Education Commons^™

A Critical Inquiry Exploring The Relationship Between Critical Consciousness And Community Engagement Educators, Carol Difalco

Counseling and Psychology Dissertations

Community engagement programs are shaped by the educators who facilitate them. Due to a curtailed critical consciousness, such programs are not always sensitive to the negative implications for the communities they are attempting to support. Guided by critical ethnographic and interpretive phenomenological analysis, this study examines how educators perceive their relationship with critical consciousness, its impact on their community engagement initiatives, and what we can learn from educators using community engagement to work towards social justice issues. As expected, results from the participants revealed varying awareness and understanding of how structural power and institutional oppression impact community engagement initiatives. Some …

Teacher Professional Dialogue For Justice-Oriented Practice: A Qualitative Action Research Study, Megan Leigh Normandin

Antioch University Full-Text Dissertations & Theses

This study used a qualitative action research approach to engage a group of secondary English teachers in a collective inquiry to determine the best model for transformative teacher reflexivity and dialogue. Through solution-focused conversation, the goal was to design a sustainable framework for professional development that fosters creative, just, and compassionate instruction. The primary question explored was: What is an effective structure for sustained reflective dialogue among teachers in a comprehensive public high school? The action research model provided the context for a cyclical process of reflection, discovery, and growth. Findings of this study will form both a blueprint for …

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

Journal on Empowering Teaching Excellence

Access the online Pressbooks version of this article here.

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 …

The Power Of Role-Modelling: White Teacher Educators Normalising Anti-Racism And Cultural Reflexivity For White Pre-Service Teachers, Mary-Anne Macdonald, Sarah Booth, Helen Mills, Robert Somerville

Research outputs 2022 to 2026

Every child has a right to feel culturally safe in schools, yet for countless Indigenous students this is not the case. Many White pre-service teachers in Australia enter initial teacher education with a limited understanding of racial identity, Indigenous knowledge or White anti-racism. This autoethnographic study applies Social Cognitive Theory and the Theory of Planned Behaviour to understand the role of the White teacher educator in racial conscientisation of White pre-service teachers. We examine how White teacher confidence in enacting anti-racist behaviours builds when White teacher educators role-model the professional approaches which White teachers can use to teach about race …

A Paradox Of Fact And Fiction: Cultivating The 'Literary Imagination' Through Quiet Rebellion, Eden A. Evans

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The dissertation explores the problems that patterned and processed teaching and learning poses for implementing principles of critical pedagogy in English Literature courses. I apply multiple theoretical frameworks including literary theory, critical theory and post-humanism to place my own experiences amidst the on-going conversations about standardization and democracy. I draw upon the work of educational theorists such as Maxine Greene, Martha Nussbaum, Louise Rosenblatt, and Mary Aswell Doll to explore the ways that literature can enrich students’ lives and society, and Geneva Gay and Lisa Delpit to explore how cultural bias regarding linguistics can function when teaching literature and language …

Finding Motivation And Connectedness For Learning With Special Education Students Qualifying Under Emotional Disturbance, Nikole Denton

Education | Master's Theses

The purpose of this research seeks to understand the conditions for motivation among disengaged high school students in special education who qualify under emotional disturbance (ED) and support them in rediscovering their desire for learning while also determining how educators can be supportive in cultivating academic engagement and agency. The theoretical framework looks toward co-created curriculum through an understanding of intrinsic motivation (Ryan et al., 2021), self-Determination theory (Niemiec & Ryan, 2009), and critical pedagogy (Shih, 2018). Currently, there is a lack of empirical research on the effectiveness of pedagogical approaches in determining what works in engaging special education students …

Radicalizing First Year Composition: A Novice Educator’S Venture Into Revolutionary Teaching, Xochilt Trujillo Flores

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

­­This project is based on my experiences and reflections as a novice instructor on implementing educational practices which center a critical, feminist, anti-racist pedagogical approach in a first year composition course. Using my own experiences of teaching FYC as a central focus, this project will collect data through teacher-reflective journals. Those journals will be focused on how radical pedagogy shapes my approaches to teaching and how I experience/implement that approach in my day-to-day practices. In doing so, this project aims to address the persistent gap between theory and practice, particularly in the context of novice educators’ experiences in a …

Social Justice And The Us Food System: A Critical Course On The Human Dimensions Of Food, Ali Brooks

Food Systems Master's Project Reports

Our world is made up of overlapping political, environmental, and economic spheres that engender social injustice and inequality. Though separate societal issues can seem divergent and unconnected, they are all linked together by one universal necessity: food. Because everyone eats, everyone is connected to—and dependent on—food and the systems that govern it. However, the impacts of our industrial food system are not felt equally among people who hold different positions of power within it.

