Societal shifts increasingly demand that people work across social and geographic borders, often virtually, to solve complex problems in the areas of education, environment, healthcare, poverty, technology innovation and ethics, and more. This collaboration requires critical and emancipatory dialogue and problem-solving. This qualitative multiple…

Education has always been attached to the "American Dream," an abstract concept built from the ashes of conquest and capitalism. The dream is one of property and privacy, money and power, the ability to live a life free from obstacles. However, the American dream isn't complete without an antagonist. For a long time the antagonist has…

Educational research that effectively addresses larger sociopolitical and sociohistorical contexts must interrogate macro-level decision-making and policies "and" prioritize the lived experiences of those who directly affect and are affected by social structures. This project explores racial and economic justice work in schools by…

In this study, a Black scholar in the midst of understanding his neurodivergence and his identity as someone who has been dis/abled reacts to the prodding of white peers by creating a course on decentering whiteness. The scholar then interviews ten of the participants in said class to understand how they came to select such a course and what they…

The high attrition rate of novice K-12 teachers has been a longstanding issue of concern for districts and school administrators. The purpose of this action research was to study contributing factors of social-emotional resilience in educator well-being, and how transformational conversations could support Teacher Preparation Program (TPP) leaders…

Knowledge-producing practices in sciences and engineering increasingly use computational means for modeling and working with data. Despite consensus regarding the importance of computational thinking in science and engineering, scholars differ in conceptualization of the primary purposes and role of its integration in K-12 science (Kafai &…

Podcasts in academia have largely been employed as either a supplementary resource to lectures, as an alternative for giving student feedback, or as a specific text to be utilized for research analysis. Largely overshadowed by the prior, there are few examples of podcast ethnographies and even fewer examples of researchers that are experimenting…

This dissertation of practice considers the dynamics of identity development of in-service educators and the intersection of their educator role with their other identities in service of orienting toward an anti-racist praxis. The problem of practice addressed centered the theory that educator identity is socially constructed, and identity may…

A number of critiques have been positioned against the modern university as the center of multiple modes of colonial and neoliberal violence; however, the vast majority of these critiques fail to speak to the context of people employed in the field of student affairs and its systemic role within the university. Responding to this concern, my study…

Queering' questions, unlearns, disrupts, and transforms approaches, expectations, and realities. Futures are time and change. The approach I have designed to operationalize Queering and futures, or Queering futures, is the Queering Futures Framework (QFF). The Queering Futures Framework (QFF) is a brand-new transdisciplinary research framework…

The focus of this qualitative descriptive study was on what undergraduate faculty at 4-year Christian universities or colleges in California have experienced and what recommendations they have pertaining to the use of scripted syllabi in teaching online courses. Ted Aoki's theory on curriculum implementation as a situational praxis was used as the…

This study examined how White, female U.S. community and technical college educators develop and sustain an antiracist praxis. In the context of this study, antiracist praxis was defined as the ability for White educators to engage in consistent cycles of critical self-reflection about race and demonstrating antiracist actions. Semi-structured…

The COVID-19 pandemic unveiled significant inequities within our social, economic, and educational infrastructures, prompting reconsideration of conventional approaches to education. Drawing from national trends and experiences at a four-year regional institution in East Texas, the current study delves into student departure rates and disparities…

The ways in which mentor teachers, as school-based mathematics teacher educators, support prospective teachers during the student teaching experience of teacher preparation has been largely unexplored. In the limited instances when the work of mentor teachers has been researched, the focus ignores the various approaches mentor teachers employ to…

This dissertation explores the well-being of public K-12 teachers in the United States who explicitly identify as anti-racist and/or anti-colonial teachers. Well-being has traditionally been conceptualized as attached to single human individuals in most Western academic scholarship. However, drawing on insights from the posthumanisms, community…