Browsing by Author "Hempel, Lynn, committee member"
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Item Open Access Crossing the home-school boundary: bilingual education in a Colorado kindergarten(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2012) Eisenhauer, Scarlett, author; Snodgrass, Jeffrey, advisor; Hempel, Lynn, committee member; Kent, Suzanne, committee member; Sherman, Kathleen, committee memberWithin the United States school systems, there are many children who are considered "at-risk," "deficient," and "unlikely to succeed." Numerous of them are minority and poor children who come from cultural backgrounds unlike those of the middle and upper class. For many Hispanic students, school embodies a foreign culture with which they are unfamiliar. This can cause serious incongruities for the Hispanic students between their home and school boundaries which hinders their ability to transition into the boundaries of school and experience success. The present research examines the Mezcla Elementary Kindergarten in Colorado to evaluate its bilingual program. The school provides support for the Hispanic students who are new to the norms and expectations of school. The three main supports discussed are "Slow to go Fast," Language, and Home Visits. Using both qualitative and quantitative data, I suggest that Mezcla Elementary is successful in reducing some barriers to entering school for poor Hispanic kindergarteners.Item Open Access Ecological libertarianism: the case for nonhuman self-ownership(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2016) Nelson, Zachary, author; McIvor, David, advisor; Davis, Sandra, committee member; Hempel, Lynn, committee memberTo view the abstract, please see the full text of the document.Item Open Access Educational continuity following the 2013 Colorado Front Range Floods: a case study of Lyons elementary and middle/senior high schools(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2019) Tobin, Jennifer Lynn, author; Peek, Lori, advisor; Hempel, Lynn, committee member; Browne, Katherine, committee member; Carlson, Laurie, committee member; Cox, Robin, committee memberEducational continuity is a complex social process where school, school district, and community leaders work together to continue providing education and all other school-based services for students following a disaster. Schools are vital social institutions that serve a variety of functions for students and communities and are integral to post-disaster response and recovery activities. Moreover, schools can offer protective mechanisms when they continue to care for and educate students following a crisis. However, current literature pays little attention to the organizational capacity of school districts to respond to disasters and what district-and school-level characteristics create the context for educational continuity. This research begins to fill this gap by exploring how the St. Vrain Valley School District (SVVSD) prepared for, responded to, and continued to educate Lyons students following the 2013 Colorado Front Range Floods. This dissertation draws from organization theory, school management, and disaster sociology literatures to frame the educational continuity process for Lyons Elementary and Middle/Senior High Schools. The research questions that guide this dissertation are: 1) How did Lyons Elementary and Middle/Senior High Schools and the St. Vrain Valley School District keep students and staff together after the 2013 Colorado Front Range Floods? 2) What was the pre-existing social context that allowed school administrators to prioritize educational continuity for Lyons students? and 3) What resources were needed and what actions were taken by Lyons Elementary and Middle/Senior High School staff to continue operations and assist students in recovering from the disaster? To answer these questions, I conducted a qualitative case study that included: 1) semi-structured in-depth interviews with 67 key community leaders, district administrators, school administrators, teachers, counselors, parents, and students involved in the educational continuity process; and 2) the analysis of secondary data in the form of preparedness plans, student created photo and story books, demographic information, and official and personal documents generated in response to the flood. Findings from this dissertation research revealed five major influences that contributed to educational continuity for Lyons students. First, the school district purposefully dedicated time and resources to preparedness planning. This included employing a full-time emergency manager who developed and carried out critical training exercises prior to the flood. The knowledge gained from these activities contributed to the capacity of the school district to swiftly resume classes for students at a new location just eleven days after floodwaters displaced Lyons residents. Second, the school district had a well-established organizational ethos that was built on distributed control, dedication to students, strong social bonds, and a reciprocity of trust between and across organizational members. Third, this organizational ethos was developed with and supported by the superintendent of the district, who had a documented history and lauded reputation of being a strong and compassionate leader with years of experience. Fourth, parents, teachers, staff, and administrators were dedicated to helping students recover. School level efforts to facilitate recovery included establishing routine and stability, allowing space for flexibility and adaptability, and implementing the use of creative methods such as art and