Digital Commons Network^™

The Language Of Racism And Education, Megan A. Visser

Masters Projects

Language, and how we use it, affects all people around us, including the students in our schools. This project aims to educate others on the importance of language, show how language is often used to be covertly racist, and begin the process of setting educators on a new path towards language that is inclusive. The aspects of language that this project will break down are colorblind language, diversity language, and microaggressions. Once broken down we will address some ways to rebuild our language in a way that makes our students feel safe in our classrooms.

Creating A Partnership Using The Home To School Connection To Implement Relevant Instruction In The Classroom And Supporting The School To Home Connection To Create A Tier Two Intervention Tailored To Students’ Early Literacy Needs, Sara L. Arthurs

Masters Projects

A child’s first place of learning is within the home environment. Research has proven the importance of family involvement in developing children’s early literacy skills. Children have academic success when family members are involved and supportive of development. Early elementary students are expected to enter formal schooling already holding knowledge of foundational literacy skills. The home environment offers children the opportunity to learn and support later literacy success. However, there has been a disconnect between how family and schools partner which has impacted how families engage in their child’s educational experience. Schools and teachers should continue to partner with families …

An Examination Of Early Childhood Scholars’ Social Emotional Competencies, Monica J. Graveling

Masters Projects

Research has disclosed valuable evidence about early childhood social emotional learning. This project investigates the recent history of Social Emotional Learning (SEL) in America and the impact it is having on young learners in order to improve instructional techniques and foster SEL growth within early childhood children. SEL capabilities influence the overall well-being of young scholars in the present and the future. There is an abundance of early childhood students who lack the SEL skills needed to succeed in education and society. Positive, classroom relationships are beneficial in developing social emotional abilities. Additionally, interactive read aloud experiences and discussions are …

Standardized Testing And Stress In Teachers And Students, Gretchen L. Spoelman-Delong

Masters Projects

This project demonstrates the relationship between standardized testing and increased stress in both teachers and students. The emphasis placed on standardized testing and therefore potential for increased anxiety and stress for teachers and students is important because stressed and anxious teachers are not going to be teaching to their full potential. Likewise, stressed and anxious students are not going to be able to rise to their full learning potential (Gonzalez et al., 2017). The purpose of this project is to decrease the amount of stress and anxiety that students and teachers feel. This can be accomplished by informing school personnel, …

The Negative Effects Of White Teachers Biased Views Towards African American, Alisha M. Brown

Masters Projects

This study explores the possibility that teachers' prejudices against African Americans have an impact on the academic performance of black students. Data show that Black students perform academically lower than any other group of students. This problem needs to be solved in order to guarantee that every student obtains the best education possible. One solution to this issue is to implement culturally responsive teaching in the classroom. Culturally sensitive instruction benefits both the teacher and the student by fostering a sense of community. Additionally, it will increase students' in-class participation. Teachers will learn the fundamentals of eliminating prejudice and becoming …

The Effects Negative Of White Teachers Biased Views Towards African American, Alisha M. Brown

Masters Projects

This study deals with the question of how black students' academic performance may be impacted by educators' prejudices toward African Americans. Black students perform worse academically than any other group of students, according to data. To ensure that every student receives the greatest education possible, this issue must be resolved. Implementing culturally responsive teaching in the classroom is one strategy to solve this problem. By encouraging a sense of belonging, culturally responsive teaching will be advantageous to both the instructor and the student. Additionally, it will boost students' participation in the classroom. Through this professional development, teachers will learn the …

The Negative Effects Of White Teachers Biased Views Towards African American Students, Alisha M. Brown

Masters Projects

This study explores the possibility that teachers' prejudices against African Americans have an impact on the academic performance of black students. Data show that Black students perform academically lower than any other group of students. This problem needs to be solved in order to guarantee that every student obtains the best education possible. One solution to this issue is to implement culturally responsive teaching in the classroom. Culturally sensitive instruction benefits both the teacher and the student by fostering a sense of community. Additionally, it will increase students' in-class participation. Teachers will learn the fundamentals of eliminating prejudice and becoming …

