by communities of practice and school structures. Our experiences were analyzed on the micro, meso, and macro levels using data sources including videotapes, audiotapes, written reflections, and various other artifacts.
The Social Network of US National Math Education
Year of Dissertation:
2012
This dissertation investigates the emerging US national math education, its curriculum and purpose, with respect to the individuals and organizations comprising its social network. National math education means two things: a circumstance in which all students across the US are offered primarily the same instruction from among mathematical topics, and a process whose outcome is in the national interest. The method of inquiry relies on a new perspective of governance in which social networks operate among official governing structures. Upon constructing a representative social network surrounding US national math education, the following interests were found: developing a national math education that enhances the productivity of US workers, advocacy for either a traditional or reform mathematics pedagogy, improving the content knowledge of US math teachers, and a national math education that fuels an education services industry. Taken together, these interests undermine each other and are argued to fail at national math education's purported objective, namely, to increase the knowledge and use of mathematics by persons living in the US.