Education Commons^™

Educating Critically : Challenging The Familiar Contours Of Literacy Teacher Education., Bianca Nightengale-Lee

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The shifting cultural ecologies of U.S. classrooms emphasize acknowledging difference, accepting diversity, and sustaining both cultural and linguistic plurality (Banks & Banks, 2009; hooks, 1994; Paris 2014). Teacher education programs play an integral role in preparing Pre-Service Teachers (PSTs) with skills, knowledge, and dispositions necessitated by a growing Culturally and Linguistically Diverse (CLD) student population (Cruz, Ellerbrock, Vasquez & Howes, 2014). To enact equitable teaching practices reflective of 21st century students, PSTs need to demonstrate a level of cultural awareness that acknowledges the racially, socially, and politically charged societal structures that shape education for CLD students (Hall & Carlson, 2016). …

Beyond Accessibility: How Media Literacy Education Addresses Issues Of Disabilities, Yonty Friesem

Journal of Media Literacy Education

This special issue on media literacy and disability provides a variety of examples and case studies to showcase the importance of addressing issues of disability in the media literacy community. The literature on the intersection of media literacy and disability is slender but suggests four distinct uses of media for students with disabilities. However, none include applying a critical lens to the use of media for students with disabilities. By connecting the practice of critical media literacy with disability theory, this paper offers a theoretical and practical framework for media literacy educators, extending NAMLE’s principles of media literacy education to …

The Medical Student Manifesto, Ye Kyung Song

Pedagogy and Theatre of the Oppressed Journal

Under neoliberal education systems, medical students are unable to critically engage and develop a critical consciousness because they are forced to master standardized test-taking skills and memorize medical minutiae. As insider-outsiders, medical humanists and bioethicists can shed light on the culture and power dynamics inherent in medical education. Furthermore, the medical humanities could teach medical students to critically reflect on their own human values, and to become ethical and humanistic physicians in the face of the hierarchical culture of biomedicine and neoliberal university administrations. Medical educators, through critical pedagogy, can liberate the medical student and create the potential for changing …

How Do Teachers Challenge Neoliberalism Through Critical Pedagogy Within And Outside Of The Classroom?, Rezvan Shahsavari-Googhari

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis uses the qualitative case study approach to investigate current strategies and skills four Ontario public secondary school teachers apply both within and outside of the classroom to enhance students’ critical consciousness. The focus is on teachers’ pedagogical work in the era of neoliberal restructuring in order to provide a rich account of how neoliberalism challenges and affects their teaching. Existing literature shows a crisis of identity and political agency among youth in many Western societies, characterized by individuals’ inability to think critically about social, political and economic issues, which is rooted in neoliberal education reforms. Adopting a critical …

A Teacher's Inquiry Into Bringing In Biliteracy In A Fifth-Grade English-Only Classroom, Stephanie Lynn Abraham

Networks: An Online Journal for Teacher Research

This teacher inquiry project explored how I, a non-Spanish speaking teacher at the time, implemented critical, bilingual pedagogies to foster biliteracy development among my fifth-grade students. One, the project showed that students could further their biliteracy by incorporating their funds of knowledge through a family stories writing project. Two, many students were anxious about reading in Spanish, and dual poetry alleviated this due to its compactness and linguistic scaffolding. Finally, the project showed the continual issues of unequal power relations concerning bilingualism and biliteracy in US classrooms by showing how I failed to include languages other than Spanish in this …

Introducing Critical Pedagogies, Deepening Service-Learning Practices, Kathryn J. Kozak

Pedagogy and the Human Sciences

Book review of Critical Perspectives on Service-Learning in Higher Education by Susan J. Deeley. (2015). London, England: Palgrave Macmillan.

Translanguaging Practices For Educational Equity: Moments In A Bilingual Middle School Classroom, Luz Y. Herrera

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Dual language bilingual education (DLBE) programs in New York City largely follow a 50-50 model: half of the instruction is in English while the other half is in another target language. In NYC, as well as the rest of the country, these programs are typically English-Spanish due to the large Spanish-speaking population in the U.S. Bilingual programs also tend to strictly separate languages and often insist that teachers and students only use the designated language according to the school or district’s particular language allocation policy.

