Education Commons^™

A Symbiotic Qualia: Studio Art, Bachelor Of Fine Arts 2017–18 \ Western Gallery Exhibition, Corinne Barber, Isis Beckwith, Anastasia Devol, Austin Herrmann, Katie Howard, Abigail Kuchar, Cecilia Lister, Natalie Millsap, Marcus Reid, Robyn Roberts, Clinton Sana, Mikah Washburn, Seiko Purdue, Javier Berzal De Dios, Gregory Elgstrand

B.F.A. Catalogs

A Symbiotic Qualia is the fourth annual Studio Art, BFA catalogue.

“Qualia” is the moment when one becomes aware of the subjectivity of an experience. Although each of our works represent individual experiences, we have formed a symbiotic network through concurrent artistic expression.

The Athena Effect: Strong Womxn Or Straw Womxn?, Alyssa Kaufman

WWU Honors College Senior Projects

The Athena Effect is an original model which demonstrates how masculinized womxn--in art, but also life--perpetuate patriarchy.

The Albigensian Crusade: The Intersection Of Religious And Political Authority In Languedoc (1209-1218), Alexis Nunn

WWU Honors College Senior Projects

The Albigensian Crusade saw religious goals conflict with political realities in Languedoc as crusaders attempted to establish secular and religious authority in a region that saw the crusade as a war of aggression rather than one of religious reformation.

Magnum Opus: A Satirical Rock Opera, Alynn Sobolik

WWU Honors College Senior Projects

"Magnum Opus" is a satirical rock opera about the college experience and what's to come after graduation.

Recognition, Internalization, Growth: Intuitive Design For Archival Representation, Jaime L. Ganzel

Graduate Student Symposium

Although there is a pressing need for archival description and access systems to be more intuitive and user-friendly, the uniqueness of archival records presents significant barriers to establishing simplistic and standardized conventions for the representation of archival materials. Indecipherable finding aids and access tools prevent new and inexperienced researchers from accessing the unique information and documentation held in archives. This article aims to help open the archival record to new and non-traditional archival users, support individual development of archival literacy skills, and cultivate a greater level of archival awareness in our society by developing a usable model for archivists to …

Interlude: Pursuit Of The Present, Emily Bartlett

WWU Honors College Senior Projects

This 12-piece tea and coffee set is the pinnacle of my design education at Western.

Theatre Makers And Social Issues: How Art Imitates Life, Marlena Mchenry

WWU Honors College Senior Projects

A reflection on a devised theatre process and the creation of form and content for performance.

Magical Black Girls In The Education Industrial Complex: Making Visible The Wounds Of Invisibility, Teri A. Mcmurtry-Chubb

Journal of Educational Controversy

Black girls in public school are constantly exposed to physical violence, racialized gender hostility and harassment, and hate speech. Yet, the national narrative perpetuates the belief that Black boys are the main targets of such behaviors. This narrative renders Black girls invisible, and normalizes their treatment as another beam in the framework of white supremacy. This article addresses Black girls' invisibility first creatively, though the African diasporic rhetorical practice of storytelling. It then turns to an exploration of Fennell v. Marion Independent School District, where three sisters were subjected to a racially hostile educational environment in Marion, TX. The article …

Cocaine And College: How Black Lives Matter In U.S. Public Higher Education, Bill Lyne

Journal of Educational Controversy

Taking the Black Panthers' call for relevant education as its starting point, this article looks at the recent history of race and higher education to put the Back Lives Matter movement into historical perspective and ask whether Black lives can ever really matter in U.S. mainstream education.

Unfinished Beliefs: Three Stories And An Essay, Adam Kane

WWU Honors College Senior Projects

Unfinished Beliefs, is a collection of three short stories and an essay written for the Western Washington University Honors Senior Project.

