Browsing by Author "Nelson, Joseph"
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- ItemAs We Trudge Through: An Autoethnography of my College Experience(2022) Samuel, Destiny R.; Foy, Anthony; Nelson, Joseph; Smulyan, LisaI wonder if something counts as fundamental if the entire world witnessed and experienced it simultaneously. Together, at the same time, we witnessed and experienced the world crumble with no sense of when it would piece itself together again. I wonder if it is cliche to write about the COVID-19 pandemic. I already see the art, in its many visual and written forms, deriving from this era. At what point does the world become oversaturated with too many Coronavirus stories and “pandemic reflections”?
- ItemThe Burdens They Carry: How Black College Students Resist and Internalize Received Messages about Race and Racism(2018) Koku, Lydia E.; Laurison, Daniel; Nelson, JosephAt predominantly white institutions, black college students' understandings of their campus climate are complicated by their experiences of racial microaggressions and racial battle fatigue. In addition to navigating discriminatory encounters with peers, faculty and staff, black college students must contend with systemic inequality. Although prevalent research notes that positive racial socialization practices can prepare young people to think about, address and cope with racism, few studies have qualitatively explored black college students' perceptions of their socialization, and particularly, whether or not they were adequately prepared to experience and conceptualize racism in college. My thesis addresses these gaps by considering how black college students come into consciousness about racism through racial socialization, how effective they perceive their socialization history to be, how socialization informs their responses to racism and how their sociopolitical development manifests through their perceptions of their extracurricular involvements on campus as activism. Relying on racial socialization theory (Lesane-Brown 2006) and sociopolitical development theory (Watts 2003; Anyiwo et al. 2017; Freire 2000), my research questions are: How have black college students' racial socialization histories affected their sociopolitical development? What is the role of sociopolitical development in governing how black college students perceive and respond to racism on their predominantly white campuses? This phenomenological study analyzes in-depth interviews with ten students at Swarthmore College and Bryn Mawr College to explore the messages students received about race and racism during childhood and to identify how those messages prepared or did not prepare them to experience racism in college. The majority of participants describe feeling unprepared; the processes by which they prepared themselves (through education and activism) are critical to understanding how they construct meaning of Blackness, resistance, and liberation at their PWIs.
- Item“Talking the Talk:” Mathematical Language, Linguistic Bias, and The Delusion of Meritocracy in the Study and Practice of Mathematics(2021) Witkowski, Gene Thomas; Nelson, JosephChallenging the dominant narrative of meritocracy, objectivity and moral/ideological neutrality embraced by many mathematicians, this thesis critically interrogates the form and function of mathematical language within academic and professional mathematical spaces. Grounded in my own experience as a s tudent within the discipline and the frameworks of various scholars within the subdiscipline of literacy education, I offer an understanding of the language of these spaces as a veritable form of literacy implicated in a flexible sociocultural context and dependent on one’s access to forms of capital. I submit that this language serves various functions including, but not limited to: the paternalistic and elitist conflation of mathematical ability with the ability to deploy mathematical terminology; the regulation, marginalization, and/or exclusion of aspiring mathematicians from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds; and the encoding of implicit bias masked behind discussions of standardization and appropriateness. A fter exploring the implications and consequences of the uncritical reliance on this language, I conclude with a series o f potential action steps that may be taken by educators in the pursuit of a discipline that works for the good of all mathematicians, rather than a select few.