storytelling. Fifth, the above efforts were, in part, made possible because of the socioeconomic and demographic characteristics of the school district and the community of Lyons. The SVVSD has a robust fiscal budget that provided the immediate financial resources necessary to reopen school quickly. The district and school staff are highly educated, well-trained, and have many years of experience, which made them well-equipped to respond to this event. Furthermore, like the demographics of the school district, Lyons is a mostly white, educated, upper-middle class community. Therefore, community leaders and families were able to draw upon their own education and social, cultural, and material resources to help facilitate the smooth transition and educational continuity process for Lyons students. This dissertation operationalizes the concept of educational continuity and offers clear examples for how to plan for this process. Further, it contributes theoretically by advancing understanding of how preexisting organizational structures and management styles influence disaster recovery. Based on the findings from this research, I argue that schools and school districts should be more formally integrated into community level disaster preparedness and response frameworks and better utilized as emergent organizations when disasters strike. Finally, this dissertation contributes methodologically, by offering an in-depth case study for school district emergency managers to draw from when creating their own educational continuity plans. This work also reveals the need for more research to examine and measure preparedness, response, and recovery efforts and the organizational capacity of schools across a variety of locations and social contexts.Item Open Access Essays in the economics of care(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2022) Altringer, Levi A., author; Braunstein, Elissa, advisor; Zahran, Sammy, advisor; Mushinski, David, committee member; Hempel, Lynn, committee memberThe Build Back Better legislation (H.R. 5376) currently being debated in Congress represents the first major attempt to build a care infrastructure that heavily invests in children and families, recognizing the value of care and care workers. The legislation (1) promotes recruitment, education, training, retention, and career advancements of direct care workers by providing competitive wages, benefits, and other support services to the direct care workforce; (2) establishes an entitlement program to provide qualifying families the opportunity to obtain high-quality child care; (3) allows states, almost entirely federally funded for the first three years, to provide universal preschool to 3- and 4-year-olds; (4) establishes universal paid family leave; (5) provides infrastructure grants to improve child care safety; (6) supplies child care wage grants for small businesses; (7) provides child care allowances as part of trade adjustment programs for workers; (8) makes permanent the expansion of the Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit provided by the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021; and (9) establishes payroll tax credit for child care workers and tax credits for caregiver expenses. In their own way, each chapter of this dissertation speaks to policies outlined in this legislation. In Chapter 1, titled The Role of Care Policy in Procyclical Child Mortality, I investigate the impact of the business cycle on child mortality. I conceptualize care as being supplied by three sectors---household, private, and public---and argue that public investment and provision insulates children from cyclical fluctuations in the quantity and quality of care provided. I then hypothesize that, in so far as the care mechanism mediates procyclical child mortality, children who are most likely to be the beneficiaries of generous care policy will be less exposed to the mortality risks of economic boom. Employing a sample of 21 OECD countries over the period 1960-2015, I show that procyclical mortality is null for children 5 to 9 years of age. This is the age group for which all OECD countries in my sample have universal, publicly provided care---i.e., primary education. Among children 0 to 4 years old, however, economic expansions are associated with increased risk of mortality. I then show that procyclical mortality among the 0- to 4-year-old age group is attenuated, and even disappears, in increasingly generous care policy environments. In Chapter 2, titled The Contemporaneous Mortality Benefits of the Head Start Program, I investigate the impact of Head Start on population-level child mortality. Though widely perceived as a schooling program focused on cognitive development, I argue that the "whole child" services provided by Head Start act as a de facto investment into the health and safety of poor children. The Head Start Expansion and Quality Improvement Act of 1990 led to considerable variation in program funding across localities. Further, program age requirements meant that increases in funding were largely directed toward the enrollment of 3- and 4-year-old children. Employing a sample of 50 large labor market areas over the period 1983 to 2007, I estimate log-log and log-linear fixed-effect mortality regressions and find that, relative to 1- to 2-year-olds, increases in Head Start funding are associated with reductions in 3- and 4-year-old mortality, all else equal. Then, utilizing that fact that children must also be poverty-eligible for Head Start, I show that the potential mortality benefits of Head Start are pronounced in relatively poor and disproportionately Black communities, as