Improving anti-racist education for Multiracial students

This dissertation explores how anti-racist education might be improved, so that it more effectively teaches Multiracial students about racism. A brief history of anti-racist education and a theory of monoracism – the systematic oppression of Multiracial people – provide context for the study. Anti-racist education in communities and colleges has supported U.S. social movements for racial justice. However, most anti-racist education programs are not designed by or for students who identify with two or more races. Nor have such programs generally sought to address Multiraciality or monoracism. Since the 1980s, Multiraciality has become more salient in popular U.S. racial discourses. The number of people identifying as Multiracial, Mixed Race, or related terms has also increased, particularly among school-age youth. Further, the size and number of Multiracial people’s organizations have also grown. Anti-racist education may pose unintended challenges for Multiracial students and their organizations. This study asked twenty-five educators involved in Multiracial organizations to discuss anti-racist education: what it should teach Multiracial students; what is working; what is not working; and how it might be improved. Qualitative data were gathered via five focus group interviews in three West Coast cities. Participants proposed learning goals for Multiracial students. Goals included learning about privilege and oppression; social constructionism; historical and contemporary contexts of racism; and impacts of racism and monoracism on Multiracial people. Participants also called for education that develops interpersonal relationships, self-reflection, and activism. Participants also discussed aspects of anti-racist education that may help or hinder Multiracial students’ learning, as well as possible improvements. Participants problematized the exclusion of Multiraciality, the use of Black/White binary racial paradigms, linear racial identity development models, and the use of racial caucus groups or affinity spaces. Participants also challenged educators’ monoracist attitudes and behaviors, particularly the treatment of questions as pathological “resistance.” Suggestions included addressing Multiraciality and monoracism, accounting for intersectionality and the social construction of race, validating self-identification, and teacher education about monoracism. The study then critically analyzes participants’ responses by drawing on literature about anti-racist education, social justice education, multicultural education, transgender oppression (cissexism), and monoracism. Based on that synthesis, alternate recommendations for research and practice are provided

Exploring Community Outreach Initiatives for Artist-Run Centers: A Case Study Using Anti-Racist Feminist Pedagogies to Create Inclusive Spaces for Knowledge Exchange

In a city like Montreal, where language, race and class divide the city into visible and not so visible ways and geographical patterns, it is important to analyze the often unquestioned positions of privilege held both by individuals and institutions. The need to create spaces where critical thought and reflection may take place is therefore important. Based on an anti-racist feminist framework rooted in a thorough literature review, I undertook a case study based on action research, to experiment with the possibilities of opening accessible and inclusive spaces for knowledge creation and exchange in a diverse society. The evidence presented in this thesis brings together my personal experiences with outreach programming, and the acquired information and feedback from a two day Recognizing Privilege & Oppression Workshop carried out with the board of directors and staff of articule, an artist run community centre. Data were collected utilizing both ethnographic and auto-ethnographic approaches as well as through participant worksheets, recorded notes from the workshops including key points and decisions taken, as well as the centre’s strategic plan documents. The research questions addressed are: What changes can artist-run centres implement to be more connected to the communities in which they are located? Are notions of access and privilege being addressed on a continuous basis? How can changes be actualized under budgetary constraints? In what way should curatorial, programming, and display practices be challenged and/or modified? And what can museums and larger civic institutions learn from community run centres

Le système de question-réponse QUANTUM

Mémoire numérisé par la Direction des bibliothèques de l'Université de Montréal

Beating the Spin-Down Limit on Gravitational Wave Emission from the Vela Pulsar

We present direct upper limits on continuous gravitational wave emission from the Vela pulsar using data from the Virgo detector\u27s second science run. These upper limits have been obtained using three independent methods that assume the gravitational wave emission follows the radio timing. Two of the methods produce frequentist upper limits for an assumed known orientation of the star\u27s spin axis and value of the wave polarization angle of, respectively, 1.9\ee{-24} and 2.2\ee{-24}, with 95% confidence. The third method, under the same hypothesis, produces a Bayesian upper limit of 2.1\ee{-24}, with 95% degree of belief. These limits are below the indirect {\it spin-down limit} of 3.3\ee{-24} for the Vela pulsar, defined by the energy loss rate inferred from observed decrease in Vela\u27s spin frequency, and correspond to a limit on the star ellipticity of $\sim 10^{-3}$. Slightly less stringent results, but still well below the spin-down limit, are obtained assuming the star\u27s spin axis inclination and the wave polarization angles are unknown

