Curriculum and Social Inquiry Commons^™

Legislated Love And Loyalty: An Analysis Of State Patriotism Statutes, Benjamin R. Wellenreiter

The Councilor: A National Journal of the Social Studies

State statutes require students to engage in patriotic exercises and to learn the concept of patriotism. Through emphasis on ceremonial exercises, requirement of specific document study, framing of patriotism as a character trait, and language regarding civic engagement, state statutes promote various conceptualizations of patriotism. Rarely fitting into a dichotomic framework of either authoritarian or democratic patriotism (Westheimer, 2006, 2009), statutes emphasize varying levels of maintenance of status quos or acknowledgement of societal flaws. Identified were four patriotism statute categories related to the degree to which they maintain status quos or acknowledge societal flaws: active maintenance of status quos; ceremonial …

Covid-19 And Racial Justice In Urban Education: Nyc Parents Speak Out, Kelly Brady, Mieasia Edwards, Whitney Hollins, José Luis Jiménez, Wendy Luttrell, William Orellana, David Rosas, Nga Than

Publications and Research

The COVID-19 pandemic and global calls for racial justice surfaced tremendous inequities and revitalized the debate about schooling and its purpose. NYC Parents Speak Out is a public engagement project, based on an interactive survey and interviews that records and reflects NYC family educational experiences during the unprecedented school year of 2020-2021. Our research collective, comprised of researchers, parents, advocates, teachers, and school leaders from the Urban Education Ph.D. Program at The Graduate Center (CUNY) identified three key recommendations based on research findings: to improve communication through family and community engagement; give greater attention to social-emotional and mental health; and …

Integrating Adult Mentorship Module Within Youth Oriented Programs, Shady Elfaham

Capstone Collection

ABSTRACT

World Learning (WL) is a non-governmental entity focused on the advancement of leaders around the world through educational exchange programs and sustainable development initiatives. Its Youth Exchange Unit comprises an experienced and inventive team designing and implementing cultural exchange programs centered on capacity and skills building in civic engagement, teambuilding, leadership, youth workforce development, and entrepreneurship. Through such experiential learning initiatives, WL staff have recognized the correlation between mentorship and positive youth development.

Recognizing the short- and long-term benefits that quality mentorship can generate for youth, this capstone project integrates a tailored adult mentorship module within upcoming WL youth-oriented …

Meditation And The Inner Life Of Today’S Educator, Summer Nicklasson

Education | Master's Theses

This project stemmed from the researcher’s feeling stress as a new teacher and the need for self-care. The study is contextualized and the theoretical frameworks include meditation and mindfulness. (Venditti et al., 2020). Teaching is a stressful profession and many teachers experience daily stresses that can often lead to teacher burnout. When teachers are stressed, their ability to effectively teach and connect with students is diminished. This is further exacerbated by the fact that educators are teaching through the unprecedented times of COVID-19. Meditation and mindfulness are universal and free tools that educators can use to decrease stress and increase …

Biomedical Ethics In The Medical School Curriculum: Lessons Learned From The Holocaust, Emma Flanagan

College Honors Program

The Holocaust, the murder of 6 million Jews, is the only medically-santioned genocide. This thesis explores the roles of Nazi doctors in the planning, organizing, and implementation of the organized mass murder of European Jewry. Given the German medical community’s complicity, it is imperative that physicians today are well informed about their profession’s history of involvement in the Holocaust. In addition, and by way of contrast, a study of the moral challenges faced by doctors imprisoned in concentration camps or in the ghettos of Nazi-occupied Europe might serve to better prepare physicians for future ethical dilemmas. In a survey of …

“Fixed Mindsets” And The Deprecation Of Youth Voice, Brenham Cozine

Education | Master's Theses

This research explored reflective writing as a tool for understanding critical consciousness, with 10th and 11th-grade history students as a form of engaged research toward understanding self-efficacy and civic agency. It was situated in a framework of Critical Race Theory (Bryant et. al., 2015) critical consciousness (Furman, 2012; Shih, 2018), and Participatory Action Research (Maguire, 1987). Through in-depth interviews, focus groups and reflective writing prompts with 9 students and a faculty member, the findings showed that the deprecation of youth’s voice by adults affects youth’s sense of self-efficacy and perceived abilities to create meaningful change. It was further found that …

