Education Commons^™

A Participatory Exercise In Developing Syllabi With Adult Learners, Laneshia Conner, V. Nikki Jones, Jason P. Johnston

Journal on Empowering Teaching Excellence

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Transformative participatory approaches in education are positioned to challenge traditional models where instructors bear all responsibility for knowledge creation and learners are passive recipients of knowledge. The promotion of participatory learning and critical pedagogy is essential to helping professionals seeking to understand oppressive structural barriers and employing strategies to dismantle these structures. This article describes a participatory approach undertaken to guide learners through an exercise to co-create syllabus content in a graduate social work course. Learners identified three themes, concerns, fears, and problems, related to the course material. Learners were also …

Full Issue: Journal On Empowering Teaching Excellence, Volume 7, Issue 1, Spring 2023

Journal on Empowering Teaching Excellence

The full-length Spring 2023 issue (Volume 7, Issue 1) of the Journal on Empowering Teaching Excellence

Access the online Pressbooks version (with downloadable EPUB format) here.

The Spring 2023 issue presents research and guidance on topics related to student self-reflection, participatory learning, and returning to the in-person learning following the COVID-19 pandemic. The first article takes a critical approach to understanding pedagogy with adult learners by involving students in the creation of course syllabi as a way to challenge ideologies related the roles of instructor and students. The second article blends research and narrative to explore how the experiences of …

Remote Portals: Enacting Black Feminisms And Humanization To Disrupt Isolation In Teacher Education, Mildred Boveda, Keisha M. Allen

Occasional Paper Series

As two Black women teacher educators who contend with the neoliberal expectations of the westernized academy and the material realities of preparing teachers for P-12 contexts, we face the pressures of performing productivity while attempting to ameliorate injustices for multiply-marginalized students (e.g., Black students with disabilities facing economic hardships). Working within predominantly white spaces, we were already socially and intellectually isolated prior to the 2020 pandemic. In this collaborative essay, we articulate how COVID-19 exasperated existing educational and social inequities, yet served as a portal to collective sense-making of our heightened intersectional consciousness, sense of duty to community, and enactments …

Critically Analyzing The Online Classroom: Blackboard, Moodle, Canvas, And The Pedagogy They Produce, J.D. Swerzenski

Journal of Communication Pedagogy

Working from the crossroads of critical pedagogy and software studies, this study analyzes the means by which teaching technologies—in particular the popular learning management systems (LMS) Blackboard, Moodle, and Canvas—support a transmission model of education at the expense of critical learning goals. I assess the effect of LMSs on critical aims via four key critical pedagogy concepts: the banking system, student/teacher contradiction, dialogue, and problem-posing. From software studies, I employ the notion of affordances—what program functions are and are not made available to users—to observe how LMSs naturalize the transmission model. Rather than present a deterministic look at teaching technology, …

Catalytic Teaching And Ideologized Content, David Catterick

International Journal of Christianity and English Language Teaching

This article has as its starting point the growing acceptance over the past decade of intentional ideological influence in both English language teaching materials and approaches. It explores some current examples of ideologized content before examining catalytic teaching, the intentioned use of ideologized content by a Christian English language teacher (CELT). The article provides some examples of classroom content that may be considered catalytic and then suggests five guiding principles based in part on the findings of Johnston’s extensive study of the work of CELTs at a language school in Poland. It is hoped that these principles might be helpful …

If I Knew Then What I Do Now: Fostering Pre-Service Teachers’ Capacity To Promote Expansive And Critical Conversations With Children’S Literature, Stephen Adam Crawley

Occasional Paper Series

In this article, I reflect on my practices as a teacher educator and respond to the following questions: How do I foster the capacity of pre-service teachers to use children’s literature to promote expansive and critical conversations in the classroom? How do pre-service teachers report their stances and sense of preparedness when reflecting on the course? To address these questions, I share two strategies I employed in my undergraduate course for elementary education majors: 1) emphasizing children's literature as windows and mirrors and 2) considering stakeholder responses. For each strategy, I include preservice teachers’ (PTs’) statements that reflect how the …

A Teacher's Inquiry Into Bringing In Biliteracy In A Fifth-Grade English-Only Classroom, Stephanie Lynn Abraham

Networks: An Online Journal for Teacher Research

This teacher inquiry project explored how I, a non-Spanish speaking teacher at the time, implemented critical, bilingual pedagogies to foster biliteracy development among my fifth-grade students. One, the project showed that students could further their biliteracy by incorporating their funds of knowledge through a family stories writing project. Two, many students were anxious about reading in Spanish, and dual poetry alleviated this due to its compactness and linguistic scaffolding. Finally, the project showed the continual issues of unequal power relations concerning bilingualism and biliteracy in US classrooms by showing how I failed to include languages other than Spanish in this …

What About The Little People?: Empowering Middle School Students To Discard The Great Man Theory, Sarah Straub