Boosting Confidence In Kindergarten Writing: How To Assist Kindergarten Emergent Writers Through Developmentally Appropriate Practices In Phonics And Writing, Amy Martin

Masters Projects

For a kindergarten student, writing can be exhausting and difficult. For a kindergarten student, writing can also be imaginative and fun. Kindergarten students have a lot of stories to tell and words to write, they just need tools in their toolbox in order to do so. Writing, especially in the younger grade levels, often takes a back seat to other subjects. Unfortunately, this leaves many words unwritten, skills unpracticed, and minds unimaginative. This project aims to create a resource for teachers to use within their designated writing time specifically focusing on developmentally appropriate practices and pulling from the intertwined skillset …

Grammar Instruction Embedded Within Writing Instruction In The Secondary Ela Classroom, Erika Scheu-Millek

Masters Projects

Available research indicates that American students are underperforming in the area of writing. Grammar is the foundation of the English language, so it follows that an understanding of the language system is inherent in the act of writing. Grammar instruction, however, has been largely absent from American ELA classrooms for the past half century. This project examines the research which supports grammar instruction as part of the writing process and synthesizes the most promising research findings into a writing unit for 11th and 12th grade students. This unit includes a genre-based framework for instruction, directed writing, sentence combining, and instructional …

Celebrating Multilingual Learners With Bilingual Children's Literature, Andrea Starr Karpf, Kathleen Hinman

Michigan Reading Journal

Research on bilingual books suggests that all children in a classroom benefit from the windows and mirrors that bilingual books provide. This article presents relevant research on the placement and use of bilingual books in classroom libraries, and offers an annotated bibliography of many high quality examples.

Breaking Me Down And Lifting Me Up: An Autoethnography Of Being A Black Autistic Woman Online, Morgan Harper-Nichols

Ought: The Journal of Autistic Culture

This autoethnography investigates the diverse challenges associated with being a Black, undiagnosed autistic woman coming of age on the internet, and examines how online experiences shaped my identity over the past twenty years. Early encounters with racism and cautious self-expression on platforms such as forums, GeoCities, Myspace, and YouTube are explored as my initial efforts to "fit in" in virtual spaces. I discuss how engaging with platforms like Instagram and Etsy enabled my participation in the gig economy while grappling with my pre-diagnosis social struggles. I also share how I navigate post-2020 experiences as a Black autistic online creator, how …

Narrowing The Achievement Gap By Increasing Student Opportunities In An Outdoor Project-Based Learning Environment, Britney Christensen

Masters Projects

The nation’s lack of student achievement on standardized tests is a result of the insufficient number of opportunities a student has to interact with their environment. Research indicates racial and economic disparities limit the number of chances these groups have to build the wide range of background knowledge needed to support the academic demands in the classroom. As a result, their performances show a widening of the achievement gap. Therefore, this project speaks to perspectives centered around constructivism as a way to explain how students acquire knowledge over time. The author contends that reading diverse texts, writing for different purposes, …

Improving The Mental Health Of International Students In Higher Education With Holistic Self-Improvement Practices, Layth Almallah

Masters Projects

International students make up a large portion of students in the U.S. on an annual basis. Research has shown that international students face acculturative stress at high rates and struggle with mental health. International students have high rates of depression, anxiety, and loneliness, while also feeling homesick when away from home. This project provides intervention group-based strategies that are focused on individual self-improvement. The research shows that meditation, journaling, exercise, sleep, and understanding one's spirituality all have a positive impact on mental health. In focusing on these different self-improvement habits, international students may be able to use them in their …

Ways To Increase Retention Rates Among American Indian/Alaskan Native Students At Community Colleges, Sarah R. Wheeler

