Education Commons^™

Intersections Between Science And Social Justice: A Conversation With Liza Finkel, Liza Finkel, Maika Yeigh

Northwest Journal of Teacher Education

In preparation for the special issue: Cascading Crises: Power, Equity and Liberation, the Editors of NWJTE sat down for a conversation with Dr. Liza Finkel, a Science Teacher Educator in the Graduate School of Education and Counseling at Lewis & Clark College. Dr. Finkel’s passions include science (especially geology), finding intersections between science and social justice and helping new teachers learn to include those connections in their teaching, knitting, cooking, birding, and reading mystery novels with women protagonists.

Addressing Climate Change Anomie In Teacher Education, Teresa Anne Fowler

Northwest Journal of Teacher Education

This research project sought to understand how preservice teachers explore their relationship with Science and confidence in teaching about climate change in Science education amid a culture of denial regarding the impact of the climate crisis. Using data from three cohorts of students in an elementary Science methods course, this paper shares the context of climate change acceptance in the province of Alberta, Canada, the fossil fuel economic hub of Canada, and how using Journell’s framework for controversial issues alongside a critical energy literacy framework using inquiry, supported preservice teachers to address their hesitancy in Science classrooms to engage with …

A Student Bill Of Rights, Balkhiis Noor, Olivia Monestime, Julia Hines, David Peterson Del Mar

Amplify: A Journal of Writing-as-Activism

This Student Bill of Rights was created by two sections of Immigration, Migration, and Belonging, a year-long Freshman Inquiry class largely composed of students from under-represented backgrounds.

Reflections From A Graduate Student: Adapting Trauma-Sensitive Pedagogy In The Time Of A Pandemic, Dianne T. Wellington

Northwest Journal of Teacher Education

During COVID-19, being a graduate student has been difficult. There are challenges in building and sustaining communities in digital spaces and other unforeseen difficulties. In these difficulties, we have students experiencing issues in addition to the pandemic and consequences of the underlying systemic problems that have worsened for marginalized groups and the systemic inequity inherent in the graduate education system. In any case, this paper is a mission from me, the graduate student, to articulate a few suggestions professors could add to the practice to center both student lives and academics through trauma-sensitive pedagogy.

Cultivating Joy: Play, Rest, And Connection In Regenerative Cycles, Tim D. Howe

Leadership for Sustainability Education Comprehensive Papers

As dominant systems continue to lean towards unsustainable patterns, fueled by models of white supremacy and capitalism, these paradigms can be challenged by prioritizing joy and wonder as essential inputs rather than measurable outcomes. This paper seeks to imagine the ways in which failing systems that promise eternal growth and insatiable power dynamics can be in part dismantled through creating the conditions necessary for joy to take precedence over productivity.

The Benefits Of Using Comics In The Classroom, Caedin Brown

University Honors Theses

With more research being done on the use and effects of comics in classes, teachers and the general public are becoming more accepting of them as a teaching tool. A study in the use of comics in classrooms has found positive correlations between comics and learning in academic environments and very few possibilities of negative connotations. Comics are being proven to show an increase of motivation in students along with better retention of knowledge, especially in the field of language learning. Comic activities in language learning environments that have been developed by Stephen Cary have shown an increase of engagement, …

Critical Arts-Based Projects For Equitable Emergent Teacher Education Researcher Preparation, Lauren Jaramillo, Marcus North, Christian Valdez, Camea Davis, Luiz Claudio Barcellos

Northwest Journal of Teacher Education

This paper captures how four BIPOC student researchers and their Black woman professor used critical arts-based research methods to resist the policies and systems predisposed to BIPOC’s dispossession in academia. The arts utilized for our purpose were: songwriting, art collage, theater, and podcast. We determined these methods to be in tune with our researcher selves, which allowed for a more equitable approach preparing teacher education researchers. This work has implications for teacher educators, graduate research programs, and graduate students.