expected. In Chapter 3, titled Revisiting the Wages of Virtue and the Relative Pay of Care Work, I extend and update previous research by investigating the relative pay of care work in the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997. Research in feminist and labor economics provide several theoretical rationale as to why workers in care occupations might receive lower wages. I employ three separate measures of care work and show the continued existence of wage penalties among nurturant care occupations, while there appears to be no wage penalty for workers in reproductive care occupations, all else equal. Testing for heterogeneous care penalties across the occupational skill distribution, I find that the wage penalty for nurturant care work increases in relatively high-skill occupations among men. Alternatively, the wage penalty for nurturant care work is null, if not a slight wage premium, in relatively high-skill occupations among women. I explore potential explanations for the inconsistent behavior of these estimated care penalties across gender, such as occupational crowding and selection via occupational segregation, or sorting. The findings of this chapter have important implications for care penalty literature and motivate potential avenues of future research.Item Open Access Fair Trade certified coffee estates: can Fair Trade USA promote workers' well-being, empowerment and gender equity in Brazilian and Nicaraguan coffee plantations?(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2019) Rosty, Claudia Magalhaes, author; Raynolds, Laura T., advisor; Hempel, Lynn, committee member; Carolan, Michael, committee member; Stevis, Dimitris, committee memberIn 2012, Fair Trade USA began to certify coffee estates, previously restricted to small producer organizations, to expand the benefits of fair trade to hired laborers. This dissertation research analyzes the implications of the Fair Trade USA certification of coffee plantations in 1) bolstering workers' well-being, 2) empowerment, and 3) gender equity on certified coffee estates in Brazil and Nicaragua. Using a cross-national comparative design and multi-methods qualitative techniques, this study examines how the Fair Trade USA certification of coffee estates plays out differently within each national context. The findings suggest that Fair Trade USA fosters worker's well-being in coffee estates when operating below national labor legislation and sectoral standards, and indicate variation, unevenness and limitations in bolstering worker's empowerment. This research reports marginal gender equity impact on rural workers.Item Open Access Growing diverse co-operative networks?: an examination of boundaries and openings to resilient food futures(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2017) Hale, James W., author; Carolan, Michael, advisor; Hempel, Lynn, committee member; Malin, Stephanie, committee member; McIvor, David, committee memberEfforts to improve connections between people, food, agriculture, and the environment abound – Community Supported Agriculture, land-sharing, school and community gardens – just to name a few. Yet, the ability of groups to work together on such projects, and pull the resources that help them thrive, varies. This is the focal point of this dissertation. Drawing on extensive field work, this research examines how food and agriculture co-operative networks diversify their resources. Through a series of papers, I demonstrate: 1) that the importance of such inquiry lies in a relational approach to resilience thinking which views resilience as the imminent potential of networks to enact diverse resources. Assuming that diversity and equity play a vital role in fueling adaptation and transformation, I pay particular attention to the socio-cultural values and interactions which create openings and boundaries to more diverse network performance. 2) Honing in on the role of frames and framing processes in community development activities, I demonstrate the vital role of cultural and symbolic values in shaping co-operative network resource access. As symbolic power becomes more concentrated, diverse resources becomes more difficult to enact. For example, the more a utilitarian frame shapes co-op member engagement, the more this can limit boundaries and openings to cultural diversity and bridging social capital. My research suggests that while sustained dialog around co-op values can help networks adapt and access more resources, it also requires additional resources which may take away from other activities. 3) While co-operation the verb is often assumed in the co-operative organizational form, my research suggests that co-operative efforts can be unco-operative in practice. By adopting an egalitarian view of co-operation, I show that decision-making can often be exclusionary, that leadership can reproduce socio-cultural inequities, and that the emotional work necessary to co-operative relationships can sometimes limit membership recruitment and engagement.Item Open Access Islamicodes: the post 9/11 racialization of counter-terrorism(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2013) Kamandy, Jamal, author; Kim, Joon, advisor; Cespedes, Karina, committee member; Hempel, Lynn, committee memberAfter 9/11, a conceptual conflation between Islam and terrorism occurred within American culture and public spheres, forming a new epistemology, Islamicodes. In order to understand how Islamicodes have influenced U.S. Counter-terrorism efforts, this thesis analyzes American culture and the judicial system through discourse, semiotics, and power/knowledge. This article will argue that the conceptual