Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Commons^™

Bridging The Gap With Voice And Movement, Joy A. Guarino

Experiential Learning & Teaching in Higher Education

Excerpt

Dance at SUNY Buffalo State College delivers a liberal arts education and embraces a civic and community engagement philosophy in all aspects of the program. In addition to rigorous studio training that enhances the physical experience of the art form, the diverse curriculum is designed to deepen students’ understanding of the cultural, historical, and aesthetic value of dance, while addressing local and global societal needs through numerous service-learning, artistic, and outreach projects. The COVID-19 pandemic is tremendously affecting artists, yet it is the arts that brings joy to people’s lives during unsettling times. Now more than ever we need …

What To Do When The Lab Closes? Managing An Interdisciplinary, Undergraduate Research Capstone Course During A Global Pandemic, Robert L. Hirsch, Aardra Kachroo

Experiential Learning & Teaching in Higher Education

Excerpt

The Agricultural and Medical Biotechnology (ABT) program at the University of Kentucky’s College of Agriculture, Food and Environment is a genetics-based, research-intensive, interdisciplinary program that consistently produces undergraduate scholars prepared for careers in research, medicine, and other health-related industries. The program enrolls approximately 250 students and is administered around a liberal philosophy of interdisciplinarity, with undergraduates encouraged to build their own individualized curricula centered on foundational courses in biology, chemistry, and genetics. This student-centric approach, combined with an array of faculty research foci, results in a diverse student body engaging in scholarship that ranges from human neurobiology to plant …

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Experiential Learning & Teaching in Higher Education

No abstract provided.

In Search Of Virtual Connectedness: A Comparative Essay In The Development Of New Pedagogies For Remote Learning Environments, Ryan Hargrove, Phd, Travis Klondike

Experiential Learning & Teaching in Higher Education

Excerpt

The ongoing disruption caused by COVID-19 has provided an opportunity to pause and reflect on how educators are shifting pedagogies, inventing approaches, and developing skills shifting, inventing, and developing various skills and approaches to foster an experiential learning curricula despite moving to physically-distanced forms of teaching. Design education, in particular, is faced with the challenge of rethinking a model that at its core is highly reliant on frequent face-to-face interactions. The studio classroom experience for centuries has utilized what are commonly referred to as “desk critiques.” These interactions are the central focus of most studio classes and serve as …

Full Issue

Experiential Learning & Teaching in Higher Education

No abstract provided.

Creating Engaged Community Scholarship Through Alternate Experiential Learning In Dietetics Education, Elizabeth Lucas Combs, Aaron Kyle Schwartz

Experiential Learning & Teaching in Higher Education

Excerpt

Supervised Practice Programs (SPPs) are designed to provide innovative experiential learning opportunities for dietetic interns. The University of Kentucky Dietetics and Human Nutrition (UK DHN) program promotes critical thinking and integrates the hard skills learned in the classroom with soft skills required in a professional setting. The experience provides an opportunity for hands-on learning and application, creativity, and reflection linking theory to practice. The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted the 2019 SPP, challenging the fundamental nature of experiential learning. Problem-solving and flexibility were required to develop innovative approaches to helping interns meet core competency expectations through alternative supervised learning experiences. The …

An Investigation Of How Environmental Science Textbooks Link Human Environmental Impact To Ecology And Daily Life, Yael Wyner, Rob Desalle

Publications and Research

Making direct connections between humanity and the environment is of ever-increasing importance in the context of today’s environmental crisis. We used qualitative content analysis of precollege- and college-level introductory environmental science textbook case studies to study how they portray humanity’s link to the environment. We assessed case studies for how specific and data rich they are and for how they link together daily life, human impact, and ecological interactions. We found that, for many textbooks, case study stories were vaguely drawn and included few data. We also found that, for all textbooks, case studies almost always described human impacts without …

It’S (Not) In The Reading: American Government Textbooks’ Limited Representation Of Historically Marginalized Groups, Shawna M. Brandle

Publications and Research

The Introduction to American Government course, and its textbook, is a nearly universal experience for students in American colleges and universities, but what exactly is being taught in this course? Do the textbooks used in this widely taught course accurately reflect the diversity of populations and experiences in the United States? More specifically, how do textbooks for Introduction to American Government cover historically marginalized groups, if at all? This article builds on previous work by analyzing the representation of individual historically marginalized groups to conduct index search and content analyses on traditionally published and openly licensed (i.e., open educational resources …

Faculty Achievements, October 2020, Otterbein University

Faculty Achievement Reports

No abstract provided.

Response To Intervention For English Language Learners (Ells): Using Data Collection, Goal Setting, And District Level Support For Instructional Improvement, Stacie K. Pettit, Nao-Cheng Kuo

Journal of Contemporary Research in Education

Response to Intervention (RTI) has become a mandatory educational policy in many states. However, issues on how school districts use RTI to support English Language Learners (ELLs) has not been fully discussed in literature. In this study, artifacts including school RTI manuals and handbooks for instructing ELLs were analyzed. A survey with all school district ELL coordinators in one of the states where RTI is mandated in K – 12 was also conducted. The purpose of this study is to help educators and researchers in the field of language education understand how schools use RTI to support ELLs and how …

