Education Commons^™

A Case Study Of Two Taiwanese Students With Hearing Loss Navigating The English As A Foreign Language Requirement At Their University, Yu Chen

Language, Literacy, and Sociocultural Studies ETDs

Many institutions of higher education (IHE) students in Taiwan now need to meet the English proficiency requirement to earn their higher education degrees. In this case study, I intended to a) provide the opportunity for IHE students with hearing loss in Taiwan to share their opinions, thoughts, and experiences of learning English as a foreign language in higher education institutes; and b) understand how English as a foreign language policies and educational practices contribute to create opportunities and barriers for IHE students with hearing loss. The research question I intended to examine was “what are the perceptions of the lived …

Diné Bina'nitin Dóó O'Hoo'aah/Education For Us, By Us: A Collective Journey In Diné Education Liberation, Lyla June Johnston

Language, Literacy, and Sociocultural Studies ETDs

This study is an educational memoir of my experience working for education liberation with hundreds of Diné (Navajo) people written in the style of auto-ethnography. We are indigenous to what is now known as the southwestern United States and organize in the wake of attempted genocide and destructive assimilation policies. Our collective set out to answer the following question: If we could teach and learn anything we wanted, in any way we wanted, what would we do? Based on our ancestral Nitsáhakees-Nahat’á-Iiná-Sii Hasin strategic framework, this Diné collective organized a summer school that reflected their hearts’ true pedagogical desires. What …

Critical Social Justice Theory In Action: A Practitioner Inquiry Into The Service-Learning Capstone Experience, Julie A. Jaynes

Language, Literacy, and Sociocultural Studies ETDs

Service-learning pedagogy can be found in K-12 schools and higher education classrooms across the country. Those programs and courses exist on a complex spectrum from charity to social justice; research presented here documents my efforts as a service-learning teacher to better align the program’s senior capstone class to the teachings from critical social justice theory. I used a practitioner inquiry approach to address the problem of an epistemology in the research process that recreated systems of oppression by excluding the knowledge and voices of the minoritized groups who are impacted by the issues being researched. My inquiry centers my students’ …

Indonesian Students' Perceptions Of Written Feedback In Second Language Writing, Rahmah Fithriani

Language, Literacy, and Sociocultural Studies ETDs

Grounded in sociocultural theory, written feedback activities in second language (L2) writing provide the social interactions that help learners develop their psychical functions within the zone of proximal development (ZPD) as they co-construct knowledge with teachers and peers through guided learning (De Guerrero & Villamil, 2000). Written feedback can also help student writers improve their writing proficiency, including organization of their texts and awareness of the mechanics of the language necessary for successful communication of the intended message (Chandler, 2003; Ferris, 2006; Jahin, 2012; Kamimura, 2006).

Regarding the eminence of feedback in L2 writing, a large body of research has …

Agency, The Uncanny, And Strangeways: An Autoethnographic Journey Through An International Wunderland., Roberto T. Ollivier

Language, Literacy, and Sociocultural Studies ETDs

The African diaspora and postcolonial studies author George Lamming writes in his book “The Pleasures of Exile” that the Caliban character from Shakespeare’s “The Tempest” “cannot be revealed in any relation to himself-for he has no self which is not a reaction to circumstances imposed upon his life” (Lamming, 1992, p. 107). One could argue that the only hope this half-human half-monstrous creature, or for that matter, any of us have to find peace, lies in the attempt to find resolution through the metaphorical slaying of our respective pasts. Like Caliban, many of us are never …

An Ethic Of Love: A Frommean Critique Of Education, Katrina E. Dillon

Language, Literacy, and Sociocultural Studies ETDs

This dissertation is centrally concerned with the ways in which Erich Fromm’s critical analysis of society can be applied to education, specifically looking at the ways in which Fromm’s conceptualizations of freedom, ethics, and love can be used both to critique education and to provide an alternative vision of education through an ethic of love. With its focus on humanization and freedom, critical pedagogy offers a powerful critique, but its liberatory potential has yet to be fully realized, largely because of the ways in which critical theory has been engaged in the work of critical pedagogy. Fromm’s work offers a …

