In democratic education, schools are places where democracy holds center stage, where students explore the aims and assumptions that underpin democracy, and where students develop a shared understanding of core values. Despite the democratic promise of schooling, however, schools often fail to prepare people to interrupt racism, classism, gender…

In online courses, much of the course communication occurs in public spaces. In synchronous courses, the video and audio channels represent a shared space, and although private chat messages are possible, they may not be substantial or frequent. In asynchronous courses, discussion boards are the allocated space for communication. In these…

Online learning has provided pathways for access to flexible educational experiences, but can also feel isolating and impersonal, lacking authentic relationships with instructors and peers. Centering the discussion of humanizing distance education through the lens of three core pedagogical components of teaching and learning (i.e., instruction,…

Education researchers and the US Department of Education interpret chronic absentee data as supporting a causal relationship between absenteeism and negative outcomes later in life (Frydenlund, 2022; Berkowitz et al., 2017; Hopson & Lee, 2011; Thapa et al., 2013). As school absence rates continue to reflect disparities among students of color…

This dissertation investigates student experiences on a four-year public U.S. college campus, focusing on the impact of humanized support services in non-academic administrative offices. Chapter 1 introduces the study's purpose, while Chapter 2 reviews literature on customer service practices through the lenses of Experience Management, Service…

Bang on the System pairs critical race theory (CRT) with the litany of radical democratic analysis guiding the social practices of various revolutionary movements, proposing a new pedagogical framework that deploys a mutually informed critical race praxis as the basis to engage historically dispossessed youth in their own learning. This lens is…

Humanizing research online claims to engage practices that care for human learners. Even so, many of the recommended practices are unreflective about the universalizing ethic from which they draw. We argue that humanizing online learning becomes tangled in broader university aims that expect care to happen aside from underlying histories of…

Based on institutional betrayal theory, this research examines whether students' perceptions of being dehumanized by their universities mediate the relationships between different types of interpersonal mistreatment on campus (i.e., bullying victimization, sexual harassment, ostracism) and impaired student well-being. A cross-sectional study (N =…

Given the imbalance in the ratio of male to female ADHD diagnosis, there is a dearth of information on the profile for women with ADHD, especially in adulthood and with those of higher intelligence levels (Rommelse et al., 2016). Each, if not all, diagnoses of ADHD or giftedness come from a parent, teacher, or outside observer's scale of symptoms…

Background: Co-design can be challenging and rewarding as educators explore new roles and ideas. Accounts of co-design rarely examine educators' affective and relational experiences, nor investigate scaffolds for creating humanizing environments. We asked: How did affect and relationship show up in co-design for educators?, How did the affirmation…

This study examines the significance of emotion in the lives of culturally and linguistically diverse students within the ESL classroom. In the classroom 'underlife', students not only replicate the ideologies of the official world, but also cultivate shared cultural practices in response to the world around them. The study's findings shed light…