Curriculum and Instruction Commons^™

The Little Book Of Gifts: Great Ideas For Teaching, Eugene Korsunskiy, Petra Bonfert-Taylor, Emme Burgin, Jentry Campbell, Solomon G. G. Diamond, Kendall R. Farnham, Mattias W. Fitzpatrick, Rebecca Gallivan, Katherine R. Hixon, Michael Kokko, Wesley Marrero, Vicki V. May, Erin N. Mayfield, Colin R. Meyer, Emily H. Monroe, Nina Montgomery, Kofi M. Odame, Laura E. Ray, Peter J. Robbie, Rafe H. Steinhauer, Douglas W. Van Citters, Vikrant S. Vaze

Dartmouth Scholarship

We borrowed the “GIFTs” acronym from the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE), whose annual conference includes sessions in which educators share quick, actionable ideas for new and exciting teaching practices that they’ve developed.

In this collection, we present over thirty Great Ideas For Teaching—collected from faculty and staff at the Thayer School of Engineering at Dartmouth College—that can be used in diverse labs and classrooms.

The specific theme of the GIFTs in this volume is: accessibility & inclusion. The ideas in this collection are all aimed at making our course content more understandable, our …

Cultivating Collaboration In Biomolviz: Key Attributes For Building A Stem Educator Community Of Practice, Pamela S. Mertz, Charmita Burch, Roderico Acevedo, Josh T. Beckham, Didem Vardar-Ulu, Kristin M. Fox, Lauren A. Genova, Rachel M. Mitton-Fry, Swati Agrawal, Daniel R. Dries, Kristen Procko

Biology, Chemistry, and Environmental Sciences Faculty Articles and Research

BioMolViz is an educational community of practice (CoP) focused on creating resources to improve biomolecular visual literacy instruction and assessment. The community of life science instructors developed in three phases, beginning with a small Core Team that emerged from a conference session and established the domain of interest for the CoP. In-person workshops, supported by short-term funding, drove the initial expansion of the community and the development of shared activities in Phase 2. This CoP was sustained through intentional choices about how members interact, collaborate, and share work. As the community matured in Phase 3, it was supported by longer-term …

From Protection To Provision, Not Participation: A Bibliometric Analysis Of Children's Digital Rights Research And Its Implications For Media Literacy Education, Author Information Removed

JMLE Submissions Open for Review

Media literacy education is widely held to have moved from a protective to a participatory paradigm. This study asks whether the children's digital rights literature that informs it has made the same move. Records were retrieved from Web of Science and Scopus (search date 31 August 2026), screened, and deduplicated, yielding 1,012 publications from 1993 to 2026. A dictionary built on the protection–provision–participation framework of the Convention on the Rights of the Child was applied to 4,507 keywords. Protection accounted for 40.4% of classified keywords, provision for 44.4%, and participation for 15.1%. Protection exceeded participation by 2.4 to 3.1 throughout, …

Flipbook-Based Media To Prevent Academic Burnout Among Senior High School Students In Yogyakarta, Puan Maharani Fauza, Eva Imania Eliasa, Kun Widya Nurfiani

Jurnal Pendidikan: Teori, Penelitian, dan Pengembangan

Academic burnout is a pressing issue that negatively affects senior high school students, yet conventional counseling services often rely on monotonous, static media that fail to engage today's digital generation. To address this urgent gap, this research aimed to develop an interactive digital Flipbook as a preventive intervention. The study employed a Research and Development (R&D) method using the ADDIE model, consisting of Analysis, Design, Development, Implementation, and Evaluation stages. Product validation was conducted by media experts and subject-matter experts, while the practicality test involved two Guidance and Counseling teachers. The effectiveness test was carried out through an experimental study …

Pre-Service Teachers' Experiences On Teaching Essay Writing To Grade 10 Learners In The Eastern Cape, Ncebazakhe Makhohlisa, Lundi Nomlala

Jurnal Pendidikan: Teori, Penelitian, dan Pengembangan

This paper explores pre-service teachers’ experiences in teaching essay writing to Grade 10 English First Additional Language learners. Despite the significance of essay writing for developing learners' writing skills in multilingual classrooms, writing essays remains a challenge for most English First Additional learners. The extant research has examined the challenges that learners face in essay writing. However, there is limited research examining pre-service teachers’ experiences in teaching essay writing during their teaching practice. This paper employed a qualitative research approach, and data were drawn from 30 pre-service teachers’ reflective journals based on their teaching practice experiences. Cognitive Process Theory was …

Ai-Supported Analysis Of Jury Deliberation Impact Factors, Jennifer Siciliani Phd

Generative AI Teaching Activities

Students conduct a controlled, two-run generative AI jury simulation to examine how a single socio-legal variable affects simulated jury deliberation. They compare and manually code the AI-generated outcomes against peer-reviewed human jury research to evaluate the model’s accuracy, limitations, and potential biases.