Connecting Genre-Based And Corpus-Driven Approaches In Research Articles: A Comparative Study Of Moves And Lexical Bundles In Saudi And International Journals, Basim M. Alamri

Language, Literacy, and Sociocultural Studies ETDs

Research articles (RAs) have become the primary channel for researchers to circulate academic knowledge within certain discourse communities. Writing an acceptable research paper for publication in a scholarly journal is challenging for novice writers, especially for nonnative speakers of English. The present study was pedagogically motivated, and the ultimate goal was to provide the basis for a genre approach and corpus linguistics to academic writing for ESL/EFL postgraduate students in the field of applied linguistics.

The study analyzed the rhetorical structure and lexical bundles of English-language RAs—Introduction-Methods-Results-Discussion-Conclusion (I-M-R-D-C)—sections published in Saudi Arabian and international journals in the field of applied …

Rediscovering Misinterpreted Concept Of Vospitaniye, Core Constituent Of Vygotskian Zpd, Through Scholar’S Socio-Cultural Actuality, Svetlana Mylnikova

Language, Literacy, and Sociocultural Studies ETDs

ABSTRACT

Lev Semyonovich Vygotsky, a renowned Russian psychologist, whose immediate family, academic surrounding, and scientific findings are typically scrutinized by scholars of past and present (Feingenberg, 1996, Kotik-Friedgut, 2008, 2011, Kuzmich, 2006, Vygodskaya & Lifanova, 1999, Yasnitsky, 2011, 2012) was the first to emphasize the holistic multidisciplinary approach to child development of pedology (child pedagogy) and distinguish two equally meaningful components of child education: obuchenie (teaching/learning process) and vospitanie (fostering). Even though Vygotskian theories are extensively employed in modern educational practices the intricacy of a complex unity of obuchenie and vospitanie in the process of education was overlooked as both …

Family Emotional Literacy: A Critical Education Curriculum For Mental Health Promotion, Anna L. Dinallo

Language, Literacy, and Sociocultural Studies ETDs

This narrative study documents the experiences of seven Latina community educators through focus groups, interviews, and artifact data. Given the stigma of mental health (Bayer, 2005), a lack of culturally centered emotional curriculums (Boler, 1997; Boler & Zembylas, 2003) which are removed from structural oppression (Collins, 2002,1989; Crenshaw, 1991, 1993; hooks, 2014), educators, parents, and communities are in need of mental health promotion tools. According to the American Psychiatric Association (APA, 2015), approximately 70 million Americans annually are diagnosed with mental health issues that disable daily functioning. More relevant to the study population was the loss of three middle school-aged …

Digital Technology, Literacies, And Identity: Experiences Of Historically Marginalized Adolescents, Daniel Olufemi Dr.

Language, Literacy, and Sociocultural Studies ETDs

New media and digital technologies shape the literacy practices and identity development of adolescents (Ellison, 2014, Barton & Hamilton, 2000; Perry, 2012; Lotherington & Jenson, 2011). Research into this phenomenon has largely focused on the general adolescent population. However, this narrative inquiry focuses on the experiences of four adolescents of color in New York City who live in poverty. Participants in this study visit a neighborhood library to access computers and the Internet. The researcher conducted semi-structure interviews in the library to evoke narratives about participants’ use of digital media and observed participants as they used the library computers. Analysis …

The War Against Teachers: How The Discourse Of A Nation At Risk Set The Agenda For Contemporary New Mexico Education Policy, Christine P. Wernle

Language, Literacy, and Sociocultural Studies ETDs

A Nation at Risk (ANAR) represented a paradigm shift in national education policy and public education discourse. This Critical Discourse Analysis utilizing the theoretical framework of Fairclough and Wodak (1997) found five major recurring themes between ANAR, national and state discourse, and NMTEACH (as referenced in the Final Report and Recommendations of the New Mexico Effective Teaching Task Force, 2011): 1) The Establishment of Pedagogic Authority; 2) The Common-Senseness of Education; 3) Anti-Teacher Rhetoric and the Artificial Support of Teachers; 4) Deracialisation of Educational Policy and Color-Blind Ideology; and 5) The Movement from Symbolic to Physical Violence. This study has …