4 Advanced Comprehension Strategies To Use With Adolescent Readers, Gerlinde Beckers, Elizabeth M. Wadlington

Journal of Contemporary Research in Education

Reading comprehension involves an intricate interaction between the reader and attention to the text. Teachers should employ reading strategies to increase comprehension skills required by adolescent students to address the increase in use of informational text and text complexity as stipulated in the newly adopted Common Core State Standards (CCSS). Four advanced reading comprehension strategies that teachers can use to help their students navigate the increase in higher level comprehension skills stipulated by the CCSS are presented here. Also, presented are a justification for why to use the strategy, information on how to use the strategy, research that supports the …

From Epistemological Pragmatism To Educational Pluralism, Matthew B. Etherington

Journal of Contemporary Research in Education

Much of K-12 and higher education today reflects John Dewey’s pragmatic vision of education. Pragmatism as an epistemology has utility such as the ability to solve real concrete problems; however Dewey’s vision lacks comprehensiveness because it privileges scientific knowledge over other types of knowledge. Consequently, Dewey’s epistemological pragmatism cannot accommodate all types of knowledge learners and their traditions. For schools to be inclusive of all learners today they must move away from Dewey’s epistemological pragmatism and adopt educational pluralism.

Minority Students In University Remediation: A Phenomenological Analysis Of Their High School And First Semester College Academic Experiences, Savannah L. Kelly

Journal of Contemporary Research in Education

The existence of remedial curriculum at four-year universities remains a well-established, albeit controversial, component of contemporary higher education. Incoming students are required to enroll in postsecondary remedial coursework as a direct result of standardized test scores. It is well established in the literature, however, that minority students both underperform on standardized tests and are also overrepresented in remedial courses. This qualitative study explored the intersections of minority students’ high school academic experiences with their first-semester university academic experiences. The sample included eight minority students who were each enrolled in three remedial and at least one non-remedial course at a public, …

Cover Pages, Journal Editors

Journal of Contemporary Research in Education

No abstract provided.

Diversity Issues In Literacy Teacher Education, Sue Ann Sharma, Wendy C. Kasten, Lynn A. Smolen, Abha Gupta, Julie Kidd, Tanya S. Wright

Journal of Contemporary Research in Education

In this study, the researchers examine how diversity and knowledge about diversity were viewed and integrated into higher education literacy programs. Using online focus groups, we collected information about diversity in literacy at the program and course levels. Literacy teacher educators reported complexities in the preparation of current and future teachers regarding working with diverse learners. The three themes of perspectives and dispositions, curriculum issues and decisions, and outside influences emerged. The researchers recommend that teacher educators find innovative ways to increase teacher education program effectiveness to enhance the dispositions and practices of the teachers whom they prepare where diversity …

Anti-Realist Epistemologies In Education, Mark Ortwein

Journal of Contemporary Research in Education

Constructivism and postmodernism endorse and anti-realist metaphysics. Once we abandon the fruitless search for objective reality, so the argument goes, we can devote ourselves to making our beliefs more efficacious than they were before. We can do this because we have given up truth-as-correspondence, and have embraced the claim that what makes a belief right is just that experience has taught us that it works. In short, because our claims to truth (and thus knowledge) refer to utter contingent accounts of reality, it follows that they are only contextually true. As such, any claim to an invariant foundation (an objectively …

Opening Up Information Literacy: Empowering Students Through Open Pedagogy, Erin Fields, Adair Harper

Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, Innovative Pedagogy

Open pedagogy and critical information literacy are influenced by critical pedagogy, which advocates for a disruption of information authority and privilege in the classroom and the creation of an environment that empowers students to be equal participants in their own learning. With the open education movement and the affordances of networked technologies, open pedagogy has the potential to enable students to be active co-creators of knowledge, engaging in information literacy practices of finding, analyzing, and sharing knowledge. Moving beyond an individualistic skills-based approach to information literacy, open pedagogy provides students with opportunities to not only reflect on their understanding of …

Making Methods Relevant: Undergraduate Research Methods And The Content Analysis Project, Kevin E. Courtright, David A. Mackey

Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, Innovative Pedagogy

Teachers of undergraduate research methods classes may struggle at times to keep their courses engaging and to have students view the material as relevant to the occupations they will soon enter. This article discusses a content analysis assignment and how it offers a way for students to demonstrate critical thinking and acquire data analysis skills. Through the use of multiple high-impact learning practices, the assignment requires students, individually or in a group, to identify data appropriate for content analysis and then, with faculty guidance, develop research questions, manage the data, conceptualize and operationalize themes, perform content analysis, draw conclusions from …

Advancing College Students’ Thesis Writing Ability: A Case Study Of An Online Library Instruction Course, Derek Stadler, Dianne Gordon Conyers

Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, Innovative Pedagogy

The following case study adapted a library instruction course to support students’ ability to construct a thesis statement. Given at an urban junior college, the goal of the credit-bearing course is for students to acquire effective research strategies for finding reliable information and to develop information literacy skills. For this study, pedagogy divided thesis writing development over the course of several weeks in which students reviewed sample theses and the work of their peers, providing feedback to fellow students and revising their own work based on feedback from both students and instructors. The class section in this study utilized Blackboard …

Responding To Xenophobia: Politics, Populisms And Our Teaching, Phyllis E. Vanslyck

Publications and Research

This essay explores ways faculty in the humanities may guide students through current manifestations of populism, specifically, this movement’s encouragement of xenophobia. As a member of an English department at a public community college in the United States, I argue, first, that community college students, who often have deep personal connections to the experiences of immigrants, may respond to the anti-immigrant rhetoric in useful and provocative ways. Second, I suggest that the related history of anti-immigration sentiment in American politics since the beginning of the 20th century can provide students with a powerful context for understanding xenophobia today. Third, I …