Education Commons^™

Effectively Managing Bias In Teacher Preparation, Natasha Johnson

CJC Publications

This is the call for teacher preparation programs to actively incorporate an emphasis on social justice education and the development of teachers committed to creating equitable schools. Education in today's multicultural, pluralistic society must be actively concentrated on and successful at creating more just and unbiased schools for underserved students. Similar to Ladson-Billings' argument for a redefining of ‘good teaching,' there must be a redefinition of that which constitutes social justice teaching. It is the role of today's teacher preparation programs to equip teachers with the essential skills necessary to develop students, manage bias, and create a culture of equity …

Writing As An Art Of Rebellion: Scholars Of Color Using Literacy To Find Spaces Of Identity And Belonging In Academia, Ethan Trinh, Luis Javier Pentón Herrera

Middle and Secondary Education Faculty Publications

In this dialogue, we explore the topics of identity, spaces, and writing from our own perspectives as members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) community, and as first-generation, immigrants, and work-ing-class scholars of colors in academia. In this piece, we propose writing as an art of rebellion against a system designed to silence the voices of margin-alized educators (Park, 2013; Van Galen, 2017). Within this space, we return to our true self and tell our stories in creative ways: sitting at the kitchen table and engaging in walking meditation. Furthermore, we write with the vision of working …

Quê Hương, Ethan Trinh

Middle and Secondary Education Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

What Does Social Justice Look Like In The United States? Critical Reflections Of An English Language Classroom On A Field Trip, Ethan Trinh

Middle and Secondary Education Faculty Publications

This paper witness a field trip of a group of English learners and the instructor at a historical site in the United States of America. The purpose of this trip explores a question, What does “social justice” look like in the United States? Drawing from the nepantlerx concept, the author describes a conversation between the students and the teacher in a field trip and discusses how the field trip has changed their students and the teacher as a result of it.

Crossing The Split In Nepantla: (Un)Successful Attempts, Ethan Trinh

Middle and Secondary Education Faculty Publications

This paper neither plans to use the restorative agenda nor provides a sample of representation or voices of a teacher candidate or researcher who identifies themselves as queer. Instead, this paper looks into the researcher’s desires and imagining in analyzing a split self to think about how to problematize their thinking and actions, which should go beyond the limits of gender and sexuality or a coded term “L-G-B-T-Q,” to disrupt the existing binary of doing queer research. First, the author reviews what queer and after-queer mean in educational research and how the researchers have queered their work in the education …

Critical Storytelling: Multilingual Immigrants In The United States, Luis Javier Pentón Herrera, Ethan Trinh

Middle and Secondary Education Faculty Publications

This edited book is a beautiful and powerful collection of poems and personal and visual narratives of multilingual immigrants in the United States. The purpose of this book is to create a space where immigrant stories can be told from their personal perspectives. The contributors are immigrants from all walks of life who represent a diverse picture of languages, professions, and beliefs from the immigrant diasporas within the United States. Inspired by the use of autoethnography, authors examine their own lives through poems and personal and visual narratives to share with others who might have similar experiences.

Cultivating Calm And Stillness At The Doctoral Level: A Collaborative Autoethnography, Luis Pentón Herrera, Ethan Trinh, Manuel De Jesús Gómez Portillo

Middle and Secondary Education Faculty Publications

Academia is a stressful environment for students and professors alike. While pursuing a degree, students often experience emotional and psychological distress, which may affect their ability to balance their personal, financial, and professional lives. Similarly, faculty in higher education also experience undesired feelings and emotions such as burnout, stress, fear, insecurity, anxiety, depression, and burnout, connected to their job. Inspired by the work of Brown (2010, 2013), the authors of this article engage in a collaborative autoethnography (Chang, Ngunjiri, & Hernandez, 2013) to explore the cultivation of calm and stillness as self-care practices at the doctoral level. In this article, …

Philosophical Considerations Always Already Entangled In Mathematics Education Research, David W. Stinson

Middle and Secondary Education Faculty Publications

In this paper, I explore how mathematics education research is always already entangled with and in ontological, epistemological, and ethical considerations—that is, philosophical considerations—of the researcher (or research team) from beginning to end. The danger in too much of the existing mathematics education research, however, is limited acknowledgement of how philosophical considerations drive both knowledge production and knowledge dissemination in the field. Illustrating how the concepts ontology, epistemology, and ethics are made sense of across the research paradigm spectrum—predict, understand, emancipate, and deconstruct—sheds light on not only the possible divergences in approaches to research (mathematics education or otherwise) but also …