This qualitative case study challenges the strict separatist language model of some dual language bilingual …

What About The Little People?: Empowering Middle School Students To Discard The Great Man Theory, Sarah Straub

MLET: The Journal of Middle Level Education in Texas

This paper attempts to address the promotion of critical thinking in our middle school students as they reflect on the widely-accepted White Eurocentric perspective of history that has been traditionally taught in school. In this article, the incomplete treatment of history is identified as Carlyle’s Great Man Theory. The hope is that educators can be critical of the curriculum they are teaching so as to promote critical perspectives in their own students. History is not just the story of Great Men – it is a collective story of which many of us have a partial understanding. Specifically, this article addresses …

Translanguaging: Definitions, Implications, And Further Needs In Burgeoning Inquiry, Luis E. Poza

Faculty Publications

The term translanguaging has appeared with growing frequency in research about the education of linguistic minority students. Amid increasing application of the term, concern emerges regarding the consistency of its definitions and characterizations, specifically with respect to the term’s social justice implications, which risk dilution. Early instances (García, 2007, 2009a) position the term as both a pedagogical strategy for supporting multilingual learners and a critique of existing conceptualizations of language and bilingualism that have historically marginalized particular speech communities. In this review of recent literature, I analyze 53 texts published between 1996 and 2014 for their definitions, exemplifications, and attributed …

Sustainability Of Our Planet And All Species As The Organizing Principle For Slce, Kevin Kecskes, Jennifer Joyalle, Erin Elliott, Jacob D. B. Sherman

Public Administration Faculty Publications and Presentations

We may define and prioritize them differently, but few would deny that our human community is facing intractable problems at local, national, and global scales. We call on higher education institutions (HEIs) around the world to work collectively and with strategic intent and action to use sustainability as an organizing principle to focus service-learning and community engagement (SLCE) activities on the flourishing of our planet and its diverse species.

In the United Nations report, Our Common Future, sustainable development (the future-oriented view of “sustainability”) was defined by World Commission on the Environment and Development members as “the kind of development …

Subaltern Pedagogy: A Critical Theorizing Of Pedagogical Practices For Marginalized Border-Crossers, Shireen Keyl

Teacher Education and Leadership Faculty Publications

Given the ever-increasing migration in today’s globalizing world and the pervasive xenophobic behaviors and attitudes of some U.S. school stakeholders toward vulnerable groups such as refugees, migrants and asylum seekers, I argue for a paradigm shift in the theorizing of educational pedagogy. Based on my qualitative study conducted in Lebanon that examines the lived experiences of African women as border-crossers who migrated to Beirut for economic reasons, I forward a subaltern pedagogy. Three critical theoretical frameworks inform this pedagogical shift: critical pedagogy, post/decolonial thought, and a critical spatial analysis. The latter idea in particular situates marginalized, subaltern groups in their …

Reorienting An Information Literacy Program Toward Social Justice: Mapping The Core Values Of Librarianship To The Acrl Framework, Shana Higgins, Lua Gregory

Library Faculty Publications & Presentations

Since the publication of the Association of College and Research Libraries' (ACRL) Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education librarians have grappled with the purposes, impact, and meaning of this teaching document for their daily instructional practice, for curriculum development, and for institutional and programmatic assessment goals. A strength of the Framework is its emphasis on context, an emphasis aligned with the goals of critical pedagogy and one that acknowledges investment in specific community needs. This article reflects on an attempt to contextualize the Framework for an information literacy program concerned with social justice and student agency by connecting it …

The Educational Dimensions Of Filipina Migrant Workers’ Activist Identities, Rowena Magdalena Tomaneng

Doctoral Dissertations

There are 10.4 million Filipino/a migrant workers worldwide, with the large majority of Filipina migrants working in traditional gendered labor such as domestic work, care giving, nursing, teaching, and factory work (Ruiz, 2013). Because of the private nature of household work, Filipina migrants are vulnerable to mental and physical abuses from their employers in addition to labor exploitation. While researchers recognize migrants’ agency and acknowledge migrants as political and social actors, few studies connect Filipina migrant workers’ activist identities to the political education they receive from grassroots organizations in the Philippines, United States, and other countries. Consequently, the purpose of …