This dissertation is a study of English language and literacy in the multilingual Indian context, unfolding along two analytic planes: the first examines institutional discourses about English learning across India and how they are motivated and informed by the dominant theme of "globalization," and the second investigates how local language ideologies and literacy practices correspond to these discourses. An ethnographic case study, it spans across four years. The setting is a microcosm of India's own complex multilingualism. The focal children speak Bengali or Bihari as a first language; Hindi as a second language; attend an English-medium village school; and participate daily in Sanskrit prayers. Within this context, I show how the institutional discursive framing of English as a prerequisite for socio-economic mobility, helps produce, reproduce, and exacerbate inequalities within the world's second largest educational system. The notion of globalization, further, is deeply woven into these discourses. I begin by showing that while top-level discourses about English accept globalization as doxa, little attention is paid to its differential intervention along socio-economic lines. My study complicates the commonly liberatory rhetoric of globalization by illuminating how such discourses employ multiple strategies to mobilize institutional voices in order to control and restrict access to linguistic, symbolic and economic capital. Further, fine-grained analyses of the children's linguistic practices and interview data reveal how local language ideologies counter, resist, and contest these discourses and voice enduring anxieties about English. Because these discourses have fueled the proliferation of private English-medium schools in India, catering mostly to the poor, the classroom forms another locus of investigation. Its analysis entails the close examination of literacy practices, curricula, and pedagogy at the children's school. The study reveals that factors such as multigrade classrooms; teacher-centered pedagogy; level-inappropriate textbooks; emphasis on rote memorization; and the difficulty of teaching and learning in a language in which neither the instructor nor the student has proficiency result in limited and superficial English acquisition and also limit children's access to educational content. In light of my findings, I argue that such English-medium schools not only widen the English-vernacular gap, they also reinforce the role of English in elite formation. The significance of my study lies in underscoring the ways in which institutional notions around English and globalization flatten out difference and enact erasure of local voices, with serious consequences for educational equity. This is not merely an Indian story; the role of English in an era of globalization is the high-stakes language politics story of our time.

Neoliberalism has become the hegemonic rationality of our time, framing nearly every aspect of our social world in terms of competition. This dissertation sheds light on neoliberal infiltration and naturalization within the field of language education through three distinct but interrelated papers. In Discourses of dual language bilingual education, I map out the discursive landscape of the field and, building on Ruiz (1984), I theorize a cross-epistemic model to demonstrate why the English-as-resource paradigm of the nationalist era has transformed into a multilingualism-as-resource paradigm within the current neoliberal era. In Rebranding bilingualism: The shifting discourses of language education policy in California’s 2016 election, I use critical discourse analysis to compare Proposition 227 (1998), which effectively banned bilingual education in California, with its legislative repeal, Proposition 58 (2016), specifically demonstrating the discursive shift to neoliberalism that occurred between 20th and 21st century language education policies. In Mechanisms of neoliberalization within California’s language education policy, I draw on the tools of critical discourse analysis as well as corpus linguistics to examine California language education policy texts spanning from 1967 to the present, laying bare three discursive mechanisms of neoliberalization within the field: 1) infiltration of market-based vocabulary; 2) terminological sloganization; and 3) commodification of multilingualism.

While the neoliberalization of language education has contributed to more widespread support of bilingual education—now rebranded as multilingualism—it has also altered the reasons behind this support—from promoting equity and social justice to a market-based rationale of expanding individual opportunity in an increasingly globalized world. My findings point to the ways in which those who have traditionally been served by bilingual education—that is, racially and linguistically minoritized students—are being crowded out by more privileged (i.e., white) students seeking a competitive edge in the global market era. Neoliberal policies–through color-blind, a-historic, and universalistic rhetoric–are deceptively designed to appear objective and democratic (“for all”). I argue, however, that neoliberalism undermines democracy by reproducing colonial relations of power that privilege Whiteness. This collected work contributes to a deeper understanding of the political work of language.

