Digital Commons Network^™

Teaching About The Global Refugee Crisis, Melissa Kafer

Honors Projects

Around the world, there are more than 30 million refugees (UNHCR, 2023) facing language barriers, cultural differences, prejudice, racism, and xenophobia. The number of admitted refugees in 2022 has more than doubled since 2021 (Duffin, 2022), and yet, many Americans do not know or understand the global refugee crisis. There are misconceptions in America that cause lack of empathy, bias, and prejudice towards refugees. Through the creation of four lesson plans, this research project aims to discover Americans’ misunderstandings regarding refugees and teach them about the crisis to remedy the misconceptions. This study includes a literature review detailing appropriate teaching …

A Socially Innovative Curriculum For An Afterschool Program, Shelinda T. Knight Davenport

Masters Projects

ABSTRACT

Since the colonial days in what is now known as America, there has been the social problem of racism. Racism has always been and remains a cancer in America’s culture. From racism, a deep hatred has spawned for other races. To the extremes, it has led to violence and murder, and most Americans believe it is more prevalently outspoken today than it has been in the last 20 years (Schaefer & Edwards, 2022). This thesis project consists of a Disrupting Racism curriculum for approximately 3rd grade, which is situated in the literature on racism and education. Grounded in culturally …

Re: Beyond Fake News, Nate Floyd, Jaclyn Spraetz

Journal of Media Literacy Education

A student success librarian with a Ph.D. in mass communication and an information literacy librarian with an M.A. in secondary English education describe their efforts to innovate in the field of news literacy by incorporating the media effects research tradition. By highlighting the emotional, behavioral, and cognitive elements of information processing, the authors hope to show students how professional norms, institutional and market pressures shape the news while their own predispositions influence how they interpret the news they consume. The authors emphasize agenda-setting and framing, two fundamental media effects paradigms, and report on their effort to develop news literacy classes …

The Promise Of Media Literacy Education When “Everything Is At Stake” And “Everything Is Expected”, Monica Bulger, Gina Baleria, Renee Hobbs, Kimberly R. Moffitt

Journal of Media Literacy Education

In the midst of a tumultuous time in American and global history, the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication Annual Conference 2021 hosted a panel to explore the promise and limits of media literacy. Panelists discussed the vital role of media literacy education in responding to challenges to democracy, social justice, and public health. With “everything at stake,” the panelists moved through responses to current crises while grounding in a historical context and offering recommendations for the future. Curated transcripts share a pivotal moment when much was expected of media literacy and media literacy experts explored promise and …

In My Secret Life: Reflections On Media Life, Learning, And Research, Vojtěch Hodboď

Journal of Media Literacy Education

This paper describes a year-long ethnographic, phenomenologically hermeneutically oriented project of research and practical education that focused on a) the media experiences of adolescents aged 15-17, and b) nurturing adolescents’ ability to reflect upon their lived media experiences. Autoethnography is used to illustrate a day in the life of a teacher and researcher who takes a holistic approach to media learning and to explore how self-reflection can enrich both students’ lives and learning and professional research, in a mediatized world. The author reflects on his own media experiences and exposes an inner dialogue about the role media plays in his …

Intercultural Film Literacy Education Against Cultural Mis-Representation: Finnish Visual Art Teachers’ Perspectives, Sergei Glotov

Journal of Media Literacy Education

Cultural misrepresentation simplifies cultures and their minorities, promotes racism, nationalism and eventually weakens democracies by spreading false information through audio-visual media. Intercultural film literacy education combines intercultural education and film literacy and uses a film as a starting point to discuss the cultural context, to analyse cultural representation and to evaluate how the culture is portrayed from a stylistic and formal point of view. The current study builds upon the previous research that linked intercultural education and film literacy to discuss how visual art teachers understand and practice intercultural film literacy education towards critical analyses of cultural representation in audio-visual …

