Bowdoin Orient v.139, no.1-26 (2009-2010)

https://digitalcommons.bowdoin.edu/bowdoinorient-2010s/1000/thumbnail.jp

Final Report of the Cuyahoga County Election Review Panel

The Panel was charged with identifying the deficiencies in the May 2, 2006 Cuyahoga County election, ascertain the causes and contributing factors of those deficiencies and provide recommendations to remedy the deficiencies

Bowdoin Orient v.133, no.1-24 (2003-2004)

https://digitalcommons.bowdoin.edu/bowdoinorient-2000s/1004/thumbnail.jp

"Good Teachers" Require "Better Students": Identity Crisis in the Search for Empowering Pedagogy

Although schools have often served as agents of cultural assimilation, they have also been sites of contestation and transformative change. Despite an increasingly substantial body of literature that addresses the need for teacher transformation, particularly among white teachers, there has been little focus on the process and implications of concientization within specific settings. This dissertation chronicles a participatory, ethnographic study of the lived experience of one English Language Arts teacher dedicated to the more equitable transformation of self and school. Spanning interactions from 2003-2006, but concentrating primarily on her work as the only English teacher in a new program, it details her attempt to redefine practice in more critical and culturally relevant ways and explores the impact of such work on teacher identity. In particular, the emic tropes of the Good Teacher and the Better Student are explored as problematic identity constructions with crucial consequences for teacher-student relationships and pedagogical decisions. Sustained by stratified classrooms and defining achievement in limited ways, they oversimplify the complex set of interactions that necessarily comprise teaching and learning. This study offers a window on transformative practice in process-its inception, its challenges, and its ultimate impact on teacher identity. Specifically, it includes an examination of 1) a teacher's work in two separate school systems-a traditional, comprehensive, suburban high school serving a largely white population, and an alternative, urban Middle College program serving mostly students of color; 2) the power and problems arising from authentic care-oriented classroom relations, and 3) the success and failure of reinvented pedagogical approaches. It argues that, in this case, transformation also creates an identity crisis that simultaneously empowers and destroys, undermining the teacher's sense of self, efficacy, and sustainability even as it inspires her to advocate for marginalized students and to hope for wider social change

"They Don't Want to See Us Succeed": How Micro-Interactions Produce Problematic Identities for Black Girls in US Public Secondary Schools

Current discussions about inequity within US public schools are centered on a singular narrative of the Black male crisis. Though warranted, this focus on Black boys has inadvertently left Black girls, and their struggles, in the shadows. To date, a primary focus of scholarly inquiry has been on examining the identities these young women bring into schools with them, as shaped by familial and community forces, and how schools react and respond to them via their institutional practices and policies. What has remained under analyzed is how schools actively construct Black feminine identities and what these constructions mean for the young women’s academic opportunities, present and future. In light of this extant gap, drawing upon socio-cultural theory and Black feminist thought, my dissertation project provided a 1-year critical ethnographic investigation of an urban high school to examine: (a) how schools actively construct Black feminine identities through their policies, practices, and norms of interactions; (b) what these constructions mean for Black girls’ academic opportunities and orientations toward school; and (c) how Black girls interpret and respond to school based constructions of their identities. The analysis of teachers’ discourse revealed that both Black girls’ socio-emotional and academic identities were imagined to consist of pejorative traits. When characterizing Black girls’ socio-emotional identities, teachers described the young women as emotionally volatile in their demeanors and interactions. Using bomb-related imagery, they suggested that Black girls unpredictably erupted into aggressive, abusive, and confrontational behavior. In addition, teachers characterized Black girls as rebellious and intentionally acting in ways that were difficult, combative, and manipulative in order to undermine the existing power structure within the school. Much like the way their dispositions and inclinations in the social realm were imagined, teachers characterized Black girls’ academic identities as rooted in an intersecting web of problematic dispositions. They suggested that Black girls lacked the necessary attitudes, behaviors, and demeanors that were foundational to academic success. However, a closer look at the interactions between Black girls and their teachers revealed that the negative qualities that teachers imagined to be inherent traits of the young women, in fact, were produced during their micro-interactions. Said another way, the teachers’ own dispositions and behaviors called forth the problematic manner in which Black girls sometimes enacted their identities. While the school officials imagined Black girls’ identities in ways that were static and one-dimensional, my participant observation revealed that the young women’s enactment of their identities was tied to the contexts they were in and the opportunities the varied contexts afforded them to bring forth productive selves. More specifically, when Black girls were in contexts that supported and affirmed their socio-emotional and academic identities they enacted them in productive and positive ways. When they were in contexts (i.e. their classrooms) where they felt attacked and unsupported, they enacted their identities in the ways the teachers described. The teachers, in solely constructing Black girls as problems were unable to identify their role in producing the problematic behavior. This led to unproductive relationships, inequitable discipline referrals, and systematic denial of access to academic resources. Ultimately, this dissertation argues that schools differentially shape the opportunities and educational outcomes of Black girls through the identities they construct for them and calls for teachers to reimagine their role as teaching professionals.PHDEducational StudiesUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/144133/1/alainamn_1.pd

