Education Commons^™

Ethnic Studies As A Vehicle Of Empowerment: Students Of Color And Their Educational Journey, Briana Anguiano

McNair Research Journal SJSU

Students from marginalized communities often enter classrooms where their cultural heritage is not reflected within the classroom. As a result of being in an environment where one’s culture and experiences are overlooked, students can become disengaged in the classroom. This project investigates the ways in which Ethnic Studies courses hold social promise to inspire better academic performance for high school students. Therefore, the goal of this study is to document, describe, analyze, and advocate for the implementation of ethnic studies scholarship into the California high school curricula. My literature review will ask and answer the following research question: To what …

Exploring The Impact Of Field-Based Supervision Practices In Teaching For Social Justice, Detra Price-Dennis, Erica Colmenares

Faculty Research, Scholarly, and Creative Activity

The purpose of this study is to understand how field-based supervisory practices support preservice teachers’ conceptualizations of reflective practice, curriculum inquiry, and social justice-oriented pedagogies. Moving away from the more traditional supervisory triad model (e.g., preservice student--cooperating teacher--university supervisor), our qualitative investigation examined five supervisory practices: formal observation, Lesson Study, video debriefs/observations, guided observations, and participation in Intellectual Learning Communities (ILCs). Through a case study of two preservice teachers, this study highlights how these supervisory practices helped support preservice teachers’ notions of reflective practice and curriculum inquiry but did not deepen their notions of social justice and inclusivity.

Introduction To "The State Of The Syllabus" Special Edition Of Syllabus Journal, Katherine Harris, Rebecca Frost Davis, Matthew Gold

Faculty Research, Scholarly, and Creative Activity

Positioning the syllabus as a key artifact in the modern academy, one that encapsulates many elements of intellectual, scholarly, social, cultural, political, and institutional contexts in which it is enmeshed, we offer in this special issue of Syllabus a set of provocations on the syllabus and its many roles. Including perspectives from full-time and part-time faculty, graduate students, and librarians, the issue offers a multifaceted take on how the syllabus is presently used and might be reimagined.

Affective (An)Archive As Method, Erica Eva Colmenares, Jenna Kamrass Morvay

Faculty Research, Scholarly, and Creative Activity

The purpose of this article is to explore affective (an)archives in educational research. Unlike archives, which act more like a repository, the (an)archive is a technique for research-creation; it is a process-making engine that triggers new, creative events. The affective (an)archives studied in this paper encompass the affective intensities that arise for teacher-activists participating in public political activism, as well as the affects that animate the moments of emotional crisis (or “stuck moments”) of student teachers in a social justice-oriented teacher education program. We ruminate on the possibilities, intensities, conversations, and materialities that our (an)archives might open. Specifically, we wonder …

Supporting Faculty To “Do The Flip!” Lessons Learned When Transitioning Faculty To Active Pedagogy In The Classroom, Laura Sullivan-Green, Patricia Backer, Ravisha Mathur

Faculty Publications

San José State University, in partnership with California State University-Los Angeles and Cal Poly Pomona, are developing supportive methods to transition STEM faculty from lecture-based instruction to instruction using active learning pedagogies. These efforts, sponsored by the Department of Education’s First in the World Grant Program, focus on providing faculty training through workshops conducted in the active learning model, resources to support their material development, and peer support through access to multi-disciplinary/multi-campus learning communities. Active learning pedagogies like the flipped classroom have been shown to be a high impact practice that increases URM student success and retention. The partner campuses, …

Integration Of An Electrical Engineering Capstone Course With Social Justice And Global Studies, David Parent, Patricia Backer

Faculty Publications

A four course package (six units total) consisting of two general education (GE) classes and two electrical engineering capstone classes that are taught in a highly integrated manner, that not only meets university GE requirements, but also meets the new ABET criteria in which the need to address a societal need is embedded with design criteria. The prompts for the new integrated GE/capstone Assessment results are also presented, along with methods to increase student motivation for studying GE.

