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Full-Text Articles in Education

Teaching And Learning News Media In Politically Unsettled Times, H. James Garrett, Mardi Schmeichel, Joseph Mcanulty, Sonia Janis Jan 2021

Teaching And Learning News Media In Politically Unsettled Times, H. James Garrett, Mardi Schmeichel, Joseph Mcanulty, Sonia Janis

Department of Teaching, Learning, and Teacher Education: Faculty Publications

Our research explores and elaborates the ways preservice teachers come to know and begin conceptualizing ways of teaching about news media. We report on what we interpret as their understandings and, perhaps more importantly, their misunderstandings of media literacy as they relate to their emerging ideas about what it means to teach others about crucial social and political issues of our time. The students with whom the authors worked demonstrated problematic misperceptions and misunderstandings about important media concepts and topics. These preservice teachers misunderstood the ways in which news media is different from other media genres. Additionally, they often indicated …


Social Studies Teacher Perceptions Of News Source Credibility, Christopher H. Clark, Mardi Schmeichel, H. James Garrett May 2020

Social Studies Teacher Perceptions Of News Source Credibility, Christopher H. Clark, Mardi Schmeichel, H. James Garrett

Department of Teaching, Learning, and Teacher Education: Faculty Publications

Politically tumultuous times have created a problematic space for teachers who include the news in their classrooms. Few studies have explored perceptions of news credibility among secondary social studies teachers, the educators most likely to regularly incorporate news media into their classrooms. We investigated teachers’ operational definitions of credibility and the relationships between political ideology and assessments of news source credibility. Most teachers in this study used either static or dynamic definitions to describe news media sources’ credibility. Further, teachers’ conceptualizations of credibility and perceived ideological differences with news sources were associated with how credible teachers found each source. These …


Googly Eyes And Yard Signs: Deconstructing One Professor’S Successful Rebuffing Of A Right-Wing Attack On An Academic Institution, Theresa Catalano, Ari Kohen Jan 2020

Googly Eyes And Yard Signs: Deconstructing One Professor’S Successful Rebuffing Of A Right-Wing Attack On An Academic Institution, Theresa Catalano, Ari Kohen

Department of Teaching, Learning, and Teacher Education: Faculty Publications

Right-wing populism is on the rise worldwide, and political attacks against universities have increased in the United States since the election of Donald Trump. In 2017, an incident occurred at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln which resulted in accusations of hostility toward conservative students. Just over a year later, political forces again attempted to denigrate the university’s reputation, but this time they did not succeed. This (multimodal) positive discourse analysis/ generative critique combines collaborative auto-ethnography to describe the way these events were represented in the media, deconstructing a professor’s methods of countering a right-wing attack on an academic institution. Findings demonstrate …


Missing The (Turning) Point: The Erosion Of Democracy At An American University, Anthony Fucci, Theresa Catalano Feb 2019

Missing The (Turning) Point: The Erosion Of Democracy At An American University, Anthony Fucci, Theresa Catalano

Department of Teaching, Learning, and Teacher Education: Faculty Publications

On August 25, 2017, student members of Turning Point USA (TPUSA), a right-wing conservative organization who advocates for smaller government and free market enterprise, recruited on the University of Nebraska–Lincoln (UNL) campus. Members of the UNL community protested nearby. Part of the protest was recorded on video and released to social media leading to harsh public criticism that accused the university of restricting free speech and being an unsafe environment for conservative students. Drawing on cognitive linguistics (e.g. metonymy, framing) and multimodal critical discourse analysis (MCDA), this paper explores how the TPUSA incident at UNL was recontextualized in local and …


Qualitative Research On Youths’ Social Media Use: A Review Of The Literature, Mardi Schmeichel, Hilary E. Hughes, Mel Kutner Sep 2018

Qualitative Research On Youths’ Social Media Use: A Review Of The Literature, Mardi Schmeichel, Hilary E. Hughes, Mel Kutner

Department of Teaching, Learning, and Teacher Education: Faculty Publications

In this article we explore how educational researchers report empirical qualitative research about young people’s social media use. We frame the overall study with an understanding that social media sites contribute to the production of neoliberal subjects, and we draw on Foucauldian discourse theories and the understanding that how researchers explain topics and concepts produces particular ways of thinking about the world while excluding others. Findings include that: (1) there is an absence of attention to the structure and function of social media platforms; (2) adolescents are positioned in problematic, developmental ways; and (3) the over-representation of girls and young …


The Use Of Zingari/Nomadi/Rom In Italian Crime Discourse, Theresa Catalano Jan 2018

