Education Commons^™

Pullinger's And Joseph's Inanimate Alice And Intercultural Engagement, Ana Abril

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Pullinger's and Joseph's Inanimate Alice and Intercultural Engagement" Ana Abril analyzes Kate Pullinger's and Chris Joseph's digital graphic novel and game. Inanimate Alice offers a model for online education environments and has been widely acclaimed. However, Abril's ana-lysis suggests possible ways for improving the empathic and educational potential of the novel/game for interpersonal and intercultural benefit. Abril bases her analysis on the theories of human interpersonal communication and then applies these findings to Inanimate Alice and suggests improvement so that participants would be able to decide if they want to play from the viewpoint of their own …

Telescopes And Spyglasses: Using Literary Theories In High School Classrooms, Danielle M. Rains

Honors Projects

This handbook is structured in a way that can be directly applied to the classroom. The theories are organized and ordered to build on one another; the skills that your students learn from one will help them complete the tasks of the next. Each chapter provides information about the theory, how to conduct a reading following the theory’s guidelines, and how to introduce the theory to your students.

Using Self-Assessment Checklists To Make English Language Learners Self-Directed, Masoud Mahmoodi-Shahrebabaki

masoud mahmoodi-shahrebabaki

Self-directed learning (SDL) has recently gathered momentum among EFL/ESL researchers. Within the SDL framework, learners are responsible to monitor and evaluate their own learning. Student selfassessment can play a crucial role in helping learners become more dedicated and motivated. This study aimed at examining the role of filling out self-assessment checklists by 115 Iranian EFL learners over three successive semesters with reference to the role of gender and level of proficiency. Three classes filled out a standard weekly self-evaluation checklist while three corresponding classes passed the same courses simultaneously without filling out any checklist. The result showed that there is …

Jane Austen And The 21st-Century Classroom, Maureen Jecrois

Honors Program Theses and Projects

Across the United States, educators and administrators have been discussing whether classical literature still has a place within the high school classroom. Included in this discussion are the works of Jane Austen. And while Jane Austen’s texts have much to offer as far as discussion on gender and familial dynamics, economic and political tension, and, of course, societal norms (what our communities expect from us individually and as a whole), the texts present many challenges within the frameworks of today’s classroom. What we have come to know as “our” time is a rapidly changing environment filled with experiences and technologies …

English Language Learning Through Visual Arts Practices: A Curriculum For Conflict-Affected Youth In Secondary Education, Jenny Lemper

Master's Projects and Capstones

This field project summarizes recent research in conflict and education, and presents an English language learner curriculum designed to address the current gap in quality education for conflict-affected youth. The curriculum contains six modules and develops English language literacy through student visual arts projects using text and images. The purpose of the curriculum is to familiarize students to the various confidence-building and coping mechanisms available in creative expression and to develop valuable visual and verbal language related life skills, therefore equipping students with tools to support successful futures.

English Language Learning Through Visual Arts Practices: A Curriculum For Conflict-Affected Youth In Secondary Education, Jennifer Lemper

Jennifer Lemper

This field project summarizes recent research in conflict and education, and presents an English language learner curriculum designed to address the current gap in quality education for conflict-affected youth. The curriculum contains six modules and develops English language literacy through student visual arts projects using text and images. The purpose of the curriculum is to familiarize students to the various confidence-building and coping mechanisms available in creative expression and to develop valuable visual and verbal language related life skills, therefore equipping students with tools to support successful futures.

One Man's Fakelore Is Another Man's Treasure: A Case Study Of Paul Bunyan And The Legend Of The Sleeping Bear, And The Value Of Fakelore In An Interconnected World., Kalani Bates

Honors Theses

The American academic study of folklore blossomed in the past hundred years. The tumultuous battle to define, collate and structure the new study of folklore raged in the academic world, especially in the 1950’s.[1] This obsession not only manifested itself in the academic study of it, but also in the popular culture of the 1900’s. The tradition of the tall tale and the legend exploded into the consumer world, becoming a commodity produced and consumed at will.[2] Richard Dorson classifies this explosion into two very separate studies of ‘folklore’ and ‘fakelore’. Folklore is the group of stories that …

"We Can't Reclaim What We Don't Understand": Teachers' Perceptions Of Advocacy And Voice In A Rural Institute Of The National Writing Project, James Anthony Anderson

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This study examines teachers' perceptions of advocacy and voice in a summer institute of the National Writing Project. The Rural Advocacy Institute, a first-time initiative through the Northwest Arkansas Writing Project, offered three weeks of professional development centered on rural education and teaching English language arts in rural public schools. The study is a grounded theory study; grounded theory forces the researcher to stay "close to the data," compare data sets, and use reflective writing to identify conceptual categories in the data. Data collection in the study included semi-structured interviews with six K-12 teachers participating in the Institute and twenty-seven …

Please Help Your Teachers Play Hookey With Us, Leah A. Zuidema

Faculty Work Comprehensive List

Posting about the 2014 National Council of Teachers of English annual convention and why it's good for both teachers and students from Teachers, Profs, Parents: Writers Who Care - a blog advocating for authentic writing instruction.

