Semester

Spring

Date of Graduation

2021

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Type

PhD

College

College of Education and Human Services

Department

Curriculum & Instruction/Literacy Studies

Committee Chair

Nathan Sorber

Committee Co-Chair

Erin McHenry-Sorber

Committee Member

Abhik Roy

Committee Member

Sam Stack

Abstract

This qualitative method single case study explores the phenomenon of a racially tense campus climate at the University of Missouri Columbia, a Predominantly White Midwestern Institution. At the forefront of the media regarding student and athlete protests, leading to the resignation of senior level administrators, African American students put forth eight demands to their administrators. Included, was the creation and implementation of a required racial awareness and inclusion curriculum. The study explores the perceptions of the institutional response to an exceptional campus racial climate issue and the process of formulating and participating in a diversity training course and a semester long course centered around race. Also, to understand how participants perceived this curricular intervention to have addressed their discontinuities in race and racism and contributed to organizational change, and institutional reform. This study addresses a gap in our understanding of the aftermath of such events, the institutional process of responding to them, addresses an understudied area of divergent participant perceptions, by exploring how student’s demands were implemented as institutional interventions, and by understanding their perceptions of building a required racial awareness and inclusion curriculum. Four-emergent themes: Process of Curricular Reform Implementation, Towards Combating Discontinuities of Intergroup Relations in American Society at Mizzou through Education, Required or Optional Racial Awareness Curriculum to Elicit Institutional Reforms, and Perceptions about the Institutional Response/Curricular Reform Efforts to Change Mizzou’s Campus Racial Climate. Hence, I developed a framework for considerations: Towards Implementing a Race and Identity-focused Inclusive Curriculum, for practitioners/educators desirous of implementing said curriculum.

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