Linguistically Responsive Teaching In Pre-Service Teacher Education: A Review Of The Literature Through The Lens Of Cultural-Historical Activity Theory, Ana T. Solano-Campos, Megan Hopkins, Laura Quaynor

Early Childhood and Elementary Education Faculty Publications

This article presents an integrated systematic review of scholarship related to preparing preservice teachers (PSTs) to teach multilingual learners in U.S. schools. We drew from cultural-historical activity theory to investigate how teacher educators who focus on preparing PSTs to work with multilingual students attended to the linguistically responsive teaching (LRT) framework. We identified three distinct activity systems, each linked to specific LRT dimensions. The ways in which the components of each activity system integrated LRT have implications for both theory and practice. Specifically, our findings highlight the need for program-wide coherence in teacher preparation and for comparative analysis examining teacher …

Comic Book Conversations As Pedagogies Of Possibilities In Urban Spaces, Ewa Mcgrail, Gertrude Tinker Sachs, Megan Lewis

Middle and Secondary Education Faculty Publications

The researchers in this qualitative case study explored the dialogic experiences of elementary school students during Comic Book Club meetings held in their local community resource center. The researchers wanted to know what experiences of dialogism were manifested in children’s conversations about reading, writing, and comic creation and what concepts of dialogism were evident in those experiences. The interview and observation data and artifacts suggest that co-construction of meaning and intertextuality played important roles in the dialogic experiences of the participants. Children’s co-construction of meaning and intertextuality also demonstrated engaged embodiment due to children’s spontaneous enactment of dance and dramatization …

Bridge Building Through A Duoethnography: Stories Of Nepanleras In The Land Of Liberation, Ethan Trinh, Leonardo Javier Merino Méndez

Middle and Secondary Education Faculty Publications

This innovative volume showcases the possibilities of autoethnography as a means of exploring the complexities of transnational identity construction for learners, teachers, and practitioners in English language teaching (ELT). // The book unpacks the dynamics of today’s landscape of language education which sees practitioners and students with nuanced personal and professional histories inhabit liminal spaces as they traverse national, cultural, linguistic, ideological, and political borders, thereby impacting their identity construction and engagement with pedagogies and practices across different educational domains. The volume draws on solo and collaborative autoethnographies of transnational language practitioners to question such well-established ELT binaries such as …

Too Nepantlera To Write: Building An Inclusive Tribalism For All, Ethan Trinh

Middle and Secondary Education Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Suicide And Nepantla: Writing In In-Between Space To Crave Policy Change, Ethan Trinh

Middle and Secondary Education Faculty Publications

This autohistoria, or “a personal essay that theorizes,” is a special piece to me.[1] It is spiritual, poetic, political, and dialogic. This essay thus delves deeper into the mourning, the fear, the tears, the pain, the loneliness, the strength of a Vietnamese queer immigrant in a state of Nepantla in order to relate with other queers of color in the dark (i.e., in suicidal process). “Living in Nepantla, the overlapping space between different perceptions and belief systems, you are aware of the changeability of racial, gender, sexual, and other categories rendering the conventional labelling obsolete.”[2] In this space, …

Photovoice In A Vietnamese Immigrant Family: Untold Partial Stories Behind The Pictures, Ethan Trinh

Middle and Secondary Education Faculty Publications

This paper, in the form of walking meditation, sitting, drinking, eating, and traveling among spaces and times, witnesses how the author as a Vietnamese immigrant child living in the United States (U.S.) traces untold stories of their family through family photos. Further, this paper attempts to find, understand and connect the relation between personal and political, between individual and collective, for a Vietnamese re-education camp detainee and his family, situated in political, historical, and cultural context. The use of photo elicitation comes from the desire that the reader can engage with the voices of the family members as they describe …

Still You Resist: An Autohistoria-Teoria Of A Vietnamese Queer Teacher To Meditate, Teach, And Love In The Coatlicue State, Ethan Trinh

Middle and Secondary Education Faculty Publications

This piece will be walking, writing, meditating in in-between spaces with me. I call this act queer walking meditation, which blended autohistoria, the Coatlicue State, and meditation to examine my own queer self. This queer walking meditation helps me move between stories, initiates dialogues with a self, recognizes my self's confusion, and leads to a series of actions to fight against the struggles and complicatedness in my identities. As a result, I learned how to mediate and take actions for myself and with my students from the standpoint of a Vietnamese queer, accented, Teaching English to Speakers of Other …

Scholars Before Researchers: Philosophical Considerations In The Preparation Of Mathematics Education Researchers, David W. Stinson

