Senior Theses & Projects

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Browsing Senior Theses & Projects by Author "Allard, Elaine"

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    Arts-Based Education for Social Justice
    (2015) Stevens, Samantha; Allard, Elaine; Fraga, Christopher Michael
    This thesis explores the arts as a potential framework for achieving social justice through the system of education. The author uses her experience as a student-teacher in a charter school with an arts-based social justice framework as a springboard for discussion, identifying points of tension that arise as educators translate social justice theory into practice in today’s schools. Faced with the challenges of oppression and systemic inequality, educators work to transform schools into vehicles for social justice. Some teachers turn to the charter school model in an effort to sculpt environments fit to meet the needs of students form marginalized populations. The author explores theoretical differences in conceptualizing what it means to work for social justice, claiming that the arts is particularly well-suited as a framework for social justice work.
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    Ethnographies Revisited: English Learners and Language Ideologies
    (2017) Rosales, Alondra; Allard, Elaine
    As the public school populations all over the United States continue to change to include more linguistically diverse student demographics, English language education continues to show many of the issues that it has faced for decades. With deep roots in colonization and imperialism, English language education policy and practice shows evidence of language ideology shaping the way education and policymakers think about the linguistic practices of their students. Using a critical lens that focuses on language ideologies, two canonical educational ethnographies that highlight the experiences of English Learners in the United States will be analyzed using three trends of language ideologies: Language as Capital, Language and Race, and Language as Deficit. Using this lens the two works-Fu's "My Trouble is my English" and Olsen's Made in America-to demonstrate how students view Standard English as necessary for gaining economic and cultural capital without always considering the role of their peers and teachers in distributing capital among those that are not in the culture of power. Additionally, they show how non-monolingual English speakers are racialized and excluded from being legitimate members of the school's social structure. Lastly, the works show how the non-English linguistic practices of the English Learners are ignored and viewed as detrimental to their English language acquisition. This new lens on the works of Fu and Olsen sheds light on how language ideologies manifest in the actions and language of students and teachers, along with the effect these have on the educational experience English Learners.
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    Los Angeles County: Housing Policy Effects on the Opportunity Gap for Latinx Students
    (2018) Gomez, Abigail; Allard, Elaine; Kaya, Ayse
    By examining the residential and student populations in East Los Angeles and SouthEast Los Angeles, it is possible to identify the local housing politics that affect student success. Analysis of high mobility and displacement of students is indicative of the range of students' lack of academic opportunity. High mobility, displacement, safety concerns, and academic failure are attributed to exclusionary zoning, expulsive zoning, mixed-income housing and schooling, and tax increment funding. In addition to examining the effects of each policy on student success and levels of opportunity, it is necessary to examine the recommendations and limitations for amending the state of housing policies in Los Angeles County, and thus, the changes to students' academic trajectories.
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    Raciolinguistic socialization and subversion at a predominantly white institution
    (2021) Keicho, Momoka; Allard, Elaine
    By interviewing current Swarthmore students on their linguistic experiences at Swarthmore College, I investigated how students with diverse linguistic practices interact with the raciolinguistic ideology of academic language at a predominantly white institution. Ultimately, I argue that Swarthmore’s linguistic climate perpetuates the academic language raciolinguistic ideology by equating academic language with academic performance. In response to this linguistic climate, students whose linguistic diversity is not appreciated by the institution either conform to or subvert the expectations for academic language in the classroom in order to survive and succeed. Students expressed four main approaches to responding to the linguistic climate: 1) conforming by performing sociolinguistic labor (Holliday and Squires, 2020), 2) finding and creating participation spaces outside of the main classroom discourse, 3) identifying safe participation spaces created by figures of authority, and 4) subverting the academic language ideology in the main classroom, despite the institution’s linguistic expectations.
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