This dissertation research aimed to examine the processes and practices of inclusive education for students with diverse disabilities in a school district in northern California. The first part is a theoretical articulation of a conceptual framework that school districts and local education agencies can use to design, implement, and sustain inclusive educational practices. This framework has three central tenets, which relate to (a) how students access general education, (b) meaningful ways in which they can participate alongside their peers, and (c) support structures that can undergird effective implementation. The second part of this dissertation consists of an empirical study that evaluated the deployment of this framework in implementing inclusive education in the kindergarten-through-12th-grade context. It brought under scrutiny the system-level processes and programmatic structures that were in place or being developed at this school district. Facilitators and barriers to inclusion were examined as they related to access, meaningful participation, and creation and provision of supports for all participants within their sociocultural context. I make visible the ableist and disablist discourses and practices that sometimes frame the construction of disability and what it means to teach or parent a child with a disability within those confines. In this way, this dissertation untangles the oppressive ideologies that are prevalent in narratives about the disabled and destabilizes any claims made to a normative ideal, while affirming that inclusion and receiving education in the least restrictive environment is a civil right for disabled students.

This two-year ethnographic study of five teachers and their adolescent students in India, South Africa, the U.S., and Norway traced how participants negotiated social media in educational settings, especially the challenges and benefits of incorporating social networking in teaching and learning. We are at a critical juncture in educational research, as texts, ideas, and people rapidly circulate around the world (Appadurai, 1996) and social networks connect audiences, authors, and texts in new relationships with heightened responsibilities and obligations (Silverstone, 2007). This dissertation study represents an effort to map how teachers and students negotiated these new relationships in a globally networked environment, in what is arguably the first empirically documented educational social networking project (Hull, Stornaiuolo, & Sahni, 2010). Using a cultural historical activity theory lens (Cole & Engeström, 1993; Engeström, 1999a), I analyzed the activity system of the networked community, looking particularly at the contradictions that participants faced in incorporating new digital and social technologies into educational spaces. Employing a multi-sited ethnographic approach (Marcus, 1995), I collected interview, observational, artifactual, and informatic data about how teachers and students used the resources of the networked community for learning and literacy development. This ethnographic study was designed to help educators identify how we might productively incorporate social media into classrooms and foster students' development of the compositional facility needed to communicate with diverse audiences across multiple composing contexts.

One of the central findings of the study is that teachers have a crucial role to play in creating opportunities for young people to develop as thoughtful and capable 21st century communicators but that this enterprise is fraught with difficulty, requiring persistence and collaboration between participants in addressing those challenges. Specifically, participants in this study struggled with the contradiction of incorporating seemingly `social' practices into more `academic' contexts, and teachers grappled with what role to take up in their classrooms and in the networked community in relation to these hybrid social/academic practices. While this enterprise was fraught with difficulty, however, teachers persisted across challenges, working together to open spaces for dialogue and to highlight participants' responsibilities to one another as authors and audiences. The study revealed that educationally-turned Web 2.0 tools and practices can play a generative role in expanding participants' transliterate capacities, flexible composing and interpretive strategies for communicating with diverse audiences across complex and varied texts.

This study contributes to a still-nascent empirical research base around how young people's communicative capacities can be supported by an educational framework that integrates digital tools and practices, particularly for adolescents whose experiences and beliefs are not always taken into account. Highlighting the generative role of contradiction and the centrality of mediational artifacts in driving innovation, this study represents an empirically grounded example of expansive learning (Engeström, 1987) in a virtual community. It also offers implications for extending the theory of expansive learning for literacy studies by demonstrating that learning across (horizontal or expansive learning) is a kind of transliterate practice, a form of literate action that plays an important transcontextualizing role in the world in building and sustaining connections across time and space (Brandt & Clinton, 2002). As participants in this study engaged in these transliterate practices, I argue that their artfulness and generosity in doing so illustrates a cosmopolitan stance in the world (Hansen, 2011; Hull, Stornaiuolo, & Sahni, 2010). As one of the central challenges facing educators in the current age, maintaining a stance of both openness to the new and loyalty to the known is a challenging yet ever more imperative prerequisite for learning from, about, and with others across our ever-more connected world (Hansen, 2010). This study offers implications for the ways that teachers can model these cosmopolitan dispositions - by inhabiting shared spaces, listening to others with respect, and accepting the obligation to be hospitable interlocutors, all crucially important capacities as we seek to become ethically alert citizens in and of the world (Silverstone, 2007).

