Dissertation Defense Announcements

This qualitative study explores the lack of African American students enrolled in AP Calculus courses in North Carolina public high schools. It considered the perception of student-counselor relationships, academic advising practices, and sense of identity of high school counselor participants. In-depth interviews were conducted with three, African American, female high school counselors with five to twenty-four years of experience in high school counseling. The data yielded five domains: characteristics of a school counselor, expected duties of a school counselor, criteria to become an AP Calculus student, student-counselor relationships, and academic advising practices and the outcomes. From the domains, twenty-seven themes were generated: empathetic, open-minded, organized, flexible, creative, knowledgeable, serving the holistic needs of students, classroom guidance activities, non-counselor duties, resource, enrollments, interventions, advocacy, completion of prerequisite courses, exceptions to the rule, teacher recommendation, AP agreement, importance, trust, connections, race, alternatives, methods, encouragement, benefits, awareness, and partnership. Recommendations include universal access to Math I for African American students in 8th grade, update all stakeholders of the role and purpose of school counselors, professional development for school counselors, and an integrated curriculum for school counselors and administrators.

Since the early 1980s, American educational reformers have tried to improve schools through standards, high-stakes tests, and punishments for those schools that failed to meet the mark. In North Carolina, many schools with diverse populations and low socioeconomic status have struggled to succeed, receiving the state performance grade of D or F and the consequent “low-performing” label. Meanwhile, some teachers in these schools have achieved at high levels and attempted to improve not only their classrooms, but their schools and districts. Few researchers have sought the opinions and expertise of high-performing teachers in order to better understand their experiences, their role as change agents, and their recommendations for other so-called “low-performing” schools. This qualitative multiple case study used in-depth interviews with these high-performing teachers in “low-performing” elementary schools in North Carolina. Specifically, this research gathered information about their backgrounds, their actions for school transformation, and their lessons learned about education and equity. Findings from the study indicated that high-performing elementary teachers tried to reform their “low-performing” schools through teacher agency but were blocked by multiple factors. School administrators and district officials reduced teacher agency and opportunities for school improvement. North Carolina’s “low-performing” schools policy harmed children, reinforced school failure, and produced discriminatory and inequitable results. Teacher agency theory provided a promising approach for the state to change course and improve failing schools.

The effects of the COVID-19 pandemic changed the way education transpired for teachers and learners worldwide. Widespread virtual learning brought deeper academic and social inequities among K-12 diverse learners to light. Multilingual learners and their teachers were no exception. Research has yet to deeply explore the topic of ELD teachers’ experiences with advocating for their multilingual students during this unique time in educational history, as well as the lessons they learned during the pandemic that inform their advocacy work today. This phenomenological study used in-depth, semi-structured interviews to investigate these experiences. Potential implications for this study include teacher preparation, professional development, as well as policy-making decisions surrounding advocacy needs for multilingual learners.

The increased reliance on Big Data Analytics (BDA) in society, politics, policy, and industry has catalyzed conversations related to the need for promoting ethical reasoning and decision-making in the mathematical sciences. While the majority of professional data scientists today come from privileged positions in society, those processed by the decisions made using data science are more often members of one or more marginalized social groups, translating into disproportionately negative outcomes for these individuals in society. Thus, it is argued that future citizens must develop an ethical mathematics consciousness (EMC) that human beings do mathematics; thus, there are potential ethical dilemmas and implications of mathematical work which may affect entities at the individual, group, societal, and/or environmental level. Drawing from this conjecture, the purpose of this Design-based research study was to develop a local instruction theory and materials that promote students’ ethical mathematics consciousness in a high school Ethical Data Science (EDS) course grounded in a feminist, relational ethic of caring and social response-ability. Outputs include the identification of design heuristics, including the task structures, participation structures, and discursive moves that supported students' development of EMC and equitable participation in classroom activities, an initial curriculum for the EDS course, and a student-use protocol and corresponding analytic framework for making critically conscious ethical decisions in data science.