Education Commons^™

Poetry And Praxis: Lessons From An Activist Educator, Dr. Emmanuel Tabi

Journal of Multicultural Affairs

Drawing on data from a narrative multi-case study based in Toronto, Canada, this article discusses the lived experiences of one Black activist. Utilizing critical race theory, new literacy studies and the rhetoric of cultural production as theoretical frameworks, the article foregrounds the work of Ebele, a Toronto activist whose work supported the educational trajectories and emotional well-being of Black students, many of whom reported being marginalized in school. Through his creative labor, Ebele directly addressed the sociology of anti-Black racism that deeply influences the lives of Afrodiasporic people in Canada. This article continues the conversation about what it means to …

Video Games And Their Potential As Literacy Tools, Jessica Reich

University Honors Program Senior Projects

Video games are an essential part of emergent popular culture, with millions playing games every day. With how popular gaming has become, it is logical to research its full potential as a literacy tool both inside and outside the classroom. This thesis contributes to the discussion of the importance and potential of video games as a literacy tool that can be utilized educationally and through gaming at home. This thesis includes a section for gaming definitions, a literature review on research on video games and their impact on education and literacy skill development, a discussion of video game narratives, and …

An Interdisciplinary Rendezvous Between Mathematics And Literature: Reflections On Beauty As A Perspective In Comparative Disciplinary Didactics And A Thematic Approach To Interdisciplinary Work In Upper Secondary School, Uffe Thomas Jankvist, Helle Rørbech, Jesper Bremholm

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

In this paper we propose a thematic focus on aesthetics in the context of an interdisciplinary collaboration between mathematics and literature (Language Arts) as a way to further students’ reflections on and deeper understanding of what characterizes the two subjects. Furthermore, we argue that approaching aesthetics through the perspective of literacy can potentially strengthen students’ understanding of ways of thinking particular to specific (academic) disciplines; ways of thinking that are otherwise often hidden when teaching focuses on more pragmatic aspects. G. H. Hardy’s A Mathematician’s Apology from 1940 serves as the recurring illustrative example in our discussions of the pedagogical …

Enhancing Classroom Instruction With Online News, Michael D. Ekstrand, Katherine Landau Wright, Maria Soledad Pera

Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

Purpose

Investigate how school teachers look for informational texts for their classrooms. Access to current, varied, and authentic informational texts improves learning outcomes for K-12 students, but many teachers lack resources to expand and update readings. The Web offers freely-available resources, but finding suitable ones is time-consuming. This research lays the groundwork for building tools to ease that burden.

Methodology

This paper reports qualitative findings from a study in two stages: (1) a set of semi-structured interviews, based on the Critical Incident Technique, eliciting teachers’ information-seeking practices and challenges; and (2) observations of teachers using a prototype teaching-oriented news search …

If They Would Just Hush And Pay Attention, Quinton Granville

National Youth Advocacy and Resilience Conference

An interactive session that prepares educators to apply literacy strategies such as “Real-Talk” to overcoming the challenges associated with engaging post-millennials in college and career aligned skill practice. The presenter demonstrates how to plan standards-based instruction that incorporates students’ voice as a tool for empowering students to apply their verbal and written communication skills to complete content-specific (i.e., social studies, ELA, science, etc.) assignments.

Law School News: Roger Williams University Announces 11th President 02-13-2019, Ed Fitzpatrick

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

The Second Decade Of Numeracy: Entering The Seas Of Literacy, H. L. Vacher

Numeracy

This multipurpose editorial explores and tries to count the many types of literacy that are referred to by name in Wikipedia and Numeracy. Wikipedia’s Category:Literacy page identifies 44 kinds of literacy that are the subject of articles, ranging from numeracy and graphicacy to braille literacy and diaspora literacy. In addition, searching Google finds more than 30 adjective-literacy or noun-literacy collocations, including quantitative literacy, adult literacy, and document literacy, that do not have Wikipedia pages of their own but are mentioned on other Wikipedia pages. The sum puts this modest literacy count in line with the more than 70 bodies …

Disaster Prevention Literacy Among School Administrators And Teachers: A Study On The Plan For Disaster Prevention And Campus Network Deployment And Experiment In Taiwan, Sung-Chin Chung, Cherng-Jyh Yen

Educational Leadership & Workforce Development Faculty Publications

Taiwan is located at the high-risk region of natural disasters with the frequently occurred earthquakes. The importance of the disaster prevention education on campus is made even more obvious by the fact that natural disasters often occur during the school days. Given the leading roles the school administrators and teachers playing in the disaster prevention education of their pupils, this study purposed to investigate how disaster prevention literacy was among them and how disaster prevention literacy differed across various background variables of them. Furthermore, the current study also examined if disaster prevention literacy changed by participation in the disaster prevention …

Scaffolding To Improve Writing Skills In A Computer Science Literacy Course, Wu He, Harris Wu, Li Xu, Kurt Maly

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Writing has been recognized as an important skill in the technology field. This paper reports a study that uses a scaffolding approach to improve student writing skills in a computer science literacy course. While the quantitative results do not show a significant impact of scaffolding in individual paper assignment on the subsequent group wiki assignment, the student feedback in end-of-semester evaluations strongly indicated that scaffolding indeed helped improve their writing.

Playing In Trelis Weyr: Investigating Collaborative Practices In A Dragons Of Pern Role-Play-Game Forum, Kathleen Marie Alley

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This descriptive case study examined adolescents' and emerging adults' literate and social practices within the context of a role-play-game (RPG) forum, investigating the ways participants read and collaboratively composed within this space. As a researcher, I was interested in how this space functioned and how the interactions between members impacted their composing processes, with particular attention to the role of online spaces and popular culture in adolescents' motivation to engage in this forum. This study was guided by three research questions: (1) In what ways is Trelis Weyr, an RPG forum, organized as a virtual environment?; (2) In what ways, …

Constructivist And Behaviorist Approaches: Development And Initial Evaluation Of A Teaching Practice Scale For Introductory Statistics At The College Level, Rossi A. Hassad

Numeracy

This study examined the teaching practices of 227 college instructors of introductory statistics from the health and behavioral sciences. Using primarily multidimensional scaling (MDS) techniques, a two-dimensional, 10-item teaching-practice scale, TISS (Teaching of Introductory Statistics Scale), was developed. The two dimensions (subscales) are characterized as constructivist and behaviorist; they are orthogonal. Criterion validity of the TISS was established in relation to instructors’ attitude toward teaching, and acceptable levels of reliability were obtained. A significantly higher level of behaviorist practice (less reform-oriented) was reported by instructors from the U.S., as well as instructors with academic degrees in mathematics and engineering, whereas …

Parts Of The Whole: Is Everything Equally Important?, Dorothy Wallace

Numeracy

Two strategies are proposed for sorting out priorities and goals in education. At the college level the column argues that goals, and therefore requirements, should be set based on the desired knowledge base of the entire population rather than the individual. At the scale of a single K-12 classroom the column argues that priority be given to content requiring most instructor intervention, describing how the structure of class time and school activities would change as a result. Implementation of these strategies would lead to more efficient use of teacher’s time and effort, better allocation of systemic resources, and clarity of …