Gentle Action Theory As A Method Of Deliberative Democracy In Addressing The Lack Of Voice For Indigenous Students In Institutions Of Higher Education, Carma J. Corcoran

Amplify: A Journal of Writing-as-Activism

This paper examines how Indigenous college students attending non-tribal colleges and universities in the United States experience feelings of alienation and marginalization. The concept of democracy and deliberation from the model of the larger oppressive society is not a cultural norm. Civic engagement is experienced differently in Indigenous communities. This paper articulates the outcomes of a deliberative forum which examined the concept of democracy employing Gentle Action Theory as the method to provide the students an opportunity to share their thoughts and experiences and to express their frustrations and needs regarding their academic endeavors. The comparison of Traditional Ways and …

Professional Development For Special Education Paraeducators: How To Effectively Train Classroom Staff To Support Students With Complex Instructional And Behavioral Needs, Cara Olson-Sawyer

Dissertations and Theses

According to data from U.S. Bureau of Labor and Statistics in 2018, it is estimated that there are 1,308,100 paraeducators employed in public schools in the United States. Despite the prevalence of paraeducators, these employees receive limited opportunity for training. In addition, there is little guidance from the Department of Education or Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) for effective professional development and there are no standardized job qualifications or job descriptions across states and school districts. This lack of uniformity, combined with vague job descriptions often result in paraeducators entering the education field with no formal education and training, …

Addressing The Body Mass Index Using A Teaching Math For Social Justice Lens, Riley J. Wolfe

University Honors Theses

Teaching Math for Social Justice (TMSJ) lessons are designed to explain math in social justice contexts. TMSJ leads to better engagement with math content by providing relevant contexts. Because the field is so new, there are math topics not yet covered and areas of social justice that also have gone unaddressed by TMSJ. One of these topics is the problem of weight discrimination. This paper will explain how Body Mass Index (BMI) can be used as a jumping off point to introduce the issue of weight discrimination. Then, a detailed lesson plan is provided which connects the historical origin of …

The Practice Of Traditional Grading: A Site For Inquiring Into Teacher Identity Friction In A U.S. High School, Sarah Emily Dutton-Breen

Dissertations and Theses

High school teachers' identities and agency are often affected by systems that require their compliance if the teachers are to maintain employment. Sometimes when teachers perform an expected task, they experience identity friction, a term created to explain the residual effect of performing an institutional obligation that is misaligned with a teacher's identity and agency. Considering the potential impact of grades on students' academic opportunities and perceptions of themselves, one teacher obligation that creates identity friction is assigning student grades. And yet, scant research has been done on the impact identity friction -- resulting from working within the traditional grading …

An Instructional Guide To Environmental Campaigns For K-12 Schools, Erin Mccarty

University Honors Theses

Evidence suggests environmental education can correlate with both short- and long-term behavioral changes, but existing research on the effectiveness of popular environmental education tactics show mixed results. Qualitative research was used in this study to assess student engagement and behavioral change within the context of environmental education campaigns. Ideally, students exposed to environmental campaigns become more informed on environmental issues and adjust their behavior to align with the campaign’s objectives. However, only a portion of environmental campaigns have these desired effects on their students. Based on a preliminary literature review, I anticipated the defining catalyst on post-campaign behavioral engagement would …

Black Liberation In Teacher Education: (Re)Envisioning Educator Preparation To Defend Black Life And Possibility, Justin A. Coles, Darrius Stanley

Northwest Journal of Teacher Education

Current configurations of teacher education programs are insufficient in attracting and producing teachers equipped to teach through the permanence of antiblackness, instead still relying on race-neutral or color-evasive pedagogies that perpetuate the misrecognition of antiblackness. As evident by the sustained inequities experienced by Black children and the routine marginalization of Black (teacher) educators in the field, we recognize that teacher education programs, and subsequently P-12 classrooms, are not designed nor equipped to reduce the harm caused by persistent anti-Black racism. Despite the ways Blackness is derided and invisibilized in educator preparation, Black students, families, and communities have long countered anti-Black …