http://writerswhocare.wordpress.com/2014/11/10/please-help-your-teachers-play-hookey-with-us/

An Argument For The Great Divorce In The Public School Ninth Grade English Classroom, Taylor Isom

Senior Honors Theses

C. S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce (1946) can provide a useful supplement for ninth grade English instruction because of its quality as a literary work, the ideas it represents, its commentary on enduring human questions, and its connections to its historical context. At its core, the book reflects on recurring philosophical and religious ideas in a way that simultaneously links to and transcends its time. It also exhibits hallmarks of literary excellence, such as formal consistency and a comprehensive view of its themes. The Great Divorce’s skillful use of literary elements suits it for instruction, adapting form to purpose. …

Forum: Teacher-Writers: Then, Now, And Next, Anne Elrod Whitney, Troy Hicks, Leah A. Zuidema, James E. Fredricksen, Robert P. Yagelski

Faculty Work Comprehensive List

In this article, the authors reflect upon “the teacher as writer” and describe how they see this concept and movement developing. They articulate a view of the teacher-writer as empowered advocate. Using examples from their scholarship, they illustrate how this powerful idea can transform research conducted about and with teachers. Finally, they draw attention to the potential of the teacher-writer stance as a means of resistance to current reform efforts that disempower teachers.

Language Of Harry's Wizards: Authentic Vocabulary Instruction, Divonna M. Stebick, Constance N. Nichols

Education Faculty Publications

This study was the result of a year long action research project within a middle school language arts classroom. The students showed improvement in their vocabulary skills due to this instruction using Harry Potter as a context.

A Literary Tour Of Ireland, Lisa K. Miller

DLPS Faculty Publications

This Powerpoint presentation offers an overview of some of Ireland's greatest writers, from Dublin, Limerick and the West, and Belfast and the North. Includes an audio file of W.B. Yeats reading "The Lake Isle of Innisfree." The Powerpoint is available below under "Additional Files."

Review Of Marilyn Francus, Monstrous Motherhood: Eighteenth-Century Culture And The Ideology Of Domesticity, Phyllis Ann Thompson

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830

Review of Marilyn Francus. Monstrous Motherhood: Eighteenth-Century Culture and the Ideology of Domesticity. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 2012. Xi + 297pp. Index. ISBN 978-1-4214-0737-1.

Discomforting Narratives: Teaching Eighteenth-Century Women’S Travelogues, Elizabeth Zold

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830

In this essay, I describe an undergraduate course I designed and taught on eighteenth-century women’s travelogues and advocate for more courses that explicitly focus on noncanonical genres and authors. Using student papers, I explore how students worked through their discomfort with new genre conventions and improved their overall reading and analytical skills. I hope that my outline of the course will be useful to those who teach or will be teaching women's travel literature or who wish to focus courses on noncanonical authors and genres.

In Their Hands: Students Editing Eighteenth- And Nineteenth-Century Letters, Thomas Mclean

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830

This article describes an honours-year class conducted in 2013 at the University of Otago in New Zealand. Students transcribed, annotated and wrote essays about a little-known New Zealand collection of unpublished letters written by leading British women writers of the Romantic era. Their research was then collected and published as a book entitled "In Her Hand: Letters of Romantic-Era British Women Writers in New Zealand Collections." The success of this course suggests the benefits of allowing students the opportunity to undertake original archival research and serves as a reminder that rich archival collections are found all over the world.

The Best Laid Plans Of Librarians And Faculty: Information Literacy Instruction In A General Education Literature Course, Difficulties And Successes, Kelly Diamond, Lisa Weihman

Georgia International Conference on Information Literacy

Members of this panel (a librarian and faculty member) began collaborating to create information literacy sessions for English 272: Modernist Literature. Assuming that students enrolled would be English majors or similar, we created sessions and assignments focused on higher-order research skills, such as working with and analyzing primary sources.

However, this section of English 272 fulfilled a General Education Curriculum (GEC) requirement. At our institution, students take 43 credit hours to fulfill GEC requirements, courses from a broad range of disciplines. Unfortunately, many students enroll in GEC courses for which they are under-prepared, have no personal interest, and are not …

History Abroad: How Do Denmark And The U.S. Measure Up?, Louis T. Gentilucci

Student Publications

By viewing bias itself as a product of history, educators and scholars can understand it better in their own times. By studying the historical path of the United States and Denmark, scholars can see that the nature of history can have subtle but important impacts on common education. Even when educators are aware of potential bias, history itself warps its dissemination.

Student-Centered, Interactive Teaching Of The Anglo-Saxon Cult Of The Cross, Christopher R. Fee

English Faculty Publications

Although most Anglo-Saxonists deal with Old English texts and contexts as a matter of course in our research agendas, many of us teach relatively few specialized courses focused on our areas of expertise to highly-trained students; thus, many Old English texts and objects which are commonplace in our research lives can seem arcane and esoteric to a great many of our students. This article proposes to confront this gap, to suggest some ways of teaching a few potentially obscure texts and artifacts to undergrads, to offer some guidance about uses of technology in this endeavor, and to help fellow teachers …

Unwrapping The Comfort Of Sameness With Spanish Immersion Elementary School, Christin N. Taylor

English Faculty Publications

I watched my 6-year-old hover around the periphery of the table, unable to find somewhere to sit. The cafeteria was a cacophony of little voices, Spanish and English, tumbling over each other, her classmates sitting close and waiting to be dismissed to homeroom.