The Use Of Zingari/Nomadi/Rom In Italian Crime Discourse, Theresa Catalano

Department of Teaching, Learning, and Teacher Education: Faculty Publications

This study examines the use of the metonymies zingari/nomadi/rom [Gypsies/Nomads/Roma] in Italian media discourse, in order to critically reflect on their relation to the perception of Roma. The author analyses the frequency of these terms in general discourse and crime discourse, as well as the way they are used in context. The findings reveal that nomadi and rom are used to directly and indirectly index Roma, and have a sig­nificant impact on their ethnicization and criminalization. In addition, the episodic framing of crime events, combined with the use of these metony­mies, erases the Italian government’s responsibility for the conditions of …


Teacher Twitter Chats: Gender Differences In Participants’ Contributions, Stacey L. Kerr, Mardi J. Schmeichel Jan 2018

Teacher Twitter Chats: Gender Differences In Participants’ Contributions, Stacey L. Kerr, Mardi J. Schmeichel

Department of Teaching, Learning, and Teacher Education: Faculty Publications

Gender differences in participation were examined across four Twitter chats for social studies teachers. Analyses drawing on mixed methods revealed that while there was parity across most kinds of tweets, participants identified as men were more likely to use the examined Twitter chats to share resources, give advice, boast, promote their own blog/resource/website, and offer critique to another participants’ tweet. Participants identified as women were more likely to write tweets that included positive affirmations for other chat participants. These findings suggest that there are differences in the way that women and men tend to participate in teacher Twitter chat spaces.


The Complexity Of Learning To Teach News Media In Social Studies Education, Mardi Schmeichel, Jim Garrett, Rachel Ranschaert, Joseph Mcanulty, Shannon Thompson, Sonia Janis, Christopher Clark, Stephanie Yagata, Briana Bivens Jan 2018

The Complexity Of Learning To Teach News Media In Social Studies Education, Mardi Schmeichel, Jim Garrett, Rachel Ranschaert, Joseph Mcanulty, Shannon Thompson, Sonia Janis, Christopher Clark, Stephanie Yagata, Briana Bivens

Department of Teaching, Learning, and Teacher Education: Faculty Publications

This research reports on data generated through an initial teacher certification program for secondary social studies teachers that introduced a specific and program-spanning focus on news media literacy. Growing out of the urgent need for pedagogies that address and promote critical engagement with the kinds of news media sources upon which civic decisions are made, our project follows teacher candidates from their initial certification coursework through the culminating student teaching semester. Our work with teacher candidates over this time was explicitly intended to intervene in and develop teacher candidates’ understandings of news media literacy, its place in social studies education, …


Othering Others: Right-Wing Populism In Uk Media Discourse On “New” Immigration, Grace E. Fielder, Theresa Catalano Jan 2017

Othering Others: Right-Wing Populism In Uk Media Discourse On “New” Immigration, Grace E. Fielder, Theresa Catalano

Department of Teaching, Learning, and Teacher Education: Faculty Publications

Right wing populism is on the rise. Through the use of othering, right-wing groups delimit their own identities while excluding others. The purpose of this chapter is to shed light on how European mediated public spheres (such as reader responses to media discourse) constitute an important domain of identity articulation and struggle through the discursive construction of the ‘Other’. In this case, the others come from the Central and Eastern European countries that are perceived as newcomers to Western Europe due to the consecutive enlargements of the European Union. Specifically, this chapter provides an in-depth analysis of 236 reader comments …


The Roma And Wall Street/Ceos: Linguistic Construction Of Identity In U.S. And Canadian Crime Reports, Theresa Catalano Jan 2013

The Roma And Wall Street/Ceos: Linguistic Construction Of Identity In U.S. And Canadian Crime Reports, Theresa Catalano

Department of Teaching, Learning, and Teacher Education: Faculty Publications

Discriminatory practices against Roma (also known as Romanies) occur on a daily basis in many countries around the world through media discourse. This paper investigates the representation of Romanies in U.S. and Canadian online newspaper crime reports and compares this representation to Wall Street/CEOs in crime reports demonstrating how identity of both groups is constructed through a variety of linguistic and non-linguistic strategies. Drawing on Mayr and Machin’s (2012) critical linguistic analysis of the language of crime, this multimodal study incorporates a variety of tools such as Critical Discourse Analysis and Cognitive Linguistics in order to dig below the surface …


Feminism, Neoliberalism, And Social Studies, Mardi Schmeichel Jan 2011

Feminism, Neoliberalism, And Social Studies, Mardi Schmeichel

Department of Teaching, Learning, and Teacher Education: Faculty Publications

The purpose of this article is to analyze the sparse presence of women in social studies education and to consider the possibility of a confluence of feminism and neoliberalism within the most widely distributed National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS) publication, Social Education. Using poststructural conceptions of discourse, the author applies second-wave feminist theory and Fraser’s (2009) work on neoliberalism as lenses to illuminate the limited attention to women and feminism in this text during the 1980s in order to better understand how women have been marginalized in social studies education and to consider the possibility that the …