Education Commons^™

Teaching Empathy For Others Through Young Adult Literature, Madison Boeckman

Honors Projects

Literature can let a reader grow in empathy by learning about a character’s experiences and cultures. Teaching literature with diverse characters to young people can help combat bias and hatred towards people who are perceived as different.

This project uses Rudine Sims Bishop’s metaphor of mirrors, windows, and doors, Gloria Ladson Billings’ Culturally Relevant Pedagogy, and Gholdy Muhammad’s Culturally Responsive Pedagogy as foundation for creating activities for diverse literature. These activities are for the texts Ms. Marvel: No Normal, The Poet X, and The Marrow Thieves, all texts that are academically enriching with diverse characters that would …

Quickwrites And The Quest To Reverse Writing Reluctance, Jenna Dunn

Honors Projects

Current research suggests that students’ enjoyment of writing will positively impact their writing achievement (Graham, 2007; Bulut, 2017). Given this trend, the following study explores the extent to which quickwriting, a teaching strategy developed extensively by Linda Rief (2003, 2018) as well as Donald Graves & Penny Kittle (2005), impacts the attitudes of reluctant writers. A total of nineteen eleventh-grade students were interviewed in three focus groups. All of the students within the study experienced three weeks of regular classroom quickwriting along with one week of a quickwriting extension workshop prior to participation in the focus groups. Students were asked …

Developing A Culturally Relevant Pedagogy Through The Use Of Diverse Literature And Perspective-Taking: A Resource Guide, Katie Dushek

Honors Projects

There is a growing diverse population in today’s secondary schools, yet the literary canon that is taught remains extremely white. Additionally, students today are rarely challenged to step into another’s shoes to see from a different perspective. With this lack of diversity in mind, I have created a resource guide with the goal of helping in-service and pre-service teachers to develop a more culturally relevant pedagogy through the use of diverse literature in their curriculum and the incorporation of more perspective-taking activities into their lessons. This guide provides a list of diverse books, recommendations on how to teach more diverse …