A Student Led Assessment Of Diversity, Equity, And Inclusion In The Environmental Science And Management Department At Portland State University, Aneesha Gharpurey

University Honors Theses

In the summer of 2020, the world watched as Black communities and allies responded to the murder of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. An intensification of social and racial justice awareness provoked many entities like higher education institutions (HEI) to evaluate how they support marginalized people and update their diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) plans. In an attempt to maintain excellence, many HEIs implement DEI plans through top-down methods where high-level administrators target recruitment and retention, campus climate, community engagement, and curriculum. These plans rarely incorporate students as co-collaborators and administer DEI changes that have little effect on students' self-belonging, …

Covid-19 School Closure Experiences In Rural Alaska And Reimagining The Roles Of Education And Teachers, Ute Kaden, Karen Martin

Northwest Journal of Teacher Education

The COVID-19 pandemic shut down schools and education moved online in the spring of 2020. With in-person classes canceled, the normal structure of school for K-12 students, teacher candidates, and their mentors disappeared. School districts scrambled to provide technology, develop schedules, and modify grading policies. Teacher preparation programs had to quickly determine acceptable student-teaching experiences and how candidates could demonstrate teaching competency. In this essay, we reflect on how stakeholders in parts of rural Alaska experienced the rapid transition to online instruction. We also share our vision for an education that includes a digital future without reinforcement of previous inequalities. …

Reimagining Education, Not Relocating It: A Reflection For The Covid-19 Pandemic, Brian Robert Taberski

Northwest Journal of Teacher Education

As we prepare for the upcoming academic year and the new normal COVID-19 initiated, how are we as teachers framing our approach? Are we asking how we teach online? Or, are we asking what learning looks like for online and hybrid experiences? The author suggests that the questions we ask guide our decisions and identifies the obstacles we face. By contextualizing the challenges and change we are presented with as adaptive, we can become more conscious of what may be impacting our work and consider paths forward that ensure the equitable success of our students.

Disrupting The Deficit Gaze: Equity Work With University Supervisors, Maika J. Yeigh

Education Faculty Publications and Presentations

Teacher candidates commonly experience tensions within their clinical field placement classroom. Recently, candidates have brought forward tensions around the use of a deficit gaze (Dudley-Marling, 2007) on students and their families by their mentor teachers. Where candidates of the past would ignore negative framing, current candidates want to disrupt the status quo. This conceptual article describes one EPPs attempt to support teacher candidates “disruption” of instances where a mentor teacher used a deficit-lens toward students and/or their families. Clinical supervisors were offered professional development to support teacher candidates and guide them to disrupt in ways that maintained the professional relationship …

Do Corporate Owned Adaptive Learning Platforms Perpetuate Banking Style Learning? Integrating Technology For Activism Into Transformational Sustainability Education, Tina M. Garner

Leadership for Sustainability Education Comprehensive Papers

We live in a world that tends to be controlled by corporations. The public school system should be wary of the problems that corporate control has on education. Even though public schools should not have corporate influence, the fact remains that they do, and this perpetuates Freire's banking style learning. Through time, the corporate influence in education was through educational materials such as book sales. Since the decline of the use of books and the growth of the use of technologies, corporations have followed suit through the sales of Adaptive Learning Platforms. Through leveraging the technology which students enjoy using, …

Out Of Time: Accomplices In Post-Carceral World-Building, Benjamin J. Hall, Rhiannon M. Cates, Vicki L. Reitenauer

Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Faculty Publications and Presentations

