Education Commons^™

Faculty Learning Community: Advancing Faculty Academic Advising Pedagogy, Linda Jean Raynard

Culminating Experience Projects

Within higher educational institutions faculty may serve in a faculty advising role. The quality of faculty advising conversations can impact student’s sense of mattering and support to campus leadership, community, and beyond. Faculty, however, have competing priorities and a lack of pathological training that has prevented them from investing deeper in advising practices. Students may then miss important opportunities to initially connect with campus leaders about their curricular and co-curricular development. To better operationalize academic advising practices for faculty to use in their everyday student conversations, a faculty learning community is suggested to aid. The Faculty Learning Community: Advancing Faculty …

Mental Health Education In Higher Education, Chelsea J. Farley

Culminating Experience Projects

This project dives into the current mental health status of college students and what institutions are doing to address students steady and continuous decline of mental health. Mental Health 101: A Comprehensive Guide for Faculty incorporates suggestions from literature and theory to provide resources to faculty members when educating students. Mental Health 101 was created with the social-ecological model in mind (Bronfenbrenner, 1979) by connecting the individual student to their environment, or in this case, the college classroom. The guide consists of information about mental health such as risk factors and warning signs, coping strategies, activities, and assignments faculty members …

Wakanda: Opening The High School Classroom To Afrofuturism, Carrie M. Mattern

Language Arts Journal of Michigan

Afrofuturism has a solid place in high school classrooms thanks to the current work of Ryan Coogler, but also to those who have been in this work for decades including the Mother of Afrofuturism herself, Octavia Butler, adrienne maree brown, dream hampton, and a litany of Black poets and artists. This article leaps inside an Afrofuturistic unit curated for high school seniors with feedback and insight from their teachers and also the students who buckled up for a journey through time, space, and place.

Boosting Attendance Through Relationships, Mia Ferguson

Culminating Experience Projects

Research has shown that students who feel a sense of belonging or personal connectedness in school have higher academic achievement. This project is to help my school Westfield Preparatory High School with its attendance issues. Since COVID, we have struggled to make daily attendance, so I chose this research project to give me better insight based on the issues staff and students gave for chronic absenteeism. I created an in-service for teachers to let them know how important teacher-student relationships are. During this in-service, I will present my research to teachers and present an academic coaching program where teachers will …

Teaching With The Genius In Mind: Enacting Literacy As A Civil Right, Katie Glupker, Pam Gower, Angela Knight

Language Arts Journal of Michigan

Because literacy is a civil right, educators are responsible for designing and implementing literacy education that is designed with the excellence of all students in mind. In order to learn about ways to ensure that literary practices are equitable for all students, the authors joined an educators’ book club to read Cultivating Genius: An Equity Framework for Culturally and Historically Responsive Literacy by Gholdy Muhammad. Muhammad describes the Black literary societies of the past and challenges educators of today to enhance classrooms by upholding equity and excellence through a five-layered framework: Identity, Skills, Intellect, Criticality, and Joy.

We studied Muhammad’s …

Improving Career Readiness And Employability Of College Graduates, Megan Packer

Culminating Experience Projects

Research shows that current college graduates are lacking in skills related to career readiness and employability upon graduation. Due to this, college students are entering the workforce and are landing in jobs that either do not require a college degree or are not the role that they hoped for upon graduation. In relation, career development as a whole is lacking in the college experience. This project will discuss the current state of employability and career readiness of college graduates. It will dive into potential methods and strategies for improving career readiness and career development of college students within higher education …

Inquiry And Counter-Witnessing In Covid-19, Erica R. Hamilton, Deborah Vriend Van Duinen, Gretchen Rumohr

Michigan Reading Journal

This essay focuses on the use of inquiry and counter-witnessing as a means of understanding our teaching identities, vulnerability, and productivity in the era of COVID-19. Based on our experiences as teacher educators at three separate institutions of higher education, we have come to value counter-telling and validating. As we share in this essay, working in COVID-19 has taught us, once again, that we must find, and model, courage and self-acceptance. In our teaching and administrative roles, we – along with other educators – can learn to speak our truths and experiences bravely. We hope that in so doing, others …

Writing On Demand In College, Career, And Community Writing: Preparing Students To Participate In The Pop-Up Parlor, Kelly J. Sassi, Hannah Stevens

Language Arts Journal of Michigan

The Writing on Demand Unit is an important part of the College, Career, and Community Writers Program. In this article, we review the literature on C3WP; contextualize the writing on demand unit in relation to the other instructional resources in C3WP; explore five big ideas about writing on demand; and describe an approach to teaching this unit that includes some preliminary results of teaching this unit in a rural, Native American high school. The five big ideas that inform its use are the following: 1) emotions matter, 2) everyone does it, so provide reasons for writing on demand, 3) time …

Advocating For The Affective: Writing Hope Into School Spaces, Nicole Sieben

Language Arts Journal of Michigan

Several scholars in the field of English education advocate for student voice and emotion to take precedence in our English language arts (ELA) classrooms. Because emotions are inextricably tied to learning processes (Smagorinsky, 2017), we know that we cannot effectively teach English language arts unless we consider the affective components of our students’ educational experiences. When students are given opportunities to access the deepest parts of themselves, they can then begin to unpack their full potentials as critical readers, writers, and thinkers in the world. This piece provides several frameworks and strategies for teaching with affective advocacy in mind in …