Masters Projects

American Indians/Alaskan Natives (AI/AN) pursue higher education disproportionately compared to other populations. Literature indicates that a sense of belonging significantly impacts AI/AN students' persistence rates at community colleges. Sense of belonging and support from community colleges and families directly influence student success in higher education. AI/AN students are grounded in their community and have desires to build their cultural capital. Obtaining a degree will strengthen their community and, ultimately, their nation. It is essential for AI/AN students and parents to feel equipped with resources and ways community colleges support marginalized students. Creating a student and parent orientation, access to a …

Exploring The Lived Experience Of International Students Of Color At Predominately White Institutions., Soheli Farzana Jony

Masters Projects

International students are essential to US higher education, bringing cultural, global, and economic growth to US institutions each year. Despite previous research explaining this population's adjustment barriers due to cultural and linguistic differences, this project paper investigated the lived experience of international students of color (ISC) in relation to racism, microaggression, sexism, classism, and linguicism that they experience in U.S. higher education. Thus, to fully understand the lived experience of international students of color in predominantly white institutions, four major tenets of critical race theory: racism is normal and not aberrational, white supremacy, counter storytelling, and intersectionality, were applied to …

Implementing Differentiated Instruction In Early Elementary Classrooms Through Professional Development And Professional Learning Communities, Stephanie Zeichman

Masters Projects

In the classroom, the focus needs to be student-centered, and to achieve this, teachers can implement differentiated instruction. The purpose of this project is to provide Kindergarten through Second grade teachers with a guide to implementing differentiated instruction into their classrooms. Teachers will participate in professional development along with a yearlong professional learning community that will help build their knowledge on incorporating differentiated instruction and necessary strategies and activities to use in their classroom.

Supporting Students In Inclusive Settings, Jordan B. Tucker

Masters Projects

Inclusion provides students in special education the opportunity to learn alongside their same-aged peers to the greatest extent that is appropriate. Although many special education students are included in general education classrooms, it is common that teachers do not practice asset-based approaches during instruction. Understanding and recognizing student strengths will help educators organize teaching strategies to equip students with the skills to identify what they learn well and what areas they have challenges in. It is crucial for teachers to provide meaningful learning opportunities that allow students to use their assets throughout the learning process. It is important for teachers …

Abstracts And Recorded Presentations, Iaccp

Papers from the International Association for Cross-Cultural Psychology Conferences

The abstracts are organized in the following way: All special events (keynotes, award presentations, meet the editor, pre-conference workshops, provocation sessions, etc.) are presented first. All other presentations are organized along the Thematic Streams in alphabetical order. Within each Thematic Stream, the order follows the structure: symposia, individual papers, and posters.

Year Of The Golden Jubilee: Culture Change In The Past, Present And Future, Emma E. Buchtel, Wolfgang Friedlmeier

IACCP Proceedings of the Biennial International Conferences

Part 1 of the IACCP Proceedings contains the abstracts and links to the recordings of the XXVI Congress of the International Association for Cross-Cultural Psychology, 2022.

(c) 2023, International Association for Cross-Cultural Psychology

A Survey Of Text Representation And Embedding Techniques In Nlp, Rajvardhan Patil, Sorio Boit, Venkat Gudivada, Jagadeesh Nandigam

Open Access Publishing Support Funded Articles

Natural Language Processing (NLP) is a research field where a language in consideration is processed to understand its syntactic, semantic, and sentimental aspects. The advancement in the NLP area has helped solve problems in the domains such as Neural Machine Translation, Name Entity Recognition, Sentiment Analysis, and Chatbots, to name a few. The topic of NLP broadly consists of two main parts: the representation of the input text (raw data) into numerical format (vectors or matrix) and the design of models for processing the numerical data. This paper focuses on the former part and surveys how the NLP field has …

A Research-Based Approach For Teaching Written Apologies To English For Academic Purposes Learners, Lisa Leopold

MITESOL Journal: An Online Publication of MITESOL

This article describes a research-based approach for teaching written personal, corporate, and public apologies to advanced English language learners. Following an explicit-inductive approach, the proposed lessons incorporate authentic input, metapragmatic explanation, noticing activities, corpus-based exercises, and empirically based research findings, all of which have been shown to enhance learners’ sociopragmatic and pragmalinguistic competence. Learners apply research findings to analyze authentic apologies, revise them for greater sincerity, and use a corpus to expand the range of expressions for apologizing. The pedagogical activities expand the scope of written pragmatics instruction which has been relatively under-represented in the field of pragmatics.

