Education Commons^™

Enriching Science And Math Through Engineering, Adrienne Redmond, Julie Thomas, Karen High, Margaret Scott, Pat Jordan, Jean Dockers

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

This case study reviewed the collaborative efforts of university engineers, teacher educators, and middle school teachers to advance sixth- and seventh-grade students’ learning through a series of project-based engineering activities. This two-year project enriched regular school curricula by introducing real-world applications of science and mathematics concepts that expanded opportunities for creativity and problem-solving, introduced problem-based learning, and provided after-school programming (for girls only) led by engineering students from the local university. This engineering education initiative showed significant impact on students’ (1) confidence in science and mathematics; (2) effort toward science and mathematics; (3) awareness of engineering; and (4) interest in …

A Distance-Delivered Teacher Education Program For Rural Culturally And Linguistically Diverse Teacher Candidates, Gayla Lohfink, Amanda Morales, Gail Shroyer, Sally Yahnke, Cecilia Hernandez

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

This article describes a collaborative, distance-delivered, teacher preparation program for rural, culturally and linguistically diverse (CLD) teacher candidates. Multiple institutions partnered with one university in order to diversify the teaching force in the region and meet the needs of CLD students living there. In describing the program's design and implementation phases, a focus on cultural responsiveness to the candidates ' needs, their rural settings, and high populations of Latino/a students in the rural areas in which they were trained is presented. Assessment of each implementation phase guided program practice for the participants ' training as effective teachers. Relevant discussion indicates …

Teacher? Learner? Both!, Deborah L. Hanuscin, Delinda Van Garderen, Deepika Menon, Jeni Davis, Eun Lee, Rena Smith

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

February 2011 55 It may be cold and snowy, but it’s not too early to begin seeking summer professional development (PD) opportunities. Summer is a great time for teachers to attend PD workshops and learn new techniques to bring back to their classrooms. However, teachers often wonder if by the time September rolls around, they’ll remember everything they learned. Will they have the necessary knowledge and skills to implement new ideas and content in their classrooms? Teachers often have questions about how the strategies they learned at the workshop will work with their students. Wouldn’t it be great if teachers …

Navigating The Waves Of Social And Political Capriciousness: Inspiring Perspectives From Dream-Eligible Immigrant Students, Amanda Morales, Socorro Herrera, Kevin Murry

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

This article examines the psychological and sociological impacts of the proposed Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act and instate tuition legislation on DREAM-eligible students in the Midwestern United States. The researchers sought to capture the lived experiences of undocumented immigrant students through their rich interpretations of current immigration policy and how participants described their situation, their identity, and their dreams in relation to the volatility of their external environment.

Resumen: Este manuscrito examina el impacto psicológico y sociológico del propuesto Acto de Desarrollo, Asistencia, y Educación para Menores Extranjeros (DREAM) y la ley de educación para …

Common Ground With A Common Faith: Dewey’S Idea Of The “Religious”, Bradley Baurain

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

In A Common Faith, Dewey rejects organized religion and belief in the supernatural, instead arguing for an authentically “religious” attitude which this interpretive essay analyzes in terms of four propositions: 1) Knowledge is unifi ed. 2) Knowledge is democratic. 3) Th e pursuit of moral ideals requires moral faith. 4) Th e authority for moral ideals is experience as explored via inquiry. Th e author responds from the perspective of his own religious faith and outlines conceptual relationships with modern spirituality in education writers. Th e common ground is that the “religious” must be seen as a signifi cant way …

What Makes The Anthropology Of Educational Policy Implementation 'Anthropological'?, Edmund T. Hamann, Lisa Rosen

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

As sociocultural theorists (e.g., Gutierrez and Rogoff, 2003; Orellana, 2009) have recently asserted, "culture" is something one does, rather than something one has. That is, human beings produce, perform, and reproduce culture every day. Policy implementation — or what Milbrey McLaughlin (1987: 175) has called "muddling through" — is deeply implicated in these processes of cultural production and thus invites anthropological inquiry. Indeed, it is possible to link the study of policy implementation to some of the foundational efforts of anthropology, particularly cultural anthropology (Wedel et at., 2005). Our discussion in this chapter thus borrows explicitly and centrally from an …

