Education Commons^™

Building Resilience Through Nature Connection And Storytelling To Face The Climate Crisis And The Ecological Crisis, Adam Hettler

School of Education and Leadership Student Capstone Projects

Climate Change is creating more and more severe impacts on our planet. Impacts include more destructive storms, increased temperatures, more wildfires and therefore smoke. Additionally, destruction of habitat is threatening species around the world, who are also struggling to survive the changing climate. Many young people around the world are very worried about the future, and many teachers feel unprepared to teach students about climate change. This project seeks to provide a resource for teachers and students to process the science of climate change by connecting to nature. It asks:

How can educators use digital storytelling tools to develop students’ …

In What Ways Are Schools, Districts And States Proactively Supporting The Mental Health Of Their Teachers To Reduce Teacher Turnover And Burnout?, Lauren Meyer

School of Education and Leadership Student Capstone Projects

Teacher mental health is of high concern when looking at the number of teachers leaving the profession. Schools are facing high levels of turnover due to teacher burnout. This issue did not arise as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, but the number of teachers leaving has increased since 2020. Teachers are feeling burnt out due to underlying issues of the education system. This research involves the reasons why teachers are feeling burnt out, what educators can do to help build self-resilience, and what leadership teams can implement to support teachers within their schools. The research goes broader and identifies …

“Using Culturally Responsive Educational Practices To Help Campus Communities Reach Their Zero-Waste Goals”, Ellen Gurrola

School of Education and Leadership Student Capstone Projects

Culturally responsive teaching is a term that has increased in popularity amongst educators over the past decade. However, it is not always addressed within zero-waste education on college campuses across the United States. This paper uses a critical lens to connect research from the book Culturally Responsive Teaching and The Brain with zero-waste practices and education on college campuses. The presentation created for this project is targeted towards college students to educate them about zero-waste and culturally responsive teaching. The content in the presentation challenges students to create a path towards zero-waste by: building collectivism across the campus community, addressing …

Tying Community Science And Social Justice Together In An Urban Biology Class To Foster Environmental Responsibility, Sarah Graham

School of Education and Leadership Student Capstone Projects

Research shows that students who are involved in projects within their communities feel more sense of belonging and connection to their space. This is also true when discussing environmental justice. Students who have been historically marginalized can feel more comfort within navigating science. The unit plan designed for this project addressed the research question: How can community science and social justice be tied together in an urban biology classroom to foster environmental responsibility? The unit plan combined the knowledge of community science which focuses on sense of place with social justice within science or critical pedagogy in order to support …

Creating Inclusive Spaces: Using Book Clubs To Increase Diverse Literature In Schools, Clare Ng

School of Education and Leadership Student Capstone Projects

Multiple studies have identified that many groups of underrepresented students, including non-Christians, LGBTQ+, Native-Americans, children of immigrant families, and youth of color, feel invisible or not included in school settings because there is a lack of visibility of non-dominant groups in school, or a lack of policies and practices that support the needs and experiences of non-dominant groups. This may include a lack of representation in recognized celebrated holidays, curriculum topics, or literature discussed in school. This capstone project will focus on how we can create inclusive spaces for students to promote positive school culture by obtaining diverse literature for …

Supporting Social-Emotional Learning With Diversely Representative Children’S Literature: Toolbox Supplementary Read Aloud Lesson Plans, Taylor Rose

School of Education and Leadership Student Capstone Projects

Read aloud texts play an essential role in shaping social-emotional learning skills, implementing routines, and bolstering early literacy skills in the early elementary classroom. Yet, despite the increasing racial and cultural diversity of the United States student population, children’s literature often lacks meaningful, intersectional representations of diversity. This capstone project pairs diverse children’s literature with the Toolbox social-emotional learning curriculum to explore the question, How can early elementary students' social-emotional skills develop through the intentional reading and conversation about children's literature featuring characters, authors, and themes of diverse and intersectional identities? The research concludes that the representational children’s literature can …

