Educational leaders are pushed to get students to score high on standardized tests. They are directed to implement new strategies to close the achievement gap. Instead of focusing on the output of students, our educational leaders should focus on themselves to create a more equitable educational system. Leaders must recognize the impact that their…

Today's modern landscape of leaders fails to accurately represent societal diversity. This inequity, as in all inequities, is not accidental, but instead the results of socially constructed norms that begin in childhood. In this dissertation, I question how internalized norms of white supremacy and patriarchy perpetuate racial and gender aligned…

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…

This investigation focuses upon the nation of Finland. Described by its Ministry of Foreign Affairs ("This is Finland", n.d.) as a parliamentary democracy, Finland is a free-market economy with a young but progressive history. While the nation's scores on the 2015 triennial PISA continue to indicate above average performance on all three…

One of the goals of education is for students to develop critical thinking skills. In order to build those skills, students must become critical and engaged users of information. Students become engaged and critical users of information when they have opportunities to explore and immerse themselves in information from different viewpoints and…

This dissertation focuses on examining the motivations, experiences, and perspectives of socially elite urban Chinese students who attend emerging internationally focused public high schools in China and who plan to study at U.S. universities. Drawing on critical theory, I integrate critical curriculum studies with educational policy studies to…

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…