Education Commons^™

The Arc Of Teacher Education: From The Normal School To Now, Thomas R. Turner

The Arc of Teacher Education: From Normal Schools to Now

When Horace Mann delivered the dedication address at Bridgewater’s newly completed academic building in 1846 he said “Coiled up in this institution, as in a spring, there is a vigor whose uncoiling may wheel the spheres.” Even a visionary like Mann, however, would undoubtedly be astounded if he could view the multi-purpose university which Bridgewater has become including its College of Business and $100,000,000 Science and Math facility.

While Bridgewater has witnessed enormous change over its 175 years there have nonetheless been areas of strong continuity. One of these is remarkable stability in leadership; the school has had only 11 …

Radical Social Purpose In 19th Century Teacher Education: Normal Schools And The Port Royal Experiment, Mary-Lou Breitborde, Louise Swiniarski

The Arc of Teacher Education: From Normal Schools to Now

State normal schools and the professionalizing of teaching broadened women’s vision and the public and political spheres of their work. The opportunity for higher education and career inspired teachers to improve the lives of children and the health of the nation. Despite the intentions of founding legislators aiming to prepare teachers for the common schools; despite criticisms that the curriculum was too limited, or, conversely, too taxing; despite claims that “normalites” lacked “scholarship,” even “knowledge and interest in human life”[i], countless graduates left with a passion to do good, do it well and do it with a sense …

A Theory-Driven Reappraisal Of The Historiography Of Normal Schools, Garrett Gowen, Ezekiel Kimball

The Arc of Teacher Education: From Normal Schools to Now

Mainstream historiography understates the importance of normal schools; as a result, historians cannot fully appreciate normal schools’ influence on institutional forms. We support this contention through a review of: 1) the description of normal schools in synthetic histories; 2) literature specifically on normal schools; and 3) a reappraisal of each using social theories that illuminate relationships between people, institutions, and society related to normal schools.

The dominant historiography of American higher education relegates the normal school to a discursive cul-de-sac whereby they offered roughly the same academic rigor as a high school and are quickly superseded by teachers colleges (Brubacher …

Finding A Future In Our Past: Student Writers, A Normal School Archive, And What Happens When They Meet, Lee Torda

The Arc of Teacher Education: From Normal Schools to Now

In “A Rediscovered Tradition: European Pedagogy and Composition in Nineteenth-Century Midwestern Normal Schools” Kathryn Fitzgerald argues that the Normal School tradition, though unrecognized by elite institutions, challenges dominant histories of education, offering a democratizing force for post-secondary education today. While Fitzgerald looks at institutional change and the Normal School narrative, this presentation showcases student writing that demonstrates a changed relationship among students and their home institution, former Normal Schools, and the students’ sense of intellectual power.

This presentation describes student work written in a creative nonfiction course, using the archives (dating back to 1840) of the third oldest normal school …

The "Great Experiment" And The Transformation Of The Michigan State Normal School, Ron Flowers, James Barott

The Arc of Teacher Education: From Normal Schools to Now

Of the normal schools that existed in 1910, 180 would evolve into state colleges or universities. One of these, the Michigan State Normal School (MSNS), founded in 1849, would be the first such school outside the original 13 colonies, the fifth normal school in the country, and the first to offer a four-year curriculum leading to a bachelor’s degree. This essay examines the transition of MSNS from a quasi-secondary school into a college-level institution. The conflict that unfolded in 1878 with the beginning of what became known as “the Great Experiment” and ended with the dismissal of Charles Bellows in …

Teaching In China: Reflections On Higher Education, Student Learning, And Teacher Training, Wing-Kai To, John Marvelle, Ryan Labrozzi, Chien Wen Yu

2013 New England Association for Asian Studies Conference

In spring and summer 2013, four faculty members from Bridgewater State University taught courses on history, business, education, American studies, and second language acquisition in several universities in Hong Kong, Shanghai, Beijing, and a workshop for teachers in an international school in Xiamen. These opportunities offer our faculty new perspectives on the current state of higher education, student learning, and teacher training in China and Hong Kong. Wing-kai To taught history, culture, immigration, and ethnicity to graduate students and undergraduate students in the spring semester at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and University of Hong Kong and in a …