Critical Online Information Evaluation (Coie): A Comprehensive Model For Curriculum And Assessment Design, Lauren Weisberg, Xiaoman Wang, Christine Wusylko, Angela Kohnen

Journal of Media Literacy Education

The recent evolution of technology and the Internet has transformed how individuals find and share information. Research shows that citizens of all ages and backgrounds struggle with critical online information evaluation (COIE), which could result in serious societal consequences. Although it is crucial to develop student proficiency within this key information literacy construct beginning in middle school, there is currently no interdisciplinary framework for designing COIE instruction or assessments. To address this gap, we have developed a comprehensive COIE model for curriculum developers, assessment creators, and practitioners to implement at the secondary and post-secondary level. In this paper, we provide …

“It’S Not Always Poor Decisions”: Shifts In Business Student’S Attitudes Toward Poverty After Completing Spent, Jessica M. Parks

Journal on Empowering Teaching Excellence

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This Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) study examined whether undergraduate business students reported having different attitudes towards poverty after completing SPENT. SPENT is an open-access, digital poverty simulation offered through Urban Ministries of Durham. The author used the Reflexive Thematic Analysis approach (Braun & Clarke, 2006) to analyze 17 student reflection papers. The students were enrolled in an introductory finance course at a small teaching institution in the Southwest. The student reflection paper prompts were based on the four-phase Experiential Learning Model (Kolb, 1984). The author constructed four themes about …

Promoting Student Reflection Through Reflective Writing Tasks, Elena Taylor

Journal on Empowering Teaching Excellence

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Reflection is a necessary component of learning. Through reflective assignments and tasks, students are given opportunities to evaluate their learning and analyze strategies they use while acquiring and applying course material. Reflections also help students assess and think deeply about the information presented in class and thus better retain it. Through reflecting on their learning, students are also given the opportunity to formulate goals for future improvement. Reflective tasks can be implemented in any classroom, and writing is a powerful tool to do that. This article describes several writing tasks that …

On Becoming Online Educators: Developing Hybrid Learning-Centered Pedagogy, Rachel Toncelli Edd, Leila Rosa Phd

Journal on Empowering Teaching Excellence

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Recent global events pushed in-person learning to online formats. As K-12 teachers struggled with shifting from in-person to online teaching while adapting and adjusting instruction, and higher education prepared to do the same, two faculty members in a TESOL teacher preparation program joined forces to question assumptions about online teaching, reflect on praxis, and revisit pedagogy and practices through a critical autoethnographic study. Building from adult constructivist learning theory and collegial inquiry, the researchers utilized the pandemic as a stage for innovation and an opportunity to study their own ability, as …

A Participatory Exercise In Developing Syllabi With Adult Learners, Laneshia Conner, V. Nikki Jones, Jason P. Johnston

Journal on Empowering Teaching Excellence

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Transformative participatory approaches in education are positioned to challenge traditional models where instructors bear all responsibility for knowledge creation and learners are passive recipients of knowledge. The promotion of participatory learning and critical pedagogy is essential to helping professionals seeking to understand oppressive structural barriers and employing strategies to dismantle these structures. This article describes a participatory approach undertaken to guide learners through an exercise to co-create syllabus content in a graduate social work course. Learners identified three themes, concerns, fears, and problems, related to the course material. Learners were also …

Full Issue: Journal On Empowering Teaching Excellence, Volume 7, Issue 1, Spring 2023

Journal on Empowering Teaching Excellence

The full-length Spring 2023 issue (Volume 7, Issue 1) of the Journal on Empowering Teaching Excellence

Access the online Pressbooks version (with downloadable EPUB format) here.