Empowering And Educating Lgbtq+ Middle Schoolers Through Intentional Instruction Of Queer Topics In Gsa Clubs, John Gallagher

School of Education and Leadership Student Capstone Projects

For decades, GSA clubs have provided LGBTQ+ students with a safe space within their schools to connect with other queer students, and seek guidance from the club adviser(s). GSA clubs offer a vital learning opportunity for students to learn more about queer topics, which often are not discussed with their families at home. However, there is a considerable lack of accessible and ready to use curriculum for GSA clubs, particularly at the middle school level. This capstone creates a cohesive and logically sequenced curriculum of ten lessons about LGBTQ+ topics to be used for middle school GSA clubs. The lessons …

A Framework For Incorporating Best Practices To Provide Foundational Literacy Skills To English Learners For Sustained Academic Success, Gabriel Arechigo

School of Education and Leadership Student Capstone Projects

English Learners (ELs) have experienced a lack of sustained academic success for generations, especially compared to their non-EL peers. The cause of this experience is multifaceted and the importance of making its history visible cannot be stressed enough. This capstone aims to empower individuals with the knowledge of this topic and create empathy for the EL community so that awareness becomes actionable and change is demanded for the way foundational literacy skills are taught in public schools. Knowledge for this topic includes a historical context of language policies, theories of learning, literacy instruction, and misconceptions stemming from these facets that …

When You Look Into The Mirror And See Nothing: Psychic Disequilibrium And Its Relationship With Impostor Phenomenon In Hmong Women Leaders In The United States, Mai Nhia Xiong-Chan

School of Education and Leadership Student Capstone Theses and Dissertations

Xiong-Chan, M. (2023). When You Look into the Mirror and See Nothing: Psychic Disequilibrium and its relationship with Impostor Phenomenon in Hmong Women Leaders in the United States.

Hmong have made considerable educational and socio-economic strides in the United States, post immigration after the Vietnam War. This has been achieved through significant challenges such as language, culture, discrimination, poverty and racism. This phenomenological study focuses specifically on Hmong women leaders in the United States and, through qualitative research, examines how psychic disequilibrium and impostor phenomenon have impacted their journeys. Using thematic analysis this study focused on the following research questions: …

How Can Udl Be Used To Increase Equity And Access At An Abe Site?, Karen Cook

School of Education and Leadership Student Capstone Projects

Universal Design for Learning (UDL) has been shown to reduce barriers through all levels of education. Similarly, there is research showing the effectiveness of UDL to increase equity and inclusion. Given the diverse population of Adult Basic Education (ABE) and the overrepresentation of students with a learning disability, UDL makes sense as a curriculum shift. The professional development project was designed to give ABE teachers tools for implementing UDL that can be used in various classroom settings, regardless of course level or area of study, so that there can be consistency across all classes at an ABE site rather than …

Subverting The Academic Language Hegemony: Implementing Language Architecture And Similar Pedagogies, Viviana Chavez Garcia

School of Education and Leadership Student Capstone Projects

The field of English language teaching is continually evolving in order for teachers to best serve the students. The field’s connected history with colonization and racism must be acknowledged in order to confront the reasons why academic English is valued higher than all other forms of English and other languages. Under the current framework, teachers are asking multilingual students to change their language in order to reverse their own oppression. According to language architecture, the languages that students bring to class are already sufficiently cognitively sophisticated to achieve content standards and participate in academic activities. This is where the foundation …

Creating An Elementary Reading Curriculum That Leads All Students To More Equitable Success, Ian Lyon

School of Education and Leadership Student Capstone Projects

Each year history repeats itself in the United States with high numbers of elementary students not being able to read proficiently, and an even higher number affecting BIPOC students. To address the opportunity gaps, teachers need an easy-to-follow road map of interventions led by the science of reading, culturally sustaining pedagogies, and student motivational strategies. This professional development capstone project will allow teachers to learn these three topics, one in each half day in the beginning of the school year. The first day will focus on the Science of Reading (SoR) with structured literacy influences from the Simple View of …