1. Lightweight
2. My Stall
3. Spiro's Mountain
4. Spiritus Mundi

State Of The Field: What Is The Legacy Of The Common Schools Movement? Revisiting Carl Kaestle's 1983 Pillars Of The Republic, Johann N. Neem

History Faculty and Staff Publications

Perhaps no one put it better than Ellwood Cubberley who, during the first half of the twentieth century, was America’s best-known education historian. Cubberley had attended common schools in Indiana, taught school, and served as superintendent in San Diego, before becoming an education professor at Stanford in 1898 and receiving his doctorate from Teachers College. In his 1919 Public Education in the United States, written for normal-school students, Cubberley laid down a moral tale. He was on the side of the school reformers. His story told of the heroic efforts of Horace Mann and others to overcome ignorance and …

Music And Medicine, Thomas Zink

WWU Honors College Senior Projects

Music therapy is not a new concept, although its acceptance by the medical community as a clinical modality is just beginning to grow. This newfound acceptance is the result of recently emerging empirical evidence supporting the efficacy of music in a range of applications. Using music to aid learning, either in recovery from brain damage or to overcome neurological disorders is widely accepted. For instance, music has been used to help patients learn to speak after traumatic brain injury (Schlaug, 2009). Much of these music learning programs are based off the Tomatis method that uses specifically adapted music tracks to …

Crowding New Public Management Off The University’S Horizon Of Expectations, Michael Schapira

Journal of Educational Controversy

This article is a response to Asger Sørensen’s vivid example of how neo-liberal university reform has subjected Danish universities to New Public Management. Sørensen effectively shows the noxious effects of NPM by discussing the infamous Koldau case, where newly empowered rectors, who served as centralized arbiters of university affairs, superseded academic decision-making. He concludes that one reason these cases have not been met with resistance by faculty is that they are paralyzed by radically conflicting normative visions of the university. In this article I respond to Sørensen by suggesting that conflicting normative visions need not be a disempowering condition and …

Visiting The Neo-Liberal University: New Public Management And Conflicting Normative Ideas. A Danish Case., Asger Sørensen

Journal of Educational Controversy

At Danish universities, the governance structure is regulated by law. This structure was radically changed in 2003, abolishing the republican rule of the senate consisting of academics, students, and staff in favour of an authoritarian system assigning all executive power to the vice-chancellor, or as we say in Denmark, the rector. To introduce the current situation at Danish universities, in the first two sections of this article I will compare them with more well-known counterparts in other countries. This situation is reflected in exemplary cases, and in the third section I focus on the most dramatic controversy ever encountered at …

Higher Education Under The Islamic Republic: The Case Of The Baha’Is, Mina Yazdani

Journal of Educational Controversy

This article explores the Islamic Republic of Iran’s campaign to deny Baha’is, members of Iran's largest religious minority, access to higher education. It outlines the contours of this campaign: in the early 1980s, the newly established Islamic government began dismissing Baha’i students from universities; later and up to the early 2000s, it forbid them from even participating in the nation-wide university entrance exam; finally, in order to divert growing international attention from its campaign, it began admitting a small number of Baha’i students into universities, though in more recent years, it has expelled the majority of these students before they …

(Re)Sequencing The Research/Writing Process In The Writing Classroom, Megan Spiegel, Lee Olsen, Suzanne Paola

Writing Research Fellows

What are the outcomes of sequencing writing assignments so that students are introduced to primary sources and allowed to browse these sources prior to selecting a research topic? (This as opposed to the standard sequence by which instructors ask students to choose a topic before completing any sort of preliminary research in source material.)