The Spring 2023 issue presents research and guidance on topics related to student self-reflection, participatory learning, and returning to the in-person learning following the COVID-19 pandemic. The first article takes a critical approach to understanding pedagogy with adult learners by involving students in the creation of course syllabi as a way to challenge ideologies related the roles of instructor and students. The second article blends research and narrative to explore how the experiences of …

How Can A Culturally Responsive Discussion Of The Five-Paragraph Essay Help Asian American Students Write Well?, Yuemin He, Catherine M. Gaiser

Inquiry: The Journal of the Virginia Community Colleges

The five-paragraph essay is highly controversial, and yet it has also been a useful format for composition. In this essay we explain why, despite its limits, students need to go along with the format to make what use and get what advantage of it. We then demonstrate that valuing the philosophical, historical, cultural, and educational backgrounds of our students can help navigate away from the restrictive nature of the format and lead to equitable learning for all students. Finally, we introduce a few curriculum designs and instructional practices to expand the epistemological and pedagogical frontiers of the format. In short, …

The Dialectic Transformation Of Teaching And Learning In Community Colleges Through Ungrading., Grace Pai, Jennifer Corby, Nicole Kras, Dusana Podlucká, Midori Yamamura

Publications and Research

As five Andrew J. Mellon Transformative Learning in the Hu-manities Faculty Fellows in the City University of New York, we capture in this essay the dialectical experience of ungrading our community college courses with our students. Drawing on case examples of implementing un-grading in a range of courses and a thematic analysis of our students’ reflec-tion submissions of being ungraded, we argue that ungrading is an effective pedagogical tool for debunking a deficits-based, outcomes-focused perspec-tive that is pervasive in studies on and of community college students. Through various ways of building student agency, self-reflection, and feed-back into our courses, we …

Improving Diabetes Management For School Health Workers Using A Live, Virtual Training Course, Bonnie Mccann-Crosby, Lisa Setchfield, Yvonne Barham, Dawn Espinosa, Jennifer Bailey, Beth Pali, Amanda Garey, Sarah Lyons, Rona Sonabend

Journal of Nursing & Interprofessional Leadership in Quality & Safety

Background: Type 1 diabetes is one of the most common chronic diseases in childhood. Optimal school nurse and staff education is critical to creating a safe learning environment and influencing long term outcomes of students with type 1 diabetes. The purpose of this project was to develop a virtual continuing education diabetes management course for school health workers to improve their knowledge of diabetes management and evaluate the effectiveness of the learning platform.

Methods: A total of 199 participants completed the live, virtual continuing education course. Participants completed a pre and post-test to assess improvements in the key learning objectives …

The Intersection Of Culturally Responsive Pedagogy And Engineering Design In Secondary Stem, Mariam Manuel, Jessica Gottlieb, Gina Svarovsky, Rebecca Hite

Journal of Pre-College Engineering Education Research (J-PEER)

The instructional practices of the engineering design process and culturally responsive pedagogy have each garnered national attention and multiple decades of research. Findings from the respective literature bases call for educators and policymakers to integrate these two pedagogical approaches into K-12 classroom instruction. Scholars have argued that this integration would improve student engagement and academic achievement. There is a significant amount of research that supports the positive student outcomes associated with each approach, yet there remains a dearth of literature that addresses the integration of these two practices into the science and mathematics content areas. The movement around educational reform …

How Two English Language Arts Teachers’ Beliefs And Practices Impact Their Students’ Academic And Emotional Success, Christiana C. Succar

The Qualitative Report

This study commenced as part of a more extensive narrative inquiry about a literacy coach building relationships with two early-career sixth-grade English language arts teachers. The more extensive study revealed a gap in research about the teachers' beliefs and practices and their impact on their students' academic and emotional success. The research questions are: (1) in what ways do two teachers' beliefs and professional knowledge influence their teaching philosophies? (2) How do these teachers' identities influence student outcomes? The two teacher participants took part in interviews, observations, and reflections. By re-storying the data into narratives, three themes from each question …