conflation of Islam and terrorism, through the usage of language, symbols, and institutional practices, severely limits the Constitutional rights and life chances of Muslims in America.Item Open Access Making meaning of whiteness: life experiences that inform culturally conscious student affairs leaders(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2012) Webb, Leslie J., author; Aragon, Antonette, advisor; Davies, Timothy, committee member; Jennings, Louise, committee member; Hempel, Lynn, committee memberFour white student affairs educators shared their histories, experiences, and critical incidents that helped shape their focus on inclusive practice at predominantly white institutions of higher education. Critical white studies and the construction of whiteness, identity development models, privilege, multicultural competence and consciousness, and social justice provided a conceptual framework for this narrative inquiry. Through a series of interviews, participants shared their understanding of identity, critical incidents that influenced their development, and their experiences as engaged white student affairs educators. Eighteen total themes were developed in this study throughout the participant's stories. The most emergent themes developed in the study included (1) Contextualized Identity, (2) Individual Story, (3) Action and Presence, (4) Core Values and Beliefs, (5) Responsibility and Accountability, (6) Transformational Practice, (7) Campus Ecology, (8) Justice, (9) Assessment, (10) Spirituality, (11) Progressive and Continual Development, (12) Self-reflexivity, and (13) Emotional Intelligence and Mindfulness. Overarching findings included the possibility of developing "positive" white identities that make space for inclusive practice; race privilege and the relationship to power must be examined in order to locate and understand self in the context of engaging in justice work; various stages exist within the process of coming to terms with a "positive" white identity; and, personal and professional development is continual and ongoing. Participants expressed challenges coming to terms with whiteness through memory recall and critical incident exploration, acknowledged unearned privileges, articulated the interconnectedness of their multiple layers of identity, and lived with the conflict and messiness surrounding their identity and how it influences their practice. Possibilities for future research are also provided.Item Open Access One thing happens, and then another one comes right after.' Anthropological perspectives on vulnerability, resilience, and social justice for a Latinx community in post-Harvey Houston(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2020) Azadegan, Shadi, author; Browne, Katherine, advisor; Kent, Suzanne, committee member; Hempel, Lynn, committee memberThe materially destructive and socially disruptive impacts of natural hazards run parallel to historical inequalities that put marginalized communities in harm's way. The purpose of this thesis project is to gain insights into the role that chronic disaster conditions play in actualizing acute disaster impacts. I begin with a discussion of anthropological perspectives on disaster vulnerability and resilience and explore social justice and capabilities theory as a starting point to improve disaster recovery approaches. I use this framework to analyze my findings from conversations with residents of a low-income Latinx community in Houston, Texas that was impacted by Hurricane Harvey. Next, I discuss the approaches to disaster recovery employed by government agencies and community-based organizations (CBOs). I conclude this thesis with a discussion of how government agencies and CBOs can apply these insights to better support marginalized communities during disaster recovery.Item Open Access Professionalization, factionalism, and social movement success: a case study on nonhuman animal rights mobilization(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2016) Wrenn, Corey Lee, author; Carolan, Michael, advisor; Hempel, Lynn, committee member; Lacy, Michael, committee member; Velasco, Marcela, committee memberThis project explores the intra-movement interactions between professionalized and radical factions in the social movement arena using a content analysis of movement literature produced by the Nonhuman Animal rights movement between 1980 and 2013. Professionalized factions with greater symbolic capital are positioned to monopolize claimsmaking, disempower competing factions, and replicate their privilege and legitimacy. Radical factions, argued to be important variables in a movement’s health, are thus marginalized, potentially to the detriment of movement success and the constituency for whom they advocate. Specifically, this study explores the role of professionalization in manipulating the tactics and goals of social movement organizations and how the impacts of professionalization may be aggravating factional boundaries. Boundary maintenance may prevent critical discourse within the movement, and it may also provoke the “mining” of radical claimsmaking for symbols that have begun to resonate within the movement and the public. Analysis demonstrates a number of important consequences to professionalization that appear to influence the direction of factional disputes, and ultimately, the shape of the movement. Results indicate some degree of factional fluidity, but professionalization does appear to be a dominant force on movement trajectories by concentrating power in the social change space. Professionalization appears to provoke the mobilization of radical factions, but it also