Research On University Faculty Member's Reasoning About How Departments Change, Gina Quan, Joel Corbo, Courtney Ngai, Daniel Reinholz, Mary Pilgrim

Faculty Publications

Research on institutional change says that effective change agents are able to flexibly reason with multiple models for change, depending on their local context and their goals. However, little is known about what it looks like for individuals to draw on and reason with different change models in-the-moment. Within interviews, we invited STEM faculty to discuss specific changes in their department and the process of change in general. This work is part of an ongoing study to understand how to support departmental change through Departmental Action Teams (DATs). Our preliminary analyses suggest that faculty's ideas about change are highly varied …

Externalizing The Core Principles Of The Departmental Action Team (Dat) Model, Joel Corbo, Gina Quan, Karen Falkenberg, Christopher Geanious, Courtney Ngai, Mary Pilgrim, Daniel Reinholz, Sarah Wise

Faculty Publications

Departmental Action Teams (DATs) are departmentally-based working groups of faculty, students, and staffaimed at achieving sustained departmental change related to undergraduate education. DATs have been conceptualized and are facilitated by members of our project team based on a set of Core Principles. These principles serve both as guides in the design of DATs and targets for the kinds of culture we aspire to create through our facilitation. In this paper, we describe our Core Principles, including theoretical underpinnings and a brief implementation example for each. We argue that articulating principles is a critical component of externalizing acomplex change effort and …

Applied Computing For Behavioral And Social Sciences (Acbss) Minor, Farshid Marbouti, Valerie Carr, Belle Wei, Morris Jones, Amy Strage

Faculty Publications

The growing digital economy creates unprecedented demand for technical workers, especially those with both domain knowledge and technical skills. To meet this need, an ACBSS (Applied Computing for Behavioral and Social Sciences) minor degree has been developed by an interdisciplinary team of faculty at San José State University (SJSU). The minor degree comprises four courses: Python programming, algorithms and data structures, R programming, and culminating projects. The first ACBSS cohort started in Fall 2016 with 32 students, and the second cohort in Fall 2017 reached its capacity of 40 students, 62% of whom are female and 35% are underrepresented minority …

Public Education For Democracy: Teaching Immigrant And Bilingual Children As Equals, Luis E. Poza, Sheila M. Shannon

Faculty Publications

This theoretical essay offers a genealogical analysis (Foucault, 1975) that problematizes the idea of “public” with respect to schooling immigrant and bilingual students. “Public” has been reconfigured in ways that privilege hegemonic whiteness, resulting in policies and practices such as standardized testing, for example, that primarily evaluate, sort, and penalize (Foucault, 1975) schools serving these students. We contend that testing’s pernicious impacts stem from a raciolinguistic project of American identity (Flores & Rosa, 2015). Educators, adapting to the tests (Freire, 1974), cement linguistic and racial hierarchies. Referencing classrooms from our teaching and empirical work, we argue for teacher education that …

En Busca Del Diamante: Using Tasks To Mitigate Word Reduction In Spoken Learner Spanish, Sergio Ruiz-Pérez, Lorena Alarcón, Avizia Long

Faculty Publications

A common feature of second language Spanish, particularly in the case of native English-speaking learners, is to shorten or reduce segments within words (Schwegler & Kempff, 2007). This is particularly noticeable with multi-syllabic words (e.g., ingeniería, floristería, cafetería), and mispronunciations during second language interaction influence speech intelligibility. To address this pronunciation challenge and provide learners with opportunities for practice of words that demonstrate this reduction, we designed a two-way information gap task to draw learners' attention to these words in second language Spanish interaction. We specifically used principles of task-based language teaching and learning (e.g., Ellis, 2009; M. H. Long, …

Social Skills And Students With Moderate To Severe Disabilities: Can Community Based Instruction Help?, Carissa Hernandez, Saili S. Kulkarni

