HOLDING OUT FOR A HÉROE: A BOOK CLUB STUDY OF RURAL MIDDLE SCHOOL LATINAS

1 online resource (179 pages) : PDF

2020

University of North Carolina at Charlotte

Literacy provides people with intellectual tools to question, challenge, understand, disagree, and arrive at informed perspectives and is a reflection of cultural values and meaning-making for adolescents within their community. By understanding the development stages of self-identity in adolescence, reading material provides the implicit and explicit narratives of acceptance, value, and preference to a reader about societal norms. The purpose of this study is to examine how a group of middle grades Latinas, in a rural context, interacted with ethnically diverse protagonists featured in an extracurricular book club and the intersection of text, dialogue, and identity. This study is influenced by the analytical frameworks of Mirrors, Windows, and Sliding Glass Doors and Reader Response Theory to support the best practices in rural education research. A qualitative case study design was used to conduct this study over five weeks during the spring of 2019. This study was conducted in a middle school classroom with six students in rural North Carolina. Data sources include interviews, observations, and a collection of student responses. The data was analyzed using a combined methodology of discourse and thematic analysis to better understand the influence of diverse characters on student identity and cultural connections as evidenced in their discussion. After analyzing the data, Latinx culture, cultural challenges, familial relationships, and educational perspective emerged as themes to answer the research question about the Latinas experience with a Latinx-centric Book Club in the rural South.

doctoral dissertations

Middle school education
Reading
Instructional systems--Design

Ph.D.

Book Club
Diverse Characters
Identity
Latinx
Middle School
Rural

Curriculum & Instruction

Mraz, Maryann

Salas, Spencer
Taylor, Bruce
Anderson, Kelly

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of North Carolina at Charlotte, 2020.

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Dymes_uncc_0694D_12341

http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.13093/etd:2285