Education Commons^™

Decolonizing My Classroom During The Covid-19 Pandemic: An Autoethnographic Study, Nadia Khan-Roopnarine

Theses & Dissertations

American schooling is a colonized construct that seeks to maintain white patriarchal hegemony (Battiste, 2013). As a critical educator whose personal epistemologies are shaped by Indo-Caribbean feminism and Coolie feminism, I continually grapple with a large bureaucratic system that thrives on the perpetual dehumanization of teachers, families, and students. The sudden shift to remote learning surfaced the particular cognitive dissonance I navigate, both within myself and in my professional spaces, as I work to decolonize my classroom spaces while inadvertently perpetuating them.

As a high school English teacher serving a population of exclusively BIPOC students in a small urban school, …

Educator Perspectives On Both Sides Of The Pandemic: Inspirations Taken From Hamilton, Audrey Cohan Ed.D, Andrea Honigsfeld Ed.D.

Faculty Works: EDU (1995-2023)

The year is 2020; it is unrecognizable to students, parents, and teachers. While struggling daily to redefine what pandemic teaching is—interwoven with the stress of surviving the disease, or even managing at-home life—teachers are challenged to be innovative in new ways. They are called to be agile, creative, digitally fluent, and responsive to varied models of instructional delivery. Hours are spent balancing home and work while designing virtual lessons, developing engaging activities, learning new technology and remote-teaching strategies, as well as determining which students may be lost along the way. It is widely recognized and documented that not all districts …

A Case Study Of Teaching Mba Quantitative Analysis Online, Daniel R. Ball

Faculty Works: Business (1973-2022)

Advancements in video capture and learning management systems (LMS) provide faculty with more tools than ever before to effectively teach quantitative business subjects to graduate students enrolled in blended and online courses. Students pursuing an MBA often come from diverse educational and professional backgrounds, with some continuing directly from undergraduate programs while others may be returning to school after spending years in the workforce. These students require instructional design that is both comprehensive and flexible to meet their various needs, accommodating the increasing preference for visual content delivery. Early in an MBA program, a course in quantitative analysis often serves …

Dewey In China: A Historical Look At His Message Of Peace And Understanding, Charles F. Howlett Ph.D., Audrey Cohan Ed.D, Mariola Krol

Faculty Works: EDU (1995-2023)

Not long after he arrived in East Asia, a journey he eagerly welcomed, John Dewey quickly turned his thoughts to the past world war. It was a conflict that traversed the globe, ravaged the European landscape beyond anyone’s comprehension, led to almost seventeen million deaths, and tumbled dynastic empires forever. As he began to pen an article for the liberal journal, The New Republic, he kept abreast of developments at the Treaty of Versailles. He had hoped that the victorious Allies would find common ground by putting aside partisan hatred and bitterness in favor of lasting peace. His wish was …

Education As An Instrument For Peace And Democracy: Dewey's Perspective On The Rise Of Nationalism, Audrey Cohan Ed.D, Charles F. Howlett Ph.D.

Faculty Works: EDU (1995-2023)

This article examines Dewey’s views on the concept of nationalism and how it should be taught in schools. Dewey was the first major American philosopher to address the positive and negative factors associated with the term, which became increasingly used for political purposes during and after World War I. Four basic aspects are addressed in this analysis. First, the authors discuss several fundamental Deweyan propositions tied to peace and citizenship. As Dewey viewed it, education is an extension of democratic ethics and healthy community-building. Second, the authors explore Dewey’s goal for achieving world citizenship and lasting peace, which was based …

Closing The Door On Standardized Test Preparation And Opening The Door To Next Generation Literacy, Vicky Giouroukakis Ph.D., Maureen Connolly Ed.D.

Faculty Works: EDU (1995-2023)

These are the words of four graduate students who are excited about becoming English teachers as of September 2016. Notice anything about their reasons for teaching? No one mentions wanting to increase students’ test scores. We believe that you would be hard-pressed to find a teacher candidate or practicing teacher who chose this profession because of a passion for test preparation, but as teachers and students are facing mandated standardized assessments like PARCC, Smarter Balanced, the new SAT and ACT, as well as local measures to determine student growth, we are growing concerned that the level of importance placed on …

An Important Scholarly Exercise: What It Takes To Write A Valuable Book Review And Why, Charles F. Howlett Ph.D.