This dissertation study investigates the complexities of the relationship between literacy and international development in Indonesia. I focus on the Literacy Boost program from the international non-governmental organization Save the Children, and I explore how the program was differentially implemented and received in two sites: mega-metropolitan Jakarta, and Belu Regency, a largely rural region in Eastern Indonesia. Drawing on thirteen months of ethnographic research conducted between 2016-2017, I identify both intended and unintended outcomes of the Literacy Boost program.I highlight the tension between the core Literacy Boost program components, standards, and practices, and the program’s heterogenous manifestations in the two sites. I find that in each site, Literacy Boost had to confront systemic challenges at schools before and while implementing literacy programming. Whereas in Jakarta, Literacy Boost focused on issues related to school-based management, in Belu, it focused on banning corporal punishment in classrooms. Thus, Literacy Boost produced different short- and long-term impacts across the two sites, none entirely predictable nor coincidental. My analysis discerns how these distinct trajectories of development unfolded and were experienced by an array of Literacy Boost stakeholders. Furthermore, I explore how Literacy Boost programming was shaped by the exigencies of international development practice, including evaluation requirements and time constraints. These shared constraints notwithstanding, I show how in each site Literacy Boost was modulated by the distinct linguistic context, infrastructure and accessibility, and local notions of progress and development. In demonstrating how a literacy intervention has been taken up in situated contexts of teaching and learning, this dissertation contributes to the understanding of how international development processes succeed and falter across geographic, linguistic, and cultural contexts.

This mixed methods study investigated 10th grade students' shifts in reasoning between handwritten narratives of personal conflicts and their production of digital podcast versions of the same conflicts. Specifically, shifts in perspective, resolution, domains of social reasoning, domain coordination, and storytelling elements were compared. This study was implemented as a curriculum intervention with 32 participants in a public high school in British Columbia. Analyzing multiple narrative constructions of the same personal conflict, but within different mediums, is conceptualized as a way of stimulating and bringing into view developmental transformations, including the development of critical moral reasoning and critical consciousness. Key findings include a significant decrease in victim perspectives in the podcast format, and an increase in the use of the conventional domain in students’ resolutions of their conflicts in the podcast format. The type of characters included in students' conflicts changed between narrative and podcast, and students arrived at different types of conclusions. The podcast is proposed as a storytelling format that can target specific critical moral reasoning and critical consciousness components, such as transactive reasoning, heteroglossia, and making connections between personal and societal struggles. Implications for educators include how to identify emerging critical moral reasoning and critical consciousness skills within students' podcasts, as well as barriers that students may face in the process of coming to critical conclusions.

The present study investigated the ability of young children with and without Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) to identify emotion in photographs as well as their response to a distress event. Since communication is a core aspect of the disability, alternate methods of assessment were employed in order to investigate emotion understanding and emotion response in children with and without ASD. Thirty-one children with ASD (mean age 48 months) and forty typically developing children (mean age 53 months) participated. A sorting procedure was used to determine participants' ability to identify happy, sad and angry emotions in photographs with and without contextual information. Results suggest that context had no effect on either group. Children with ASD were significantly less likely to correctly sort emotional faces. When witnessing the experimenter in distress, children with ASD showed similar levels of affect matching and a similar pattern in heart rate. Significant differences were found in the eye gaze pattern of the two groups; the typically developing children were more likely to look at the face of the experimenter during the distress event. By reducing the language component required for the emotion identification task and including behavioral and physiological outcome measures to the response to distress paradigm, this study seeks to investigate the unique characteristics of children with ASD without the impediment of their communicative difficulties. These results provide insight into the emotional lives of children with ASD and may shed light on why these children respond differently to emotion than their typically developing peers.