provides organizations that professionalize the mechanisms for controlling and marginalizing radical competitors.Item Open Access The impact of heir property on post-Katrina housing recovery in New Orleans(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2014) Kluckow, Richard, author; Peek, Lori, advisor; Hempel, Lynn, committee member; Trumbo, Craig, committee memberThis thesis examines the impact of heir property on post-Katrina housing recovery in New Orleans. Heir property is a form of collective ownership of immoveable property that is the result of intestate succession prevalent in poor and minority communities. For decades, vulnerabilities associated with heir property have been a leading cause of land loss for rural African Americans. After Hurricane Katrina, urban heir property owners in New Orleans struggled to collect insurance money or access federal recovery grants due to issues of unclear title. This research draws on 15 in-depth interviews with institutional actors working on heir property issues in New Orleans and heir property owners in and around the Lower Ninth Ward, a neighborhood devastated by flooding and with high levels of heir property. Specific mechanisms that contributed to lower levels of recovery for heir property owners are identified and recommendations made to protect this particularly vulnerable group of homeowners in future housing recovery programs.Item Open Access The role of whiteness in access disparities in college counseling services(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2021) Klug, Jeffrey Alan, author; Anderson, Sharon K., advisor; Hempel, Lynn, committee member; Kuk, Linda, committee member; McCafferty, Kate, committee memberAccess barriers to campus mental health counseling services for persons of color have been previously identified in the literature. These barriers are known to create disparate access to this important campus resource for students of color. Despite this robust body of research, inequities have persisted, revealing a gap in the literature. The purpose of the current study was to fill this knowledge gap by exploring the role that Whiteness plays in perpetuating access disparities. Using a critical White studies (CWS) framework, the current study sought to answer the question: How do experiences of Whiteness impact access to mental health care for domestic, undergraduate White students and students of color at their respective college counseling centers? A qualitative study was conducted using a phenomenological methodology; and more specifically from a hermeneutic tradition. Six participants (three White students and three students of color) were interviewed using a semi-structured interview approach. Participants' interviews were recorded and transcribed. Then, the transcripts were coded in three successive rounds until saturation guidelines were achieved. The research question was addressed in each of the three iterative coding rounds. Key findings revealed how participants' values systems, color-blind ideologies, and categories of Whiteness either enhanced or impeded access to counseling services. Findings were used to compare, contrast, substantiate or rebut current literature on access disparities. In the final chapter, implications for practice include stepped-care models of counseling services, extending clinical boundaries, remote tele-mental health, and strength-based counseling approaches. Future research focusing on dialectical opposites using a CWS lens may avoid problematizing students of color.Item Open Access Towards an aesthetic praxis: Hannah Arendt, Herbert Marcuse, and the realm of necessity(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2020) Hilinski, Hunter, author; McIvor, David, advisor; Stevis, Dimitris, committee member; Hempel, Lynn, committee memberThis thesis attempts to put the vast works of Hannah Arendt and Herbert Marcuse in conversation with one another. The study begins by examining the way both interpret the relationship between freedom and necessity, the latter of which is rooted most notably in the work of Karl Marx. Following this interpretation of their works I extract two notable ideas to begin building what I refer to as aesthetic praxis. This combination is centered broadly around Arendt's theory of action and Marcuse's theory of the imagination. The mixture of these ideas serves to investigate three corresponding elements of political affairs: 1.) the connection between the inherent unpredictability of political action and the future-oriented consciousness of political actors, 2.) the role of art, action, and aesthetic expression in times of political and social unrest, and 3.) the relationship between human activity, nature, and the growth of consumerism in the modern world. These pressing and often-overlooked areas of political science, I argue, can be better understood through the lens of an aesthetically driven conception of political action, where the dynamism of political activity and the growth of an aesthetic consciousness promote the development of new methods of self-discovery, thus transforming the realm of politics into a more open, connected, and engaged democratic collective.Item Open Access Tracing hydrosocial change: the social constellations of water access and allocation for oil and gas development in Colorado(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2018) Boone, Karie, author; Laituri, Melinda, advisor; Carolan, Michael, committee member; Hempel, Lynn, committee member; Poff, LeRoy, committee memberIncreasing water use for OG development in Colorado suggests a change in the social constellations of water governance. Colorado's