7424 research outputs found
Sort by
A Cultural Legacy of Resiliency: Black Male Teacher Retention in K-12 Classrooms
Get PDFOnly 18% of the nation\u27s teaching force are minorities, with 2% being Black male teachers (National Center for Education Statistics, 2013). Black educators have the lowest retention rate and the highest departure rate (Snyder et al., 2014). There is limited empirical research that explores turnover patterns and organizational conditions that impact Black male educators’ decisions to remain in the field (Achinstein et al., 2010; Johnson et al., 2005; Kirby et al., 1999). As a result, this qualitative study is imperative in that it contributes to a body of literature that explores aspects and experiences of Black male teachers in K-12 classrooms. Utilizing the late historian, Clyde Woods\u27 (2017) concept of the blues epistemology, which illustrates the African American identity as one rooted in the tradition of resistance to the antebellum plantation regime, this qualitative study sought to better understand how Black male teachers navigate workplace experiences and how organizational conditions impact retention. Data collection included personal essays and interviews. This dissertation contributes to the literature that explores how organizational school conditions impact retention, but more importantly, this study highlights elements of the decision-making process in which the participants grappled with workplace challenges, wrestled with their professional choice, and decided to remain in the classroom for one of the following reasons: their connection with students, collegial support, or their belief that teaching is their vocation
Great and Precious Things
Get PDFA memoir in three parts: Them, Us, Me; Great and Precious Things is a personal investigation and discovery of how the past influences future decisions in life, romance, and behavior; the ways in which people disappear from our lives, and how we disappear into others’ lives, losing ourselves along the way. From the deaths of family members to strained relationships and the depths of loneliness, we are destined to carry the ghosts of our past while trying to discover our authentic selves
The Story of Jennie Steers: An Examination of Race, Gender, and Lynching in Northwest Louisiana
Get PDFAs the nineteenth century ended, the American South entered a new century equipped with the foundations of a Jim Crow society. Through political intimidation, segregation, and racial violence—most notoriously through the practice of lynching—white Southerners reasserted white supremacist rule. Yet the lynching of Black men in this era is more often documented than the plight of Black women at the hands of white mobs and local authorities. By focusing on Jennie Steers, a woman lynched outside of Shreveport, Louisiana in 1903, this project sheds light on the violent history of Northwest Louisiana and the ways in which Black women navigated the racial codes and structures of the segregated South. Steers’s story challenges the inequitable production of history that purposefully forgets Black women and racial violence in Southern historical memory. Only by unearthing the life of Steers and other women, and highlighting Black female resistance to white supremacy, can historians counter the fictitious, benevolent, and romanticized portrayals of Southern history still embedded in the contemporary landscape
Experiencing Positional Turbulence: High School Social Studies Teachers\u27 Perceptions of Instructional Leadership Support While Teaching During National Crises
Get PDFThis research examined instructional leadership support of eight Louisiana high school social studies teachers as they experienced positional turbulence as a result of teaching to politically and socially aware students in a polarized political and social climate during the 2020-2021 school year. In recent years the American education system has been challenged in unprecedented ways. A global pandemic, renewed calls for social justice, and a highly polarized political climate created an extremely turbulent environment for all educators. Social studies teachers faced a unique set of challenges of integrating controversial current events into a high-stakes standards-based curriculum. Utilizing a conceptual framework of turbulence theory and Leader-Member Exchange theory, this heuristic phenomenological study chronicled the impact of instructional leaders’ support of teachers as they navigated those challenges. Participants experienced primary supports such as modified school schedules and technology integration for instructional purposes. Participants also reported experiencing ancillary support when their instructional leader deferred to their professional judgment trusting their instructional practices. Differentiated support, based on experiences of positional turbulence, was rare and largely resulted from curriculum-based parent complaints. Participants’ identity salience impacted their relationship with their leader and their perceptions of support. Participants primarily relied on colleagues and self-directed learning to solve curriculum dilemmas. Many participants rationalized the lack of support during experiences of positional turbulence by citing a high-quality relationship with their instructional leader that was based on trust, mutual respect, and professionalism. Participants’ stories support the prioritization of two types of relationships to mitigate the effects of extreme positional turbulence: those among teachers that support collegial conversations and dyadic relationships between the leader and teacher that enable high-quality relationships based on trust, sharing of information, teamwork, and strategy formulation that inform the level of support provided by an instructional leader to a faculty member experiencing turbulence
Salt and Shadows
Get PDFThis essay collection blends the scientific with the personal to explore human life through an oceanic lens. The collection is divided into five sections, corresponding with the five pelagic zones of the ocean: Sunlight, Twilight, Midnight, Abyssal, and Hadal. Each section contains two essays, which explore that ocean zone and the corresponding depths of personal experience. Through this structure, readers can delve deep into reflections on family, ecology, and humanity’s long-standing relationship to the sea
Environmental Justice of Repetitive Flood Loss and Freeboard Mitigation in New Orleans
Get PDFAfter the 2005 Hurricane Katrina disaster, discussions of social and racial inequity in environmental justice became more significant. Flooding is the most destructive type of natural hazard in terms of property damage and economic loss throughout the United States. However, the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) has continuously faced difficulty in financing itself during climate change (GAO, 2019). Many New Orleans residents are seasonal victims of both hurricane-level disaster flooding and frequent repetitive flood loss due to heavy everyday stormwater runoff. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA; 2020) recommends freeboard elevation as the best form of hazard mitigation to reduce the cost of repetitive flood loss. However, only about 10% of New Orleans structures are adequately mitigated to freeboard standards (CHART, 2021). Underlying socioeconomic and geographical vulnerabilities have amplified the flood risk for the most disadvantaged communities. Accordingly, this study examined the city\u27s latent historical inequality that has shaped its inequitable distribution of flood risk and mitigation. The study’s explanatory, sequential mixed methods identified the socioeconomic and geographical inequities that have hindered freeboard mitigation to reduce repetitive flood loss. As CHART lead graduate researcher, the research team analyzed more than 40 years of New Orleans’ NFIP flood claim data and over 140,000 properties data. Furthermore, we collected qualitative data from more than 130 stakeholders. The disparity in Katrina recovery funding between socioeconomic groups disproportionately offered economic support for freeboard mitigation to reduce repetitive flood loss. Environmental racism has created a geographical uneven resiliency between New Orleans’ affluent White and low-income Black neighborhoods. The dissertation\u27s findings identify an environmental justice approach to equitable emergency management for shared resilience in New Orleans