Education Commons^™

Constructive Alignment And The Curriculum: A Call For Improved Pedagogical Practices In Higher Education, Kerwin A. Livingstone

Kerwin A. Livingstone

From the turn of the century, there have been fervent calls to reform the curriculum in such a way that all students benefit. In light of heated debates, ‘constructivism’ was embraced as the new learning theory that would cause an improvement in student learning outcomes. Much later, ‘constructive alignment’ emerged, which sought to revolutionise the curriculum, significantly modifying pedagogical practices. Consequently, this article seeks to address constructive alignment in the curriculum and the urgent need to improve didactic practices in higher education. To this end, a discussion ensues on the curriculum and its necessity in pedagogy. The different approaches to …

Content-Based Instruction And Corpus Linguistics Curriculum For Early Advanced Efl Saudi Students, Ahmed Alattar

Master's Projects and Capstones

For many years now EFL teaching and learning in Saudi Arabia has suffered from a lack of authentic life-related and meaningful materials. Most of the EFL books available, therefore, pay more attention to form and less attention to meaning. This has resulted in many Saudi EFL students having difficulty improving their L2 proficiency. For this reason, I developed a curriculum that incorporates content-based instruction and corpus linguistics. The curriculum is divided into six units. The units focus on the five basic language skills: Reading, Writing, Listening, and Speaking. Each unit focuses on different content and includes examples form several corpus …

Creating Theatre-Based Curriculum For Use In The Esl/Efl Language Classroom: A Model, Alexandra Williams-Fleck

Master's Projects and Capstones

Many countries require the study of the English language as part of the standard curriculum in K-12 schools. Unfortunately, many students lack the interest and motivation to learn, despite English’s potential to open future academic and professional doors. This is particularly true for students living in countries where English is not a nationally spoken language. They receive no language support from their surrounding environment, which affects their rate of language acquisition. Coupled with a prevalence of out-of-context materials and non-native English-speaking teachers (NNESTs) who may be unable to impart the non-verbal and cultural implications of the language, students are at …

Teaching Health Literacy In Conjunction With Esl, Dora Lee

Master's Projects and Capstones

In the United States, many English as a Second Language (ESL) speakers who have limited English proficiency also have low levels of health literacy. The purpose of this project is to create a curriculum that ESL teachers can implement to improve the English language proficiency and the health literacy skills of adult ESL speakers with limited English proficiency residing in the United States. The curriculum is designed for teachers who work with ESL speakers who may be having trouble obtaining, processing, communicating, or managing health information due to language barriers.

Dreams Of A Motley Graduation Cap: A Proposal For Stand-Up Comedy In Higher Education, David Patterson

Student Scholar Symposium Abstracts and Posters

It is said that the most valuable tool an education at a liberal arts university is how it produces well rounded people with a better understanding of themselves and the world around them. To produce people not only aware of current issues, but with the toolbelt needed to assess them and shed new light. If this is true, then I propose that the goals of liberal arts university are synonymous with the goals of a comedian.

In this thesis, I mean to draw ties to the world of stand up comedy and within the world of liberal arts academia. I …

Developing A Curriculum Framework For Yellowstone’S Youth Conservation Corps, Kristen Schulte, Ana K. Houseal

Ana K Houseal

Yellowstone’s Youth Conservation Corps is a youth employment program founded on service learning concepts implemented through stewardship projects. Education is integrated into all projects through the Resource Education Curriculum (REC). To enhance the REC, in 2012-2013 a framework was created and implemented to assist in the development of 17 environmental educational (EE) lessons. Five major bodies of knowledge emerged: leadership, cultural heritage, stewardship, ecological relationships, and sustainability. These acted as a springboard for developing clear participant outcomes and a diversity of instructional strategies. The purpose of this session is to help strengthen interpretation programs by exploring a framework for curriculum …

Teaching About Propaganda: An Examination Of The Historical Roots Of Media Literacy, Renee Hobbs, Sandra Mcgee

Journal of Media Literacy Education

Contemporary propaganda is ubiquitous in our culture today as public relations and marketing efforts have become core dimensions of the contemporary communication system, affecting all forms of personal, social and public expression. To examine the origins of teaching and learning about propaganda, we examine some instructional materials produced in the 1930s by the Institute for Propaganda Analysis (IPA), which popularized an early form of media literacy that promoted critical analysis in responding to propaganda in mass communication, including in radio, film and newspapers. They developed study guides and distributed them widely, popularizing concepts from classical rhetoric and expressing them in …

Creating Critical Viewers, Renee Cherow-O'Leary

Journal of Media Literacy Education

This essay is a personal reflection on the implementation of Creating Critical Viewers, a national media literacy program sponsored by the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences (NATAS), an industry association, in 1995. The television industry’s decision to develop a media literacy curriculum in the 1990s was a powerful statement by certain broadcasters to take seriously the ethical and social questions being raised about the impact of their work and to learn how to address those questions through education.

