Honors Program Theses

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Open Access Honors Program Thesis

First Advisor

Aliza Fones

Abstract

For this thesis project, I conducted a qualitative case study of a rural high school facing demographic changes that affected the district’s population of English language learner (ELL) students. This study took place in Smalltown Community School District (all locations and names in this study are pseudonyms), an Iowa school district located in a very rural area of the state. I have close ties to this district and have spoken with people involved in their efforts to work with this population change they are facing. As a future teacher of ELL and multilingual students, I was highly interested in pursuing this information as it can help me in my future career, and I am passionate about helping these populations. It is so incredibly important that the education field realizes how prominent multilingual people now are in this society; their presence can be an asset to any community, but at times rural locations do not know how to connect with immigrants to welcome the positive attributes they can bring. I found the situation in the Smalltown Community to be very compelling and relevant to many parts of the nation currently. Through this work I have shown the effects of a “small” demographic change on a rural community that lacks resources, and brought to light more research about communities in a similar situation.

Year of Submission

2024

Department

Department of Languages and Literatures

University Honors Designation

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the designation University Honors

Date Original

5-2024

Object Description

1 PDF (18 pages)

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Language

en

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