Education Commons^™

Understanding Contradictions In Teacher-Learner Identity, Digital Video, And Goal-Directed Activity In A Blended Graduate Reading Education Course, Jennifer K. Lubke

Doctoral Dissertations

More teachers are experiencing professional development within blended/virtual learning communities, which I consider a fruitful avenue for expansion of new literacies in K-12 classrooms. However, new literacies challenge traditional structures in education even as new rules of corporate-sponsored reform and high-stakes accountability serve to reinforce these structures. Within this context of contradictions, a cohort of teachers from a rural, remote county in the southeast United States participated in a blended learning environment in their final semester of graduate-level coursework in Reading Education. Some of the teacher-learners, whose own attitudes and motivations toward technology were as diverse as the tools themselves, …

Constructing Meanings By Designing Worlds Digital Games As Participatory Platforms For Interest-Driven Learning And Creativity, Vittorio Marone

Doctoral Dissertations

This study emerges from the observation of an increasing divide between generations: a lack of a shared ground that carries profound social, cultural, and educational implications. In particular, the broadening differences between academic and “grassroots” approaches to learning and creativity are transforming formal and informal enterprises into seemingly incommunicable realms. This clash between different (and distant) practices, inside and outside of school, is inhibiting the construction of a common language between teachers and students, and, more broadly, between generations, thus hindering the development of any educational discourse.

In this study I inquired into an online participatory space in order to …