Dissertation Defense Announcements

Although significant research has been conducted on opportunity gaps between White and racially minoritized students, the percentage of minority students has reached 53% of the United States K-12 public schools (NCES, 2022). While the percentage of minority students now constitute the majority of public schools, the teacher workforce and school leadership remains majority White. As such, there is a need for additional investigations examining the role of culturally responsive classroom and school leadership practices in public schools. In particular, in the research, less is known about African American males and their culturally responsive school leadership practices. Thus, this study uses autoethnography to explore the experiences of a Black male school leader and the role of culturally responsive school leadership (CRSL) and conscientization in promoting effective school practices. As a member of a minority group, the school leader had relevant life and educational experiences of struggles and triumphs that impacted his leadership practices. These practices included but are not limited to fostering empathy, care, relevance, and rigor, which impacted the overall school climate and achievement. With the use of these practices that are grounded in CRSL, this urban school outperformed schools in the neighboring district. In sum, the findings suggest that there remains a need for more investigations on the role of CRSL in promoting urban school success.

This phenomenological qualitative study, serves to fill a gap in the research surrounding how the multiplicities of identities inform the instructional practices and racial identity of self-identified antiracist educators by answering the following questions: “How do intersections of identity shape the way teachers view themselves in the classroom?” and “How do the varied intersections of white identity inform teacher experiences, philosophical and pedagogical paradigms, and instructional practice amongst self-identified antiracist educators?” Using interpretive phenomenological analysis and employing the theoretical frameworks of critical whiteness (Roediger, 1994), critical whiteness feminism, and double-imagery (Seidl & Hancock, 2011), the following themes were identified as relevant to forming white teachers’ critical consciousness (Freire, 2018), thus supporting an antiracist pedagogical paradigm: gender, religion, proximity to people of color, and education. These intersections in turn shifted their pedagogical paradigm to a student-centered humanizing paradigm, centering student identity, culture, voice, and choice through rigorous and relevant instructional practices.

In August 2019, The New York Times published what was said to be a “controversial” journalistic take on African American and American history. Written by Nikole Hannah-Jones, an awardee of the Pulitzer Prize and a MacArthur Genius Award, and her fellow journalists at The New York Times, The 1619 Project was intentionally published on the 400th anniversary of the arrival in Virginia of the first ships arriving in Virginia with enslaved Africans aboard (The New York Times, 2019). Although it has become one center of the United States political debate and rhetoric, the intent of The 1619 Project was not to further politicize the United States educational system. Rather, the intention was to present a compelling counternarrative to American history, but more importantly, African American history (The New York Times, 2019). However, because education within the United States is a politicized system, the work of Nikole Hannah-Jones and her colleagues has magnified the growing disconnect between a history of honest racial representation and its alignment with formal curriculum, standards, and education policy.
The purpose of this dissertation was to investigate how the formal social studies curriculum can become politicized by political actors and media. The New York Times’s The 1619 Project serves as a contemporary illustration of these dynamics. Through a multi-method approach using archival data and the Transcript: Ezra Klein Interviews Ta-Nehisi Coates and Nikole Hannah-Jones, the intent and media influence of The 1619 Project was examined situating the study within the theoretical frame of critical policy analysis using grounded theory methods to be analyzed through BlackCrit (Birk & Mills, 2015; Charmaz, 1996; Diem et al., 2014; Dumas & ross, 2016; King, 2018; Young & Diem, 2018).

Keywords: African American, The 1619 Project, representation, anti-Blackness, politics, political affiliation, education, Nikole Hannah-Jones, The New York Times, “controversial”

Historically, male students have been known to score lower than their female counterparts in reading and writing on standardized measures of academic success. While scholars, teachers, and even policy makers have attempted to explain and mitigate this gender gap in reading and writing scores, the male students themselves have had little opportunity to offer their insight into the research. Moreover, there is limited research about the causes of the perceived gap in reading and writing scores, or the potential ways in which the high school English classroom could be reimagined in order to provide a solution. This qualitative multiple case study explores how the experiences outside of the classroom in the lives of high school male students enrolled in an alternative education program mediate their reading and writing in the high school English classroom. Furthermore, this study explores how high school male students enrolled in an alternative education program perceive pedagogical elements in the high school English classroom. In particular, this study focused on the experiences outside of school of three high school male students enrolled in an alternative education program. These stories were told through individual, narrative portraits composed by the researcher which were composed based on the analysis of data from two focus group sessions and two semi-structured one-on-one interviews. Findings from the study indicate that there is a need to expand the understanding of literacy skills, as well as how they are recognized, practiced, and assessed, in the high school English classroom.