Amy E. Traver

Institutions and Organizational Change: Reforming New York City's Public School System.

This paper reviews New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s education reform agenda, ‘Children first’, in the light of organizational theory. I argue that this reform agenda reflects both coercive and mimetic isomorphism, as Bloomberg uses mayoral control to apply business concepts and practices to New York City’s public school system. Through participant observation in a New York City classroom and the use of secondary data, I highlight those elements of school life that thwart the standardization so essential to the mayor’s reform effort, specifically the dominant myths and fictions held by teachers.

How Do We Integrate Students’ Vocational Goals into Introduction to Sociology Curricula, and What Are the Effects of Doing So?:

President Obama’s America’s College Promise proposal has brought renewed attention to community colleges’ capacity to connect the college and career aspirations of today’s undergraduates. Despite this capacity, however, community colleges have historically offered students two distinct educational pathways: a liberal education transfer-oriented program or a terminal vocational program. In the face of this long-standing and ideological divide, some community college instructors have taken to integrating students’ liberal and vocational learning in individual courses, an act that requires a willingness to define “liberal” and “vocational” learning in broad terms. Through a preliminary qualitative case study and content analysis of students’ assignments, this research explores the nature and impacts of said integration in two spring 2015 sections of Introduction to Sociology at Queensborough Community College of the City University of New York.

Dancing Around (Dis)Ability How Nondisabled Girls Are Affected by Participation in a Dance Program for Girls With Disabilities

In this article, we heed lessons from Laurel Richardson’s After a Fall: A Sociomedical Sojourn to investigate how nondisabled high school–aged girls are affected by their volunteer experiences in Believe Ballet, a nonprofit organization that provides primary- and secondary-school-aged girls with physical disabilities with the opportunity to dance and perform ballet. Drawing on a qualitative content analysis of three academic years of volunteers’ pre- and post-participation questionnaires, this article focuses specifically on changes in volunteers’ self-reported perceptions of disability and ability. This article also points to directions for future research in the fields of disability, feminist disability, and ableism studies.

Becoming a ‘Chinese-American’ Parent: Whiteness, Chinese Cultural Practice, and American Parents of Children Adopted from China

At the time of this writing, American citizens have adopted more than 65,000 Chinese children (US Dept. of State, 2012). The vast majority of these children are girls adopted by white parents (Pertman, 2000). In the face of socio-historical pressures to acknowledge the racialized ethnic incongruence in their families, white American parents of children adopted from China face a significant conundrum: how do they construct an ethnically ‘rooted child’ without marking that child as ‘naturally” [belonging] to another [family] or place’ (Yngvesson, 2000, p. 169)? Drawing on original data gleaned from semi-structured in-depth interviews, my research examines how white American parents respond to this puzzle by personally identifying with the cultural heritage of their ethnic-Chinese children or, in the words of Donald, a white father of a ten-year-old girl from China, becoming a ‘Chinese-American’ parent.2

Contextualizing Developmental Math Content into Introduction To Sociology In Community Colleges

Across community colleges in the United States, most students place into a developmental math course that they never pass. This can leave them without the math skills necessary to make informed decisions in major areas of social life and the college credential required for participation in growing sectors of our economy. One strategy for improving community college students’ pass rate in developmental math courses is the contextualization of developmental math content into the fabric of other courses. This article reviews an effort to contextualize developmental math content (i.e., elementary algebra) into Introduction to Sociology at Kingsborough Community College and Queensborough Community College, both of the City University of New York, during the spring 2016 semester. Data from a pretest/posttest control-group design implemented across the two campuses reveals the significance of this strategy for some sociology students’ grasp of discrete mathematical skills and success in developmental math.

Service-Learning and Immigrant-Origin Community College Students: How and Why Project Design Matters

Perhaps paradoxically, America’s community colleges are global institutions: their vocational orientation is informed by the skills and cultural competencies required in our globalized economy (Malkan and Pisani 2011); their funding structure is tied to what many define as a global neoliberal ideology (Saunders 2010); their doors are open to international students and they increasingly facilitate study-abroad opportunities (Smith 2013); and their example has become a model for the expansion of educational access and opportunity in communities around the world (Redden 2010). Yet, America’s community colleges are global institutions for one decidedly local reason as well: they are situated in what Logan and Zhang (2011) call “global neighborhoods”; communities that are multiethnic, multiracial, and home to a burgeoning number of immigrants.