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William James (1841–1910), working primarily out of the United States, and Michel Foucault (1926–1984), working primarily out of France, are two very different figures who both made an impact on current theories of education. Even if the primary focus of their work is not education, their ideas challenge what it is that makes education recognizable as education and takes issue with its very identity as a discipline. William James, who began publishing in the 1870s, is generally described as a philosopher and psychologist. He remains well-known for his work on pragmatism in the wake of Charles Sanders Peirce’s pragmaticism and for his work on religion, ethics, and mind theory, but he also devoted considerable time to the study of parapsychology and gave some attention to teacher education. Foucault has been variously described as a philosopher, historian, historian of ideas, and a social and political theorist. His work addressed an impressive array of fields across the sciences, literature, art, ethics, and institutional, political, and social history, and spanned a wide range of historical periods mainly in European and French history from the 13th century to the 20th century with later excursions into the Ancient Greek and early Christian eras. Foucault’s work has been widely, but selectively, deployed within education studies across the globe, with a strong focus on his notions of power, governmentality, surveillance, subjectivity, discourse, and ethics in their various iterations. James’s work has been relatively less deployed, with emphasis on the application of his version of pragmatism, theories of mind, and talks to teachers. The work of the two thinkers may be considered to overlap in two important ways: first, in their respective approaches to the notion of practice, namely the idea of philosophy as strategic and located in day-to-day concrete experience rather than occupying the rarefied realms of abstraction; and secon

Language is fundamental to teaching and learning, yet is prone to invisibility in education systems. Drawing on work from applied linguistics that foregrounds language use in education, a “power” heuristic can be used to highlight linguistic privilege and its implications for students and their individual language repertoires. Language can be understood as a tool for performing particular interpersonal and ideational functions; its structure and uses are determined by context. For most students, experiences of language that is education-related reside in three core domains: the home and community, the school, and the nation state. Language expectations in these domains vary and position the linguistic repertoires of students differently. A key consideration is the student’s first language and its relationship to the expectations and privileged varieties of different institutions, for example, the local school and the national education department. By foregrounding linguistic privilege in education, the alignment, or misalignment, between students’ language resources and the prevailing language norms of educational institutions is made visible and open to change. Inherent in the level of alignment are issues of educational inclusion, access to powerful language forms and genres, and academic achievement. The concept of power affordances can be used to refer to the enabling potential of the relationship between language status, language affiliation and a student’s linguistic repertoire. Power affordances can operate as three broad potentials, capabilities or statuses: socioeconomic power, which resides in the language of global and state institutions ranging from government to schools and manifests in instruments such as national standardized tests; sociocognitive power, which enables the capacity to learn and recognizes the language intensity of knowledge; and identity power, which references social belonging and is strongly indexed to language. Conceptualizing langu

In the context of offenders who have learning difficulties, autism, and/or social, emotional, and mental health problems, their families, and professionals who work with them, caring and ethical research processes can be explored via fieldnotes. Conducting life story interviews and recording fieldnotes within qualitative criminological, education, and sociological research have long since been used to document and analyze communities and institutions and the private and public spheres. They richly tell us about specific research contexts, or everyday lives and relationships, that interview transcripts alone perhaps overlook. It is in the process of recording and reflecting upon research relationships that we can see and understand care-full research. But caring and ethical research works in an interdependent and relational way. Therefore, the participant and the researcher are at times vulnerable, and recognition of this is critical in considering meaningful and healthy research practices. However, the acknowledgement of the fact that particular types of research can be messy, chaotic, and emotional is necessary in understanding caring research

The field of world language education is one that has historically been dominated by traditional pedagogical practices and perspectives that limit the opportunity for rich, critical examination of course content. This often leaves much to be desired in students' learning experiences for many students, and frequently causes students of color to feel alienated from the language learning process. There has been a recent shift within the field in which social justice pedagogies are utilized by educators in an effort to create more meaningful learning experiences for students. This study explores the former learning experiences of three Black, post-secondary Spanish instructors and examines their pedagogical practices as they explore social justice-based phenomena and question and challenge systems of inequity and injustice with their students through use of the target language. The pedagogies implemented within the classrooms are based on the educators' own perceptions of what it means to teach for social justice. Furthermore, these practices are the educators' intentional efforts to prepare their students to be globally-minded, critical thinkers who work to disrupt systems of privilege and power within our world. This study is centered on the following questions: (1) What are the world language instructors' interpretations of social justice pedagogy related to world language education? (2) How do the instructors' interpretations of social justice inform their pedagogies in the world language classroom? and (3) What were the instructors' K-20 (and beyond) experiences as world language learners? How might their experiences influence their interpretations of social justice within the world language classroom? Critical Race Theory, Culturally Relevant Pedagogy, and Social Justice Pedagogy are used as the conceptual frameworks to analyze and examine data collected from interviews and classroom observations completed by each participant. This project is a major contribution, Doctor of Education

Black males have the highest college attrition rates of all races and genders (Harper, 2006a). Federal reports indicate that 54.4% of White males finish their college degrees, compared with 33.1% of Black males (U.S. Department of Education, 2012). The 21.3 percentage point disparity leads many to believe that Black male students may need special attention in order to close the gap. Vincent Tinto is the most prolific, and possibly most respected, of the theory-based attrition and retention researchers, but his model (1975) has been criticized for not addressing the experiences of minority, and other non-middle class, students. Tinto's theory has maintained its credibility over two decades, but the experiences of marginalized students, specifically Black males, are an essential part of the college attrition puzzle, and their voices have been largely absent from the research to date. In an effort to add to and enhance research on the attrition and retention of Black male students at PWIs, this study extends Tinto's (1975, 2000) retention theory through an exploration of the experiences of five high achieving Black males at a prominent PWI in the South. By utilizing qualitative methodology to present students' perspectives on their collegiate experiences, this study advances our understanding of the retention theory. This qualitative study utilized individual, semi-structured interviews framed by a narrative inquiry to answer two primary research questions. First, what are the factors which contributed to the retention of black males who have successfully obtained a baccalaureate degree from a prominent predominately white institution? Second, what are the factors which contributed to the academic success (above a 3.0 gpa) of Black males from a prominent predominately white institution? The results of analysis of the narratives describe the thematic structure of five Black males' experience of persistence and completing their baccalaureate degrees between 2013 and 2015, Doctor of Philosophy