Enhancing Cross-Cultural Competence Of Advanced Chinese Learners — Strategies In Teaching Business Chinese At The College Level, Fang Lu

2013 New England Association for Asian Studies Conference

Integrating cross-cultural education into language instruction has been a considerable challenge for second language educators, becoming even more challenging when teaching languages for specific purposes, such as business, which faces significantly increased global competition. This paper presents a few pedagogical strategies I utilized to implement cultural components in advanced business Chinese instruction with the purpose of enhance students’ cross-cultural competence. The first part focuses on strategies of selecting appropriate teaching materials to create a dynamic context for cross-cultural language learning. While adopting Yuan Fangyuan’s Business Chinese for Success: Real Cases from Real Companies as the textbook, I have integrated a …

"I Cannot Teach Because I Am Not Smart": Working Class Mothers’ Support For Their Children's Education In Japan, Yoko Yamamoto

2013 New England Association for Asian Studies Conference

Social class is a powerful element which predicts mothers’ support for their children’s academic development in Japan. Middle class mothers tend to hold higher educational expectations, invest in their children’s educational opportunities, and interact with the teachers more frequently than working class mothers (Stevenson & Stigler, 1992; Yamamoto, 2006). While ample evidence shows social class differences in parents’ academic support, few have examined why working class mothers are not as involved in their children’s education as middle class mothers. In order to understand the mechanisms of social class reproduction and mobility, it is critical to investigate the experiences and elements …

Getting Past Powerpoint, James Hayes-Bohanan, Eric Lepage

EdTech Day

For an entire generation, integrating technology into the classroom has very often meant using PowerPoint to enhance—and even to organize—lectures. More advanced integration of technology often means teaching students to prepare their own PowerPoint presentations.

Dr. James Hayes-Bohanan became acquainted with PowerPoint when working as an in-house software trainer as the application was first coming to market. As a new professor in the ensuing years, he used many of PowerPoint’s bells and whistles—sometimes literally—in his own teaching and helped both middle-school and college students to use the software.

It is from this deep involvement with PowerPoint that he eventually came …

Elearning Live, Diane Forand, Andrew Hinote

EdTech Day

BigBlueButton is an open source web conferencing system similar to DimDim, Elluminate, and Wimba. This solution runs on Mac, Unix, or PC computers, and is very simple and quick to install and configure. Faculty have found to be the simplest interface for web collaboration. Come take a look at how we are using it at Bristol Community College to supplement and support eLearning and face-to-face courses.

Ditch Your Lms Discussion Board And Make The Move To Facebook Groups, Eric Lepage

EdTech Day

This past semester I taught an undergraduate Communications course on social media, and we spent a week holding our online course discussions in a Facebook Group site, rather than in our course Learning Management System (Moodle). The Facebook discussions worked so well that my students asked if we could abandon the Online Discussion Board tool and use Facebook Groups for the remainder of the semester. I will share with you the pros and cons of using Facebook for your online course discussions.

Increase Student Participation With Poll Everywhere, Susan Eliason

EdTech Day

Do your students text-message in class? An article inspired me to use their passion to text as a teaching tool and to increase in-class participation. Poll Everywhere allows you to pose a question to students via an embedded PowerPoint poll. Students can then respond to the poll via SMS text, Twitter, or the web. Your polls can be multiple choice based or open-ended questions to create conversations. The service is free for up to 30 responses per poll question. The polls have engaged students in conversation and participation in the learning activity and it created a novel learning experience.

Mco Track: Online Teaching And Learning Best Practices From Mco Cod Award Winners, Dona Cady, Anne Hird, Michelle Manganaro, Susan Todd, Lori Weir

EdTech Day

Massachusetts Colleges Online created the Courses of Distinction (COD) Awards to recognize faculty whose course designs best exemplify online education’s potential to enhance teaching and learning. Recent COD Award winners share their course sites and best practices in online teaching and learning.

