In this dissertation, I examine the socioeconomic impacts of college degree attainment on white working-class Millennials. I conducted a qualitative study in Western New York, individually interviewing twenty men and twenty women. Additionally, I facilitated three focus groups (one male, one female, and one mixed gender) to further discuss these…

The purpose of this study is to illustrate how in the span of three decades, a working-class Black gay male college student residing in a post-industrial city navigated college. Through a postcolonial geographic epistemology and theories of human geography, we explore his narrative, mapping the terrain of sexual, race and class dialects, which…

By mixing up various writing genres, the author interweaves a hybrid narrative of a fable, her postcolonial feminist subjectivity, and her research. The narrative begins with Aesop's fable, "the Bat, the Bird, and the Beast." In the fable, a bat wants to be both a bird and a beast, but being neither, s/he is refused by both. Connecting…

The effects of neoliberal ideologies infiltrate all aspects of the teaching-learning environment, including academic practices of reading and writing. Writing, more than simply a demonstration of academic proficiency, represents a means of thinking--an opportunity to develop critical thought, build resistance to neoliberal individualism through…

Our personal and professional lives intersect: the story of how one young man dropped out of a doctoral program in physics to figure out what to do about the continuing problem of dropout in higher education.

This article describes a cultural production process called religification, in which religious affiliation, rather than race or ethnicity, has become the core category of identity for working-class Pakistani-American youth in the United States. In this dialectical process, triggered by political changes following the September 11 terrorist…

A community-based, multisite study using mixed methods examined the experiences and perspectives of Latino students and families in a low performing urban school district in New York State. This research project was spearheaded by a Latino Education Task Force which brought together multiple stakeholders in a collaborative effort to counteract…

This dissertation investigates lexical borrowing in Spanish in New York. English-origin lexical material was extracted from a stratified sample of 146 Spanish-speaking informants of different ages, national origins, classes, etc., living in New York City. ANOVAs and Pearson correlations determined whether lexical borrowing frequency and the type…

For adult students at Lehman College, in the Bronx, and LaGuardia Community College, in Queens, the separation between politics and daily life seems practically invisible. Both colleges are part of the 23-campus CUNY system, where more than two in five of the nearly 197,000 students are 23 and older. For most of these students, it is nearly…

This ethnographic case study investigates the literacy practices one teacher and his students engaged in during a full year digital video composing English elective. The research site is an English course offered at a diverse, first-ring suburban high school. The course, Mass Media and Video Productions, is a full year English elective open to…

Early resistance theorists analyzed working class students' oppositional behavior at a time of high availability of viable jobs in manufacturing. They argued that oppositional behavior constituted a rejection of middle class culture motivated by an implicit understanding of the myth of meritocracy. But times have changed. This paper seeks to…

Recent criticism of the over-representation of minority students in special education do not adequately account for gender, despite the fact that urban special education classrooms in the USA are largely populated by young men of colour. In fact, we know very little about how being female shapes the experiences and understandings of young women of…

This book overturns the typical conception of standards, empowering educators by providing concrete examples of how top-down models of assessment can be embraced and used in ways that are consistent with critical pedagogies. Although standards, as broad frameworks for setting learning targets, are not necessarily problematic, when they are…

An open admissions policy for the City University of New York was approved by the University's Board of Higher Education in 1969, ushering in a new era of greater access to college for the city's poor and working class Blacks, Latinos, and white youth. This policy change was made in response to demands from students, civil rights organizations,…

Faculty members take pride in the great diversity of students attending LaGuardia Community College. Their students self-identify with various nationalities, races, religions, ethnicities, and sexual orientations. Not only do students adopt diverse identity markers, but they also come to their classroom with variant skill levels. It is difficult…