Faculty Publications

The purpose of this research study was to determine how Community Based Instruction (CBI) affects the social skills of middle school students with moderate to severe disabilities. Existing literature is limited in findings related to the influence of CBI on middle school students with moderate to severe disabilities. This qualitative study was completed using interviews and observations. Participants included students, teachers, and paraprofessionals from a middle school in Southern California. The findings of this study are intended to support the use of CBI in middle school special education classrooms and to demonstrate how a functional program can improve the social …

Flipping Stem Classrooms Collaboratively Across Campuses In California, Laura Sullivan-Green, Ravisha Mathur, Andrew Feinstein

Office of the Provost Scholarship

San José State University, in partnership with California State University-Los Angeles and Cal Poly Pomona, was awarded a prestigious 2015 First in the World grant, sponsored by the Department of Education. The multi-campus effort is focused on bringing the flipped classroom model to seven STEM gateway courses over three years that have high failure rates through collaborative efforts from faculty on the three partner campuses. SJSU, CSULA, and CPP are all designated Hispanic-Serving Institutions and Minority-Serving Institutions, though their demographics are very different. High impact practices like the flipped classroom approach have been shown to increase URM student success and …

An Evaluation Of Escience Lab Kits For Online Learning, Diana Orozco

Themis: Research Journal of Justice Studies and Forensic Science

Higher education online science courses generally lack the hands-on components essential in understanding theories, methods, and techniques in chemistry and biology. Companies like eScience Labs construct kits to facilitate online learning, which provide students with hands-on activities relevant to their science courses. In order to evaluate ease, efficacy, and comprehension of the forensic science kits by eScience Labs was completed while writing observations of the activities during and after completion; the lab manual learning objectives were compared to results of activities and two stopwatches took elapsed time of each activity to compare with the stated times in the kit manual. …

The Intersections Of Africana Studies And Curriculum Theory: An Exploration, Theodorea Regina Berry

Faculty Publications

There has been much critique of globalization now circulating in curriculum studies both nationally, in the United States, and internationally, helps us understand some of the lethal effects of globalization. Nevertheless, little of such critique is grounded in a strong commitment to work beyond the Western epistemological perimeter. While we, as reconceptualists in curriculum studies, acknowledge the necessity to honor the multiple sources and perspectives of knowledge, we continue to operate in spaces and with intentions embedded in globalized, traditional notions of curriculum. This problem is especially heightened for socially marginalized learners, particularly Black/African American learners.

In this article, I …

Our Home By The Sea: Critical Race Reflections On Samuel Chapman Armstrong’S Accommodationism Through William Watkins’ White Architects Of Black Education, Theodorea Regina Berry, Michael Jennings

Faculty Publications

The work and words presented are a reflection of the multidimensionality of two critical race scholars and their engagement with the work of Dr. William H. Watkins, specifically his seminal text The White Architects of Black Education: Ideology and Power, 1865-1954. This work will be framed similarly to the way Watkins framed his chapter on General Samuel Chapman Armstrong in this work. Our story, a critical auto-ethnographic narrative, will begin with a discussion of the historical context that frames the relationship we have with Watkins and the relationship we have with General Samuel Chapman Armstrong and Hampton Institute. Next, …

Learning From Bad Teachers: Leibniz As A Propaedeutic For Chinese Philosophy, Kevin Delapp

Comparative Philosophy

One of the challenges facing instructors of Chinese philosophy courses at many Western universities is the fact that students can often bring orientalizing assumptions and expectations to their encounters with primary sources. This paper examines the nature of this student bias and surveys four pedagogical approaches to confronting it in the context of undergraduate Chinese philosophy curricula. After showcasing some of the inadequacies of these approaches, I argue in favor of a fifth approach that deploys sources from the “pre-history” of comparative philosophy, viz. documents by some of the first Western interpreters of Chinese thought. Such sources give students an …

Promoting School Earthquake Safety Through A Classroom Education Grassroots Approach, Lelli Van Den Einde, Heidi Tremayne, Thalia Anagnos, James Mallard