I couldn’t help but notice how different Noelle looked from most of the children, with her liquid blond hair and saucerlike blue eyes. [excerpt]

Selva Simbólica Selva Simbiótica Apuntes Para Una Ecocritica Latinoamericana, Liza Pamela Rosas-Bustos

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation focuses on Latin America's selvatic territories. It argues for prevailing ecological principles as revealed in the selected works of three twentieth-century Latin American story-writers and poets. They portray rainforests as multisensorial lands that encompass bewildering events from which a principle of local authority emerges. This analysis is based on Francisco Coloane's short stories "Tierra del Fuego" and "Cabo de Hornos," Rosario Castellanos'Balún Canán, and Luis Sepúlveda's Un viejo que leía novelas de amor. Such phenomenology is also present on the environmental poetics from Marosa di Giorgio, Cecilia Vicuña, and Leonel Lienlaf linked to emotions of fear, urgency, …

Realizing Transitions: Common Core, College, Career, Patrick Randolph

Patrick T. Randolph

In 1885, Hermann Ebbinghaus, the great German psychologist, discovered that we forget up to 90% of what we learn within 30 days if we do not make a conscious attempt to retain the learned material. What is most troubling is that much of this information is actually forgotten just hours after the initial exposure. Ebbinghaus’s study has been reconfirmed with recent research in neuroscience (Kandel & Hawkins, 1992; Medina, 2009; Sousa, 2011). Applying these daunting numbers to our students’ retention of vocabulary, it is easy to understand why they forget a large percentage of the terms they study in their …

"A Simple Tale Told Simply": The Cultural Importance Of R. D. Blackmore's Neglected Novel "Lorna Doone", John Stanifer

Morehead State Theses and Dissertations

A Thesis Presented to the Faculty of the Caudill College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences Morehead State University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Arts in English by John Stanifer on September 18, 2014.

Children's/Young Adult (Ya) Author Event: Tim Green Author Visit, Roxanne M. Forgrave

Grant Reports

The Children’s/Young Adult Author Committee at Olivet Nazarene University received a $2500 Community Engagement Grant from the university. Because of this grant, the university hosted Tim Green, a former NFL football player who is now authoring books of primary interest to fourth through eighth graders. The success of this grant is difficult to measure, but in numbers, more than 3200 4^th - 8^th grade students and their teachers attended his speaking events during his two day visit. Green autographed more than 400 books for the attendees. Regarding reading motivation, area teachers have and still are reporting students, boys …

Six Easy Things Profs Can Do To Help Students Learn, David James

Faculty Presentations

No abstract provided.

How To Increase Global Learning In Your Classroom, Ernest D. Cole

Faculty Presentations

No abstract provided.

Three Poems From "The Elder Project," Vernon School District 22, Brian Antoine, Yetko Brooke Bearshirt-Robins, John (Wilke) Louis, Lindsy Oppenheimer, Vicky Raphael, Lenaya Sampson

The Goose

Poetry by Vernon School District secondary students and their elders, in collaboration with The Elder Project organized by Wendy Morton and Sandra Lynxleg.

Examining Teachers’ Knowledge And Attitudes Towards Immigration And Undocumented Immigrants, Esmeralda Cruz

Open Access Theses

It is projected that by the year 2040, one in three children entering the classroom in the United States will be a second-generation immigrant. Among children of Latino immigrants, four in ten second-generation immigrant children have at least one undocumented immigrant parent and therefore live in mixed-status families. These demographic changes have significant implications for the schools and teachers who must be prepared to educate and meet the needs of these children; however, many teachers are not equipped to address the needs of these students. The present study examined whether participation in an immigration workshop would improve teachers' knowledge and …

Though This Be Madness, Yet There Is Method In’T: Using Graphic Shakespeare Texts To Create Meaningful Engagement In The High School Classroom, Eric Kallenborn

All Student Theses

This thesis covers the attempt to successfully motivate and connect with high school students by giving them the option of reading a graphic form of Hamlet instead of the original text. This research was conducted to not only dispel the myth that comics and graphic novels are juvenile and adolescent but to also explain the benefits of such texts to educators and administrators.

For this research, 10^th graders were assigned Hamlet and were allowed to select the graphic text over the traditional text, allowing for student buy-in from the selection. Students also took part in a project that …

The Over-Education Of The Negro: Academic Novels, Higher Education And The Black Intellectual, Archie Lavelle Porter

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation focuses on the academic novel - a literary genre which fictionalizes the lives of students and professors in institutions of higher education. In particular this project focuses on academic novels written by black writers and which address issues in black higher education. This dissertation has two concurrent objectives: 1) to examine the academic novel as a particular genre of literature, and to highlight some specific novels on black American identity within this genre, and 2) to illustrate the pedagogical value of academic fiction. Through the ancient practice of storytelling, academic novels link the travails of the individual student …