Today’s industrial food complex operates on the capitalist principle of profit accumulation through exploitation, commodification, and extraction. This set of relations is not defined by scale …

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 …

Who We Are: Focus On… Student Identity, Yarina Aguilar Becerra, Cecilia Diojuan, Jasmine Walker, Neera Malhotra, David Peterson Del Mar, Vicki Reitenauer

University Studies Faculty Publications and Presentations

In short

• Increasingly, professionals in higher education are acknowledging the short- and long-term impacts on individuals and communities of institutional failures to create welcoming, inclusive, and caring environments for traditionally underrepresented students.
• Student voices, reflecting on their lived and felt experiences in college, have been less frequently present in the discussions about inclusion in higher education.
• Listening to students from underrepresented groups has the potential to redefine and renew how we understand education and ourselves, offering a template and a foundation for the dense network of relationships that a student-focused institution of higher education ought to aspire to and build …

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 …

Authoring Dis/Ability Identities Mapping The Role Of Ableism In Teacher Candidate Identity Construction, Molly B. Siuty, Margaret R. Beneke

Curriculum and Instruction Faculty Publications and Presentations

Ableism, or the belief that abled ways of being and knowing are superior, perpetuates deficit views of ability differences, and constructs dis/ability as a problem in need of remediation so that individuals achieve “normalcy.” Ableism’s entrenched pervasiveness in education systems can be a significant barrier in teacher education when preparing critical educators who can work towards radical forms of dis/ability justice. In this paper, we argue that dis/abled teacher candidates can afford particular insight into the ways in which ableism operates in educational institutions and that dis/ability should be considered an asset to inclusive and socially just teacher preparation. Using …

“In Our Very Flesh, (R)Evolution”: An Exploration Of Secondary Education Teachers, Otherness, And Embodiment, Ryan Ambuter

Doctoral Dissertations

In education, the proliferation of a mind/body dualism leaves the pedagogy of the body undertheorized, and its impact on education disregarded. While there is not an absence of research on the body within the field of education, what exists is limited in scope. Little has been written about the connections between teachers’ bodies, pedagogy, and politics at the level of secondary education. This research specifically focuses on teachers who are visibly other, critically conscious of their bodies, and find power in their difference. The purpose of this study is to make meaning of the stories, experiences, and potential of teachers …

Patriotism As Critique: Youth Responses To Teaching About Injustice, Hillary Parkhouse

Teaching and Learning Publications

The view that patriotism is characterized by unquestioning loyalty to one’s country remains common in the United States despite its anti-democratic implications. From this standpoint, classroom discussions of past and present injustices are a threat to patriotism because they raise doubts about national superiority and exceptionality. Through an ethnographic study in two critical, culturally diverse US history classrooms, I investigated students’ attitudes towards their country and the notion of patriotism. As opposed to fomenting disaffection among students, candid discussions of injustices led students to view their teachers and curriculum as more trustworthy than what they had encountered in prior classrooms. …

Disrupting The Heteronormative Mindset In Teacher Preparation Through Inclusive Children's Literature, Denise I. Donahue

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Because of discrimination that presents itself through bullying based on identity, and the lack of positive LGBTQIA+ representation within classroom lessons, there is a need for a higher quality of preparation for teachers in order to create inclusive environments.

