Education Commons^™

Buying A Better World: Students As Conscious Consumers, Sean Murray

Journal of Vincentian Social Action

Conscious consumer movements have given people opportunities to “vote with their dollars” – that is, buy from companies with values matching their own, and forgo products from businesses with questionable policies and practices. After providing brief context about consumerism and conscious consumption, I focus on a Conscious Consumer Project that I teach in my First Year Writing courses at St. John’s University. Excerpts of student writing emphasizing labor issues, as well as student reflections on the project, are shared as I discuss possibilities for revising and improving the assignment. The possibilities discussed include increasing opportunities for students to do academic …

It’S Not All About Climbing Rocks: Reorienting Outdoor Educators Toward Social Justice, Sarah J. Clement

Summit to Salish Sea: Inquiries and Essays

The field of outdoor adventure education was born in the Western world in the twentieth century because of several specific factors. These factors include, but are not limited to: changing Euro-American attitudes toward wilderness, Kurt Hahn’s character education schools and the pervasiveness of white supremacy. Today, outdoor adventure education is widely popular among the white middle class. According to current instructors in the field, outdoor education is for the purpose of individual development, learning in a wilderness setting and teaching students how to be environmental stewards for wild places. These purposes result from underlying, sometimes false, assumptions about the nature …

Being In Tension: Faculty Explorations Of The Meaning Of Social Justice In Teacher Education, Mary Shelley Thomas, Christine D. Clayton, Shin-Ying Huang, Roberto Garcia

Excelsior: Leadership in Teaching and Learning

This study explores faculty perspectives of social justice in teacher education within one New York institution with a social justice focus. Grounded in the institution’s self-study process for accreditation, the researchers were a part of a team that collected data from structured interviews, including a card sort, of 42 full time teacher educators across 16 programs in the institution. Informed by sociocultural theories (Vygotsky, 1978, Wertsch, 1991), a content analysis revealed the language selected by faculty as well as their meaning-making process and describes how individuals contextualized those meanings. Findings demonstrated a range of meanings and lack of a shared …

A Is For Activist, Melody Elliott

Diverse Families Bookshelf Lesson Plans and Activities

No abstract provided.

Neoliberal Reading Interventions And Student Needs, Mahbuba Hammad

Journal of Critical Issues in Educational Practice

This article discusses reading programs within the context of Neoliberalism and the extent to which they address student needs. The rise of such reading programs in the market economy has come at the expense of placing the burden of reading development solely on the shoulders of students after restricting their academic and personal growth. The article explores how this has been done without any consideration regarding the needs of ethnically and culturally diverse students; and without taking into account the relationship between poverty and educational outcomes. Without a doubt, this has affected the ability of students to think critically about …

A Case For The Common Good: How Training In Faith-Based Media Literacy Helped Teachers Address Social Justice Issues In The Classroom, Maria Rosalia Tenorio De Azevedo

Journal of Media Literacy Education

This case study reveals how a faith-based initiative offering structured teacher training in media literacy. The program is centered in Catholic Social Teaching, encouraging the use of critical media literacy in the classroom to aid the learning of social justice issues. The critical literacy of Paulo Freire serves as theoretical framework to help answer the research question: How has a teacher training program in faith-based media literacy influenced teachers’ practice when addressing social justice issues in the classroom? This case study relates the accounts of a middle school teacher, a high school teacher, and a college professor, graduates of the …

The Power Of Creation: Critical Imagination In The Honors Classroom, Jennie Woodard

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

The article examines how to incorporate issues of social justice and diversity in the honors classroom through critical imagination. Inclusion and diversity are among the five strategic pillars of honors education, but the challenge is to create space for social justice as an academic inquiry. This article describes an honors project where students were tasked to come up with their own concept for a television show, using their imagination to bridge gaps in representations on television. Critical imagination allowed the students to move beyond analyzing television in its current state and conceptualize what more inclusive television could look like in …

With Great Privilege Comes Great Responsibility, Anne Dotter

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

This essay contends that honors education should seize the opportunity to expose our students to the horrors of our society such as “the violence against those among us with the least amount of power.” We can affirm our curricular foundation (writing, reflection, and critical thinking) by supplementing it with histories of oppression in order to better equip our students with the tools necessary to become change agents. Such a shift in curricular content and pedagogies could engender changes in our institutional practices that model successful collaboration across races, cultures, and disciplines for our students, ultimately leading the way to a …

Critical Mathematical Inquiry

Occasional Paper Series

Welcome to Issue 41 of Bank Street’s Occasional Paper Series. The issue features a collection of papers by authors with a shared affinity for the work of critical mathematical inquiry (CMI). In what follows, we present our framing of mathematics education as a participatory venue for CMI and situate it in the context of another, perhaps more familiar approach to teaching mathematics for social justice (TMfSJ).