Connecting Dots: Using Learner Self-Narratives To Address The Disconnect Between The Texts And English Learners' Prior Experience, Rui Niu-Cooper

Michigan Reading Journal

With the rapid increase of ELs in Michigan and around the United States, scholars have been exploring ways to narrow or close the achievement gap. This pursuit is significant, but hard to achieve due to various challenges that ELs experiencing in their schooling. This situation worsened in relation to ELs from refugee backgrounds due to the traumatic experience that occurred before they were resettled in the U.S. More critically, EL teachers and paraprofessionals are often marginalized from other teachers. The purpose of this article is to introduce and advocates for a Learner Self-Narrative-based (LSN-based) approach to better support EL students. …

Why Not Sign? Classrooms As Sites Of D/Deaf And Multilingual Literacy Development, Dawnavyn James, Brianne R. Pitts

Michigan Reading Journal

While often, “bilingual” literacy instruction has overlooked the potential of incorporating ASL in classrooms (U.S.DPE, 2021), this article engages discussions of practice from a Missouri Kindergarten classroom to argue that teachers can improve student literacy outcomes by leveraging d/Deaf and hard of hearing multilingual learning (DML) strategies as a way of (re)imagining students’ multimodal literacy development. By engaging with a variety of strategies learned from DML students, readers may conceptualize DML inclusive classroom practices. Following a review of the literature and discussion, games, instructional strategies, and text recommendations for educators seeking DML inclusive literacy environments are provided.

Full Issue: Volume 55, No. 2

Michigan Reading Journal

No abstract provided.

Human-Centered Change Leadership, Annie Bélanger

Presentations

In this session, GVSU Leading Laker participants learned to:

• Be aware and able to apply Human Centered change leadership and management approaches
• Articulate your values and your leadership vision
• Understand core components of change management and tools to support healthy processes

Front Matter

Language Arts Journal of Michigan

No abstract provided.

Pandemic Communication: International Communication, Anthony Spencer

Other Scholarly Publications

The COVID-19 pandemic has transformed our world as we previously knew it. One of those major changes is how we communicate with one another across national borders. The pandemic forced us to find ways to improve the way we utilize social media outlets to communicate with others around the world. Research into global communication has long been too focused on the West, and particularly the United States. This shift in our communication usage also provides a moment of pause to reflect on ways to make the field of international communication more inclusive and focus on key issues which influence transnational …

Community Spotlight, Angela Hood

Language Arts Journal of Michigan

No abstract provided.

Letter From The Editors, Raven L. Jones, Tanya Upthegrove Gregory, Alexandra M. Sánchez

Language Arts Journal of Michigan

No abstract provided.

Building Sustainable Antiracist Coalition: Developing A Research Team For Studying Diverse Language And Literacy Practices At The University, Nicole L.G. Varty, Adrienne Jankens, Linda Jimenez, Anna Lindner, Mariel Krupansky

Language Arts Journal of Michigan

In the face of so many current challenges, teachers may feel overwhelmed at the thought of engaging in antiracist work, or they may be discouraged by seemingly slow progress. This article presents present a narrative of building and maintaining an antiracist research coalition across departments at our university. By grounding our work in the important work of key black scholars, we describe our process of naming whiteness, inviting collaboration, grappling with definitions, and even identifying a few small victories along the way. Members of our group contribute their voices and perspectives from across the past two years of developing our …