Food Justice And Urban Agriculture: Using City Spaces To Foster Equity, Jessica Giese

School of Education and Leadership Student Capstone Theses and Dissertations

In an increasingly urban society, urban agriculture creates opportunities to address inequalities in access to healthy foods and bridge gaps in our food systems. While solving the problems of food and environmental injustice demands large-scale changes at a systemic level, urban agriculture can promote community engagement, education, and sovereignty, empowering city residents to gain control over their resources and access to nutritious foods. This research seeks to explain how two very different urban agricultural projects are impacting their communities through access, engagement, and education. Intersections Food Forest is a neighborhood project that utilizes an empty city lot to cultivate perennial …

How Affinity Groups Can Help With Bipoc Teacher Support, Retention, And Growth, Emily Dech

School of Education and Leadership Student Capstone Projects

Our classrooms have become increasingly diverse. Teachers of Color (TOC) make up about 20% of U.S. public school teachers while Students of Color represent about 52% of public school students. It becomes difficult to model affirmative acknowledgement of diversity in the classroom when most of the adults fit into the demographics of white, cisgender, middle class, and female. To help all students, but especially BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) students, we must first address the importance of Teachers of Color and the crucial need to support and retain them through having BIPOC affinity groups. This brings about the question: …

History As A Catalyst For Effective Activism: A Project Based Curriculum, Seth Bobrow

School of Education and Leadership Student Capstone Projects

Many history classes lack ways to link content to actions or skills that students can use. At the same time research suggests that activist practices are skills that are underutilized in classrooms because teachers don’t have the resources or time to teach them. Therefore this project demonstrates how history can be used to teach effective activist practices. It identifies four elements of activism that improve efficacy. They include: selecting the government as a target, strategic use of framing, utilizing physical space in addition to digital space and participating in organizations characterized by strong structures. By combining the Case Study, Texts …

Students Writing Restorative Justice, Rebekah Rentzel

School of Education and Leadership Student Capstone Projects

The need for systemic change has never been stronger. Schools are at a breaking point. In the wake of the uncertainties of COVID and the injustice seen in the racial uprisings after the police murder of George Floyd of 2020, students are dealing with trauma that needs to be addressed in schools. The practices of restorative justice, when applied with a cultural shift within the schools, are powerful ways to support students in their healing (Morgan, 2021). Studies find that when students are at the center of creating a restorative system, it is more effective because it directly reflects the …

“Use Your Teacher Voice”: How A Podcast Could Support Esol Teachers’ Voices In Advocacy, Veronica Green

School of Education and Leadership Student Capstone Projects

It is clear from the current research that there is a lack of training at all levels for teachers that are advocating for ELLs and themselves. With the changing roles and needs of ESOL teachers working with marginalized EL communities, the push for co-teaching, and the emphasis on more collaboration, this project sets out to create a podcast in order to support listener learners in finding and amplifying their voices in advocacy. With a conceptual theoretical base, Bakhtinian Dialogisim, in conjunction with the chosen Chat Show genre in podcasting, these dialogues are ripe for participants to share their stories and …

The Benefits Of Incorporating Comprehensive Sex Education Into A Curriculum As Early As Kindergarten, Emma Laughlin

School of Education and Leadership Student Capstone Projects

Research has demonstrated that there are a variety of benefits that students, schools, and communities experience when comprehensive sex education is implemented. These benefits include positive changes in student mental and sexual health, positive changes in violence reduction amongst students, and positive changes in community norms. The capstone project created as a result of this research is a website that advocates for comprehensive sex education in the state of Minnesota. The website is meant to be a resource for both parents and educators to learn about comprehensive curriculum, the current sex education standards and where they are lacking, and to …

Integrating Translanguaging Into The Classroom: A Professional Development For Primary Elementary Teachers, Ashli Meyer