Social Networks As Tools For Learning In Higher Ed, Aimee Mcalpine

EdTech Day

Social networks are ubiquitous in students’ (and many faculty members) non-academic lives. Facebook, My Space, LinkedIn, and Twitter have increasingly become part of our vernacular. The potential of social networks to connect and engage people with one another through various web-based mediums for free and with relative ease provides fertile ground for thinking about how these tools can enhance student learning in academic environments. This session will explore the possibilities and challenges of social using social networks with students for the purpose of academic learning. The presenters experience delivering a graduate course via a custom social network will be shared …

Mco Track: The Human Side Of Online Learning: 7 Critical Components Of Course Design And Implementation, Michelle Manganaro

EdTech Day

Participants will examine seven critical components that are necessary for qualitative and successful learner outcomes, and a teaching and learning model for online classrooms that blends structure, redundancy, and opens learning opportunities both ‘onscreen and off.’ Sample online classrooms will be shown as part of the session, including Blackboard and OLS. Presenter will share personal online teaching outcomes from the past five years, (the positive and not so positive), and demonstrate evidence of best practices via components of the online teaching and learning model.

Mco Track: Using An Institution Wide Template In Lmss To Promote Best Practices In The Use Of Online Course Spaces, Aimee Mcalpine

EdTech Day

In early 2009, a primary goal of the Massasoit Online Learning Team became the promotion of the use of Quality Matters™ standards in the development of online spaces. As a means of supporting all Faculty in their pursuit of using a LMS to support F2F classes, teach hybrid courses, or teach fully online courses, templates were developed. Use of a template is optional and various training models have been implemented to support and promote the use of templates. This session will include:

• information about the development and implementation of the template;
• examination of the two templates currently in use; and …

Keynote: Teaching Outside The “Box”, Alexandra Pickett

EdTech Day

Web 2.0 has brought about a grassroots revolution resulting in a global democratization of access to tools, information, experts, content, and education, and in many ways has begun to change how education is delivered, conducted, and defined. I believe it is my obligation as a responsible netizen and educator in this moment to participate, to evaluate, to document, and to expose and engage students and faculty to and in this process. This presentation will endeavor to challenge and inspire you to think outside your box to consider possibilities for your own instruction. I will demonstrate my “box” and how I …

Enhance Your Blackboard Sites With Dynamic Course-Related Web News, Audio, And Video Content, Reid Kimball

EdTech Day

Rather than send students scouring across the web for important news and audio/video content, bring the Web to you! Learn how RSS News Feeds in your Blackboard sites can provide your students with instant access to the latest news from the NY Times, scholarly journals, the Boston Globe Business section, and any other course-related news site without you having to lift a finger.

Also, in this hands-on workshop, discover how to easily embed live audio and video from sources like YouTube and TEDTalks right into your Blackboard course sites so that they never have to leave the cozy confines of …

Blackboard Course Design – Don’T Be Boxed In By Blackboard, Eric Lepage

EdTech Day

Announcements, Syllabus, Faculty, Course Documents, Assignments, Communication, External Links, Tools – do I really need all this stuff? In this hands-on workshop, learn how to remove features you don’t need, add quicklinks to features you use regularly (like Discussion Board and Student Grades), and completely transform your Blackboard site into something that doesn’t look, well, so much like Blackboard anymore. Your students will greatly appreciate the efficiency, intuitiveness, and creativity of your newly designed Blackboard sites.

Getting Started With Moodle, Reid Kimball

EdTech Day

Moodle is an alternative course management option for faculty who are looking for a tool that better supports engaged student learning. Moodle is a “free, Open Source software package designed using sound pedagogical principles, to help educators create effective online learning communities” (Moodle.org). In this hands-on workshop, learn how to post handouts (syllabi, PowerPoint slideshows, etc.) and multimedia content, hold asynchronous and synchronous discussions via the Discussion Forums and Virtual Chat tools, post student grades via the Online Gradebook, organize group space for collaborative projects with the Moodle wiki, receive assignments from students via digital submission, and more.

Related Links: …