With much gratitude and excitement, I announce my passing MS Thesis Defense!

My work is titled ‘Inclusive Governance: Equitable Access to School Board Meetings Using Comparative NLP Methods’.This work is the culmination of two years of research at my time in the Department of Information Science at the University of Colorado at Boulder. I am deeply grateful for the amazing support I have received, the mentorship, and kindness from the department. On my Committee was Dr. Brian Keegan, Dr. Leysia Palen, and Dr. Alexandra Siegel.

The construction of the educational imaginary throughout the school district varies based on the socio-historical context of the school district. As school boards construct imaginaries through discourse, they are rationalizing the future through generating problematizations. Students’ in the school district are then impacted through the discursive effects of these policies. Attending the school board meeting to provide input into how this is affecting the student is a privilege not afforded to all parents. It requires organizational knowledge and the ability to dedicate time to the meeting.

This context informed two research questions: (1) What ways can school board meetings be made more accessible through computational Methods? (2) How can accurate data be derived from school board meeting corpora to support stakeholder interests?

To answer these questions, a mixed-method approach was utilized to generate insights about the overlap and caveats of each method independently. Discourse analysis was applied to a select sample of transcripts to understand how a school board problematizes. Traditional forms of natural language processing were applied to contextualize school board meetings within different spaces of problematization. Finally, new applications of natural language processing were identified to generate more accessible transcriptions and distilled versions of the meeting.

Findings indicate the language and body language used to construct a problematization may not be achieved through raw transcripts. However, in combination, applying natural language processing techniques increases the accessibility for the school board meeting in scope and distilled information presentation. Future research may consider incorporating either a larger sample for generalizability or co-design to incorporate stakeholder perspectives on accessibility. In sum, the research presented contributes to broader literature about educational equity and augmenting forms of accessibility with technology.