Faculty Publications

The earthquake engineering community has recognized that in seismically active regions throughout the United States, hundreds of thousands of students and staff unknowingly study and work in structurally vulnerable school and university buildings. The School Earthquake Safety Initiative (SESI), spearheaded by the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute (EERI), is a collaborative network of diverse, expert, and impassioned professionals who are committed to creating and sharing knowledge and tools that enable broadminded, informed decision making around school earthquake safety. The Classroom Education and Outreach Subcommittee of SESI is tackling the problem of school safety from a grassroots approach, with the goal of …

Integration Of General Education Into The Senior Capstone Class In Engineering, Patricia Backer, Laura Sullivan-Green

Faculty Publications

Over the past few years, San Jose State University (SJSU) has mandated that all of the undergraduate degree programs including engineering degrees be set at 120 units. With the existing number of units for the BS engineering degrees, this mandatory requirement has led to new innovations in General Education (GE) at SJSU. We have created a two-course sequence to support the integration of upper division General Education into the engineering major. Advanced GE at SJSU is designed to help students become integrated thinkers who can see connections between and among a variety of concepts and ideas. In the College of …

¿Vera O Verra? Using Principles Of Task-Based Language Teaching To Practice Spanish Rhotics, Avizia Long

Faculty Publications

Research on task-based language teaching and learning has demonstrated that tasks may encourage second/foreign language development, specifically by facilitating conditions believed to engage processes that are important for second language acquisition to occur (Robinson, 2011; Skehan, 2014). Recent studies conducted by Solon, Long, and Gurzynski-Weiss (2014, 2015) have demonstrated that tasks designed to make pronunciation task essential do encourage learner attention to pronunciation, and increasing task complexity leads to greater accuracy in the production of the Spanish vowels [o] and [u]. This micro-teaching lesson, inspired by Solon et al., will showcase a task designed to make the pronunciation of the …

Rethinking Assessment: Information Literacy Instruction And The Acrl Framework, Melissa J. Anderson

School of Information Student Research Journal

Most information literacy instruction (ILI) done in academic libraries today is based on the ACRL’s Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education, but with the replacement of these standards by the new Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education, there is a need to re-evaluate current teaching strategies and instructional techniques so that they can better serve the Framework’s goals. This paper explores current trends in ILI instruction and in the area of assessment in particular, since ILI assessment provides an opportunity not only to evaluate teaching effectiveness but also to reinforce the learning goals of the new Framework …

Teaching Argument Writing And "Content" In Diverse Middle School History Classrooms, Chauncey Monte-Sano, Susan De La Paz, Mark Felton

Faculty Publications

Monte-Sano et al describe a program in which they worked with curriculum leaders in an academically and culturally diverse school district to develop materials and techniques that would strengthen middle school students' skills in making arguments and using evidence in historical essays. They outline the Shays' Rebellion investigation activity, which enable students to develop inquiry and literacy practices as they integrate critical reading, historical thinking, and argument writing.

Making All Children Count: Teach For All And The Universalizing Appeal Of Data, Daniel Friedrich, Mia Walter, Erica Eva Colmenares

Faculty Research, Scholarly, and Creative Activity

In this paper, we argue that in order to bind Teach For All’s universal/izing statement of problems and solutions to the specificities and the special conditions of member programs’ local contexts, what is needed is a shared set of discursive practices, a way of bringing together the commonalities found in each country while separating the noise of particular politics and histories. That common set of discursive practices is shaped around the notion of data. This paper is structured as follows: First, we contextualize Teach for All by (briefly) juxtaposing the universal and specific elements of the network, including the organization’s …

Comparing Interaction And Use Of Space In Traditional And Innovative Classrooms, Laura Gurzynski-Weiss, Avizia Long, Megan Solon

Faculty Publications

Despite myriad changes to language teaching methods over time, university-level classroom spaces have largely remained the same—until now. Recent innovations in classroom space design center on technological advances, include movable furniture and coffee-shop style rooms, and are believed to facilitate language learning in several ways. Specifically, compared to traditional classrooms, innovative spaces are designed in the hope of decreasing pre-task set up, increasing student-centered interaction, and facilitating collaborative work with multiple partners—features believed to be important for classroom learning. However, whether or not such features are present in these innovative spaces, or more so than in traditional classrooms, has yet …

