Curriculum and Social Inquiry Commons^™

Be A Tree: Reconceptualizing Early Education Through The Roots And Fruits Methodology Of Teaching And Learning, Virginia Dearani

Occasional Paper Series

This past Winter, my seven-year old son lived through a traumatic experience, resulting in the amputation of a significant portion of his middle finger. While reflecting on the concept of being a “Whole Child,” I was engaging in conversations with my son, exploring questions on wholeness, such as, “What is the purpose of our bodies? How will my hand work now with the loss of this finger? How will my classmates see me, and view my finger? When will my nerves re-align as I place my stubbed finger on different textures of fabric, petting our dog, holding my bike handle-bars, …

Connecting Culturally Relevant And Sustaining Education Competencies In Teacher Preparation Programs To The Experiences Of Mixed-Race Learners In K-12 Settings: A Mixed Methods Study, Marissa Wallace

Education Doctorate Dissertations

Mixed-race individuals are increasing in number within the United States population. There is limited research on mixed-race learners in K-12 school settings. This study delves into the unique educational experiences of this group of learners and provides implications for future teachers. With a focus on the Pennsylvania Culturally Relevant and Sustaining Education (CR-SE) competencies, the researcher incorporates the competencies into course work and field experiences for pre-service teachers taking a course focused on literacy instruction and intervention. Quantitative, pre- and post- surveys, and qualitative data, open-ended responses, observations, and end of semester reflections were collected from pre-service teachers. Qualitative data, …

Transformative Social Emotional Learning: A Call To Heal The Effects Of Racial Trauma On Identity And Self-Efficacy, Elizabeth Trostle

West Chester University Master’s Theses

Growing up I was never a child that loved school. I fell in love with learning in environments that did not look or feel like classrooms. And in 2005 I learned that I had a passion for learning about pedagogy. I entered the classroom again this time as a teacher, ready to engage students in learning. What I was offered was curriculum and learning standards that left little room for experiences. Despite my efforts, and after a decade of experience, I was still baffled by the resistance to learning.

I wanted to understand this because I saw that education—when you …

Child Science Identity Interview Guide And Protocol, Heidi Cian, Remy Dou

Department of Teaching and Learning

While many data collection tools exist to elicit how individuals think about prototypical STEM persons (e.g., the Draw-a-Scientist assessment), such tools fail to capture the nuance of how individuals think about STEM and STEM personhood and how those perceptions change according to context and “in real life”. We designed the Child Science Identity Interview Guide and Protocol to learn about how youth see everyday experiences as “STEM” (or a particular subfield) and think of themselves and those in their social orbits as STEM persons.

Let’S Talk: An Examination Of Parental Involvement As A Predictor Of Stem Achievement In Math For High School Girls, Nicol R. Howard, Keith E. Howard, Randy T. Busse, Christine Hunt

Education Faculty Articles and Research

This research was conducted to examine the influence of parental involvement, in the form of parent conversations, on mathematics achievement for high school girls. Data from the High School Longitudinal Study of 2009 (HSLS:09) public-use file provided a sample of 13,694 students, including 6,592 girls for our analyses. A scale for measuring parent conversations was developed and regression analyses were conducted to examine whether this scale variable predicted mathematics achievement. Results indicated that conversational parental involvement was a significant predictor of mathematics achievement for Black and White girls, but not Hispanic and Asian. Implications for research and policy initiatives are …

Remaking Identities, Reworking Graduate Study : Stories From First-Generation-To-College Rhetoric And Composition Phd Students On Navigating The Doctorate., Ashanka Kumari

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation responds to the decreasing number of first-generation-to-college doctorates in the humanities and the limited scholarship on graduate students in Rhetoric and Composition. Scholars in Rhetoric and Composition have long been invested in discussions of academic and/or disciplinary enculturation, yet these discussions primarily focus on undergraduate students, with few studies on graduate students and far fewer on the doctoral students training to become the next wave of a profession. In this dissertation, I argue that if we engage intersectional identities as assets in the design of doctoral programs, access to higher education and academic enculturation can become more manageable …

Scholastic Liberation: Schools' Impact On African American Academic Achievement, Aaron M. Johnson

Language Arts Journal of Michigan

This article addresses some of the factors that contribute to low achievement observed in African American students. It is common that either schools or school districts are unable to fix the problem or they are unaware about how the beliefs and attitudes about African American students can contribute to their low performance in school. Furthermore, this article encourages school institutions to examine themselves and change school environments to align to the identities of African American students. African American students must be liberated from negative assumptions about them and to do that, individuals and the institution of school as a whole, …

Creating A Multiracial Lesson Plan, Clayton Davis

Capstone Projects and Master's Theses

The purpose of this project is to teach students about multiracial identity issues. Multiracial populations in the U.S. continue to grow and it’s important for educators to address the needs of these students. A 5-E multiracial literature lesson plan was created for second grade that incorporates KWL and Text-to-World teaching strategies. A second grade class were read two children’s picture books, each featuring a biracial protagonist, and were asked to discuss and evaluate the content and commonalities of these stories. Students recorded what they learned in this lesson in their KWL’s. The results reveal that some students understood the problems …

Attitudes Toward Using Social Networking Sites In Educational Settings With Underperforming Latino Youth: A Mixed Methods Study, Keith Howard, Margaret Sauceda Curwen, Nicol R. Howard, Anaida Colon-Muñiz

Education Faculty Articles and Research

The researchers examined the online social networking attitudes of underperforming Latino high school students in an alternative education program that uses technology as the prime venue for learning. A sequential explanatory mixed methods study was used to cross-check multiple sources of data explaining students’ levels of comfort with utilizing a social networking site platform as a supplemental communication tool in connection with their schoolwork. Students were found to be significantly less comfortable using social networking sites than other online communication tools in connection with their schoolwork, and females were significantly more uncomfortable than males using such sites in school.

Being The Change We Want To See: Enl Teachers Author Their Own Identities, Susan Adams

Susan Adams

Workshop presented at the 2011 Indiana University Southeast English as a New Language Conference, New Albany, IN, November 12, 2011.

Being The Change We Want To See: Esl Teachers Author Their Own Identities, Susan Adams, Sarah Steele

Susan Adams

Workshop presented at the 2010 Indiana English Learners State Conference, Indianapolis, IN, November 3, 2010.

The Social Construction Of Authorship: An Investigation Of Subjectivity And Rhetorical Authority In The College Writing Classroom, Johannah Rodgers

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Although we use the term author on a daily basis to refer to certain individuals, bodies of work, and systems of ideas, as Michel Foucault and other critics have pointed out, attempting to answer the question “What is an Author?” is by no means a simple proposition. And, starting from the position that there is no single, or definitive answer to this complex question, this dissertation seeks to contribute to the ongoing discussion of the genealogy of authorship by investigating the ways in which conceptions of the author have informed models of the writing subject in the field of rhetoric …