Through the use of the Program for International Student Assessment's (PISA) Global Competence results, the Economic Intelligence Unit's (EIU) Democracy Index ratings, and centralization-decentralization spectrum rubrics, this dissertation shows the association between level of democracy and education system, and the association of these variables…

Human resource development (HRD) is no longer about simply acquiring the skills needed to perform a task and is now a tool which can shape society and the ways in which we interact with one another. At the forefront of this transition are new ways of imagining HRD, including critical human resource development (CHRD) and critical management…

This research presents the testimonios of Mexicana youth. Through a qualitative research design, this centered on the central question: How does testimonio in the social studies classroom serve as a decolonizing practice and how does this impact Mexicana students? and secondary question: How do Mexicana make meaning and reclaim identity using…

Postcolonial India where diversities, tensions, and conflicts caused by social and economic hierarchies, political and religious divisions, cultural variations exist, higher education is expected to play a significant role in building up a harmonious and humane democracy founded on justice to all, especially to the minority communities. Therefore,…

This study addresses common assumptions about women of the borderlands while embracing a transformative consciousness in understanding, making, and reclaiming the meaning of citizenship for Mexican American women from the Rio Grande Valley. This critical ethnography recognizes Chicana Feminist epistemologies as a form of knowledge. Therefore, this…

The purpose of this study is to create a model of tertiary vocational education in Kenya. Despite considerable progress in Kenya over the last 20 years, current education models, low attendance, and low academic proficiency levels preclude many vulnerable learners from becoming employable. Utilizing semi structured interviews of eight Kenyan…

The scholarship on school privatization and market-oriented reforms has demonstrated the negative effects on segregation and inequity triggered by this model, not only in Chile but globally. Less is known about how to transition toward a democratic-oriented education approach after decades of embedding the values rooted in a competition-based…

The number of international collaborative projects between schools of higher education has grown dramatically during the past ten years (Knight, 2004). Collaboration helps teachers to grow professionally, increase personal confidence, and accordingly, improve the effectiveness of teaching and learning (Meadows & Saltzman, 2002). This finding,…

The purpose of this quantitative study is to describe female graduate students' perceptions about their democratic empowerment in the classroom at King Saud University in Saudi Arabia. Their perceptions are compared based on female students' tracks. It also investigates the obstacles for democratic empowerment that female students face in the…

This dissertation investigates the effect of expanded tertiary education on collective civic and political participation. The expectation is that increased participation by educated individuals would result in increased levels of participation overall. However, studies that examined this relationship have presented mixed findings with no…

The primary purpose of this study is to test whether dialogic interactions via SNSs can help revive political participation and help citizens to become involved in real-world politics. In a Tocquevillian sense, this study assumes a positive relationship between virtual associational life and political participation and therefore argues that SNSs…

A problem recognized in the United States is that a K-12 public education in urban communities is more likely to support existing patterns of inequality than to serve as a pathway to opportunity. The specific focus of this research was on the poor academic performance in U.S. K-12 urban communities. Using Benet's polarities of democracy theory as…

"Convivencia", or conviviality/coexistence, represents a pivotal node in Spanish ideologies of multiculturalism. Touted as the legacy of interreligious harmony in Al-Andalus (A.D. 711-1492), contemporary pedagogical "convivencia" involves policies, curricula, and activities which idealize distinct ways of communicating and…

The exponential growth of the Internet and mobile phone usage in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) within the last decade has created many different platforms for citizens' political participation. This appears to be changing the political landscape of most countries within the region as governments are increasingly held responsible for their actions.…

In the current political climate, where many politicians in both Europe and United States have proclaimed that multi-cultural education has failed as an educational paradigm, there is a growing fear that the very idea of a democratic, multicultural society is untenable over time. In this dissertation, I explore three responses to the question of…