This research is a qualitative case study of the class identity and life aspirations of private school alumni, as a way of examining class formation that happens through individualized learning and school choice of private school students. There is a large body of social science research on school choice that focuses on parents’ aspirations for their children and how this shapes the parents’ choice to send their children to private school. My research extends this body of work by focusing on (adult) alumni of private schools and two aspects of their experiences: 1) how they perceived their private school experience in order to explore class formation in spaces other than home neighborhoods; and 2) how this experience might have shaped the alumni’s own choices about schooling, employment, and co-curricular activities as young adults (e.g. as college students). We examined these issues through research with adult alumni of a private school in Seattle (University Child Development School). My research methods include semi-structured interviews with alumni and content analysis of public materials on the school’s website. The results of this project show that after elementary school, many of the alumni continue on to private high schools and colleges as well. This indicates that individuals begin to desire classed spaces from an early age and can even influence the spaces they inhabit later in life. These findings point to a larger issue of class segregation, stemming from the separation private school alumni have from those of a lower class.

During the 1960s and 70s, jazz enters the curriculae of school music programs as a result of social protest in the wake of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements. In Seattle, this acceptance of jazz as an academic art form coincides with the downfall of its popularity in the once vibrant club scenes of Jackson Street and the Central District. While Seattle once boasted a jazz scene that nurtured the likes of Ray Charles, Quincy Jones, and Ernestine Anderson, by the 1960s, the tradition of jazz becomes confined within high school and college jazz ensembles. Thus, Seattle's jazz scene is distanced from its working class roots, and its accessibility limited to those students who could afford to study it. Yet, even within these programs, racial tensions persist, particularly in the development of the University of Washington jazz program within the School of Music. I will argue that the complicated racial politics and history of Seattle's high school and college level jazz programs through the 1960s, 70s, and 80s restricted the availability of formal jazz education in Seattle to the wealthy and privileged. While many students, educators, and musicians from this time period viewed jazz as free of racial tensions, citing integrated ensembles as evidence, this idealized perspective ignores the larger political and economic factors that have always affected equal access and opportunity to quality jazz education. I expect that if we examinine the complex history of jazz education in Seattle, we will gain a greater understanding of why we must strive to make music programs accessible for all students.

Seattle has a well-established reputation as a progressive haven, and yet significant problems surround certain issues such as racial justice. One of the most striking examples is the current segregation of Seattle public schools; the north end schools are predominately White and the South End schools are predominately Black and Asian. My overall research question is: why is Seattle still unable to integrate its schools in 2016? To explore this question I am researching the mandatory bussing program that the city of Seattle instituted in 1977 that desegregated the schools within two years. This program was fiercely opposed by some community members, predominately White, at the time, and the main anti-bussing organizing group was the Citizens for Voluntary Integration Committee (CiVIC). I am using CiVIC as a case study and asking how it fits into a larger pattern of "Seattle racial backlash," a phenomenon that arises whenever Seattle tries to advance racial justice issues and involves predominately White community members pushing back against changes to the status quo. My qualitative methodology is primarily based on interviews with people that were involved with both sides of the bussing issue. My research thus far suggests that the ultimate downfall of bussing in Seattle was that the plan failed to attack the root of the school segregation problem, which was, and remains, housing segregation.

I focus on the ongoing effects produced by the Dayton Peace Agreement in Bosnia-Herzegovina. I explore areas this agreement failed to address and how these failures have resulted in new discriminatory practices and prolonged the process of reconciliation. Through a provision in the Dayton Peace Agreement, the Bosnian government justifies the establishment of segregated schools, separating two of the most antagonist populations, Bosniak (Muslim) and Serb (Orthodox Christian) students. I analyze the conditions for ethnic discrimination produced by conflicting narratives in ninth grade history textbooks. Furthermore, with questionnaires that I sent out to individuals who have attended homogeneous schools, I examine whether history textbooks serve as a legitimate representation of collective memory. I elucidate how variation in the historical narrative may disparately affect Bosniaks and Serbs and the possibility of reconciliation through the assignment and internalization of “us” and “the other”. Through an analysis of ninth grade history textbooks, I argue that the lack of a consistent narrative alongside competing historical accounts hinder Bosnia- Herzegovina’s internal peace and reconciliation process.

Using a similar study completed by José Franco Rodríguez in 2005, I have studied the districts in the City of Seattle to determine the ethnolinguistic vitality of the Spanish language in Seattle. In doing so, I searched through the busiest areas in two neighborhoods for each of the thirteen districts in Seattle to find where the presence of written Spanish was the most prominent. I hypothesized that the ethnolinguistic vitality of Spanish would be greatest in areas in which the population of Hispanic people was greatest, and used census data provided by the City of Seattle to determine the areas with the largest Hispanic population. In order to measure the ethnolinguistic vitality of the language in the city, I took pictures of Spanish signage throughout the city and codified the images based on where they were found, the actors responsible for their creation, the social realm in which the sign was found, and a variety of other factors. In conducting my research, I have also considered the existence of inequity between Spanish and English in the city of Seattle, and have found that signage presented by non-Hispanic entities are more likely to be discriminatory in nature and are more likely to contain grammatical and lexical errors. While I am still in the process of codifying the images, I am seeing a correlation between population of Hispanic people in a given area and presence of Spanish signage in that same area. At the Undergraduate Research Symposium, I will present my conclusions about the overall "health" of the Spanish language in Seattle and the various inequalities between Spanish and English that were encountered during data collection.

This project investigates the transfer of spirantization into the English of native Spanish-speakers. Spirantization is a type of weakening in which the consonants /b d g/ are reduced to fricatives or approximants (Kirchner, 2004: 313) in certain linguistic environments. Previous studies (Zampini 1995 and Algara, González, & Boada 2004) have shown that native Spanish-speakers do transfer spirantization when speaking English, however they relied on impressionistic transcription and were carried out under the assumption that native English-speakers do not spirantize. In this project, I use intensity ratios and a qualitative spirantization score to re-examine the spirantization of target English-voiced stops by L1 Spanish speakers. Native Spanish-speaking undergraduate students and recent graduates were recruited and recorded at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), the University of Querétaro, and the Centro del Inglés Abraham Lincoln (CIAL). In addition, the speech of 6 monolingual speakers of American English was analyzed as part of a control group. I will present data from a subset of this corpus: 4 intermediate students of English, 4 advanced students of English, and 4 monolingual American English speakers.

Preliminary results show that Spanish-speakers do transfer spirantization into their English. That is, while both Spanish-speakers and English speakers lenite voiced stops, Spanish speakers spirantize to a greater degree. The data presented in this paper also suggest that advanced leaners of English produce more English-like stop realizations than beginners, suggesting that Spanish-speakers are able to suppress the transfer of spirantization. In addition, the results presented in this paper suggest that Spanish speakers spirantize to a greater degree in less formal tasks.