water allocation institutions, practices and policies relationally shape and are shaped by water's biophysical movement over space and time through a hydrosocial cycle. The hydrosocial cycle (HSC) framework examines social complexity of water governance institutions by systematically analyzing institutional change and continuity to identify the causes and consequences of decreasing agricultural water access. Starting with history, change and continuity are operationalized through a historical institutional framework that systematically pinpoints institutional outcomes resulting from a particular sequence of events, policies and practices occurring in a unique context. This historical institutional analysis finds that social complexity can be measured more accurately by attending to relational and informal institutions, operationalizing the HSC framework to address ambiguities between historical policy and contemporary practices. To capture social complexity, then, this research considers how objects in nature and society are relational so that their meanings and uses depend on human agency and context. Colorado's institution of water rights is relational in two crucial ways. First, formal institutions are shaped by their social, political, and environmental settings/contexts. Concomitantly, formal institutions are shaped by processes and interactions that link Colorado's energy and water institutions across policy topics and levels of government instead of viewing them as evolving in isolation. A hydrosocial analysis additionally captures social complexity of water institutions through an examination of the often overlooked informal social processes occurring 'under the surface'. Informal institutions are nuanced norms, decision-making structures, unwritten rules and activities that shape and are shaped by agent's lived experiences. These informal dealings are consistently negotiated day-by-day, are not defined in formal laws, policies or organizational documents but help explain formal institutional change and actual policy outcomes. The integration of informal and relational institutions links the hydrological and social while further enriching our understanding of how increasing water use for OG extraction shapes agricultural water access and allocation in Colorado's rural communities. The changing nature of water use is taking place in Colorado's rural agricultural regions and in appropriated river basins, the Colorado River in the western part of the state and the South Platte River Basin flowing through the eastern plains. This dissertation asks if agricultural water users in these basins and in Colorado's top OG producing regions, Weld and Garfield Counties, are experiencing changes in water access related to increased water use for OG development. It additionally examines the implications of these changes. Each of the following chapters addresses this question while making theoretical and conceptual contributions to the HSC framework. The first two chapters utilize a comparative case study methodology to provide in-depth examination of the 'how' and 'why' of historical and political change processes, an important step in building understanding of Colorado's changing agricultural water allocation and access. A historical institutional analysis finds that social complexity can be measured more accurately by attending to relational and informal institutions. Chapter two examines relational and informal institutions from the perspective of water users on the ground and in the field. Interviews qualitatively investigate if agricultural water users are experiencing changes in water access related to increased water use for OG. In response, four primary themes emerged from an analysis of interview data: decreasing and differential water access for producers, leasing land and water from municipal and industrial users, maintaining agricultural water rights, and balancing equity in water access. Findings illuminate the important and changing role Agricultural Water Supply Organizations (AWSOs ) play in balancing equity in and maintaining water access for agricultural users. Chapter three suggests attending to increasing social distance in the U.S, including the rural-urban divide, by infusing policies with rural understandings. An embodied and inclusive pedagogy encourages empathy so that fewer political divides surface when rural communities feel silenced and forgotten. Interdisciplinary learning paradigms should work to generate empathy so that urban-biased water policies and practices infuse understanding across difference and foster social cohesionItem Open Access Weighted aspirations: becoming a teenage dropout in El Salvador(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2020) Mordy, Meghan Katherine, author; Peek, Lori, advisor; Hempel, Lynn, committee member; Taylor, Peter L., committee member; Velasco, Marcela, committee memberThe vast majority of poor and low-income students in El Salvador drop out during middle school or early high school. This dissertation is dedicated to describing their experiences and understanding the reasons why so many of them abandon their education as teenagers. Because of the high rates of urban violence in the nation, it focuses specifically on urban youth. The findings are based on three years of qualitative fieldwork in two urban schools—La Laguna and Cerro Verde—in a densely populated city in the metropolitan region near San Salvador. I conducted over 200 days of ethnographic observations, student focus groups, teacher interviews, and a student survey at the schools. In addition, I interviewed in-depth 54 dropouts, 28 high school graduates, and 19 