Impact of support groups on kinship care providers : a project based on an investigation at Community Coalition, Los Angeles, California

The purpose of this study was to explore how peer support groups influence kinship care providers’ (KCPs’) sense of self-worth and empowerment, and how they impact KCPs’ ability to advocate on behalf of the children in their care. Few studies to date have examined self-worth in the realm of KCPs’ parenting issues of guilt and regret, nor have they explored whether support group participation encourages relearning parenting skills and therefore instills a sense of empowerment. Although the majority of KCPs in the United States are informal care providers, most prior research on this population focused on formal kinship care providers; this study included both formal and informal caregivers. Thirteen KCPs who belong to a support group formed under the auspices of a community agency in South Los Angeles were interviewed for this study; participants were female and predominantly African American, with a median age of 64 years. Agency staff who worked with these caregivers were guided by a mission statement engendering community activism and advocacy. Major findings indicated that KCPs gained a sense of empowerment through increased knowledge from invited speakers and through emotional support from their group counterparts, thus improving their navigation of the child welfare system and increasing their connections to others. This study confirmed the value of peer support groups for KCPs. Further, it underscored the need for social workers to be sensitive to issues of racism within the child welfare system and to encourage KCPs to bring these issues to the support group

Domain-specific question answering system : an application to the construction sector

Mémoire numérisé par la Direction des bibliothèques de l'Université de Montréal

Researcher as witness : effectiveness and pedagogical and curricular decision making in race-centered professional learning

Urban School districts search for professional learning endeavors that will assist staff as they adapt to change at a rapid pace and build capacity to become in tune to the needs of the students and families. The facilitator of race-centered professional learning in urban school districts has to be pedagogically, mentally, socially and emotionally prepared for what the learner brings into the space. This research study used semi-structured interviews, observations and a researcher reflective journal to explore the definitions of effectiveness and the pedagogical and curricular decision making of ten participants who design and deliver race-centered professional learning in urban school districts across the U.S. This study employed Critical Race Theory to frame the study and analyze participant definitions of effectiveness and pedagogical and curricular decision making for race-centered professional learning. Black Feminist Thought is used to extend critical race theory centering analysis on the perspective of the researcher as participant observer. While experience of participants varied, each participant was consistent in defining effectiveness as negotiating the emotional nature of race for learners and facilitators and understanding application of learning as a long term process. Findings showed participants made pedagogical decisions to account for the complex ways race operates in a learning endeavor to establish an affirming, affective learning environment. Participants made curricular decisions drawing from counter storytelling, they chose to study or adopt existing race curricular models, and grounded learning opportunities in sociohistorical content knowledgeCurriculum and Instructio

Making Sense of Poverty in Child Welfare: A Grounded Theory Informed Study of Public and Tribal Child Welfare Workers' Poverty Constructions, Perceptions of Causes, and Praxis

University of Minnesota Ph.D. dissertation. July 2013. Major: Social Work. Advisor: Elizabeth Lightfoot. 1 computer file (PDF); v, 206 pages.In the United States, the system of child welfare acts as a powerful and complex structural agent in the lives of families, especially those living in poverty. According to the Fourth National Incidence Study of Child Abuse and Neglect, children living in poverty are three times as likely to be abused and about seven times more likely to be neglected (Sedlak et al., 2010). However, many scholars and activists have critiqued the system of child welfare for ignoring the interconnected issues of poverty (Lindsey, 2003; Pelton, 1989; Roberts, 1999), gender inequality (Mink, 1995; Roberts, 1995, 1999), and the racialization of the system (Roberts, 1995, 1999, 2002). Scholars argue that studying the perceptions of the causes of poverty is warranted because individuals' perceptions shape behavior toward poor people and actions related to poverty (Strier, 2008), yet research on child welfare workers' perceptions of the causes of poverty is lacking. This dissertation presents a grounded theory informed study, shaped by an intersectional analysis that explores how public and tribal child welfare workers think about poverty, by examining their construction of poverty, perceptions of its causes, and how workers translate these into their practice framework. From individual interviews with 30 public and tribal child welfare workers throughout Minnesota, a nascent theory developed that describes these workers making sense of poverty in child welfare, depicted in a theoretical model. Findings include that the main way workers defined poverty was "not meeting basic needs." Three of the causal explanations of poverty workers identified built on findings from prior perception of poverty studies: individual cause, structural/systemic cause, and luck, while a fourth main causal explanation rose from the data, which was family/generational cause. In addition, the workers in this study had more to say about what child welfare workers could not do to address poverty than what child welfare workers could do. The two main strategies workers stated that child welfare workers could take to address poverty were being "resource brokers" and having an advocacy perspective. Lastly, workers perceived their social location, specifically class, and somewhat their race and their gender, had an impact on how they thought about poverty. The implications of these findings include child welfare reforms that respond to the structural and internalized limitations workers experience when addressing poverty which extends to the frame of poverty as child welfare issue, and social work education and child welfare training that starts with the historical realities of the United States and situates how racial and gender inequality today continue because of the federal, state and local policies that supported race-based and gender-based discrimination, limiting the access to resources and assets that impacted the evolution of wealth in this country