Problem-Solving Pedagogy: A Foundation For Restructuring, Updating, And Improving Undergraduate Theory And Musicianship Curricula, Michael T. Simonelli

Masters Theses

The goal of this thesis is to provide the ideological and practical foundation for an improved approach to undergraduate theory and musicianship pedagogy. I will discuss the structure of conventional theory programs and explore problems inherent to traditional curriculum design. Problem-solving pedagogy, an approach rooted in creative composition and improvisation, will be presented as a complement to traditional theory pedagogy. Balancing problem-solving pedagogy with a more traditional pedagogical approach will provide a practical foundation for improving undergraduate theory and musicianship curricula.

Internationalization, Internalization, And Intersectionality Of Identity: A Critical Race Feminist Re-Images Curriculum, Theodorea Regina Berry

Faculty Publications

This poetry/paper article is a re-accounting, a poetic counterstory in curriculum, of the praxis of an African American female teacher-educator working against internalized notions of curriculum as standards by re-imagining curriculum through the lives of third grade students and her teacher education colleagues. Using critical race feminism (Berry, 2010; Berry & Mizelle, 2006; Wing, 2003) as her framework, the author will describe how she moves curriculum from internalized to connected, collective, and introspective. The author will provide her rationale for the necessity of such movements in curriculum and will conclude the paper with a discussion about the possibilities that exist …

Academic Engagement Of Hospitality Students, Donald G. Schoffstall, Susan W. Arendt, Eric A. Brown

Eric A. Brown

Student academic engagement has been researched over the years, drawing limited conclusions and suggestions for improvement. In this study, researchers utilized National Survey for Student Engagement data from a large Midwestern university to examine the academic engagement of hospitality management students and compared their engagement to business students. It was found that 50% of the participating hospitality students spent 11 h or more each week preparing for classes. For both groups, finances were reported as the biggest obstacle to academic progress. The research study provides an examination of hospitality students’ academic engagement. Suggestions are presented for hospitality educators.

Educating For A Life Of Virtue And Purpose: Starting Points, Terrance D. Olson

Brigham Young University-Public School Partnership Occasional Papers

No abstract provided.

Developing A Credit-Bearing Information Literacy Course, Andrew Kearns, Lola Bradley

Georgia International Conference on Information Literacy

Are you considering creating a credit-bearing information literacy course on your campus? Come join us and learn from our experience in creating LIBR 201, Strategies for Information Discovery, the University of South Carolina Upstate Library's first credit course. This interactive workshop will give you the chance to explore how you might create a course that is right for your campus while learning from our experiences. For each topic, we will briefly share how we developed as aspect of LIBR 201 before engaging in an activity that will help you to explore how this aspect of course development might be applied …

Preparing Climate Leaders: One Syllabus At A Time, Madeleine K. Charney

Madeleine K. Charney

Poster presentation at the 2014 Presidential Summit on Climate Leadership which highlighted the Sustainability Curriculum Initiative, a library-funded faculty mini-grant program that provides support for teaching sustainability courses across a wide range of disciplines. The poster illustrated the partnership between faculty members and subject specialist librarians. Also available was the Library’s Sustainability Research Guide, curriculum-building material which integrate library resources, photographs, and a White Paper outlining the history of the program. The Summit, held in Boston October 1-2, 2014 and hosted by Second Nature, was designed by Presidents for Presidents and Sustainability Staff in higher education. The focus of the …

Reforming High School American History Curricula: What Publicized Student Intolerance Can Teach Policymakers, Douglas E. Abrams

Faculty Publications

This article concerns the way public high schools teach American history under curricula and standards mandated by state law. “We’re raising young people who are, by and large, historically illiterate,” says David McCullough, the dean of American historians.