Middle and Secondary Education Faculty Publications

In this essay, the author explores how research in mathematics education is always already entangled with and in ontological, epistemological, and ethical considerations—that is, philosophical considerations—of the researcher from beginning to end. The danger in too much of the existing mathematics education research, however, is limited acknowledgement of how philosophical considerations drive both knowledge production and knowledge dissemination in the field. “Practical” definitions of ontology, epistemology, and ethics are provided as well as descriptions of how each concept is made sense of across the paradigms of inquiry spectrum: predict, understand, emancipate, and deconstruct. The author concludes the essay with a …

The Nicaraguan Diaspora In Costa Rica: Schools And The Disruption Of Transnational Social Fields, Ana T. Solano-Campos

Early Childhood and Elementary Education Faculty Publications

This ethnographic case study explores Nicaragua–Costa Rica cross-border dynamics, one of the most important South-South migration flows in the Central American region. I identify practices that prevent Nicaraguan children in a Costa Rican classroom from consolidating transnational identities and networks during the school day. Specifically, I examine three types of disruptions—historical, social, and linguistic—as well as various ways in which students and teachers contest those disruptions.

Educating Early Childhood Preservice Teachers About Dual Language Theory And Practice, Ana T. Solano-Campos, Maria Acevedo-Aquino, Patricia Paugh

Early Childhood and Elementary Education Faculty Publications

The article discusses Educating Early Childhood Preservice Teachers about Dual Language Theory and Practices. It mentions that many teachers are fearful or unsure about how to include literacy instruction in their curricula to affirm their students' multiple languages. It informs that Massachusetts had been one of the few states in the country that had eliminated, or highly restricted, bilingual education by law.

Beliefs For Integrating Technology Into The English Language Arts Classroom: Reflections From Scholars In The Field, Donna E. Alvermann, Ewa Mcgrail, Carl A. Young, Nicole Damico, Lauren Zucker

Middle and Secondary Education Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Microaggressions: An Introduction, Natasha N. Johnson, Thaddeus Johnson

CJC Publications

Microaggressions are brief and commonplace daily verbal, behavioral, or environmental indignities, whether intentional or unintentional, that communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative slights and insults toward people who are not classified within the “normative” standard. Perpetrators of microaggressions are often unaware that they engage in such communications when they interact with people who differ from themselves. This review of microaggressions in its numerous forms seeks to address the current literature regarding aversive behavior and its impacts; this includes investigating the manifestation and influence of everyday “isms,” on the quality of life of those on the receiving end of these acts. Ensuing …

Creating Support Systems For Black Women In Nontraditional Stem Career Paths, Tokiwa T. Smith, Natasha N. Johnson

CJC Publications

Although careers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields are widely acknowledged as central to the future, women remain largely underrepresented in these spheres. This is particularly true for Black women, highlighting the necessity of support systems and resources designed to promote their success in STEM. Ideally, these supports should begin during the K-12 years and continue throughout the course of their educational journeys. Current research indicates that Black women in STEM achieve greater, lasting success when they have access to structured support systems. As the career paths of Black women in STEM continue to evolve, there remains a …

Black Girls Speak Stem: Counterstories Of Informal And Formal Learning Experiences, Natalie S. King, Rose M. Pringle

Middle and Secondary Education Faculty Publications

This study presents the interpretations and perceptions of Black girls who participated in I AM STEM – a community-based informal science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) program. Using narrative inquiry, participants generated detailed accounts of their informal and formal STEM learning experiences. Critical race methodology informed this research to portray the dynamic and complex experiences of girls of color, whose stories have historically been silenced and misrepresented. The data sources for this qualitative study included individual interviews, student reflection journals, samples of student work, and researcher memos, which were triangulated to produce six robust counterstories. Excerpts of the counterstories are …

Pre-Service Teachers’ Perspectives On How The Use Of Toon Comic Books During Guided Reading Influenced Learning By Struggling Readers, Ewa Mcgrail, Alicja Rieger, Gina M. Doepker, Samantha Mcgeorge

Middle and Secondary Education Faculty Publications

The study presented in this article examines the use of comic books, specifically the TOON comic books during guided reading instruction. The instruction was provided to struggling readers by the Literacy Center at a comprehensive university in southeastern United States. What most pre-service teachers in this study agreed upon was that comic books served as an effective tool for getting their students interested in reading. Reading comic books with tutors as partners in conversation with the struggling readers in this study was also a powerful medium for facilitating students’ literacy skills development, particularly in the areas of reading fluency and …

