Literacy coaching has the potential to center humanizing professional learning pedagogies--promoting equity, disrupting oppression, and recognizing the complex humanity of teachers. This potential can be realized through the use of deep reflection to support teachers' awareness of what guides their behavior and further strengthened by complex…

The United States is facing a crisis of college and university closures as we approach the demographic cliff. As a result, the expected number of four-year college closures is predicted to be substantial. This doctoral project offers a theoretical model (HERC Model) that provides tangible suggestions or recommendations for how to confront the…

Human sexuality is a basic foundation of the human experience. In graduate school for psychology, students are often taught about sexuality in terms of gender identity and sexual orientation. However, there is a lack of education around sexual functioning in terms of sexual wellbeing, arousal, and disorders. Many psychologists are licensed as…

Harmful and inaccurate narratives about the nature of mathematics, and about the mathematical incapability of historically marginalized groups, are pervasive and longstanding. The persistence of these narratives, and their documented negative impacts in school, the discipline, and beyond, have led some scholars to conclude that there is something…

The Future of Work and Learning looks bleak to some, incites worry in others and signals an opportunity for widespread education and workforce innovations and invention in others. Unfortunately, the latter are counted among the few. With staggering realities that more than 50% of jobs will be forever transformed by automation. Or the fact that 65%…

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…

The induction process for new and beginning teachers has the potential to transform how teachers experience themselves and their school and ultimately the impact they have on students. Schools, like Clark Hill Academy, within rural, historically marginalized communities face challenges of recruiting and supporting new teachers. By using a…

While many community college (CC) students come to higher education with specific career or life goals, these aspirations may be forced to change if students are not able to get past the gatekeeper of remedial mathematics coursework. Racially minoritized students are disproportionately tracked into non-credit-bearing remedial (NCBR) mathematics…

A common educational assumption is that coherence is a pre-requisite for a "good" curriculum. Indeed, in mathematics education this perspective has persisted both nationally and internationally as a foundational principle for curriculum design, reform, and evaluation. While curricular coherence is often unquestioningly accepted as…

Incarcerated men look to the classroom as a refuge to learn, grow, and develop, departing from their typical, everyday environment where devaluation is the norm. Unfortunately, the absence of a humanizing pedagogical praxis exposes the danger of the classroom's inability to restore human dignity, implicitly perpetuating incarcerated men as less…

For decades, Black students have been disproportionately disciplined in schools at much higher rates than White students and other student groups. In several Southwest school districts this phenomenon manifests as differential application of disciplinary alternative education program (DAEP) referrals for Black students. Zero tolerance policies and…

This study utilized a qualitative approach to understand how school counselor and teacher dispositions toward and relationships with newcomer students shaped their educational practices. A total of five high school counselor and teacher participants shared their personal insights and lived experiences for this qualitative study. Findings from the…

The dominant educational paradigm is rooted in a Platonic, Cartesian, and Piagetian mind-supremacist epistemology that subordinates the body and experience to the mind, ideas, and objective concepts. This reduces students to cognitive receptors of information in a detached, decontextualized, and dehumanizing classroom, i.e., the banking…

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…