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Full-Text Articles in Education

Facilitating College Readiness Through Campus Life Experiences, Mary Beth Schaefer Jan 2014

Facilitating College Readiness Through Campus Life Experiences, Mary Beth Schaefer

Curriculum & Instruction Faculty Publications

In a program called “College Immersion,” middle grades students spend up to one week on a local college campus, attending specially designed college classes and experiencing collegiate activities. This research study reports on findings related to two different college-middle school partnerships involved in a College Immersion program. Literature on college and career readiness suggests that the middle school years are critical for future academic success, especially for the kinds of vulnerable populations that are involved in this study. Taking middle grades students to college offers them authentic experiences that facilitate college readiness. After participation in a College Immersion program, students …


The Prickly Embrace Of Engaged Scholarship: What It Means To Do Research In An Urban Secondary (6-12) School, Mary Beth Schaefer, Lourdes M. Rivera Dec 2013

The Prickly Embrace Of Engaged Scholarship: What It Means To Do Research In An Urban Secondary (6-12) School, Mary Beth Schaefer, Lourdes M. Rivera

Curriculum & Instruction Faculty Publications

This paper describes how two professors struggled with traditional and non-traditional approaches to scholarship in order to understand how they could best serve students in a new secondary school (grades 6-12) while fulfilling expectations for tenure and promotion. Using methods related to reflexive autoethnography, the authors explore the rewards and challenges of building a partnership between a college and school that enabled the development of a comprehensive and systemic college and career readiness program called the Career Institute (CI). The professors explore the tensions that arose when they tried to both build and study this program. Over time, the professors …


Integrating Aesthetics Within Professional Development For Eeachers Of English Learners, Audrey Figueroa Murphy Dec 2012

Integrating Aesthetics Within Professional Development For Eeachers Of English Learners, Audrey Figueroa Murphy

Curriculum & Instruction Faculty Publications

The emphasis on testing in curricular content areas has left little room in most U.S. schools for education in the arts. Yet research supports the pedagogical value of aesthetic education, particularly for English learners (ELs), whose representation in schools continues to increase. This article presents a qualitative action research study intended to contribute to the understanding of the impact of incorporating aesthetic education into the training protocol for teachers of ELs. Twenty‐three graduate education students at a private university in Queens, New York, participated in an artist‐led workshop rooted in the aesthetic education theories of Maxine Greene (1995, 2011, 2007) …


Teachers As Informal Learners: Workplace Professional Learning In The United States And Lithuania, Elena Jurasaite-O'Keefe, Lesley A. Rex Dec 2012

Teachers As Informal Learners: Workplace Professional Learning In The United States And Lithuania, Elena Jurasaite-O'Keefe, Lesley A. Rex

Curriculum & Instruction Faculty Publications

Historically, formal directive approaches to teacher learning, based upon a developmental expert-to-learner model, have dominated policy and research, with limited success. This study is based on a learner-centered view of teachers learning from the problems of their own teaching. It demonstrates the understandings that can result from teachers’ explanations of what they do and why when they encounter everyday situations that evoke their learning. Further, the microethnographic study renders these explanations as a framework for further research on teacher learning in informal school-related settings. The framework emerged from a constant-comparative analysis of the structure, language and content of a years’ …


Becoming A Good Teacher: Struggles From The Swampland, Mary Beth Schaefer Jan 2011

Becoming A Good Teacher: Struggles From The Swampland, Mary Beth Schaefer

Curriculum & Instruction Faculty Publications

One seventh-grade English language arts teacher engaged in teacher research in order to become a more understanding, responsive, and confident instructor. Systematic inquiry into her own practice revealed a conflict between what students perceived as their literacy needs and desires (discrete reading skills) with what she perceived to be important and valuable (deeper literary understandings through reflective response to literature). The teacher sought to address the conflict by listening closely to students' talk, orchestrating activities to blend reading skills with responses to literature, and negotiating class conversations to produce knowledge.


Partnering For College And Career Readiness, Mary Beth Schaefer, Lourdes M. Rivera Jan 2011

Partnering For College And Career Readiness, Mary Beth Schaefer, Lourdes M. Rivera

Curriculum & Instruction Faculty Publications

The call for educators to include college and career readiness learning standards across their curricula affords schools and universities the opportunity to create meaningful collaborations. This article presents research highlighting the importance of providing college and career opportunities in middle and high school and describes a college-school partnership that enables two examples of college and career readiness programs. Both programs emerge from collaborative efforts among university faculty, teachers and administration.


School Cultures As Contexts For Informal Teacher Learning, Elena Jurasaite-O'Keefe, Lesley A. Rex Jan 2010

School Cultures As Contexts For Informal Teacher Learning, Elena Jurasaite-O'Keefe, Lesley A. Rex

Curriculum & Instruction Faculty Publications

This study descriptively compares international social contexts for teacher workplace informal professional learning from the teachers’ perspectives. Set in elementary schools in the U.S. and Lithuania, the study illustrates how teachers make sense of and engage in learning within the historical, political and administrative contexts within which they work. A sociocultural framework brings into view different opportunities for teacher informal learning. These appear in teachers’ discourse about their schools’ missions, building structures, classroom environments, organizational arrangements, traditions, and professional relationships as referenced in teachers’ discourse. The study argues for the importance of acknowledging teacher informal learning as a method of …


The Career Institute: A Collaborative Career Development Program For Traditionally Underserved Secondary (6-12) School Students, Lourdes M. Rivera, Mary Beth Schaefer Jan 2009

The Career Institute: A Collaborative Career Development Program For Traditionally Underserved Secondary (6-12) School Students, Lourdes M. Rivera, Mary Beth Schaefer

Curriculum & Instruction Faculty Publications

Career development is integral to students’ academic and social-personal development and addressing students’ needs in this area is recognized as an important responsibility of the professional school counselor. However, efforts to address students’ career development tend to be lacking or services are provided in a disconnected manner. Helping students adequately prepare for the demands of the 21st century requires that they be actively engaged in planning for the future. Facilitating their career development during the school years is an important part of this preparation. This article provides a brief overview of the literature on career development in schools and presents …


Teachers’ Workplace Learning Within School Cultures Community In The United States And Lithuania, Elena Jurasaite-O'Keefe Jan 2009

Teachers’ Workplace Learning Within School Cultures Community In The United States And Lithuania, Elena Jurasaite-O'Keefe

Curriculum & Instruction Faculty Publications

The purpose of this study is to explore teachers’ workplace informal professional learning and inform educational researchers, teacher educators, administrators and teachers about ways teachers learn to improve their practice. By questioning how teachers learn on-the-job to be better teachers and how school cultures position them as learners, this work generates hypotheses about relationships between the nature of workplace informal professional learning and its content and contexts. An ethnographic design based upon a grounded theory generates analytic categories from interviews and field notes through comparison of learning environments in three contrasting schools in two countries—Lithuania and the United States. Discourse …