Telling Stories In A Professional And Technical Writing Course, Jeremy Cushman, Kaitlyn Teer

Writing Research Fellows

Because students, arguably, entered this 400-level Professional and Technical Writing (PTW) course with some already established ideas and expectations, it was our best chance at addressing our overriding concern that students continue to approach PTW as a mere conduit for communicating knowledge made elsewhere. So if, in fact, our own assumptions about these students were legitimate, the course allowed us to begin exploring the impact storytelling research may have in an advanced PTW course. Consequently, we worked from these two guiding questions:

• What changes, if any, occur in the ways students approach Professional and Technical Writing (PTW) in terms of …

It’S All About That Base: Persuading Learners Of Spanish As A Second Language That Verb Acquisition Is The Essence Of Communication, Sean Dwyer

Backward by Design Mini-Studies

The intended result of a series of Spanish courses is the ability to speak fluidly, if not extensively, in Spanish. The quickest way to speak quickly is to learn some set phrases. As a result of strategies that involve this learning tool, perhaps 75% of Americans can parrot “¿Dónde está el baño?” and “Dos cervezas, por favor.” However, a disappointingly high percentage of people who can say those things cannot say anything that would be useful outside a restaurant.

Working backwards from my curricular goal of creating verbal facility in my students, I start by expressing the threshold concept that …

A Political History Of The Kingdom Of Jerusalem 1099 To 1187 C.E., Tobias Osterhaug

WWU Honors College Senior Projects

The first Crusade, a massive and unprecedented undertaking in the western world, differed from the majority of subsequent crusades into the Holy Land in an important way: it contained no royalty and was undertaken with very little direct support from the ruling families of Western Europe. This aspect of the crusade led to the development of sophisticated hierarchies and vassalages among the knights who led the crusade. These relationships culminated in the formation of the Crusader States, Latin outposts in the Levant surrounded by Muslim states, and populated primarily by non-Catholic or non-Christian peoples. Despite the difficulties engendered by this …

Government Boarding Schools And Indian Communities, Alejandro E. Barajas

American Cultural Studies Capstone Research Papers

The following research concerns the relationship between U.S-implemented boarding schools and Indian communities. Throughout this paper I’ll present the overall initial rationale creating Indian-focused boarding schools, explain how policy and physical facility placement illustrates a type of colonial mechanism, and coerced youth relocation due to government leverage. I’ll also be highlighting the importance of students’ lived experiences, power of school agents, and continuing boarding school effects. To this extent, the trauma experienced due to sexual violence and abuse is mainly rooted in boarding schools and proves to be a product of colonialism.

Does History Matter? A Cautionary Tale For The Tuning Project, Johann N. Neem

History Faculty and Staff Publications

There is good reason to be concerned about the future of academic history and, more generally, the liberal arts. As increasing numbers of Americans seek higher education, colleges are under pressure to serve directly the vocational needs of students and businesses. Recent efforts to defend the liberal arts therefore emphasize the development of "transferable skills." A liberal education, advocates argue, prepares students for high-level jobs because it fosters critical thinking, analytical skills, and creativity. There is evidence that these skills may be developed more effectively in the liberal arts than in vocational fields.

Assessment Project Write-Up: Phil 112, Ethical Question Activity, Michelle Saint

Backward by Design Mini-Studies

I regularly teach Phil 112: Introduction to Moral Issues. This is a 100-level, 3 credit hour course that is intended to introduce students to philosophy in general and the study of ethics in particular. One of the most significant goals I have for the course is getting students to understand how to engage in ethical inquiry. I don’t want them to learn just the content of ethical theories that other people have previously developed; I want them to develop the skills that will permit them to engage in ethical inquiry themselves. The most significant threshold concepts covered in this class …

Reinforcement By Error Analysis Of Multiple: Threshold Concepts In Advanced Spanish Composition, Sean Dwyer

Backward by Design Mini-Studies

This year, I taught a course in advanced Spanish grammar, Spanish 302. This course provided me with an opportunity to build on a procedure I developed and refined in the Backwards by Design writing instruction workshops in 2012 and 2013 for emphasizing one of the threshold concepts in basic Spanish, noun-adjective agreement. This year’s enhanced procedure, which could not be implemented easily at the 100 level, is proving to serve as a gateway to greater understanding on the part of my students of their individual strengths and weaknesses.