This research project explores the communication opportunities for individuals in a community-based transition program in the Bay Area. The study focuses on the opportunities that are made available by a program that is founded on neurodiversity and trauma-informed principles. The research questions examined how a neurodiverse framework allows for diverse forms of communication to be utilized by participants throughout their activities at job sites, academic classes and travel training trips. The second question investigated the ways that using video recording can enhance our understanding of individual and community experiences. This was particularly relevant as I used and offered GoPro cameras to wear throughout data collection. Nine of the program’s participants agreed to participate in this study. I accompanied these individuals during their program two days per week over the course of approximately nine months. This study was halted to an immediate end by the start of the shelter-in-place due to the global pandemic. This study used observational, video, audio and photography data in its qualitative analysis. NVivo software was used to organize the data, code and analyze the findings. The first chapter describes the conceptual framework and methodological choices in detail. The following three chapters, chapter two, three and four each discuss specific groups of data excerpts that highlight distinct areas of findings. Chapter two uses data excerpts that closely analyze the interactional and accessibility of social space for the participants engaged in their program activities. With these examples, findings point to how the participants utilize strategies and are affirmed in their participation throughout program activities. Here, the discussion adds to socio-spatial theory and its direct relationship with accessibility. In chapter three, data examples are used to demonstrate the many ways that program participants invite interactional engagement through the use of material, appearance and proximity choices. The discussion builds on literature based on interactional engagement through shared referential material. Finally, in chapter four, data examples are used to describe how self-determination arises in the program. Both aspects related to how the program and staff support self-determination training and how the participants engage is discussed. This discussion provides examples for contextualized self-determination training in community-based programming. This study contributes to knowledge on the implications for neurodiverse and trauma-informed service models for individuals with intellectual/developmental disabilities. The study used an interactional analysis approach to demonstrate how choices that are made between communication partners can impact the overall flow and accessibility of spaces. Finally, this study further engages with how we come to understand self-determination as a process that is embedded in the daily practices of individual.

The first study in this series combines quantitative and qualitative methodologies to explore a social group intervention designed to promote engagement between teenagers with social disabilities and their typically developing peers. 15 adolescents with autism spectrum or related social disorders and 24 typically developing peers were recruited from a summer sports camp where participants were enrolled in a counselor training program. Quantitative analysis involved two constructs measured on a five point scale; the degree of affective engagement between participants and the `flow' of interaction. Measurement contexts in the treatment phase included adult facilitated and un-facilitated interactions within the social group. Analysis showed that participants with social difficulties made statistically significant gains after a treatment condition as compared to a control condition in the facilitated measurement context along both constructs. Video clips of the social group assessment contexts were analyzed again using conversation analysis methodology. The analysis highlighted facilitation strategies that appeared to be important factors in sustaining interaction. The facilitator ensured that all participants had a relevant role in the activity, filled in gaps to maintain a smoothly flowing interaction, allowed peer culture to emerge by loosening traditional rules, adapted her interaction style to suit the target participant's preferred mode of interaction, and validated participant contributions. The results of this study will deepen current knowledge of social interaction among teens who experience social difficulty and their peers, as well as offer practical guidelines for promoting interaction and engagement in this population.

Using discourse analytic methodology, the second study examines video data collected during the social group intervention. The analysis focuses on the interactive means by which the participants construct the identity of the group member with autism, referred to as Randal.. The concepts of emergence, positionality, indexicality, relationality, and partialness are used as a framework for understanding the characteristics of Randal's identity as well as the social processes that contribute to its formation. Results revealed that characteristics commonly associated with autism and often conceived of as grounds for isolation, such as social aloofness, intense focus on particular activities, and unusual skills, were transformed into a more positive social identity within the intervention context.

The final study uses a clinical interview methodology situated within the domain theory approach to moral development to determine how adolescents make judgments about excluding peers with social disabilities. 38 participants between the ages of 13 and 18 were asked to evaluate and provide reasons for their judgments for four contexts; a classroom lab group, a casual soccer practice, a home, and a general education classroom. Results showed that participants were more likely to judge that exclusion from the soccer and classroom settings was unacceptable than from the lab group and home settings. Analysis of the reasoning scheme that participants employed when making these judgments showed that multiple considerations, such as group functioning in the lab group context and personal choice in the home context, were pitted against moral concerns of welfare and fairness. There were no differences found for gender or age group in either judgments or reasoning processes. This study complements the existing body of research on moral judgments, and offers educators valuable insight into how typically developing peers think about acts of exclusion involving peers with social disabilities.