Education Commons^™

Community-Based Learning: Face-To-Face Tandem Language Exchanges As A Complementary Course Component For Acquisition Of Spanish, Andrew Healey

Education Doctorate Dissertations

Conceptual, in-class communication activities are the most common oral practice foreign language educators provide for L2 learners with the absence of native speakers. In most L2 classrooms in the U.S., Spanish-speaking practice transpires among learners who share the same native language and culture. For this reason, ACTFL encourages language educators to connect with local communities and those abroad to create intercultural interactions that can provide crucial avenues for achieving proficiency benchmarks and shaping globally minded citizens. To provide intercultural language-learning experiences for 16 undergraduate learners enrolled in my Spanish III course, I created a collaboration with a local ESL organization …

Teacher Perception: Secondary Level Skill Development Support For Students With Specific Learning Disabilities, Philip L. Specht

Education Doctorate Dissertations

Defining the special education framework and teacher roles continue to be a challenge as schools face the differentiated needs of 21st-century learners. Delineating the functions and duties of special education teachers (SETs) at the secondary level provides a unique challenge, which is addressed by a midsized suburban high school developing the Inclusive Consultation Model (ICM). This innovative instructional model is school-wide and multi-disciplinary, impacting both special education and academic teachers. Through weekly consultation, the SET supports the content teacher in contributing instructional methods to meet the varied student needs in class. Outside of class, SETs justify the value of their …

Socially Just Artmaking: A Practitioner's Inquiry Of Passionate Teaching For Compassionate Action, Jaime Linn Brown

Education Doctorate Dissertations

The arts serve as a vehicle to activate imagination of students in developing a broaderunderstanding of injustice, its consequences, and the range of alternative possibilities (Bell &Desai, 2011). As more young artists engage in this dialogue, we must investigate how young people themselves make sense of and experience the transformative power of the arts (Dewhurst, 2014). Activist art can communicate ideas about individual and community experiences to a wider audience; it can make public that which has been ignored, silenced, or kept from public conscience (Dewhurst, 2014). Visual expression allows one to increase their understandings beyond the limitations of words …

The Potential Impact Of Online Learning On Economically Disadvantaged Students, Anthony M. Tartaglia

Education Doctorate Dissertations

Opportunity gaps have consistently been prevalent in the United States’ education system and that continues today. The struggle to provide economically disadvantaged students the equity necessary to ensure opportunities exist, similar to those present for students of economic advantage, remains a pervasive dilemma for which there are few solutions. As technology continually changes the global marketplace, it is doing the same to education. Educators have an enormous impact on the lives of their students, both in and out of the classroom and through their instruction, there are techniques available to ensure that students remain engaged. One such method is by …

How We Got Here: Testimonios Of Secondary Latina Educators, Leila Little

Education Doctorate Dissertations

In Pennsylvania, the disparity of Teachers of Color in relation to Students of Color is three times higher than the national disproportionality rate (Stohr, Fontana, Lapp, 2018). Fontana and Lapp (2018) suggest this makes Pennsylvania “one of the most disparate states in the country” (p. 2). Specifically, for the Latinx community, the disparity is even greater. In the context of this study, the percentage of Latinx students is more than 70%, while the percentage of Latinx educators is less than one percent. This context provided an opportunity to gain knowledge from educators who learned and worked in spaces where they …

The Effect Of Differentiated Instruction Training On The Instructional Strategies Of Education Trainees At Hawk Mountain Sanctuary, Erin C. Brown

Education Doctorate Dissertations

This research examined the effects of differentiated instruction and self-reflection training within a post graduate education trainee program. The purpose of the study was to investigate the effects of the inclusion of multiple teaching and learning strategies and reflective practice instruction on how education trainees chose, adjusted, and assessed instructional methods in their programs. Differentiated instruction theory, learning style theory, and reflective theory constituted the framework for this study.

The method of analysis was a case study of individual education trainees utilizing multiple data collection methods. Qualitative data was gathered through structured interviews, dialogic seminars, and reflective journals. Constant comparative …