Scholarship With A Reach, Lori B. Doyle, Tanya M. Tarbutton, Kellie L. Albrecht

The Journal of Advancing Education Practice

While the goal of providing a path to degree completion for master’s level participants is worthy, universities can consider ways for scholarship to have a far-reaching impact beyond the individual benefits to program completers. The field of education is situated in the social sciences and rationale for program development, when tied to a theoretical foundation, provides for theory-to-practice implications. Organizational change theory is an appropriate foundation for a discussion on master’s level culminating research projects designed with a goal of enacting change in classrooms, schools, districts, and even around the globe. One university’s approach will be highlighted and two culminating …

A Phenomenological Study Of The Lived Experiences That Motivate Young People To Volunteer As 4 H Camp Teen Leaders, Ruth E. Wallace

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

The purpose of this phenomenological study was to describe the lived experiences that motivate teenagers to volunteer as 4 H Camp teen leaders in Virginia. The theories guiding this study were Lerner and Overton’s relational developmental systems theory (RDST) and Ryan and Deci’s self-determination theory (SDT). They relate to the developmental connection between an individual and the surrounding context and internal and external influences as motivating factors, respectively. The two theories together informed this study which sought to answer the central research question “What lived experiences do teens identify that motivate them to volunteer as 4 H Camp teen leaders?” …

Critical Reflections In Stem Education, Jessica R. Stephenson Reaves, Anna Maria Arias

KSU Distinguished Course Repository

The purpose of this course is to foster abilities to teach, assess, and critically reflect on STEM learning that supports authentic engagement in interdisciplinary design and inquiry. Students will engage in making connections to STEM research literature with learning and teaching practice. Field placement in a K-5 learning environment is required for this course, which is typically fulfilled through a candidate’s full time teaching position. Other arrangements are permitted but not provided. This placement is the responsibility of the candidate.

Infusing Sustainability In Secondary School Economics Education, Emanuel Mizzi

International Journal for Business Education

This research article discusses the theme relating to the infusion of sustainability in school economics. It stems from the researcher’s study that explores teaching and learning in secondary school economics in Malta. The underlying conceptual framework for this study is critical realism, which offers an understanding of the world that is real but which may be differently experienced and interpreted by different observers (Alderson, 2021; Bhaskar, 1979; Fletcher, 2017). This paper draws upon observation sessions and interviews with fourteen economics teachers. Data was analyzed by employing thematic analysis (Braun and Clarke, 2006), with the help of Nvivo software. Education for …

Impact Of Audiobooks On Reading Attitudes Of Upper Elementary Students, Jessica Grace Dewit

Master of Education Program Theses

There is a documented complex relationship between reading attitudes, reading volume, and reading comprehension skills. Stanovich (1986) documented the impact of positive attitudes towards reading on reading volume, and Allington (2014) described how reading volume impacts reading comprehension skills. This mixed methods action research study builds on these studies and explores the use of audiobooks during free reading time to examine their impact on reading attitudes. Twenty-three students in a grade 5/6 class in Alberta, Canada, listened to audiobooks during free reading time for 20 minutes, three times a week, for six weeks. Results indicate no significant change in attitudes …

“How Come There’S No Spelling?”: What Spontaneous Comments Teach Us About Student Thinking During Vocabulary Learning Tasks, Susan J. Chambrè

Reading Horizons: A Journal of Literacy and Language Arts

Vocabulary development remains an active and robust research area, yet little is known about what students, particularly young students, think during vocabulary learning. A commonly held assumption is that young learners employ few, if any, cognitive and metacognitive strategies when engaged in literacy tasks. Conversely, decades of research confirms that older learners with active metacognitive tools are better equipped to make meaning from text, of which vocabulary is a crucial component. To better understand the strategies and metacognitive actions young students make when learning vocabulary, student comments (N = 35) spontaneously produced during two experimental vocabulary learning tasks were reviewed …

The Value Of Process In Racial Equity Work: Reflections From A Faculty Learning Community, Emily R. Shamash, Julie Berrett-Abebe, Latasha Smith, Stephanie Storms, Michael Regan, Jocelyn Novella, Laurie L. Grupp, Emily Smith, Alyson Martin