The article describes three recent nationally publicized incidents in which high school students belittled lynching and the Trail of Tears, evidently without appreciating the episodes’ legal and historical significance to African Americans and Native Americans respectively. Standards and textbooks typically recognize diversity and multiculturalism, but research and surveys indicate that classroom teachers frequently sanitize or avoid discomforting topics that might trigger complaints, …

Context, Curriculum, And Community Matter: Leadership Practices Of Primary School Principals In The Otago Province Of New Zealand, Darrell Latham, Lisa F. Smith, K. Anne Wright

The Rural Educator

This research examined the leadership practices of rural primary school principals in the Otago province of New Zealand. Principals of large (>150 students) and small (students) rural schools served as participants in an investigation to learn how their practice creates and maintains effective rural schools. The goals were to investigate the interrelationships of principal, curriculum, and community and effective leadership in their schools. A mixed methods approach included a survey completed by rural principals (n = 63), followed by observations and interviews. Key findings were that leadership practices varied across contexts of large rural and small rural schools; having …

Internationalizing Curriculum And Pedagogy In Higher Education, Krishna Bista, Charlotte Foster

Krishna Bista

A Gross National Happiness Infused Curriculum: The Promise Of A More Meaningful Education In Bhutan, Sonam Zangmo

Masters Theses

Schooling in our modern society is aimed primarily to secure a career so that individuals will find their places in the political and economic systems. However, many believe that education should be reconceived so that student skills and attributes are understood more fully in relation to their impact on the local as well as the global community. The Gross National Happiness infused curriculum aspires to facilitate the holistic education that would address some of the humanistic values we need in this era. In this paper I study the concepts of Gross National Happiness and how the Gross National Happiness infused …

The Writing Is The Wall: Expanding The Means Of Communication With Multimodal Approaches To Teaching Composition, Matthew Williams Schering

All Student Theses

As the paradigm of communication shifts into the digital realm, it seems only logical that instructors’ pedagogical approaches to teaching writing should shift as well. Though there is still much merit to teaching tradition approaches to composition, are there more modern methods that could be employed to teach communication in a contemporary setting? This thesis shall examine the role that new media can play in a multimodal composition course, as new media seems to be the most effective way to teach rhetorical communication skills in a modern setting. By looking at new media elements, such as podcasts, wikis, and images, …

Politics Are Crushing The Standards, Dave Powell

Education Faculty Publications

The recent news that Oklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin signed a bill to, in the parlance of the times, "repeal and replace" the common-core standards in her state was surprising, to say the least, notwithstanding a legal challenge to the repeal filed in the Oklahoma Supreme Court by parents, teachers, and state board of education members on June 25. Before Gov. Fallin was against the standards, she supported them. [excerpt]

2014-2015 Ursinus College Course Catalogue, Office Of The Registrar

Ursinus College Catalogues, 1869-Present

A digital copy of the 2014-2015 Ursinus College Catalog. It contains details of the curriculum, departmental requirements and courses of instruction as well as core requirements such as the Common Intellectual Experience (CIE) and Independent Learning Experience (ILE). Academic policies, special opportunities and graduation requirements are also outlined.

Ethical Reasoning Development In Project-Based Learning, Elizabeth Pluskwik, Puteri S. Megat Hamari

Integrated Engineering Department Publications

This paper will describe the method of ethics instruction in a specific project-based learning program with the aim to improve the current level of moral reasoning skills in the engineering students enrolled in the program. The Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET) and the National Society of Professional Engineers (NSPE) have endorsed efforts to improve the teaching of ethics in the engineering curriculum. Criterion 3-f of the ABET outcomes,specifically calls for student attainment of an understanding of ethical and professional responsibility. In response, engineering educators seek to develop curriculum to improve moral reasoning skills, which should lead to increased …

Report Of A Curriculum Used In A Peer-Delivered Intervention To Reduce Obesity Of Adolescents In Southern Appalachia And Its Relationship To The National Health Education Standards, Diana Mozen, William Dalton, Taylor Mckeehan, Deborah Slawson

International Journal of Health Sciences Education

Adolescent obesity in Southern Appalachian is among the highest in the nation. Even though adolescent obesity is a major public health concern, effective interventions are limited. Team Up for Healthy Living is a cluster-randomized control trial developed to test the effectiveness of a cross-peer intervention with high school students focusing on healthy eating and physical activity. This instructional article describes the 8-week curriculum developed and utilized by Team Up for Healthy Living with an emphasis on the relationship to National Health Education Standards. This is important given the standards were created to promote and support health-enhancing behaviors for students all …