An article in which a faculty member, a university staff member and former student, and a currently incarcerated student and teaching assistant collaboratively examine their experiences as co-teachers and co-learners in a humanities-based prison classroom, and as co-authors of the article itself. Fostered by the faculty member’s pedagogical approach and design of the course, the authors pose that critical practices of writing and learning are dynamic sites of imagination and collaboration, and in turn, avenues by which informed and intentional futures can be enacted. Locating their practice and experience of partnership within a prison, the authors enter their co-created and …

The Infrastructural Function: A Relational Theory Of Infrastructure For Writing Studies, Sarah Read

English Faculty Publications and Presentations

This article theorizes the term infrastructure as a framework for articulating how writing products, activities, and processes underwrite organizational life in technical organizations. While this term has appeared broadly in writing studies scholarship, it has not been systematically theorized there as it has been in other fields such as economics, computing, and information science. This article argues for a four-part framework that incorporates and builds on Star and Ruhleder’s relational theory of infrastructure. Fieldwork from a federally funded supercomputing center for scientific research operationalizes the theory for its contributions to writing studies scholarship and its applications for industry and writing …

Using Virtual Reality And Web Conferencing Technologies: Exploring Alternatives For Microteaching In A Rural Region, Raymond A. Dixon, Cassidy Hall, Farjahan Shawon

Northwest Journal of Teacher Education

Preservice teachers’ views of two types of technologies which provided realistic environments in which to practice microteaching are described: (1) TLE TeachLivE™ Lab, a virtual reality environment that employs avatars as students in a virtual classroom, and (2) web conferencing technology to synchronously teach students in remotely located classrooms. Preservice teachers opined that each technology offers a relatively realistic environment that allows them to interact with virtual and real students. Microteaching through these technologies increases their self-confidence and provided a safe, non-threatening environment for them to reflect on their practice. We concluded these emerging technologies can provide viable alternatives to …

You Live Where? Maximizing O&M Services In Rural And Remote Areas Through Distance Consultation, Amy T. Parker, Mary J. Tellefson

Special Education Faculty Publications and Presentations

The region served by Portland State University’s Orientation and Mobility (O&M) and Visually Impaired Learner (VIL) hybrid preparation program is geographically vast. The states of OR, WA, ID, MT, AK, and HI comprise 28% of the US's geography, covering more than 1,061,000 square miles. Because of regional personnel shortages, faculty must prepare candidates to serve geographically dispersed children and adults with visual impairment or deaf-blindness using technologies that support distance-based consultation.

As a part of a federally funded grant from the US Department of Education, faculty in the O&M program developed an online learning module for candidates to use as …

Pedagogy Of The Edges: Anarchism And The Implicate Order, Jenka Soderberg

Leadership for Sustainability Education Comprehensive Papers

The ecological, structural and epistemological crisis that the planet is facing right now cannot be resolved within the modern educational model. Education can be a means for the transformation of society to a more just, sustainable future – but only if education itself is transformed and re-envisioned by looking to the perspectives that have been most marginalized. This new kind of pedagogy will develop outside the realm of an academic discourse, and will be found in transformative social justice movements and the relationships that are formed in these movements.

Building A Culture Of Collegiality Through Transformative Faculty Support, Rowanna L. Carpenter, Celine Fitzmaurice, Maurice Hamington, Annie Knepler, Vicki Reitenauer

University Studies Faculty Publications and Presentations

Portland State University’s (PSU) motto Let Knowledge Serve the City identifies a key piece of the University’s DNA as a community-engaged institution. As educators in PSU’s signature general education program, University Studies, we work intentionally as colleagues to catalyze transformative teaching and learning to build--with our students--a just world.

In AY 2016-17, through an iterative process involving faculty, administrators, staff, and students, University Studies adopted vision and mission statements to reflect and ground our efforts:

Vision: Challenging us to think holistically, care deeply, and engage courageously in imagining and co-creating a just world.