To Improve the Academy: A Journal of Educational Development

This article explores how one higher education faculty learning community engaged in reflective practices in pursuit of their commitment to the inclusion of anti-racist content and pedagogy across their multidisciplinary curriculums. As a key initial step in engaging in this collaborative, cross-disciplinary work, they set out to consider collective definitions of key terms that are deemed critical to anti-racist pedagogy. This group engaged in a collaborative exploratory process to explore definitions and understanding of the following terms: whiteness, racism, race, racial equity, racial injustice/inequity, white supremacy, and anti-racism and document the reflective process by which the determination took place. Themes …

Engaging Students Through Conversational Chatbots And Digital Content: A Climate Action Perspective, Thomas Menkhoff, Benjamin Gan

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

In this case study, we report experiences deploying a conversational chatbot as a pre-class and post-class engagement tool for undergraduate students enrolled in sustainability-related courses aimed at educating them about the severity of climate change and the importance of climate action by offsetting one’s carbon footprint (e.g, by planting trees or mangroves in SEA). The intitiative supports the university’s sustainability efforts in general and our new sustainability major in particular aimed at helping students to achieve sustainability-related learning outcomes with reference to climate change and climate action (SDG 13), one of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals established by the United …

Exploring The Indicators Of The Two Social And Emotional Learning Competencies And Their Relationship To Community College Grade Point Average, Arvinder Kaur Gill

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This study was done to help understand how social emotional learning impacts student academics and performance for incoming freshmen college students. The study looks at students who have had some social-emotional learning versus those who have not had any social-emotional learning skills and if impacts them at a community college setting. Also, this study looked at the relationship between instructors and students and how instructors can play a positive role in student success. A student survey on incoming freshmen entering a community college was recorded along with instructor/professor interviews to get a better idea of student experiences and outcomes. The …

Afterlives Of The Willowbrook, Hosu Kim

Open Educational Resources

By drawing upon my teaching experience at CUNY and research in critical disability studies, I frame willowbrook mile as a laboratory which connects between historic violence and present dilemmas of public higher education and explore/imagine various modalities of teaching and learning as a site of repair and a decolonizing public higher education.

Multisensory Phonics Instruction In Struggling Readers, Amanda M. Dixon

Theses and Dissertations

This paper describes a problem of practice that arose from a lack of consistent, systematic phonics instruction within a small rural school with a large percentage of students not mastering skills in a way that builds the needed foundation for reading. To address this problem, action research was conducted through a mixed methods approach to determine the impact of multisensory Orton-Gillingham based reading instruction on a small population of students’ phonetic development and how this specific type of instruction affected their attitudes about reading. In an attempt to collect quantitative data, this study was guided by two research questions: How …

The Virtual Classroom: What Can Be Learned From The Covid-19 Lockdown, James L. Nations

Senior Theses

This paper seeks to examine the teaching practices utilized during the initial COVID-19 lockdown in higher education. This forced switch to the virtual classroom forced many professors to make innovative changes to adapt to this change in teaching modality. These changes can now be examined and evaluated for potential future application. By reviewing the current literature, performing an analysis of grades from Fall 2017 through Summer 2022, and interviewing select professors at the University of South Carolina, this paper seeks to illuminate some of the potential issues that arise when adapting in-person curriculums to the virtual classroom as well as …

Implementation Of Team-Based Learning In The Pre-Clerkship Medical Curriculum: Investigating Essential Elements, Jade Woodcock

Dissertations

Team-based learning (TBL) has been used in undergraduate medical education over the past 20 years. Available evidence suggests that there is a problem with how the core design elements are implemented. It is also unclear the extent to which faculty and students believe TBL supports the goals of undergraduate medical education (UME). The purpose of this research is to identify the essential elements of TBL, how those elements have been used by medical educators over the past 10 years, and identify if faculty and student believe TBL supports the goals of undergraduate medical education at a single medical school where …