This dissertation examines the discourses surrounding remote learning during the initial stages of the COVID-19 pandemic through Twitter conversations. Employing a Critical Discourse Analysis informed by Michel Foucault's theories of discourse and power, this study explores how the pandemic has transformed educational interactions over social…

Social justice-oriented teacher education is a way for prospective teachers to learn and practice taking critical perspectives and use reflection for their future teaching practice (McDonald & Zeichner, 2009). Despite preservice teachers' interest and effort in engaging with racially and culturally just educational work, their approaches often…

Experiences preservice teachers (PTs) have in their preparation programs can directly impact their use of effective and just pedagogy in the classroom (Darling-Hammond, 2000; Tolbert, 2015; Stoddart, Pinal, Latzke, and Canaday, 2002; Bravo, Mosqueda, Solis and Stoddart, 2014). However, researchers in the field of Education have struggled to make…

Black African immigrants from Kenya, like other immigrants, value school. They consider education as a mechanism of upward mobility. School is considered as the key to a better life that would provide access to social mobility, and economic stability for immigrant families as they settle in their new home. But unknown to immigrant students and…

With the rise of modern technology, sites of knowledge have shifted from page to screen, offering hybrid spaces for 21st century learning across borders, modalities, semiotic resources, time and space (Jewitt, 2006; Kress, 2000) However, few empirical studies have been conducted from a critical lens to investigate how digitally mediated social…

The research presented in chapters 2, 3, and 4 in this dissertation uses a sociocultural and sociohistorical lens, particularly around power, authority of knowledge and identity formation, to investigate the complexity of engaging in, supporting, and evaluating high-quality argumentation within a college biochemistry inquiry-oriented classroom.…

Efforts to globalize higher education have resulted in study abroad climbing to an all-time high in the United States. Amidst this growth, emergent bodies of literature have uncovered problematic trends in study abroad that reproduce hierarchies of power and colonialism, perpetuate views of an exotic cultural "other," and privilege…

This dissertation examines, through the lenses of three second generation Vietnamese-American men, the socio-cultural contexts within which the Asian-American identity is constructed, knowledge is constructed, and the critical awareness of power dynamics are shaped. These are the contexts and structures within which Asian Americans participate in…

This discourse-oriented ethnographic case study, using constant comparison, critical discourse analysis (CDA) and cultural-historical-activity theory (CHAT) within a Foucauldian framework, investigates how the pedagogical practices of 2 teachers of English learners were (trans)formed over the course of 1.5 academic years, and how their…