Social Studies Standards and Teacher Preparation in Minnesota: An Examination in Relationship to Native American History

Five teacher preparation programs were examined to understand how teacher candidates are prepared to educate their students about Native American history in Minnesota

Hispanic Superintendents in Kansas: Where are They?

Although Hispanic students have been a part of Kansas public education since the 1800s and have been the second largest student body since 2000, as of fall 2020, there is a shortage of Hispanic superintendents across the state. With over 20 percent of the student population being Hispanic across the United States, the lack of superintendents from the same ethnic group is not a unique phenomenon found only in Kansas. There is a disproportionately smaller representation of Hispanics in superintendency across the nation in comparison to their growing student population. Correspondingly at a national level, Hispanics are the largest growing student population while only two percent of the superintendents are represented from this same ethnic group. The purpose of this study was to investigate through the lived experiences of ten Hispanic education leaders in Kansas, their career pathways, supports, barriers, opportunities provided, and perspective on becoming a superintendent. This study sought to shed light and explore potential causes of this local and national occurrence of a longstanding ethnic disparity between those who lead districts and the populations they serve. To that end, the research questions that guided this study are: 1) What factors influence Hispanic administrators to consider a district leadership position within Kansas? 2) What are the real and perceived barriers that prevent Hispanic educational leaders from considering or pursuing superintendency positions (e.g., age, family status, years of experiences, school district type, size, or community type, degree attainment, initial interest, race, social norms, ethnic identities)? 3) What types of supports encourage current building leaders to pursue leadership from teaching into administration that could be replicated in other areas of the Hispanic educator pipeline (e.g., mentoring, networking, higher education programs, recruitment, and hiring processes)? The research questions are addressed through in-depth, semi-structured interviews with principals, and mid-level district administrators in the state of Kansas. Furthermore, a qualitative research design was most suitable to examine and understand the Hispanic leaders’ narratives by the means of supports and obstacles encountered through experiences as a student to becoming an administrator. Themes were constructed using categorical content analysis to focus on specific patterns within the narratives. As indicated by the literature, it was crucial to investigate the leaks from the student to leadership pipeline to develop future Hispanic leaders in education. The findings indicate there are limited Hispanics who recruited or considered for the superintendency position. Moreover, these leaders were currently in higher-ranking positions in which few others from their same ethnicity held. They encountered barriers and supports along their journey that led them to their current position. Furthermore, there was inadequate support provided for the superintendency position even for those that had interest in obtaining the role. This finding is important because it allows us to examine the leaks to superintendency that is rarely explored in the body of literature from a Hispanic perspective. Future research might explore the causes of the marginal representation of Hispanic superintendents in comparison to the student body in this understudied topic in research

Official Register of the United States, containing a list of the officers and employes in the Civil, Military, and Naval Service on the first of July, 1893; together with a list of vessels belonging to the United States. Volume II, Pt. 1 of 2.

Official Register of the U.S. 1 July. HMD 29 (pts. 1 and 2), 53-2. v2-3. 2779p. [3230-3231] Lists all employees of the Indian service

Settler Colonialism + Native Ghosts: An Autoethnographic Account of the Imaginarium of Late Capitalist/Colonialist Storytelling

This dissertation is an Indigenous, decolonial, and autoethnographic account of the genealogical formation and function of Nativeness within biopolitical formations and racializing assemblages, as well as the visual, ontological, narrative, and affective imaginings of the northern bloc of settler colonialism (the United States and Canada). As an autoethnographic work it centres my own lived and embodied experiences to chart the corridors of settler-colonial power and knowledge production, in particular my experiences as a diasporic, urban and liminally enrolled Native person, and the very real, and at times overwhelming, affective burdens that come with such a positionality. In doing so this work situates my journey within the structures of settler colonialism, and in particular against what the late Patrick Wolfe referred to as the “logic of elimination,” as well as what many scholars have identified and referred to as the Coloniality of Power and the Colonial Order of Things. Further, it works to centre Indigenous resurgence, insurgence, decolonization, self-determination, and a politics of refusal. In thinking through in particular the centering of practices of refusal, this work proposes and engages in a kind of methodological-pedagogical-praxiological movement of autoethnographic refusal, where the dissertation begins its first of two narrative movements by charting Indigenous damage narratives within frames of political ontology, biopolitics and racializing assemblages, visuality, and community loss and disruption, before moving towards actively no longer telling those stories. The second narrative movement of this dissertation moves then from telling of my own stories of damage under settler-colonial regimes of power/knowledge, towards theorizing about Native damage narratives, most especially why they are so readily consumed within digital, filmic, and academic settings and the economies of late capitalism/colonialism. This is referred to within as the imaginarium of late capitalist/colonialist storytelling. In doing so, it continues to ask fundamentally onto-existential questions about Natives through frames of Savageness and Wildness, temporality, and what the late cultural theorist Mark Fisher referred to as the Weird