The Name Curriculum: Exploring Names, Naming, And Identity, Isabel Taswell

Graduate Student Independent Studies

The act of naming, or using and respecting one’s name, is a humanizing act: it is foundational to one’s sense of identity and belonging. Conversely, the act of ‘de-naming,’ or changing, forgetting, or erasing one’s name, is an act of dehumanization: it denies one’s sense of identity and belonging. The Name Curriculum provides an opportunity for third grade students to explore the role of names and naming as they relate to one’s sense of self and community. It draws on the role of developmental psychology, the urgency of historical context, and the power of children’s literature. Specifically, it explores how …

Approaches To Narrative Instruction For Second Language Learners, Mathew Peters

MA TESOL Collection

Narratives have reemerged as a dominant form of rhetoric over the last fifty years. This dominant use of narrative discourse has only increased with the rise of social media. Walther Fisher (1987) proposed the narrative paradigm as a unifying theory of human communication. His major claim is that people are inherently storytellers and that people use a narrative rationality and a logic of good reasons to inform their beliefs, values, and actions. This paper utilizes his theories, along with recent findings in neuroscience, to establish an argument for greater inclusion of narratives into second language teaching. Narratives can have a …

The Effects Of Bibliotherapy On Students With Behavioral Problems: Combating Negative Behavior With Books, Alaina J. Peters

Masters of Education in Teaching and Learning

At the time of the study, the researcher was a graduate student serving in a yearlong clinical teacher placement. The researcher sought to find an intervention to behavioral problems taking place in a third grade classroom setting. The aim of the study was to diminish the negative behavior occurring in the classroom setting through the use of bibliotherapy. For this study, the researcher collected data through the use of surveys, document collections, interventions, and observation with the addition of field notes. Using the constant comparative method with the addition of descriptive statistics, the author found common themes amongst the data …

“Now I Feel Like I’M Supposed To Make Mistakes”: Changing Student Perceptions Of Mistakes, Ellison Lunde

Masters of Education in Teaching and Learning

This study examined how second-grade students in a GT-clustered classroom perceived making mistakes. The researcher implemented literature discussion circles focused on growth mindset and making mistakes as an intervention to improve student perceptions. She collected data through surveys, field notes, and student focus group interviews. Data were analyzed using the constant comparative method to look for recurring themes as well as descriptive statistics in the case of numerical data. Three major themes emerged including struggles with mistakes, internal processes, and benefits of mistakes. Statistics confirmed that the intervention effectively improved the perceptions of almost every student and that GT students …

Reimagining Student Engagement In The Remote Classroom Environment, Christopher B. Denning, Serra Acar, Carol Sharicz, Ellen Foust

Pedagogy and the Human Sciences

As higher education institutions struggled with switching to remote teaching due to the COVID19 pandemic, perhaps one of the most important lessons learned is that instructors need additional support to successfully engage students in remote classrooms. Moving courses from the classroom to online delivery radically alters all aspects of teaching and learning, making it easy for interactions to be lost in the transition. It is, therefore, imperative that instructors use elements of effective online teaching and synchronous classroom pedagogy to maintain student engagement. This paper uses the constructivist learning theory as a framework, especially as this theory is applied in …

Covid-19 Impact On Radiology Students’ Distance Learning (Spring 2021), Mary Lee, Jason Chan, Cherylann Jackson-Holmes, Renzo Marmolejo, Zoya Vinokur

Publications and Research

Radiologic Technology students are well into a full year of distance learning. The Juniors are utilizing a hybrid mode, where they continue to have laboratory classes on campus at half capacity and every other week. The Senior students are completely learning through distance learning and focusing their efforts on reviewing for their licensing exams. Both cohorts are in clinical rotation with COVID-19, a smaller threat to their schooling, but still a hazard that can impact their personal and educational lives. With the use of surveys that are distributed during online classes, we hope to evaluate how a full semester of …

Coloring In The Grey Area: The Fine Line Between Academic And Student Affairs, Mannie Brown

M.A. in Higher Education Leadership: Action Research Projects

The purpose of my research was to examine the bridge between academic and student affairs within a learning community (LC) program by assessing holistic student well-being practices taking place within the classroom, residence halls, and general campus community. My research sought to answer the following question: How are current University of San Diego faculty, staff, and student leaders, within the LC program, working to articulate competencies of integration, collaboration, and student thriving? What I found was a strong need to better translate the onboarding experience into the LC program. There was also the strong desire of making the experience of …