Feminism, Neoliberalism, And Social Studies, Mardi Schmeichel

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

The purpose of this article is to analyze the sparse presence of women in social studies education and to consider the possibility of a confluence of feminism and neoliberalism within the most widely distributed National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS) publication, Social Education. Using poststructural conceptions of discourse, the author applies second-wave feminist theory and Fraser’s (2009) work on neoliberalism as lenses to illuminate the limited attention to women and feminism in this text during the 1980s in order to better understand how women have been marginalized in social studies education and to consider the possibility that the …

Creating A “Third Space” In Student Teaching: Implications For The University Supervisor’S Status As Outsider, Alexander Cuenca, Mardi Schmeichel, Brandon M. Butler, Todd Dinkelman, Joseph R. Nichols Jr.

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

The work of teacher education during student teaching typically takes place in two distinct “spaces”: placement sites and college/university settings. The program featured in this article is structured in ways that clearly mark out those two spaces. Yet this configuration led our university supervisors, whose work primarily took place in the field, to feel like “outsiders.” To redress this concern, a third learning space was incorporated into our student teaching seminar. We suggest that “third spaces” in combination with return-to-campus courses not only mitigates the peripherality of university supervisors but also amplifies the influence of a teacher preparation program.

Developing Pck For Teaching Teachers Through A Mentored Internship In Teacher Professional Development, Deborah L. Hanuscin, Deepika Menon, Eun Ju Lee, Suleyman Cite

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

Pedagogical Content Knowledge (PCK), according to Shulman (1987), is what makes possible the transformation of disciplinary content into forms that are accessible and attainable by students. This includes knowledge of how particular subject matter topics, problems, and issues can be organized, represented, and adapted to the diverse interests and abilities of learners and presented for instruction (Magnusson, Krajcik, & Borko, 1999). Recently, researchers have argued that a parallel form of PCK exists for science teacher educators (Abell et al., 2009). Nonetheless, little is known about the process through which teacher educators develop their PCK, and more specifically, how doctoral programs …

Seriously Popular: Rethinking 19th-Century American Literature Through The Teaching Of Popular Fiction, Lauren Gatti

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

A teacher breathes new life into canonical works—such as those of Hawthorne, Melville, and Longfellow—by asking students to examine the differences and similarities between their own reading tastes and those of 19th-century American readers.

taste. What do our students expect from the books they read? And that question sur faces a related one about readers in Hawthorne's time: What did 19th-century readers expect from their texts and how did Melville's and Hawthorne's work address or interact with those expectations? Curious about the connections between my stu dents' reading tastes and those of 19th-century readers, I read Nina Baym's excellent text …

Exploring Us Textbooks’ Treatment Of The Estimation Of Linear Measurements, Kuo-Liang Chang, Lorraine Males, Aaron Mosier, Funda Gonulates

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

Learning to estimate a linear measurement is critical in becoming a successful measurer. Research indicates that the teaching of the estimation of linear measurement is quite open and that instruction does not make explicit to students how to carry out estimation work. Because written curriculum has been identified as one of the main sources affecting teachers’ instruction and students’ learning, this study examined how estimation of linear measurement tasks were presented to students in three US elementary mathematics curricula to see how much and in what ways these tasks were presented in an open manner. The principal result was that …

Evolution And Personal Religious Belief: Christian University Biology-Related Majors’ Search For Reconciliation, Mark Winslow, John Staver, Lawrence C. Scharmann

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

The goal of this study was to explore Christian biology-related majors’ perceptions of conflicts between evolution and their religious beliefs. This naturalistic study utilized a case study design of 15 undergraduate biology-related majors at or recent biology-related graduates from a mid-western Christian university. The broad sources of data were interviews, course documents, and observations. Outcomes indicate that most participants were raised to believe in creationism, but came to accept evolution through evaluating evidence for evolution, negotiating the literalness of Genesis, recognizing evolution as a non-salvation issue, and observing professors as Christian role models who accept evolution. This study lends heuristic …