Education Commons^™

Moving Beyond The Banking Method And Scripted Curricula: Creating Confident Teachers, Max Solotar

Art of Teaching Thesis - Written

This thesis is an exploration of the role of scripted curricula in contemporary classrooms and its adverse impacts on students and educators alike. When scripted curricula are put into conversation with Paolo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed and his description of the banking method of teaching, the oppressive nature of both are revealed to be deeply intertwined. Political contexts, such as the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, led to a proliferation of scripted curricula in classrooms serving low-income and nonwhite children. These scripted curricula, which often deny students agency and center whiteness, heavily restricted teacher autonomy, treating educators …

Our Children, Their Stories: Storytelling In The Classroom, Malik Torres

Art of Teaching Thesis - Written

My Master’s Thesis is about children and their stories. It seeks to understand story creation in the classroom and connect it to the cultivation of the broader classroom community. Here, storytelling is understood in its five forms: reading stories, oral storytelling, drawing stories, writing stories, and acting out stories. What threads these forms together is classroom community. In my thesis, I focus on a concept called “the narrative classroom.” A narrative classroom makes space for both play and storytelling; it incorporates the multi-modal process of literacy into a classroom environment centering children and their stories as official knowledge. Most importantly, …

The Need For Spanish In Mainstream Classrooms: A Celebratory Reclamation Of Linguistic Identity, Keila Torres

Art of Teaching Thesis - Written

This paper is a testament to the sociocultural importance of bilingualism in mainstream U.S. classrooms, specifically pertaining to the Spanish language and communities in which there is a large percentage of Spanish speakers. Approximately 13% of Americans are native Spanish speakers, this is equivalent to 40 million people. States like Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, and Texas can boast populations that include over 1 million Hispanic people (United States Census Bureau, 2019). However, our school curriculums do not reflect the large percentage of Spanish-speaking students who roam their hallways. I argue that traditional …

Valuing Children’S Natural Thinking In The Classroom, Supriya Rawal

Art of Teaching Thesis - Written

This thesis discusses the importance of valuing children’s natural thinking in the classroom. Our education places a significant emphasis on literacy and math and recognizes human capacity mostly just through performance on standardized assessments in these two fields of study. But human capacity is much more than just math and literacy. Moreover, even math and literacy are taught in a very process-oriented, rote fact-based curriculum that does not allow children to learn through their own natural way of thinking. This contrived way of thinking and limited support for creative avenues leads to a very narrow definition of success, a fixed …

The Negative Effect Labeling Has On Students' Relationship With Education, Mikayla Cunningham

Art of Teaching Thesis - Written

Labeling students is a common practice in modern education but it is harmful to the relationship between the student and their learning process. I will first provide a clear definition and provide examples of labeling. I will show however innocuous or scientific a label may seem, it can have detrimental, lingering negative effects on a child’s relationship with their schooling. I will then demonstrate through real-life case studies the experience of students that have both been labeled and have not been labeled, showing the exact labels that were applied to the students, their educational progress, and how the labeling directly …

The Importance Of Visibility In Curriculum And Teaching Practice, Jasmine Bailey

Art of Teaching Thesis - Written

I am arguing that it is absolutely necessary for all teachers and administration to see the importance of making all children visible and valued and that they should include this idea into their curriculum plans and teaching practices. Despite the focus on representation, visibility in the curriculum is still lacking. I will detail how visibility is affected by the differences in how children learn, children who have experienced trauma and power dynamics and oppression.

This thesis will aim to express and display the value that all children should be made visible in the classroom. This includes all backgrounds and ethnicities …

Teaching Through Movement, Michaela Laird

Dance/Movement Therapy Theses

Within the United States, many children struggle in the public school system to meet the demands required of them. Often the underlying issue stems from a lack of focus around the social and emotional needs of the children. The demand of this issue requires work on multiple levels: the individual, collective, and institutional, and can be met through better understanding and application of nonverbal communication. Dance/movement therapy is an approach that can be applied to address these issues in such a manner. Through the application of dance/movement therapy for students and teachers alike, improvement can be made to further promote …