Is Jefferson A Founding Father Of Democratic Education?, Johann N. Neem

History Faculty and Staff Publications

This response argues that it is reasonable to consider Thomas Jefferson a proponent of democratic education. It suggests that Jefferson's education proposals sought to ensure the wide distribution of knowledge and that Jefferson's legacy remains important to us today.

Undergraduate Research Programs And The Academic Library, Nancy Cunningham, Richard Pollenz Ph.D., Drew Smith, Mark I. Greenberg Ph.D.

Mark I. Greenberg

Undergraduate research (UR) programs attract highly motivated students who often continue on to graduate/professional schools but may lack necessary information literacy skills. Collaboration with UR programs provides librarians new opportunities to help students develop these skills and work with specialized collections in the context of a research experience. In this webinar, librarians and UR administrators share their experiences in forging collaborations based on UR and library training resources, explain how information literacy skills programming has been embedded into UR, and demonstrate how this partnership has led to greater visibility of library services, collections and UR among all undergraduates.

Undergraduate Research Programs And The Academic Library, Nancy Cunningham, Richard Pollenz Ph.D., Drew Smith, Mark I. Greenberg Ph.D.

Western Libraries Faculty and Staff Publications

Undergraduate research (UR) programs attract highly motivated students who often continue on to graduate/professional schools but may lack necessary information literacy skills. Collaboration with UR programs provides librarians new opportunities to help students develop these skills and work with specialized collections in the context of a research experience. In this webinar, librarians and UR administrators share their experiences in forging collaborations based on UR and library training resources, explain how information literacy skills programming has been embedded into UR, and demonstrate how this partnership has led to greater visibility of library services, collections and UR among all undergraduates.

Backwards By Design Project Assessment Write-Up, Michelle Saint

Backward by Design Mini-Studies

In Fall 2012, I taught Phil 355: Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art. I used this course as an opportunity to test a new pedagogical technique. I will call this pedagogical technique the Incremental Exercises Model (IEM). Below, I will quickly summarize the course and its learning goals. Second, I will explain my previous method of meeting these learning goals. Third, I will explain IEM and how I implemented it in this particular class. Finally, I will provide some concluding observations about the successes and failures of this technique.

Backwards By Design Implementation Report, Kristina Luce

Backward by Design Mini-Studies

As part of my participation in the Backwards by Design Retreat during summer of 2012, I chose to design the first course of the three-part series of courses on writing required for the Art History Major. A/HI 271: Introduction to Writing and Critical Thinking is also a GUR.

My goal overarching goal was to implement the idea of a threshold concept within the course, and during the retreat I identified that concept as:

In academic writing, well-grounded claims are understood to emerge out of evidence, but in art historical writing, as in any interpretive writing, it is essential to understand …

A Process For Engagement With Threshold Concepts In Spanish Composition, Sean Dwyer

Backward by Design Mini-Studies

Numerous practices and assignments discussed at the 2012 Backwards by Design Curriculum Workshop appeal to me as sources of creativity in the classroom. Some will suit courses I teach in the future. For this year, I faced an issue: I am working with students whose classroom vocabulary is equivalent to that of a three-year-old, because I am teaching first-year Spanish.

The most applicable idea, one that energized me greatly, was the identification of threshold concepts. Working backward from that identification, I sought ways to implement practices that would, I hoped, bring those concepts permanently into my students’ approach to writing …

Linguistic Demography And Attitudinal Dimensions Of Intergenerational Transmission Of Guaraní And Spanish In Paraguay, Shaw N. Gynan

Modern & Classical Languages

Language data from the 2002 Paraguayan census ate analyzed in order to determine differential patterns of intergenerational transmission of Guaraní and Spanish. The census data are interpreted in light of the results of a survey of 168 bilingual parents on their language identity, language attitudes and language practices. In households identified by the census as Guaraní-dominant, a majority of children is reported to speak only Spanish. The vast majority of parents reports using a single language in the home. The sample that was surveyed for the language attitudes study consisted of couples who identified themselves as either Guaraní-dominant, Spanish-dominant or …