MLET: The Journal of Middle Level Education in Texas

This paper attempts to address the promotion of critical thinking in our middle school students as they reflect on the widely-accepted White Eurocentric perspective of history that has been traditionally taught in school. In this article, the incomplete treatment of history is identified as Carlyle’s Great Man Theory. The hope is that educators can be critical of the curriculum they are teaching so as to promote critical perspectives in their own students. History is not just the story of Great Men – it is a collective story of which many of us have a partial understanding. Specifically, this article addresses …

Empowering English Language Teachers Through History, Eun-Young Julia Kim

International Journal of Christianity and English Language Teaching

TESOL training programs typically offer courses in methods and pedagogy, along with other classes to equip future English language teaching (ELT) professionals with essential teaching skills and knowledge. Not as frequently offered or required, however, is a course focusing on critically examining political and philosophical aspects of ELT. This article discusses why I believe it is important for TESOL curriculums to include topics on the diachronic development and synchronic variations of the English language and to engage students in topics that would allow them to critically examine embedded power relations in ELT. By reflecting on my own classroom experience as …

Critical Pedagogy And Participatory Democracy: Creating Classroom Contexts That Challenge "Common Sense." A Response To "The Political Nuances Of Narratives And An Urban Educator's Response", Lilia D. Monzó, P. Zitlali Morales

Democracy and Education

In this response to “The Political Nuances of Narratives and an Urban Educator’s Response,” the authors applaud Pearman’s critical approach to deconstructing and challenging narratives of heroic figures who single-handedly change the world and agree with him that these narratives restrict the sense of agency that may propel citizens to become actively involved in social change efforts. We argue that it is important to question why these narratives exist and to understand them in light of the hegemonic capitalist structure that exploits the masses in service to the capitalist class. Although we agree with Pearman that democracy is best served …

Elt And Empowerment: Questions, Observations, And Reflections For Christian Educators, Michael Lessard-Clouston

International Journal of Christianity and English Language Teaching

As a field, English language teaching (ELT) has come under attack from a number of critical practitioners. In the classroom, English language teachers aim to empower our students by helping them improve their English abilities and skills. Yet there are discrepancies in terms of who learns and uses English for various purposes. Are English as a second or foreign language (ESL/EFL) teachers helping, or are we part of the ‘problem’ in ELT, as critics suggest? This article poses four questions in order for readers to consider issues in ELT and empowerment. In doing so, it summarizes observations from both the …

A Testimony Of Hope. A Book Review Of Critical Consciousness In Curricular Research, Audrey Lingley

Democracy and Education

The anthology Critical Consciousness in Curricular Research: Evidence from the Field (William-White, Muccular, D., Muccular, G., & Brown, 2013) contains a multilogical collection of strategies for establishing curriculum work as an integral part of what it means to be a teacher. Although the contributors represent a diverse range of backgrounds, perspectives, and years in education, a common manifesto emerges: Curriculum inquiry is a pathway for the enactment of democratic pedagogy and enfranchisement of marginalized students (and teachers). The editors provide a vibrant and engaging testimony of hope with which to revitalize the notion of curriculum work as part of what …

Addressing Reconciliation In The Esl Classroom, Michael K. Westwood

International Journal of Christianity and English Language Teaching

The extent to which teachers’ spiritual identities should inform their pedagogy has been a topic of much discussion among TESOL professionals. Under particular scrutiny have been Christian English teachers (CET), whose faith can be disconcerting to a multicultural field that strongly values diversity. Meanwhile, another conversation continues regarding ways in which language teaching can be used as a means of promoting social justice and global citizenship. This article attempts to add to these conversations by proposing that reconciliation should be addressed in the classroom and by suggesting that it is a topic of interest to both CET and others who …

Teacher Education And Experiential Learning: A Visual Ethnography, Maureen F. Legge, Wayne Smith

Australian Journal of Teacher Education

Abstract: This article reports research that critically examined our teacher education outdoor education pedagogy. The purpose was to use visual ethnography to critique our teaching over twenty years of annual five-day bush-based residential camps. The bush camps were situated in an outdoor education programme contributing to a four-year undergraduate teacher education Bachelor of Physical Education in Aotearoa New Zealand. The research method involved photo-elicitation of selected photographs representing students’ experiences and our practices. We each wrote about the photographs using introspection and recall to create a layered narrative analysis reflecting on the educative focus of the images. We responded to …

Which One Is Better: Saying Student Teachers Don't Reflect Or Systematically Unlocking Their Reflective Potentials: A Positive Experience From A Poor Teacher Education Faculty In Ethiopia, Jeylan Wolyie Hussein

Australian Journal of Teacher Education

This paper is informed by Deweyean pragmatism, critical pedagogy, Marxist humanism and social constructivism, all of which see teacher professional learning as a process of constructing knowledge and identity through critical interdependence. In addition to presenting the philosophical root of the reflective approach to teaching and the structure for engaging student teachers in reflective processes, I present the outcome of my own and my colleagues’ attempts to unlock the reflective potentials of student teachers at a poor teacher education faculty in Ethiopia and a theoretical/methodological framework to deal with the reflective data. I hope that teacher educators who work with …