The Impact Of Explicit Teaching Of Emotions In A Second Grade Classroom, Shaina Pine

Education Masters Papers

How can the explicit teaching of emotions affect student behavior and emotional problem solving? This action research project investigated how lessons using the explicit teaching model affected the ability for students to identify their own emotions, problem solve emotional responses, and use the process of affect labeling, or naming an emotion, to help students regulate their emotions within the classroom environment and beyond. Twenty-six second-grade students participated in daily emotional check-ins, explicit teaching lessons about twenty-five different emotions, and journal writing to reinforce emotional identification and problem-solving skills. A pre and post interview was used to assess students’ ability to …

Identifying Schools As Caring Communities: Teacher Perceptions About Character Education, Jasmine Johnson

Faculty Works

This study quantified teacher perceptions and their observations of school community interactive attachments. Observed attachments through teacher perceptions classified school communities as caring. Elementary school teachers in the southern United States districts volunteered, in order to determine the significance of school-based taught or learned character education principles in comparison with caring attachments. Data were collected using the Caring Community Profile – II questionnaire, which measures the participants’ attitudes by the extent to which they agree or disagree with a statement. The results clarified the significance of character education programs that identify school communities as caring.

Additionally, the findings answered the …

Re-Centering Racial Justice In White-Dominated School Settings, Brian A. Davis

Master's Projects and Capstones

Any institution that does not give students the critical and theoretical frameworks to understand White supremacy in the United States is an active contributor in the proliferation of this hegemonic force. White supremacy is a system that produces violence educationally, socially, politically, environmentally, ontologically, and epistemologically. The study of Whiteness and White supremacy has been discounted in high school settings for various reasons. This project seeks to solve this critical issue within the field of secondary education through the implementation of a course that unpacks White supremacy while center Black history. This course will provide students with a historical framework …

Going For The Goal: Identifying Relationships Among Sdsu Student Leaders’ Goals And Successes, Madison Dulas

Schultz-Werth Award Papers

Because today’s collegiate student leaders will be the leaders of the future, it is important to measure and ensure they have the tools needed to accomplish set goals. This study examines the relationship between South Dakota State University student leaders’ traits, time management abilities, ability to say “no,” and their impact on goal attainment. Surveys were distributed to students in the LeadState program, a co-curricular leadership development program, and a control group. Quantitative analyses, including independent samples t-tests and bivariate correlations, were conducted. Analyses revealed weak, positive relationships between leadership traits (i.e., integrity, self-confidence, synergy, and morality), time management abilities, …

“Why Are We Still Reading About Rosa Parks?”: Essential Questions For Continuation Schools, Samantha Mbodwam

English (MA) Theses

Continuation schools are historically constructed places of both academic and social rejection. With cultural rhetorics theory providing a context for the research, this inquiry values student stories and experiences. This IRB-approved case study analyzes continuation school education, including classroom participant-observation and interview data to explore if the current academic system is failing these children, and, if so, is failure essentially manufactured and a result of socialized oppression. Therefore, this case study provides a means to hear the voices of those students placed in a continuation school and the voice of a classroom teacher’s perspective on the school curriculum and educational …

Critiquing Instrumentalism In High Education: Lessons From Teaching As A Meditative Inquiry, Ashwani Kumar, Nayha Acharya

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

In this conceptual and self-reflective essay, the authors begin from the premise that the contemporary higher educational institutions in Canada and many other parts of the world have increasingly tended to focus on instrumental teaching, rooted in neoliberal and capitalist ideals of societal progress through economic development. The result is that higher education centralizes making students career ready, rather than the holistic development of the student. Critical of this, Ashwani Kumar (professor of Education) and Nayha Acharya (professor of Law), undertake a collaborative effort to discuss how Kumar’s theoretical and practical concept of teaching as meditative inquiry can be an …

Systemic Functional Linguistics In The Community College Composition Class: A Multimodal Approach To Teaching Composition Using The Metalanguage Of Sfl, Jennifer James

Education (PhD) Dissertations

This qualitative research study sought to understand the affordances and limitations of a systemic functional linguistics (SFL) approach to teaching composition at the community college level. The study took place over the course of a semester in two developmental college composition classes using the language of SFL to teach writing through multimodal assignments. The study was developed in response to the increasing diversity in writing skills and educational goals of students in the community college composition class. The increase in diversity is a result of legislation in California that restructures developmental class offerings and affects placement in the transfer-level composition …