Cultural Norms Of Clinical Simulation In Undergraduate Nursing Education, Susan G. Mcniesh

Susan McNiesh

Simulated practice of clinical skills has occurred in skills laboratories for generations, and there is strong evidence to support high-fidelity clinical simulation as an effective tool for learning performance-based skills. What are less known are the processes within clinical simulation environments that facilitate the learning of socially bound and integrated components of nursing practice. Our purpose in this study was to ethnographically describe the situated learning within a simulation laboratory for baccalaureate nursing students within the western United States. We gathered and analyzed data from observations of simulation sessions as well as interviews with students and faculty to produce a …

Unit 2: Hetch-Hetchy Talk-It-Out, Wendy Rouse

Faculty Publications, Social Sciences

This unit is from Professor Wendy Rouse of the Social Science Teacher Preparation Program at San Jose State University. She shares a specific way to have students talk through an issue that includes document analysis and a summative persuasive writing task. She has also (not included here) a separate essay explaining a research base for this activity that may come later as a CCSS Occasional Paper.NOTE: This excerpt is part of the larger article “Units That Illustrate Measurable Performance Activity Models,” p. 92-107.

Cultural Norms Of Clinical Simulation In Undergraduate Nursing Education, Susan G. Mcniesh

Faculty Publications

Simulated practice of clinical skills has occurred in skills laboratories for generations, and there is strong evidence to support high-fidelity clinical simulation as an effective tool for learning performance-based skills. What are less known are the processes within clinical simulation environments that facilitate the learning of socially bound and integrated components of nursing practice. Our purpose in this study was to ethnographically describe the situated learning within a simulation laboratory for baccalaureate nursing students within the western United States. We gathered and analyzed data from observations of simulation sessions as well as interviews with students and faculty to produce a …

International Perspectives In Lis Education: Global Education, Research, And Collaboration At The Sjsu School Of Information, Sandra Hirsh, Michelle Simmons, Paul Christensen, Melanie Sellar, Cheryl Stenstrom, Christine Hagar, Anthony Bernier, Debbie Faires, Jane Fisher, Susan Alman

Faculty Publications

The IFLA Trend Report identified five trends that will impact the information environment (IFLA, 2015), such as access to information with new technologies, online education for global learning, hyper-connected communities, and the global information environment. The faculty at San José State University (SJSU) School of Information (iSchool) is engaged in a wide range of activities that focus on these trends—benefiting students, enhancing faculty professional development, and extending the school’s impact on the global information environment. The importance of incorporating global perspectives in the curriculum to reflect changes in the way that communities around the world access and share information is …

Website Blocked: Filtering Technology In Schools And School Libraries, Jennifer M. Overaa

School of Information Student Research Journal

This paper investigates the impact of filtering software in K-12 schools and school libraries. The Children's Internet Protection Act, or CIPA, requires that public schools and school libraries use filtering technology in order to receive discounted rates on technology. As a result, nearly all public elementary and secondary schools today use filtering technology. While the provisions of CIPA narrowly define the content to be blocked, filters are often set to block much more than is required. Filtering technology is often ineffective, and many unobjectionable sites end up being blocked, including Web 2.0 sites and tools needed to educate students in …

Alienating Students: Marxist Theory In Action, Megan Thiele, Yung-Yi Diana Pan, Devin Molina

Faculty Publications, Sociology

Karl Marx is one of the most significant and widely known sociologists. Although he is largely credited for his macro perspectives, he made important contributions by detailing the micro experiences of the worker in a capitalist system. This piece details a hands-on learning activity that allows students to experience both alienation and non-alienation in the classroom. By offering an experiential activity to pair with readings on the topic, students will be better able to grasp this fundamental, yet often difficult to understand, core concept of Marxist theory.