The “Soft Bigotry Of Low Expectations” And Its Role In Maintaining White Supremacy Through Mathematics Education, Laurie Rubel, Andrea V. Mccloskey

Occasional Paper Series

In this study, we offer an analysis of the phrase the "soft bigotry of low expectations" and considers its role in rhetoric about U.S. mathematics education policy and practice, especially in regards to Critical Mathematical Inquiry. From the phrase’s origins in a speech given by President George W. Bush in 2000, to its current use on social media, this phrase offers a lens into white supremacy and "tools of whiteness" (Picower, 2009), and their persistence in U.S. schooling paradigms, especially about mathematics. We analyze specific, recent instantiations of the phrase on blogrolls and Twitter, in addition to more implicit …

Collaboration And Critical Mathematical Inquiry: Negotiating Mathematics Engagement, Identity, And Agency, Frances K. Harper

Occasional Paper Series

When faced with the challenge of supporting students to do the “messy” mathematical work necessary for exploring social justice problems through critical mathematical inquiry, teachers might rely on more procedural or direct instruction. Because how students learn matters as much as what they learn, this can inadvertently limit students’ engagement with mathematics. Instructional strategies designed to foster equitable collaboration can support critical mathematical inquiry by promoting norms for equitable student engagement and mathematics identity development. As teachers and students negotiate what counts as mathematics engagement and who has access to mathematics, students’ authority over mathematics and social justice issues increases.

Cultivating A Space For Critical Mathematical Inquiry Through Knowledge-Eliciting Mathematical Activity, Debasmita Basu, Steven Greenstein

Occasional Paper Series

Learning mathematics becomes more effective when teachers leverage their students' mathematical and everyday knowledge as resources for instruction. Thus, tasks that reveal these forms of knowledge would be especially useful to teachers. Unfortunately, such tasks are hard to find and even harder to create. Consequently, we developed a collection of mathematical tasks that we hoped would elicit “children’s multiple mathematical knowledge bases (i.e., the understandings and experiences that have the potential to shape and support children’s mathematics learning—including children’s mathematical thinking, and children’s cultural, home, and community-based knowledge)” (Turner et al., 2012, p. 68). These tasks proved to be productive …

Holistic Analysis Of The Social, Emotional, And Academic Development Of At-Risk Students In A Self-Regulated Learning Instructional Environment, Jennifer K. Macek

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

The testing an accountability system that plagues the current educational atmosphere has done little to improve outcomes for the general population, rather, it has increased harm to our nation’s most vulnerable populations. As districts grapple with accountability mandates and pressures to improve test scores the number of students excluded from traditional schools and sent to alternative programs continues to grow. Research shows that the majority of programs for at-risk youth are little more than graduation factories that do not adequately prepare students for active participation in democratic society.

This study used a mixed methods design to explore an alternative program …

Numeracy And Social Justice: A Wide, Deep, And Longstanding Intersection, Kira Hamman, Victor Piercey, Samuel L. Tunstall

Numeracy

We discuss the connection between the numeracy and social justice movements both in historical context and in its modern incarnation. The intersection between numeracy and social justice encompasses a wide variety of disciplines and quantitative topics, but within that variety there are important commonalities. We examine the importance of sound quantitative measures for understanding social issues and the necessity of interdisciplinary collaboration in this work. Particular reference is made to the papers in the first part of the Numeracy special collection on social justice, which appear in this issue.

The Experiences Of Counseling Graduate Students Who Participated In Professional Legislative Advocacy Training, Nakpangi Thomas

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Legislative advocacy efforts are increasingly becoming part of a counselor's professional identity, yet scholarly literature lacks studies about experiences of counseling students involved in legislative advocacy for the counseling profession. The purpose of this study was to gain an understanding of the meaning counseling students ascribe to their involvement in legislative advocacy for the counseling profession. Astin's student involvement theory was the conceptual framework utilized to explore the lived experiences of counseling graduate students and recent graduates who participated in a 4-day long American Counseling Association Institute for Leadership Training on legislative advocacy and leadership or in professional legislative advocacy …

Towards A Critical Game Based Pedagogy, Justin K. Egan

Cal Poly Humboldt theses and projects

This thesis outlines and examines core concepts of game-based learning as identified by James Paul Gee, and Kurt Squire, among other scholars. These findings are then connected to the contemporary, transformative threshold concepts of composition—as explored in Naming What We Know. This connection seeks to argue game-based pedagogy may be an invaluable tool for introducing critical perspectives to composition students in order to better equip them with critical thinking strategies and cultural critiques, while improving their writing skills. A theoretical framework is presented in the form of four “Pillars” of a Critical Game-Based Pedagogy: Literacy, Identity, Social Learning, and Multimodality—all …