Making Meaning Of Chinese International Graduate Students' Experiences In The Journey Of Learning English In The United States, Feng Qi

Language, Literacy, and Sociocultural Studies ETDs

This study focuses on how Chinese international graduate students make meanings of their experiences through everyday social communication with native English speaker to make adjustment to their new lives. Grounded on Vygotsky’s sociocultural theoretical framework, this study is conducted by the case study method to present the target group of students’ understanding of barriers encountered in social communication and their interpretation of the relations between self and the environment. Perezhivanie shed light on exploring the participants’ different attitudes and interpretation of the same life issues with the increasing length of residence in the United States. By experiencing a range of …

Experiences Of Adolescents And Drama: "This Is Bullsh*T. I Can't Do It", Erin K. Hulse Phd

Language, Literacy, and Sociocultural Studies ETDs

The purpose of this practitioner action research (PAR) study was to explore experiences of middle school students enrolled in a basic drama class, creating a performance piece that allowed for the representation of voices and opinions of participants. Seventh and eighth grade students developed work relating their perspectives on issues important to them--friendship, respect, equality, secrets, and moving on. Questions were 1) how are trust, ensemble, and community developed with the participants? 2) how do students respond to drama games, and 3) how do participants express their perspectives regarding issues using the creative drama strategies? Students created a performance of …

"We Might Well Have Viewed It As An Act Of War": The Normalization Of Exclusion In The Discourse Of American Educational Reform, Sandra Roth

Language, Literacy, and Sociocultural Studies ETDs

The purpose of this study is to examine the dominant ideology/discourse of educational reform through a critical discourse analysis of federal education reform documents with the goal of defining the discourse that naturalizes the exclusion of students of color and working class students from educational opportunity. The focus of the research is modern educational reform (1983 – present), which began with A Nation at Risk, the Reagan-era report within which the fear and blame aspects of modern reform discourse are created. Also within A Nation at Risk can be seen the advent of standardized testing discourse as we know …

From Project To Teacher To Student: A Qualitative Case Study Exploring The Complexities Of Student Writing At A Project-Based Learning High School, Jamie Mae Collins

Language, Literacy, and Sociocultural Studies ETDs

In this qualitative case, I explore the complexities of adolescent student writing within one project over the course of one trimester at a project-based learning (PBL) high school. With this study, I seek to both understand how students write within project work and open-up a conversation between the fields of adolescent literacy development and PBL. From my extensive collection of data—field notes; student writing samples; photographs; teacher artifacts; and audio records of teacher interviews, planning sessions, and implementation of writing activities—I sought to answer my overarching research question: What happens with student writing during one project in a PBL high …

Using The Aesthetic Stance To Achieve Historical Thinking, Heather J. Bassett Dahl

Language, Literacy, and Sociocultural Studies ETDs

This research study focuses on how an aesthetic reading stance with dystopian literature can aid teens in the development of historical thinking skills. My research is based on ideas from Louise Rosenblatt’s transactional theory and Sam Wineburg’s concept and definition for historical thinking along with the UCLA Standards for Historical Thinking. Historical thinking requires students to gain factual information but also experiences. As a social studies teacher, this practitioner inquiry study created an opportunity to explore how I might position students into the intellectual mindsets of historical thinking through fictional reading in the aesthetic stance. This study provided students the …

An Alternative Pathway To College: A Qualitative Case Study Of An Adult Learner In An Online Competency-Based Education (Cbe) Bachelor’S Degree Program, Fang Chen

Language, Literacy, and Sociocultural Studies ETDs

My dissertation research investigated an adult learner’s experience in an online competency-based education (CBE) bachelor’s degree program. The purpose of my study was to understand how CBE was transforming the practices of traditional post-secondary education and how CBE was serving the needs of students, particularly nontraditional adult students in higher education.

The methodology used in this dissertation research was a qualitative case study. The participant was an adult learner enrolled in an online CBE bachelor's degree program at a public institution. My case study used a series of face-to-face interviews, document analysis, participant-guided web tours, and participant observation to collect …