School of Education and Leadership Student Capstone Projects

Research has shown that translanguaging strategies can positively benefit language learners inside schools today. The benefits of translanguaging strategies can be incorporated into the classroom daily. This project incorporates useful strategies and the benefits that are connected to translanguaging into a three session, professional development series for K-2 general educators. The series begins by introducing translanguaging and the benefits aligned with translanguaging along with benefits of bilingualism. Each session will also introduce a new translanguaging strategy that educators can introduce into their classrooms. The three strategies from the framework provided in the CUNY-NYSIEB guide include building a translanguaging classroom, content …

Looking In To Speak Up: How White Educators Can Utilize Literacy To More Confidently And Competently Discuss Race And Racism With Early Elementary Students, Morgan Hanlon

School of Education and Leadership Student Capstone Projects

literacy to more confidently and competently discuss race and racism with early elementary students? Research indicates children are ready to begin discussing race and racism as early as three or four years old, but that educators tend to avoid these conversations assuming their students are not yet ready to handle these topics. This paper reviews literature on racism in education, understanding bias, developmental readiness, and literacy resources supporting discussions of race. The project created in connection with this research question involves a five session professional development course aimed at supporting educators in feeling more confident and competent in discussing these …

Restorative Justice Practices And Their Impacts In Elementary Classrooms, Mary Miles

School of Education and Leadership Student Capstone Projects

This capstone sought to answer the question: What are the most effective ways to implement restorative justice practices into elementary classrooms in order to create a positive learning community? This capstone analyzed the historical need for restorative justice practices in classrooms by describing the detrimental effects of zero tolerance policies and the school to prison pipeline. It analyzed the roots of restorative justice practices in indigenous cultures and examined how culture can influence the way conflict is addressed. This capstone examined the need for interactive staff development on how to implement restorative practices in the classroom. It discussed several restorative …

The Decentering Of Native English Speaking Teachers In English As A Lingua Franca Contexts, Seamus Folliard

School of Education and Leadership Student Capstone Projects

English’s spread throughout the world has made it the most widely studied second language in the world and the de facto lingua franca. Though the purpose of a lingua franca is to allow speakers with varied native languages to have a common language to communicate with, there are historical and social factors such as colonialism and racism that have created inequities in the field between native English speaking teachers and their non-native English speaking teacher colleagues. This project aims to to present the conditions that led to inequities, address discriminatory practices in the field, and provide opportunities for newly minted …

Fo(U)R Friends: The Social, Emotional, And Academic Effects Of An Extracurricular Program For Secondary Newcomer Students, Emma Johnson

School of Education and Leadership Student Capstone Projects

Research has highlighted a variety of lived experiences, special assets, and unique needs that newcomer students and English Learners (ELs) bring to our schools and communities. The United States K-12 public education system largely focuses on academic needs, failing to honor students’ strengths or address their social-emotional learning and identity development. This project is an extracurricular program model for secondary newcomer students and their peers who want to engage in community and multicultural learning, encouraging positive social, emotional, and academic growth. The project is presented in the form of a handbook. In the handbook, program leaders can find introductory lesson …

Linguistic Justice In Peer Tutoring, Emily Livingston

School of Education and Leadership Student Capstone Projects

Academic standards in higher education often require students to conform to Standard American English language practices—a linguistically unsound approach to language use that can be harmful to multilingual and multidialectal learners. Peer tutors in Writing and Tutoring Centers often find themselves enforcing these standards without reflection. This capstone project addressed the following questions: How have the monolingual language policies of the U.S. education system encouraged linguistic biases? How might linguistic biases lead to inequitable outcomes for multilingual students? What training and education can be provided to peer tutors to critically reflect on and begin to address these inequities while tutoring …

Teachers Of Color And American Indian Teachers In Suburban Schools: Retaining Through Resilience And Community Cultural Wealth, Dua Yang

