For much of the twentieth century, the Future Farmers of America was one of the most powerful youth organizations in the country and a leading voice of the American farmer. Its top members met regularly with U.S. Presidents, including Jimmy Carter who was an alumnus of the organization, and high-ranking executives from the nation's largest…

This is an ethnographic study with the purpose of spotlighting factors related to K-12 education in Lebanon that tend to reduce or exacerbate sources of sectarian conflict. The following research questions guided my research: (1) How do education stakeholders operationalize equal access, social inclusion, and social contract through education? (2)…

The bourgeoning scholarship on community organizing for educational change suggest positives outcomes when it comes to countering failed school reforms. Early reports on community organizing across the United States have shown an exponential grow since the 1990s and by 2010 there were 500 of 800 community organizing groups were working in the area…

While grassroots and student activism surrounding the first Earth Day in 1970 played a role in fostering environmental studies programs around the country, this dissertation narrates the untold story of other forces that served as crucial catalysts. Established conservation education models, the dynamics of college and university funding, and the…

The aim of this dissertation is to explore issues of privatization in teacher education. While other research has sought to address specific aspects of privatization affecting teacher education in the United States, the aim of this dissertation study is to conceptualize the influence and impact of neoliberalism on contemporary trends in teacher…

There is broad consensus amongst scholars across a wide range of disciplines that digital technologies are having profound effects on micro- and macropolitical processes across the world. However, research into digital geographies has not rigorously examined the role of the Internet in bridging epistemological difference. Rather, most of this…

This qualitative study examined how Multi-tier System of Supports (MTSS), a systematic approach to providing academic and behavioral supports to students, was implemented and experienced by macro and micro levels of educators in the Bermuda Public School system. I asked three research questions regarding: (a) how MTSS was being implemented in the…

Public and scholarly debates on what it means to be a successful teacher are characterized by increasingly pronounced differences in how various political, legislative, and professional groups define successful teaching. In response to pressures posed by these polarized discourses, critical pedagogic research on education contrasts contested views…

This study provides an examination into the formulation and construction of information and communication technology policy in China. It traces the rise of information technology and the "informatization" drive in China's political rhetoric, and identifies the changes and trajectory of information and communication technology in China's…

This dissertation examines the impact and significance of the New Left on the conservative campus and community of California State College, Fullerton (CSF) during the 1960s and early 1970s. Built to meet the demands of the Baby Boom after World War II, CSF became the latest in a series of California State campus expansions in 1959-1960.…

This dissertation takes Chinese advertisements as the research subjects to see in what way a quantifiable large number of advertisements with its metaphorical nature and instrumental mission can reflect social cultural change, in specifics, ideology and identity change of China in the last thirty years by combining four methods of research:…

School administrators, educators, psychologists, social workers, the juvenile courts, institutional reformers, and others shape the manner in which children are labeled, portrayed, and treated. However, the agendas, motivations, political language, and influence of these "helping professionals" in "treating" and…

This project offers a close look into the meaning-making practices of the Bulgarian socialist state with regard to the conception and enactment of childhood. Held for the first time in 1979, on occasion of the UN declared "International Year of the Child", the International Children's Assembly "Banner of Peace" emerges as a…

This dissertation explores the milieu in which children of Imperial Berlin were raised. When contemporaries in the rapidly expanding capital of the Second German Empire (1871-1918) looked at children, this milieu darkened. The city, they argued, threatened children's growing bodies, and such institutions as the home, the clinic, and the school…

The history of the sixties at the University of Wisconsin-Madison is both typical of other large universities in the United States and, at the same time, distinctive within the national and even international upheaval that marked the era. Madison's history shows how higher education transformed in the decades after World War II, influenced…