Faculty Works: EDU (1995-2023)

So, you’ve been asked to write a book review. Consider it an honor, not a burden. Younger scholars, in particular, often consider reviewing an onerous task detracting from their own scholarly research, interests, and desires, or that it takes up too much time. But I would argue that there are important benefits to be derived from writing book reviews. One of the most notable is that reviewing books not only expands one’s personal library of learning, but it also fosters disciplined reading habits. Failing to read and report on books deprives scholars of one of the academic opportunities of being …

John Dewey And His Evolving Perceptions Of Race Issues In American Democracy, Audrey Cohan Ed.D, Charles F. Howlett Ph.D.

Faculty Works: EDU (1995-2023)

Although the election of America’s first African American President offered a glimmer of hope, change, and potential for social justice issues to impact diverse minorities in America, the emergence of the Black Lives Matter Movement continues to resonate among people of color who believe that the promise of American democracy has yet to be achieved. Over one hundred years ago, the nation’s most famous philosopher, progressive educator, and strongest advocate for the democratic way of life, John Dewey (1916), briefly addressed the matter of race in what many consider his most famous work, Democracy and Education. “An undesirable society”, he …

This Is America: The Morris District's Potential To Be A Model Of School Diversity, Allison Roda Ph.D.

Faculty Works: EDU (1995-2023)

For Paul Tractenberg—a law professor and long-time legal advocate for educational equity and funding equalization in New Jersey, this was a story that he always wanted to tell. As Paul described it to me, to our co-author Ryan Coughlan, and to the nearly 100 Morristown residents and school staff that we would eventually interview for the Morris project, studying the 1971 Jenkins Case that brought about the merger of two racially distinct Morristown and Morris Township K-8 school systems had been percolating in his mind since the early 70’s. When we began the project three years ago, we did not …

Operation Fast And [We're Serious], Daniel Miedema, Donald Mitchell Jr., Ph.D.

Executives, Administrators, & Staff Publications

The intention of this piece is to push thinking beyond NCLB and offer a fresh perspective on how the U.S. educational system might progress in the future. Consider this a call to action to inspire and promote real change in a profession that has been restrained by federal regulations, standardization, and modest funding.

School Choice Policies And Racial Segregation: Where White Parents’ Good Intentions, Anxiety, And Privilege Collide, Allison Roda Ph.D., Amy Stuart Wells

Faculty Works: EDU (1995-2023)

A growing body of school choice research has shown that when school choice policies are not designed to racially or socioeconomically integrate schools, that is, are “colorblind” policies, they generally manage to do the opposite, leading to greater stratification and separation of students by race and ethnicity across schools and programs. Since white, advantaged parents are more likely to get their children into the highest-status schools regardless of the school choice policy in place, we believed that more research was needed on how those parents interact with school choice policies and whether they would support changes to those policies that …

Sustaining Technology In A Discovery Learning Community, Tricia M. Kress Ph.D., Leonard Ciaccio

Faculty Works: EDU (1995-2023)

Difficulty integrating technology into classrooms is a well-known challenge. As early as the 1920’s, radio and film were predicted to be innovations that would change the classroom. In the 1950’s, it was television, in the ‘60s and 70’s teaching machines, and from the ‘80’s to the present, computers. Generally, the teachers who embrace technology are the rare minority, and those who don’t are blamed for the break-down in implementation because they are regarded as showing, “indifference, lethargy, even antagonism, toward this revolutionary means of communication” (Tyack & Cuban 123). But the truth of the matter is “in the top-down process …

From Baggins To Beowful And Back Again: Teaching (Via) Tolkien, Jeff Massey Ph.D.

Faculty Works: ENG (1995-2016)

Beowulf, is traditionally at least, a difficult text for incoming freshmen. The Hobbit is arguably less so. In part this has much to do with their respective languages: one is so archaic as to seem foreign, the other is as comfortable as an old English shoe. One is a tale told to children around a quiet fire, the other an elegy shouted above raucous barbarians at beer. Beowulf is peppered with digressions, and shot through with violent revenge cycles. The Hobbit is a relatively straightfoward quest, adventures along the way notwithstanding. They are, on the surface at least, as …

Why Wildeve Had To Die: Mimetic Triangles And Violent Ends In The Return Of The Native, Jeff Massey Ph.D.

Faculty Works: ENG (1995-2016)

Although significant critical attention has been directed toward understanding Eustacia Vye’s death in Hardy’s The V^tum of the Native (1878), substantially less has been paid to the other corpse fished from Shadwater Weir, Damon Wildeve. I feel the reasons behind his death remain largely unexplored. Damon and Eustacia, in many ways so similar to one another, meet an identical end beneath the waters of the drainage pool. No small critical effort has been directed towards understanding Eustacia Vye’s death, be it simple suicide, narcissistic death wish (Mitchell), pagan necessity (Giordano), or punishment for gender transgression Deen).