School of Education and Leadership Student Capstone Projects

The capstone question in this paper was: How can a Community Cultural Wealth (CCW) Model be used to develop the resilience, resistance, and retention of Teachers of Color and American Indian Teachers (TOCAITs) in suburban school districts? The paper addressed the contextual challenges in the suburban school districts and ways to retain Teachers of Color and American Indian Teachers (TOCAITs) in this context. The literature reviewed how suburban school districts responded to demographic shifts. It highlighted issues around systems and practices that were colorblind and inequitable to the diverse learners it served. In addition, these contextual problems were connected to …

Antiracist Praxis In The Adult English Classroom, Cydnee Sanders

School of Education and Leadership Student Capstone Projects

The research question for this capstone was: How can educators of adult English learners utilize antiracist praxis like translanguaging to more deeply value learners’ linguistic and cultural backgrounds and experiences? As the field of teaching English to adults grows, educators need to be aware of the colonial history of English learning that is harmful to learners (Motha, 2014). Through colonizing ideologies of monolingualism and standardization, adult learners of English constantly get messages of inferiority towards their linguistic and cultural identities. As educators, it is our responsibility to combat these racist practices in our classroom and community with antiracist praxis. Kendi …

Systems Thinking Teaching Strategies Using The Un Sustainable Development Goals To Help Best Prepare Students To Be Future Ready, Elizabeth Hickey

School of Education and Leadership Student Capstone Projects

The United Nations has outlined seventeen sustainable development goals that high school students will have to tackle to have a sustainable future. Schools must take meaningful action in teaching their students systems thinking strategies to best prepare them to be empathic, self-aware, innovative, resilient communicators that are equipped to be sustainable global citizens. This capstone project takes ninth grade students through a student-choice inquiry project to tackle the challenges of how their school’s sustainable initiatives can become more sustainable in order to answer the question, How can I best integrate the United Nation Sustainable Development Goals into my Understanding By …

Culturally Sustaining Social Studies: Practical Applications To A High School Elective Course, Emily Thomas

School of Education and Leadership Student Capstone Projects

Scholars including Delpit, Ladson-Billings, Chandler, Paris and Alim remind us that schools must be a place where students’ cultures are validated, centered, and sustained. Social studies classrooms are optimally positioned to allow students to explore issues around race, class, gender, and other forms of (in)justice. Yet while many social studies teachers wish to teach in alignment with the theory of culturally sustaining pedagogy, powerful factors make its tenets difficult to enact in the classroom. This project embedded culturally sustaining pedagogy into curriculum design for a high school Environmental History elective. Using Tomlinson and McTighe’s (2006) Understanding by Design + Differentiated …

How Can Restorative Justice Practices Be Utilized To Create A Positive Classroom Climate In A K-2 Setting?, Ella Brown

School of Education and Leadership Student Capstone Projects

Students have the right to feel safe, loved, and valued in every school. Schools worldwide are shifting their approaches to discipline and classroom management by forgoing zero-tolerance policies and exclusionary practices. Restorative Justice in Education (RJE) is a growing movement taking the place of traditional forms of discipline. Restorative justice is more than just a buzzword. It is a way to transform learning communities, relationships, and classrooms. From personal experiences in the classroom and throughout my research, the author was encouraged to provide more teachers with resources to implement restorative justice practices into their classrooms. The question, How can Restorative …

Critical Race Theory: Measuring Anti-Black Sentiment In South Korean English Education, Kenya Nelson

School of Education and Leadership Student Capstone Theses and Dissertations

This research study examines how anti-Black sentiment influences Black teachers’ experiences in South Korea, using the critical race theory (CRT) framework to analyze various forms of anti-Black sentiment (ABS) and explore correlations between major tenets of CRT and types of ABS. Previous research has concluded that Black teachers continue to face overt racism in South Korea. Also, there continues to be a lack of empathy or disinterest in discussing racism in Korea. Unfortunately, the amount of research that focuses on the experiences of Black teachers teaching English in East Asia, primarily South Korea, is scarce. This study will add to …