Your Own Small Syllabus, Jennifer L. Holberg

University Faculty Publications and Creative Works

As an academic, the start of the school year is more the new year than whatever that thing we do in January. I know no other life rhythm, having begun every fall in a classroom since I excitedly hurried off to pre-school in 1972.

And what’s not to love: when I met my class on Monday and reviewed the syllabus, I felt as I always do the absolute privilege of getting to introduce my students to the texts with which we’ll engage this term. It’s like being a hostess at a really good party–you want everyone to meet each other …

Uneven Surfaces, Chipped Plates And Hiding Spaces: Pedagogical Practices In The Nordic Outdoor Model Of Education, Karen Walker

Faculty Publications

This article shares insights from a professional study tour of Danish early childhood education programmes, examining how social pedagogical principles are embedded in outdoor learning environments. During June 2024, a group of early childhood teacher educators from the United States visited forest kindergartens, adventure playgrounds and natural playscapes in Denmark as participants in the Nordic Outdoor Model of Education study tour. Through guided visits and observations, we documented pedagogical practices that demonstrate the application of social pedagogy– particularly the integration of head, heart and hands in supporting children’s holistic development. This article connects observed practices to social pedagogical theory, highlighting …

Impact And Utilization Of Asl Lab Spaces In University Settings, Nathan J. Dutra, Michele Vincent

Journal of Interpretation

American Sign Language (ASL) is a challenging yet rapidly growing language taught at both secondary and higher education levels. Despite its increasing popularity, there is limited literature on utilizing ASL labs as learning centers. This quantitative study examines the implementation of a new ASL lab at a large four-year university in California. It investigates the factors influencing participation, the motivations behind students' involvement, and their perceptions of the lab's effectiveness. Results indicate significant associations between course modality, instructor influence, and lab participation. The study suggests that ASL labs function as cultural and educational spaces that promote visibility of Deaf culture …

“Voices Of Tomorrow”: A Youth Participatory Action Research Study Of A Middle School Advisory In An Urban Public Charter School, Seth Hull

Theses and Dissertations

Urban middle schools often grapple with how to create spaces that affirm students’ identities and foster authentic engagement within a broader landscape shaped by standardized testing and accountability pressures. This dissertation examines Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) and advisory as two relationally grounded practices that can address these challenges. Grounded in critical hope (Zembylas, 2013), culturally sustaining pedagogy (Paris & Alim, 2017), and community responsive education (Duncan-Andrade, 2022), the study explores the experiences of 12 middle school students who spent seven months investigating their school’s advisory program as student-researchers, as well as the findings that emerged about advisory. Data sources …

Teaching Third Graders To Read Multisyllable Words: Segmentation Versus Whole Word Reading, Jolie D. Heath

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In the early years of elementary school when children are still learning to read, they are presented with words of increased syllable length, and orthographic and morphological complexity in the texts they read.  Although multisyllabic words comprise 90% of words in the English lexicon and carry important linguistic information for expanding vocabularies and comprehension of content, few studies have focused on teaching middle elementary children to read multisyllabic words.  Many children lack strategies to identify these longer more complex words accurately and easily, leading to reading difficulties that place weaker readers at higher risk for school related problems and limit …

Harkness Seminars In The Humanities, Sarah S. Novlan

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This participatory action research study explored the effects of Harkness seminars on students’ cognitive, affective, and metacognitive learning in secondary humanities classes. Educators need an effective, flexible, and adaptive method to promote student learning beyond superficial content acquisition. With the decoupling of virtue formation from knowledge acquisition, knowledge gaps from COVID-19 lockdowns, and the rise of artificial intelligence in student plagiarism, a proven method to address all aspects of student formation is needed. Using a participatory action research framework for this qualitative study, conducted at an independent K–12 school site in Texas, the researcher interviewed six secondary humanities teachers over …

Beyond The Binary: Strengthening Nursing Students’ Proficiency Of Equitable Health Promotion, Martha K. Findley

Theses

Background: Sexual and gender diverse (SGD) populations continue to experience significant health inequities, yet prelicensure nursing curricula often lack structured, evidence‑based training to prepare students for equitable care.

Purpose: This study evaluated whether a targeted, transgender‑focused simulation could improve nursing students’ clinical knowledge and preparedness for providing equitable health promotion to SGD populations.

