This Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) Project was conducted by a graduate student and teaching resident, alongside five middle school students at a public, Title-I charter school in a Southern California city. Together, the research team navigates the space of “yes and-” by examining what a school is doing well to affirm its students and what remains to be done better. The project’s guiding question is: how is positive change effectively created for marginalized communities at school? In pursuit of an answer, the YPAR group conducted a survey of about 220 middle school students, and interviews with five eighth graders. Data suggests that most students feel safe at school and that their identities are respected, but there is still significant room for growth. Implications suggest that the school should support more inclusion of student voice, intervention and practices that would eliminate the burden marginalized students carry.

Literature on the topics of education and religion suggests that there is a relationship between the two, one which could be assessed as positive or negative depending on the religion. One religion whose impact on people’s educational experience has recently become of interest is the Jehovah’s Witness religion. By analyzing the narratives of people who once practiced as Jehovah’s Witnesses, this paper sought to investigate how religion can impact people’s educational experience, and whether there is a positive or negative relationship. I utilized questions from the Life Story Interview with a framework of analysis that corresponds to common themes in narrative research. My data results consist of narratives from three different participants, which I analyzed according to different narrative themes. The analysis of my data indicated that active members of the Jehovah’s Witness community admitted to feeling less confident in pursuing education. This finding indicated that Jehovah’s Witnesses as students have unmet needs during their years of primary education, such as social support from peers and family members and an understanding of how educational opportunities would benefit them. Findings of the study also indicate that high school teachers might be well-positioned to provide social support and educational information for students in religions like the Jehovah’s Witness religion. Future research could focus on investigating the best practices for teachers to utilize when meeting the needs of students who belong not just to the Jehovah’s Witness religion but to religious minority groups overall.

This study is a small-n case study that inductively builds a theory of embedded autonomous social work policing. Embedded autonomous social work policing is a proposed model of social work policing that entails Master Social Work (MSW) social workers being at once embedded and trained within police departments while remaining hired, funded, and answerable to the human services bureaucracy in a locality. The main site of application of the theory of embedded autonomy to social work policing involves co-responder calls for service wherein both a social work expert and a law enforcement officer are necessitated owing to the gray i.e. potentially non-criminal or potentially criminal nature of the call for service depending on the success of de-escalation techniques or the lack thereof. The costs and benefits of the implementation of an embedded autonomous model of social work policing is inductively built through a case study analysis of three cases of social work policing involving fieldwork research. The three cases analyzed are Alexandria Police Department in Alexandria, Kentucky; Crisis Assistance Helping Out On The Streets (CAHOOTS) in Eugene, Oregon; and Crisis Avoidance Response Efforts (CARE) 7 in Tempe, Arizona.

There is a growing necessity for learning opportunities that promote the development of soft skills among college students as they prepare to participate meaningfully in a global, knowledge-based world. Through conducting in-depth interviews with 9 peer-mentors with first, second, and third year levels of experience in Arizona State University’s LEAD mentoring program, this thesis seeks to understand the ways in which soft skill development is promoted through participation in a formal mentoring program. The LEAD mentoring program recruits mentors who have completed the LEAD program classes during their freshman year, are current ASU students in their sophomore year and above, and seek to support and guide other students. Findings reveal that peer-mentors gain a number of valuable soft skills through the mentoring experience: self-awareness, adaptability, teamwork and collaboration, and verbal communication. Additionally, students increased their self-efficacy and ability to seek support. Given these benefits, higher education institutions should seek to increase access to mentoring opportunities. Mentoring programs provide a powerful avenue by which to increase student success, improve inclusivity on campus, and advance justice and social transformation in an increasingly globalized world.

The education and criminal justice systems have developed in relation to one another, intersected through specific events, policies, practices, and discourses that have ultimately shaped the experiences and lives of children of color. Racism, white supremacy, and oppression are foundational to the United States and evident in all systems, structures, and institutions. Exploring the various contexts in which the education and criminal justice systems have developed illuminates their coalescence in contemporary United States society and more specifically, in public schools. Public schools now operate under discipline regimes that criminalize the behavior of Black and Brown children through exclusionary practices and zero-tolerance policies, surveillance and security measures, and school police. Children of color must navigate complex and interlocking systems of power in schools and the broader society that serve to criminalize, control, and incapacitate youth, effectively cementing a relationship between schools and prisons. Describing these complex and interlocking systems of power that exclude children from schools and force them into the criminal justice system as the “school-to-prison pipeline” is increasingly insufficient. The “school-prison nexus” more accurately and completely embodies the relationship between education, incarceration, and the political economy. In the United States, where capitalism reigns, the school-prison nexus serves as an economic imperative to further fuel the political economy, neoliberal globalization, and the prison-industrial complex. In both the education and criminal justice systems, Black and Brown children are commodified and exploited through the school-prison nexus as a mechanism to expand free-market capitalism.

This literature review synthesized 15 studies about how Asian American K-12 educators in the United States considered their socio-cultural identity markers. The current literature largely revolves around the lack of representation of Asian Americans in teaching, and few studies exist about the experiences of the few Asian Americans who do become teachers. Studies included in this paper are related to the topics of Asian American pre-service and in-service teaching experiences, Asian American identity consideration, and pedagogical practices used by Asian American teachers. This paper seeks to understand and report on the various racialized experiences of Asian Americans and how their pedagogies are affected by their consideration of their identity.