Lexical conditions on syntactic knowledge: auxiliary selection in native and non-native grammars of Italian

The theoretical focus is on the linguistic intuitions of native and non-native speakers of Italian about a number of grammatical phenomena related to the choice between the auxiliaries ESSERE ('be') and AVERE ('have') with non-transitive (unaccusative and unergative) verbs. It is argued that a purely syntactic account of unaccusativity is insufficient to capture the variation exhibited by these verbs. In particular, it is claimed that the unmarked selection of ESSERE with unaccusatives and of AVERE with unergatives in the present perfect tense is sensitive not only to a hierarchy of syntactic configurations (as assumed by the Government-Binding version of the Unaccusativity Hypothesis) but also to lexical hierarchies that subdivide the range of unaccusative and unergative verbs along semantic dimensions. Such hierarchies distinguish 'core', or prototypical, types of verbs from peripheral ones , and are consistent with the historical evolution of auxiliaries in Romance. However, auxiliary selection in syntactically marked 'restructuring' constructions, induced by certain Raising and Control verbs, is not sensitive to these semantic dimensions. It was predicted that the interaction between syntactic and semantic constraints would give rise to systematic variability in native speakers' linguistic intuitions, manifested in consistent and determinate acceptability judgments on core types of verbs, and variable or indeterminate judgments on peripheral types of verbs. It was also predicted that non-natives would differ from natives in terms of the extent to which indeterminate judgments penetrated from the periphery to the core.Methodologically, this study represents the first application of magnitude estimation techniques to the elicitation of linguistic acceptability judgments. Magnitude estimation makes it possible to measure variability in acceptability judgments directly, which has the advantage of producing interval scales that can then be properly analysed by parametric statistics. Other ranking elicitation procedures produce only ordinal measurements. A systematic comparison between the judgments obtained by means of magnitude estimation and those obtained by means of a cardsorting ranking procedure indicates that both native and non-native speakers are able to judge acceptability via magnitude estimation with at least as much delicacy as via card-sorting. In some cases, magnitude estimation produces finer-grained distinctions of unacceptability, and reveals differences between native and near-natives which are not reproduced in the card-sorting task.A series of experiments was conducted addressing the three issues of (a) variability in native intuitions, (b) progressive development of non-native knowledge, and (c) ultimate attainment at near-native competence levels. Acceptability judgments were collected from Italian native speakers and English-speaking learners of Italian at four proficiency levels (beginner, intermediate, advanced, near-native). A group of French near-native speakers of Italian was also tested for the purpose of comparison with the English near-natives.Tnis study has both a theoretical and a methodological dimension. Theoretically, it is concerned with variation and indeterminacy in linguistic acceptability judgments. Methodologically, it involves the application of a rigorous procedure for the elicitation of judgment data that is sensitive to informants' variable or indeterminate intuitions.The results show that (a) the judgments of native Italians are sensitive to different lexical-semantic hierarchies of unaccusative and unergative verbs: judgments on the basic syntactic reflexes of the unergative/unaccusative distinction (auxiliary selection and ne-cliticization) exhibit more or less determinacy depending on the semantic characterization of individual verbs: however, native speakers discriminate categorically between possible and impossible, obligatory and optional auxiliary change under restructuring, irrespective of the semantics of the inducing verb; (b) nonnative judgments reflect a difference in learnability between lexical-semantic and purely syntactic distinctions. Lexical-semantic hierarchies affect the development and ultimate shape of non-native grammars, in that interlanguage representations for core lexical classes are constructed earlier than those for peripheral classes, with non-native acceptability values gradually approximating the native values. Peripheral restructuring constructions, however, never become determinate in the interlanguage grammars of English learners, which are incomplete in this respect even at the nearnative level. In contrast, French near-native speakers of Italian show evidence of having constructed determinate, but divergent representations of these syntactic phenomena. It is argued that such differences in ultimate attainment reflect differences in the overall representations of unaccusativity in French and English