The Whitworthian 1996-1997

The Whitworthian student newspaper, September 1996-May 1997.https://digitalcommons.whitworth.edu/whitworthian/1080/thumbnail.jp

Bowdoin Orient v.132, no.1-24 (2000-2001)

https://digitalcommons.bowdoin.edu/bowdoinorient-2000s/1001/thumbnail.jp

Imperial Enterprise: The United States International Volunteer Program, Neoliberal Empire, and Northern Youth

In recent years, the phenomenon of Northern international volunteering has been conceived as an instance of post-collegiate “continuing education” and, as such, has been attributed to a neoliberal logic of self-enterprise. However, such accounts have neglected to interrogate how an entrenched logic of empire also animates the practice of recruiting and deploying Northern citizens to volunteer in the “developing” world. Also overlooked have been the particular intersections of these logics in the discourses of international volunteer programs, the related subject formations of Northern volunteers who come under their tutelage, and the ways in which these intersections engage broader geopolitical objectives of Northern states. Focusing on the Ecuador operations of a major US-American international volunteer program that I call Global Community, this dissertation examines the interplay between imperialist injunctions of improving and touring a mythologized “Third World” Other and neoliberalist directives of self-enterprise and consumerism, among others. Drawing on one year of ethnographic fieldwork conducted with a cohort of Global Community Ecuador volunteers, this dissertation also examines the role of the international volunteer program in the application of a governmental technology that is both imperial and neoliberal in its rationale. Recruitment materials, compendium texts, and training activities are examined as both discursive formations and governmental acts that index broader discourses of imperialism and neoliberalism, simultaneously constructing and instructing volunteers in relation to a discursively produced Ecuadorian otherness that the program frames as the cornerstone of the volunteer stint. Focusing specifically on three distinct “contact zones” (Pratt 2007/1992) through which the program attempts to guide the volunteer – the Ecuadorian public space, the Ecuadorian homestay, and the Ecuadorian classroom (where volunteers teach English to Ecuadorian students) – each ethnographic chapter explores the relational components of volunteer subjectivity vis-a-vis an imagined Ecuadorian alterity, considering how volunteer subjectivities index program discourses and behavioral injunctions, as well as a continual interplay between the imperial and the neoliberal. Additionally, I examine how volunteer subjectivity is constituted through their continual subjection to Ecuadorian discourses around gringo-ness, which, in unsettling the production of white US-American racial normativity, pose indirect challenge to some of the foundational assertions of international volunteering discourse

Proceedings of the 19th European Roundtable for Sustainable Consumption and Production Circular Europe for Sustainability: Design, Production and Consumption

Postprint (published version