Dissertation Defense Announcements

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.

While the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision may have overturned the legal practice of race-based segregation in public schools on the basis of separate being “inherently unequal”, the promise of equality for Black students in the United States has yet to materialize (Noguera et al., 2015). Sixty-seven years removed from the Brown decision and 50 years after Swann v. CMS, African American students are still faring worse than their white counterparts by nearly every conceivable metric and the composition of many schools throughout the nation have actually moved rapidly in the direction of resegregation (Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools, 2018). Despite the dominant narrative of segregated Black schools as wholly inadequate, there are counternarratives of them producing educational excellence, racial pride and serving as pillars in the African American community. Second Ward High School was the first Black public secondary school in Charlotte, North Carolina, and located in the historic Black neighborhood called “Brooklyn”. It was closed in the wake of desegregation. This investigation of Second Ward High School utilizes a historical case study method through the theoretical framework of Community Cultural Wealth to better understand the institutional assets segregated Black schools in the urban South endowed to their student populations during the period of 1960-1969.

APRIL DENIECE THOMAS: Do you see yourself in multicultural literature? Seeking self-reflections from Black students

(Under the Supervision of Dr. ERIK BYKER)

In the United States, Muhammad (2020) explains how Black students who attend schools have a greater potential success when they see themselves represented in the curriculum and when their cultural, gender, and racial identities are affirmed. This dissertation study examined the ways in which third grade Black girls and boys (n=5) see themselves when they read African American multicultural literature. The study also investigated the literary elements in African American multicultural text that encourage self-reflection. The study’s methodology was based on a qualitative phenomenological research design, which included a pilot study (n=4) of the interview protocol. The interview protocol was revised for suitability based on the findings from the pilot study. Both the pilot study and the main dissertation research study were conducted using semi-structured interviews. The participants chose a text from a collection of African American multicultural literature and shared their responses to that text based on the interview protocol. The following research questions guided the study: 1) How do Black children respond to African American multicultural literature?; 2) How do Black children describe their cultural and racial identity within multicultural literature?; and 3) What literary features facilitate Black children’s ability to self-reflect? The findings of the study were organized based on these research questions. The study utilized two frameworks, Reader Response Theory (Rosenblatt, 2004) and Black Identity Theory (Jackson III, 2012), to unpack and discuss the findings. A new theory emerged from the study’s findings, which is called Multicultural Self-Reflection Theory. This theory explains and provides insights into how Black children self-reflect when reading African American multicultural literature. Multicultural Self-Reflection Theory provides a lens for understanding how Black children engage in what the dissertation coins, “multicultural self-reflection" when responding to African American multicultural text.

Key Words: African American, Black children, Black Identity Theory, interview study, multicultural literature, Multicultural Self-Reflection Theory, phenomenology

Reader Response Theory, self-reflect,