Perceptions, Beliefs And Practices About Technology Among Teachers In A Jamaican Infant School, Suzette Anissia Kelly

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this interview study was to describe and explain perceptions, beliefs, and practices about technology among four teachers at a Jamaican infant school, by answering: What are teachers' perceptions and beliefs about the role of technology in young children's learning? What are the practices regarding technology among Jamaican infant school teachers? I used criterion sampling to identify participants for my inquiry. For data collection, I used semi-structured interviews, teachers' lesson plans, and my reflective journal. I applied a socio-cultural approach (Rogoff, 1990) for the data analysis to make sense of the teachers' perceptions and articulated practices. The findings …

Blogging Beyond Blackboard For Deeper Learning, Marie A. Hulme, Pilar Munday

English Faculty Publications

Presentation by Marie Hulme and Pilar Munday at the Fairfield University Center for Academic Excellence Annual Conference on Innovative Pedagogy & Course Redesign May 29-30, 2014.

Improving Curriculum Design And Development: A Case Study From The University Of Guyana, Kerwin A. Livingstone

Kerwin A. Livingstone

The curriculum is a very important document which details how learning and teaching is to be done. Since this document is a guide for learning, it must be properly planned, designed and developed, if it is to achieve success in its implementation stage. Bearing this in mind, this case study centres its attention on the analysis and evaluation of a Spanish course curriculum document from the University of Guyana. The aim of this paper is to highlight those areas that are deficient in the current course curriculum, analyse and revise them, and make recommendations for improvements. Information about the University …

Preparing Librarians To Be Campus Leaders Through Mapping And Integrating Information Literacy Into Curriculum, Sharon A. Weiner, Li Wang

Libraries Faculty and Staff Presentations

Curriculum mapping is a process by which curricula are methodically examined to determine where information literacy (IL) capabilities are, or should be taught during formal coursework. Curriculum integration is the process of intentionally integrating IL capability at the points in coursework when students need to master those capabilities and competencies. During this session, librarians will develop an understanding of curriculum mapping and how to integrate IL in curricula. This knowledge prepares librarians for campus leadership, since the curriculum is the primary focus of teaching and learning and affects the entire campus.

The curriculum in higher education can be viewed as: …

The Formation Of A Department: Theatre At William And Mary 1926-1963, Joseph Thomas

The William & Mary Educational Review

From the foundation of the dramatic club in 1926 to the establishment of an independent academic Department of Theatre and Speech in 1963, the William and Mary Theatre experienced many changes as it grew from an extracurricular pursuit into a degree-granting program. Developments in facilities, curriculum, and local theatrical activity all contributed to shaping the organization of the department. This investigation uses information from faculty memoirs, course catalogs, departmental reports to presidents, and news publications to argue that many external factors influenced the particular way in which this department manifested. This work is intended to contribute to a broader literature …

Assessing College Students' Understanding Of Acid Base Chemistry Concepts, Yanjun Wan

All Dissertations

Typically most college curricula include three acid base models: Arrhenius', Bronsted-Lowry's, and Lewis'. Although Lewis' acid base model is generally thought to be the most sophisticated among these three models, and can be further applied in reaction mechanisms, most general chemistry curricula either do not include Lewis' acid base model, or quickly mention it at the end of the acid base chapter, because of the concern that Lewis' model may confuse general chemistry students (Shaffer 2006). While such a disconnection in curriculum might put students to disadvantage as they try to construct solid and coherent acid base mental models, there …

Knowledge, Perceptions, And Outcomes Of Agricultural Communications Curriculum In Arkansas Secondary Agricultural Classrooms, Carley Payne Calico

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this mixed method study was to assess the effectiveness of agricultural communications curriculum developed and incorporated into a semester-long agricultural leadership and communications course for secondary agricultural education programs in Arkansas. This study was comprised of three parts including a pilot test, teacher training assessment, and a descriptive field test over a two-year period. For the pilot test portion of the study, students (N = 297) participated in newly developed instructional modules (careers, writing, design, and multimedia) predetermined by a committee of agricultural education and communications faculty at the University of Arkansas. The pilot test indicated students' …