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Across the United States, physicians are prescribing patients nature. These "Nature Rx" programs promote outdoor activity as a measure to combat health epidemics stemming from sedentary lifestyles. Despite the apparent novelty of nature prescription programs, they are not new. Rather, they are a reemergence of nature-based therapeutics that characterized children's health programs in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. These historic programs were popular among working-class urban families, physicians, and public health officials. By contrast, adherence is a challenge for contemporary programs, especially in socially disadvantaged areas. Although there are differences in nature prescription programs and social context, historical antecedents provide important lessons about the need to provide accessible resources and build on existing social networks. They also show that nature-and its related health benefits-does not easily yield itself to precise scientific measurements or outcomes. Recognizing these constraints may be critical to nature prescription programs' continued success and support from the medical profession.

Chinese graduate students are the largest contingent of international students in the United States, and many STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) departments in American research universities rely on large numbers of Chinese graduate students to maintain a high-level of research. At the same time, China is quite frequently imagined as the United States' main competitor, both economically and educationally. A main point of contact for Chinese graduate students with Americans is in their role as Teaching Assistants (TAs) charged with teaching American undergraduates. These interactions are sometimes contentious as undergraduate students complain that they cannot understand or learn from their Chinese instructors. Undergraduate complaints have resulted in legislation regarding instructor fluency, training programs for international TAs (ITAs), and a whole body of research that examines the `ITA problem.' It is often assumed that Chinese graduate students do not possess the English language skills to effectively teach undergraduates in the United States. In my own experience with Chinese graduate students, I have found their English to be, in almost all cases, perfectly intelligible. This dissertation focuses on Chinese graduate students teaching Statistics to undergraduates at a large research university in the southeastern United States. Through a case study methodology, this dissertation attempts to answer three research questions: 1) How do undergraduate students in Statistics courses experience Chinese TAs? 2) How do Chinese graduate students experience teaching Statistics to undergraduates? 3) How does context affect the experiences of Chinese TAs and their students? Most of the ITA problem literature reaches two unsatisfactory conclusions: either the international graduate students have deficiencies that impede undergraduate learning, or the undergraduates' racism and xenophobia negatively affect their learning. Through regular observations of courses taught by three Chinese graduate instructors and interviews with the instructors, their undergraduate students, and professors in the Statistics department, I found that the structure of the courses played a major role in the experiences of the instructors and students. I also situated the case study into the larger contexts of race/racism in the United States, representations of China, undergraduate education at research universities, and the ITA problem literature.

Black students' fear of being accused of acting white has been offered as one reason for the achievement gap between black and white students. This thesis places the debate over Fordham and Ogbu's acting white hypothesis into the context of racial authenticities as a way to explain the contradictory conclusions of the research. Racial authenticity is then problematized using Paul Gilroy's denunciation of race presented in Against Race. The claims to blackness Gilroy finds in black popular culture along with representations of acting white are illustrated in Disney's High School Musical. Lastly, the call to give up race is situated within the context of educational research.

aLate in 1935, Alice Hamilton, who a generation earlier had done more than any other government-sponsored researcher to expose and ameliorate industrial lead poisoning, wrote to Martha May Eliot, assistant chief of the U.S. Children’s Bureau. 1 A young friend of Hamilton’s, a new mother married to a third-year medical student at Harvard, had asked Hamilton how to be sure that paint on baby furniture was lead-free. Although Hamilton had always assumed “that furniture and toys were painted with enamel paint, lead-free,” the Bureau of Standards informed her that in fact many enamel paints contained lead. Hamilton’s purpose in writing Eliot, then, was to urge “that tests would have to be made of furniture paints and toy paints,” and to suggest who should take on this task: “Do not you think that it is an important question and that it lies within the field of the Children’s Bureau?” No such investigation was ever undertaken by the Children’s Bureau, the federal agency charged with advocating for “the welfare of children and child life among all classes of our people.” 2