Mission: University Studies’ inclusive pedagogy

• provokes students …

Using Problems Of Practice To Leverage Clinical Learning, Maika Yeigh

Curriculum and Instruction Faculty Publications and Presentations

Teacher preparation is a complex endeavor. Preparation programs are designed to transform regular humans into adept teachers through carefully constructed coursework and clinical experiences. University programs and the K-12 school systems both play important roles in the process; however, tensions have persisted between university coursework and clinical field work—a divide between "theoretical" and "clinical". The 2010 NCATE Blue Ribbon Panel Report issued a call to action, and asked teacher preparation programs to reconceptualize approaches to pre-service teacher learning by placing clinical experiences at the heart of the work in an effort to bridge traditional theoretical and clinical divides. This article …

In Service Together: University Students And Incarcerated Youth Collaborate For Change, Deborah Smith Arthur, Jamie Valentine

University Studies Faculty Publications and Presentations

Through the lens of two courses at Portland State University (PSU), this article addresses critical service learning pedagogy as transformational for both incarcerated youth and university students. In one course, PSU students share a writing/art workshop with youth in juvenile detention though The Beat Within (https://www.thebeatwithin.org). Another course brings together PSU students and young men incarcerated at MacLaren Youth Correctional Facility in an inside/out course format (https://www.insideoutcenter.org). Working collaboratively, students have developed a variety of service-learning projects. This article explores the impact of critical service learning courses on both incarcerated young people and university students.

Catching The Wave: Are Biology Graduate Students On Board With Evidence-Based Teaching?, Emma C. Goodwin, Jane N. Cao, Miles Fletcher, Justin L. Flaiban, Erin E. Shortlidge

Biology Faculty Publications and Presentations

Graduate students hold a critical role in responding to national calls for increased adoption of evidence-based teaching (EBT) in undergraduate classrooms, as they not only serve as teaching assistants, but also represent the pool from which future faculty will emerge. Through interviews with 32 biology graduate students from 25 institutions nationwide, we sought to understand the progress these graduate students are making in adopting EBT through qualitative exploration of their perceptions of and experiences with both EBT and instructional professional development. Initial inductive content analysis of interview transcripts guided the holistic placement of participants within stages of Rogers’s diffusions of …

Hidden In Plain Sight: Findings From A Survey On The Multi-Major Professional Writing Course, Sarah Read, Michael J. Michaud

English Faculty Publications and Presentations

In this article, we report on findings from a survey of writing instructors who teach the multimajor professional writing course (MMPW) across diverse institutional contexts. We marshal these findings to advance a series of arguments about the situation of the MMPW course in U.S. higher education.

Reinvigorating Classroom Practice Through Collaborative K-12 And Higher Education Professional Development, Sean W. Agriss, Katie O'Connor, Louann Reamer, Andrea Reid

Northwest Journal of Teacher Education

High school, community college, and university faculty attempted to address student readiness for first-year college English classes by working with each other across sectors in an ongoing, collaborative professional development project, Successful Transitions to College (STC). STC demonstrates that teachers can work across sectors to smooth transitions for students who often navigate multiple educational systems throughout their K-16 experience. This professional development work intentionally built opportunities for faculty to work collaboratively while honoring teaching expertise and shared problem solving. Interest in student transition across academic sectors has created a fresh realization for many teachers—one of the best ways to …

Co-Developing An Electronic Campus Equity Walkthrough Evaluation (Cewe) To Assess Students’ Sense Belonging And Equity Mindfulness, Oscar Fernandez

University Studies Faculty Publications and Presentations

In this presentation, attendance members learn how ePortfolios--and eWorkbooks--help students recognize their sense of belonging on a college campus. By asking a series of equity-minded, student-centered questions, the CEWE eWorkbook is a toolkit for assessing whether or not resources on campus are diverse and equitable for a variety of learners.

The Sharing Campus Equity Walkthrough Evaluation (CEWE) eWorkbook is available online: https://pebblepad.com/spa/#/public/GctzZ7RbZczmzs3q4q4jp3zRWy?historyId=Rsz4bQlCTk