Education Commons^™

Using Steam To Increase Engagement And Literacy Across Disciplines, Robert L. Long Ii, Stephen S. Davis

The STEAM Journal

This paper explores STEAM as a solution to improving student engagement and helping students improve functional literacy across the curriculum. While STEM is a fairly established approach to curriculum, researchers and practitioners are continuing to develop and understand STEAM and its place in school curriculum. It is important that educators foster this holistic approach to education and strive to participate in active research associated with STEAM. It is also most advantageous for stakeholders to understand the importance of arts integration and its use to support collaboration, innovation, and creativity within students. Key strategies can be used to support arts integration …

Digital Media Production To Support Literacy For Secondary Students With Diverse Learning Abilities, April Marie Leach

Journal of Media Literacy Education

Producing digital media is a hands-on, inquiry-based mindful process that naturally embeds Universal Design for Learning (UDL) principles into literacy instruction, providing options for learning and assessment for a wide array of students with diverse learning abilities. Video production learning experiences acknowledge the cognitive talents of some students labeled “disabled.” For some, the discovery of personal abilities activated when learning through the production process may motivate deeper learning. Although challenges of access, quality of teacher preparation and assessment strategies represent significant challenges, digital media production learning experiences offer diverse learners a rich, socially interactive environment that models open communication and …

Shaking Up Shakespeare: Teaching For The Contemporary High School English Classroom, Megan Sampson

Mahurin Honors College Capstone Experience/Thesis Projects

Contemporary high school English students find Shakespeare distant because they believe Shakespeare is hard to understand. Pairing Shakespeare with thematically-similar contemporary texts can make his works more accessible to students. Using different angles on the same theme shows students that Shakespeare presented some universal issues that still have relevance today. The Literacy Design Collaborative modules included within this thesis use Shakespeare in cooperation with other texts to focus on a specific theme. Using the module structure, teachers can organize the unit’s overarching goals and can include all handouts and necessary materials. This structure of design incorporates literacy-centered practices in order …

"Resisting From Within": (Re)Imagining A Critical Translingual English Classroom, Kate Anna Seltzer

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This ethnographic case study of an urban, linguistically diverse English classroom explores what happened when space was made for students both to voice their experiences living amidst ideologies that marginalize their language practices and identities and to resist such ideologies through writing that pushed monoglossic boundaries. Intensive one-on-one work with a high school English teacher led to the creation of a year-long curriculum that emphasized metalinguistic inquiry and discussion, linked language, power, and identity, and modeled the ways that writers and other artists take linguistic risks in order to critique monoglossic language ideologies.

Over the course of the year, students …

Content Area Teacher Perspectives On Integrating Literacy Strategies, Lynette Smith Smith

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

The Common Core State Standards recommend that all educators prepare students with the literacy skills needed for college and careers. The purpose of this qualitative case study was to examine 7th and 8th grade content area teachers' perspectives towards teaching literacy. The research questions addressed teachers' capabilities in the role of literacy instructor as well as the actual application of literacy. The conceptual framework included Bruner's constructivist, Bandura's self-efficacy, and Knowles's andragogy theories. These theories informed the investigation of adult learners' perspectives regarding the way they learn and gain confidence to provide literacy instruction. Eleven English, math, science, and social …