Universities annually welcome students from a wide variety of locations, cultures, and backgrounds, aiming to educate them in their career of choice. However, they often hit a wall when it comes to creating opportunities for students who hold deep and often polarizing diversity markers, specifically religious preference, faith and/or worldview, to…

While universities' interest in community engagement has grown over time in the United States, the public pedagogies set forth by them do not always reflect a commitment to sustaining community-engaged learning. Additionally, commitments sometimes demonstrate mindsets and the language of "helping" the community or "fixing" a…

The "Framework for K-12 Science Education" and the Next Generation Science Standards have called on teachers to shift from having students "learn about" science topics to having students engage in a process of "figuring out" how and why natural phenomena occur. These reform documents push teachers away from a…

This study investigated the construct of the learning organization in the restaurant industry. Descriptive accounts of learning were gleaned from face-to-face interviews, focus groups, observations, document analysis, and data from the Dimensions of the Learning Organization Questionnaire (DLOQ) from 52 participants employed in three US…

The topic of parental involvement has been widely studied but within the topic, the area of training teachers to work with parents has not. The training and preparation for teachers to work with parents are scarce and at times, non-existent. The primary purpose of this study is to examine effective middle school teachers about the steps on their…

The research in this dissertation focuses on ways to improve the teaching and learning of science in a suburban junior high school on Long Island, New York. The study is my attempt to find ways to achieve parity in my classroom in terms of success in science. I was specifically looking for ways to encourage Black female students in my classroom…

Previous research has demonstrated that a positive relationship between teacher and student improves student performance in school. However, less information is available regarding the verbal and nonverbal communications between the students with special needs and their teachers within this middle school subgroup. Personal attention and support…