Literacy Scholars Coming To Know The People In The Parks, Their Literacy Practices And Support Systems, Gertrude Tinker Sachs, Ewa Mcgrail, Tisha Lewis Ellison, Nicole Denise Dukes, Kathleen Walsh Zackery

Middle and Secondary Education Faculty Publications

In this research, literacy scholars present the voices of the people who live in the parks near their state capital and university in a south-eastern city in the United States. Through the recorded, transcribed and analyzed conversations, we report the literacy practices of the people in the parks and their insights into the nested state and university structures that restrict and empower their quality of life opportunities. The general findings show our participants to be avid readers of a variety of genres and users of technology but with limited access to state and university resources and infrastructures due to laws …

Literacy Scholars Coming To Know The People In The Parks, Their Literacy Practices And Support Systems, Gertrude Tinker Sachs, Ewa Mcgrail, Tisha Y. Lewis, Nicole Denise Dukes, Kathleen Walsh Zackery

Middle and Secondary Education Faculty Publications

In this research, literacy scholars present the voices of the people who live in the parks near their state capital and university in a south-eastern city in the United States. Through the recorded, transcribed and analyzed conversations, we report the literacy practices of the people in the parks and their insights into the nested state and university structures that restrict and empower their quality of life opportunities. The general findings show our participants to be avid readers of a variety of genres and users of technology but with limited access to state and university resources and infrastructures due to laws …

Effectively Managing Bias In Teacher Preparation, Natasha Johnson

CJC Publications

This is the call for teacher preparation programs to actively incorporate an emphasis on social justice education and the development of teachers committed to creating equitable schools. Education in today's multicultural, pluralistic society must be actively concentrated on and successful at creating more just and unbiased schools for underserved students. Similar to Ladson-Billings' argument for a redefining of ‘good teaching,' there must be a redefinition of that which constitutes social justice teaching. It is the role of today's teacher preparation programs to equip teachers with the essential skills necessary to develop students, manage bias, and create a culture of equity …

Theory, Ethics And Equity In Intra-Action In Mathematics Education: Looking Forward, Looking Back, Susan Ophelia Cannon

Middle and Secondary Education Faculty Publications

This paper considers the intra-actions between poststructural theories and mathematics education over the last 40 years and considers how these theories have resulted in different ways to think students, teachers, and knowledge production. I argue that thinking in intra-action with various and different theories can allow us to ask different questions and radically rethink school mathematics.

Blurred Lines And Shifting Boundaries: Copyright And Transformation In The Multimodal Compositions Of Teachers, Teacher Educators And Future Media Professionals, J. Patrick Mcgrail, Ewa Mcgrail

Middle and Secondary Education Faculty Publications

The rapid proliferation of better quality “prosumer” equipment and powerful yet inexpensive editing software have helped erode the long-standing distinction between professional media producers and amateurs. Today’s aspiring young artists can take existing film, musical works, and other audiovisual material and transform them in varying degrees to create new work that comments on the world around them and that rivals in quality much of what Hollywood and professional musicians produce. However, this assessment is from the point of view of content. The looming specter of aggressive copyright policing by a litigious creative industry still divides the haves from the have …

A Teacher Goes Gothic: Walter White, Heisenberg, And The Dark Revenge Of Science, J. Patrick Mcgrail, Ewa Mcgrail, Alicja Rieger

Middle and Secondary Education Faculty Publications

Much has been written on the natures and personalities of teachers in educational research and publications (Carter, 2009; Beck, 2012; Bulman, 2015; Dalton, 2013; Gillard, 2012; Kelly & Caughlan, 2011). However, mass media can have a powerful influence on how people see teachers. The television series Breaking Bad (Gilligan, 2007-2013) and its representation of teachers, has contributed a unique – if warped -perspective on the subject of teachers and teaching in America. In this article, we argue that three important Gothic and mythic fables from literature are harbingers of Walter White and his transformation – the Faust legend, as told …

Developing Culturally Relevant Literacy Assessments For Bahamian Children, Gertrude Tinker Sachs, Annmarie P. Jackson, Tarika Sullivan, Kamania Wynter-Hoyte

Middle and Secondary Education Faculty Publications

The strong presence of culturally relevant materials in classrooms is seen as an indicator of good teaching but the development and use of these materials is under-investigated. Similarly, the actual

construction and use of culturally relevant materials for literacy assessment purposes is under- reported. This paper examines the development and field-testing of culturally appropriate reading

assessment materials for primary-school children in the Bahamas. The construction of culturally relevant assessment materials relies on the deep and intimate knowledge of the context and the use of the materials involves analyses from several perspectives: estimation of readability levels, creation of a range of …