mothers or grandmothers. This dissertation has shown the roots of dropout as deeply entangled in family poverty, community instability, and school failure. The students at La Laguna and Cerro Verde came from very poor backgrounds, but, despite their daily hardships, they and their families had faith in education and very high aspirations to graduate high school. Most wanted to go to college and believed strongly they would achieve their dreams. The contexts of their lives, however, weighed heavily against these aspirations. The lack of living-wage jobs meant parents had very low or unstable incomes and few material resources to invest in their children's education. The informal or blue collar work that parents did was also so stressful, tiresome, and physically degrading that it took a toll on parent-child relationships, adults' relationships with one another, and health and wellbeing. Family economies were highly vulnerable to shocks. A parents' illness, a broken marriage, or a loan coming due could deeply disrupt their ability to put food on the table. When youth saw their parents showing signs of distress many felt compelled to help out by working. Youth knew the outsized value their poor families could derive from even meager earnings and dropped of school to become wage earners of last resort. Household and community violence intensified the insecurity in poor youth's lives. Children living in violent households suffered physically, emotionally, and educationally. Families living in violent neighborhoods limited their children's contact with neighbors and friends. But some families experienced violence directly. Homicide, assault, threats, and police brutality devastated them, causing significant emotional and economic harm. Youth left school behind to help their families cope through what were sometimes extended crises stemming from the violence swirling all around. Schools in El Salvador have been idealized as an ameliorative for these worst aspects of poverty and tasked with the mission of providing poor children the knowledge and skills they need for gainful employment. But the situation at La Laguna and Cerro Verde showed the faulty foundations of this ideal. These schools lacked critical infrastructure, textbooks, and learning materials. Their overworked and under-trained teachers relied on outdated teaching methods and had no support systems for addressing students' remedial issues or emotional and behavioral problems. As a result, students received very little quality instruction and learned much less than they should. A legacy of learning deficits trailed them as they passed from grade to grade. By middle school, many students lacked the basic skills they need to keep up with the curriculum. Low grades and frustration eroded their motivation to make an effort in the classroom. Some students became deeply disillusioned and frustrated with their lack of comprehension and dropped out of school to avoid these emotions. Others noted they could not pass and left before being flunked. A hostile school climate worsened conditions. Students could feel rebuffed and alienated by their teachers' harsh talk and authoritarian approaches to discipline. Classmates often treated each other aggressively and fights were common. A significant number of students were threatened, harassed, or bullied by peers. Some youth experienced conflicts with teachers or peers over extended periods and, perceiving the abuse would continue or more harm could come to them, opted to drop out. In the end, the students' and their families' commitment to schooling was undermined by the compounding hazards of poverty. Families, schools, and communities did not have the resources needed to sustain these young people's aspirations. This dissertation brings to life their voices and stories, displaying how a vicious circle of deeply structured inequalities batters against the dreams of poor and vulnerable children.Item Open Access Wolakota: the face of ReZilience in "post"-colonial America(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2017) Chesnais, Aude, author; Pickering, Kathleen, advisor; Hempel, Lynn, committee member; Taylor, Peter, committee member; Leisz, Steve, committee memberThis research aims at exploring the features of sustainable social change in Lakota country. More specifically, it uses the concept of resilience to analyze local expressions of social change and challenge the colonial framework and discourse. It focuses on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation and Cheyenne River Indian Reservation in South Dakota, and compares two scales of social change at the grassroots and larger organizational level. This research's project follows a participatory and decolonial approach and emerged from a specific local need formulated by local grassroots projects managers to bring attention to the lack of resources and visibility they encounter. Reservations are historically defined territories embedded in colonial power dynamics that create socio-economic vulnerability and multi-dimensional hardships in tribal members' everyday life. What they face remains perceived and defined primarily by an etic/outsider perspective, which hinders expressions of local resilience. Ground observations indicate that creative sustainable projects with unique features actually emerge in response to local stress. Yet, by western definitions, these projects are not visible and do not qualify as resilient. This research questions the western hegemonic use of resilience in Lakota country and explores endogenous expressions of social change that shape alternative definitions and challenge the colonial discourse.