All teachers, particularly new teachers, need to know how to effectively work with diverse learners to meet their needs academically, emotionally and socially. This includes preparing teachers to instruct students and work with families who include LGBTQIA+ members. LGBTQIA+ students are often marginalized, discounted, harassed or invisible. (Kosciw, Greytak, Zongrone, Clark, & Truong, 2018). There is a need for a higher …

Special Issue Of Tej: What Is To Be Done With Curriculum And Educational Foundations’ Critical Knowledges? New Qualitative Research On Conscientizing Preservice And In-Service Teachers, James C. Jupp, Ann Mogush Mason, Theodorea Regina Berry, Amanda Morales

Department of Teaching, Learning, and Teacher Education: Faculty Publications

In this essay, we provide a brief introductory statement to the special issue of Teaching Education titled What is To Be Done with Curriculum and Educational Foundations’ Critical Knowledges? New Qualitative Research on Conscientizing Preservice and In-Service Teachers. In our introductory statement, we describe the specific aim and broad purposes of the special issue and characterize its contents. Our specific aim with the special issue is to advance the conscientization of preservice and in-service teachers via critical pedagogies and race-based epistemologies. Our broad purposes are to (a) resist the ascendant, whitened, and Eurocentric fascism via our collective pedagogical …

What Is To Be Done With Curriculum And Educational Foundations' Critical Knowledges? Toward Critical And Decolonizing Education Sciences, James C. Jupp, Theodorea Regina Berry, Amanda Morales, Ann Mogush Mason

Department of Teaching, Learning, and Teacher Education: Faculty Publications

As editors of the special issue in Teaching Education titled What Is To Be Done with Curriculum and Educational Foundations’ Critical Knowledges? New Qualitative Research on Conscientizing Preservice and In-Service Teachers, our purpose with this conceptual essay is twofold. First, we historicize and characterize the critical knowledges deployed in this special issue as a broad array of criticalities. Second, we provide a reading of these criticalities that together we tentatively call critical and decolonizing education sciences. In our discussion and conclusion, we focus on the dual challenges of developing work in critical and decolonizing education sciences: (a) …

How Do Teachers Challenge Neoliberalism Through Critical Pedagogy Within And Outside Of The Classroom?, Rezvan Shahsavari-Googhari

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis uses the qualitative case study approach to investigate current strategies and skills four Ontario public secondary school teachers apply both within and outside of the classroom to enhance students’ critical consciousness. The focus is on teachers’ pedagogical work in the era of neoliberal restructuring in order to provide a rich account of how neoliberalism challenges and affects their teaching. Existing literature shows a crisis of identity and political agency among youth in many Western societies, characterized by individuals’ inability to think critically about social, political and economic issues, which is rooted in neoliberal education reforms. Adopting a critical …

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 …

Zines In The Classroom: Critical Librarianship And Participatory Collections, Robin Potter, Alycia Sellie

Publications and Research

This lesson plan outlines using zines in a library classroom with a critical pedagogy approach. It was written based upon the teaching each author did with the Brooklyn College Library Zine Collection.

Critical Pedagogy And Participatory Democracy: Creating Classroom Contexts That Challenge “Common Sense”, Lilia D. Monzó, P. Zitlali Morales

Education Faculty Articles and Research

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 …

Agency Through Teacher Education: Reflection, Community, And Learning, Ryan Flessner, Grant Miller, Kami Patrizio, Julie Horwitz

Ryan Flessner

Agency through Teacher Education: Reflection, Community, and Learning addresses the ways that agency functions for those involved in twenty-first-century teacher education. This book, commissioned by the Association of Teacher Educators, relies on the voices of teacher education candidates, in-service teachers, school leaders, and university-based educators to illustrate what agency looks like, sounds like, and feels like for people trying to act as agents of change. These examples take the form of narratives, theoretical explorations, formal research studies, and reflective essays. Agency through Teacher Education does not seek to establish one definition for agency, but rather to conceptualize it from three …

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 …

What Stick Figures Tell Us About Irish Politics: Creating A Critical And Collaborative Learning Space, Sharon Feeney, John Hogan, Paul Donnelly

Articles

This paper focuses upon the interpretation of freehand drawings produced by a small sample of 220 first-year students taking an Irish politics introductory module in response to the question, ‘What is Irish Politics?’ By sidestepping cognitive verbal processing routes, through employing freehand drawing, we aim to create a critical and collaborative learning environment, where students develop their capacity for interpretation and critical self-reflection. This is because the freehand drawing technique, as part of a critical pedagogy, can generate a more critical and inclusive perspective, as visual representations permit us to comprehend the world differently, and understand how others also see …