Methods: A pre‑/post‑intervention design was used with senior‑level nursing students who completed a transgender patient simulation emphasizing communication, assessment, and equitable health promotion. Students completed a validated survey measuring knowledge and preparedness in caring for SGD patients.

Results: Significant improvements across most survey items demonstrated that the …

Solving For X: Centering Black Girls’ Experiences In Mathematics Education, Natasha A. Fortes

Graduate Doctoral Dissertations

Black girls can grow up, attend school, and move through their math classes without ever feeling seen as capable mathematical thinkers. Their teachers may not affirm their brilliance. Their voices may even go unheard. Math classes may not be a space where they can imagine themselves belonging. These experiences do not reflect ability. Instead, they reflect on the conditions in which they are expected to learn. This study centers the voices of Black girls and asks what they deserve from their mathematics education and instructors to develop a mathematics identity. The study is grounded in Black feminist traditions and draws …

Guardians Of The Record: A Two-Tiered Streaming Cascade With Kafka, Flink, And A Real Llm, Ilan Goodman

Generative AI Teaching Activities

Students build a streaming vandalism detector for live Wikipedia edits in which a fast rule-based tier decides which few of ~1,500 edits per minute are worth escalating to a slow, rate-limited real LLM (Gemini) — confronting the cost, latency, and failure modes of putting AI inside a production data pipeline.

Guardians Of The Record (Cs2 Edition): Heaps, Queues, And A Scarce Oracle, Ilan Goodman

Generative AI Teaching Activities

Students defend Wikipedia from vandals with data structures instead of infrastructure: a sliding-window edit-velocity tracker (hash map of queues), a hand-built binary min-heap, and a budget-bounded top-K selection decide which few suspicious edits earn a question to an expensive, rate-limited Oracle — a stand-in for a real LLM.

Reimagining Education Through Intuitive Interspecies Communication: Listening, Learning, And Belonging Beyond The Human, Avantika Mathur, Megan Tucker, Anita Vallala, Cathrine Nyquist

Journal of Contemplative and Holistic Education

Conventional educational paradigms have long been shaped by worldviews that centre human rationality, and exclude the agency, intelligence, and communicative capacity of non-human beings. While holistic and contemplative education movements have begun to open space for alternative approaches, a broader reconceptualization is needed – one that embraces the living world as intelligent, interconnected, and full of meaning.

This submission explores intuitive interspecies communication (IIC), described as the direct, non-verbal exchange between humans and other animals that draws on intuitive capacities. IIC is widespread and growing rapidly as a global professional practice, and academic interest in this topic has expanded in …

Geopoetics: Expanding The Philosophy Of Teacher Education, Linda M. Craig Dr

Journal of Contemplative and Holistic Education

Amidst our accelerating ecological crisis, this essay argues for a fundamental reimagining of teacher education through Kenneth White's theory of geopoetics. Drawing on complexity science and Whitehead's process philosophy, I trace a paradigm shift from mechanistic models of education - characterised by fixed knowledge transmission and neoliberal performativity - toward a relational, orientation grounded in emergence and becoming. Geopoetics offers a transdisciplinary framework that dissolves boundaries between science, poetry, philosophy, and spirituality, positioning education not as content delivery but as participation in the creative unfolding of life. Through an exploration of Nan Shepherd's The Living Mountain as geopoetic spiritual practice. …

Poetry As Liminal Inquiry: Illuminating Complexity, Mysticism, And Embodied Knowing, Vicki Boley Dr.

Journal of Contemplative and Holistic Education

This paper explores poetry as a form of liminal inquiry, positioning poetic practice as an embodied, intuitive, and relational mode of meaning-making within the complexity of teaching and learning. Drawing on a reflective collection of poems written during a doctoral course on Mysticism and Activism in Education, the author revisits this work from a current perspective as an educator and scholar, using complexity theory to understand both the poetic process and classroom learning as nonlinear, emergent, and relational systems. Rather than yielding to linear thinking or single answers, the paper argues that poetic inquiry mirrors how insight develops in complex …

Can One Learn From Dreams?, Anastasia Lavrenyuk

Journal of Contemplative and Holistic Education

This reflective essay explores the educational significance of dream-based and intuitive knowledge through the lens of a field experience in the Peruvian Amazon. While participating in a course on sustainability and Indigenous knowledge, I encountered a member of the Ese Eja community who described how medicinal plant wisdom once came through dreams—through spiritual connection with the forest. This moment prompted a personal and scholarly inquiry into how non-rational, subjective ways of knowing have historically shaped both scientific and cultural breakthroughs, from the structure of chemical element benzene to Indigenous learning systems. Drawing on examples from physics, neuroscience, and Indigenous epistemologies, …