Playing With Ideas: A Museum-Based Inquiry, Claire Meagher

Masters Theses

This thesis investigates the ways that alternative arts approaches such as

Teaching for Artistic Behavior, creative inquiry, and play based learning can

be incorporated into a contemporary arts based curriculum in the museum

setting. In addition to this, it looks closely at the significance of the museum

space and community in these learning encounters. The methodology included a

preliminary case study and teacher based research, which were completed with

the School & Teacher programs at the RISD museum. The qualitative data from

this research consisted of observations, teaching experiences, and reflections in

a visual journal. These findings supported the creation …

Rooted In Embodied Making: A Notebook On Process, Vija Lietuvninkas

Masters Theses

This thesis takes the form of a wooden box containing an archive of fragments – scanned notebooks, sketches, photographs, emails, journal entries, and other materials – that trace a year of embodied, process-based inquiry. Rather than presenting a linear argument or a polished final product, the work reflects a nonlinear, exploratory methodology grounded in making, wandering, and self-reflection.

Born within the context of the 2025 Sustainability Design Lab, an interdisciplinary initiative at RISD examining the material culture of wood across design fields, this project documents the artist’s evolving engagement with green wood as both material and metaphor. Through practices such …

Coarse Woody Debris: Growth & Decay, Cody W. Young

Masters Theses

Coarse Woody Debris is the felled wood from trees. When branches break off and trunks fall down to the ground, the wood from the tree begins to decay. Humans need to acknowledge the importance of this regeneration and habitat building process to help protect it. The debris from coarse wood decay provides multiple benefits to the surrounding ecosystem. It is important to leave the woody debris in the context in which it fell so that the cycles of growth and decay can be preserved. My project is a public service announcement about the values of coarse woody debris. Instead of …

Constructing Portraits Of Elementary Teachers Of Ethnic Studies: Examining The Narratives Of Anti-Racist Educators In An Era Of Common Core Curriculum And Instruction, Jennifer S. Manglicmot

Dissertations

The emergence of policies requiring ethnic studies courses in California’s secondary and higher education institutions amplified calls for anti-racist pedagogy and content in all K-12 grade levels. Currently, little empirical research exists on how ethnic studies is taught in elementary school classrooms. This absence is significant because instruction in these settings tend to focus heavily on meeting state content standards (i.e. Common Core), frameworks which have been critiqued as ignoring communities of Color epistemologies and promoting color-evasive ideologies, among other concerns. Through interviews, classroom observations, and document analysis, this qualitative multiple-case study explored how anti-racist and ethnic studies pedagogies are …

Black Parents’ Use Of Educational Advocates: Disrupting Structural And Systemic Racism In Education, Fredericka R. Butler Phd

Dissertations

Research indicates that educators’ deficit perceptions of Black students and their families factor into Black student overrepresentation in disciplinary and special education referrals and underrepresentation in advanced coursework (Annamma et al., 2014; Ford et al., 2023). This prevalence of implicit bias is documented, as is the significance of Black parent involvement in their children’s education (Latunde & Clark-Louque, 2016). Black parents’ awareness of educator racism encourages distrust of educators and interferes with cultivating effective home-school relationships that encourage successful student outcomes. School districts offer the services of educational advocates to provide support to parents whose children are referred for special …

Can You Hear A Pen Drop? A Study Of Classroom Acoustics And Aural Experience, Henry P. Moe

Honors Projects

This study investigates the relationship between classroom acoustics and perceived listening ease at Seattle Pacific University. Five classrooms were analyzed using objective measurements of reverberation time and background noise, and student and faculty perceptions were collected via surveys. While prior research and acoustic standards establish that poor acoustics hinder learning, findings revealed reverberation time and noise levels alone did not fully explain subjective listening experiences. Factors such as class size, seating arrangement, and external noise sources significantly shaped perceptions. The results underscore the importance of considering pedagogical goals and classroom usage when designing or evaluating learning environments.

Curiouser And Curiouser: Cultivating A Love Of Learning Within Elementary-Aged Children Through An Activity-Based Curiosity Program, Rayne Rickards

Critical and Creative Thinking Capstones Collection

This synthesis paper explores how a curiosity-centered educational design can promote lifelong learning (LLL) in elementary-aged children by actively engaging caregivers as co-learners. Grounded in the author’s personal and professional experience, the project responds to the underutilization of natural curiosity in traditional education. Drawing from metacognition, Self-Determination Theory (SDT), Lev Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD), and Howard Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences Theory, the author develops an activity-based curiosity program that integrates caregiver involvement into reflective, autonomy-supportive learning experiences. The program design applies principles such as collaboration, relationship-building, creative problem-solving, and metacognitive scaffolding, all explored through coursework in the Critical and …

Speech Camp: An Action Research Approach To Transformative Presentation Skills Coaching, Sherrie Torrey

Critical and Creative Thinking Capstones Collection

This synthesis explores the evolution of Speech Camp, a participant-centered coaching program developed by the author to support individuals with presentation anxiety to increased confidence in their communication. This program, developed through iterative redesign and informed by Action Research and Action Learning, reframes presentation skills development as a relational and reflective process rather than a performance-based task. The project draws upon theoretical frameworks—including Bandura’s Self-Efficacy Theory, Ryan and Deci’s Self-Determination Theory, and Mezirow’s Transformative Learning Theory—to analyze the program’s current methodology and curriculum to reveal how elements of structured reflection, peer engagement, and psychological safety promote meaningful internal change. Special …

Sociology: Culture, Marcia Morrison

Open Educational Resources

This work examine culture. It begins by examining the foundations of culture to include norms, values, language, symbols and knowledge. In looking at each, it breaks down the implication of each to the development of ourselves as well as the person in the environment. It moves on to look at contexts of culture such as dominant cultures juxtapose to competing cultural systems, and how the various elements of culture can serve to either promote or minimize the various cultural constructs within society.

Ziyyarah: Ethical And Intra-Active Space For Conducting Interviews With Muslim American Students, Wesam M. Salem

The Qualitative Report

Conducting research with Muslim American participants, who have non-Western roots and are bound to their cultural, linguistic, and religious practices, the prescribed, Eurocentric, and power-laden interviewing practices appear to be unfit and essentializing. This paper extends the argument to de/colonize research practices to create realities that are inclusive of participants' ways of knowing and culture. It also draws from the call for an intra-active and entangled approach to research that emphasizes how researchers and their subjects mutually co-constitute knowledge through their entanglement in the research process. It is also rooted in postcolonial theory, and the concept of the nomadic subject …

Teachers' Knowledge And Understanding Of Physical Literacy In Physical Education Learning: A Phenomenological Approach, Johan Irmansyah, Maulidin Maulidin, Herman Syah, Edi Kurniawan

The Qualitative Report

This study explores the knowledge and understanding of elementary school physical education (PE) teachers regarding the concept of physical literacy (PL) through a phenomenological approach. PL encompasses fundamental movement skills, as well as the knowledge, motivation, and confidence necessary for lifelong participation in physical activities. Ten PE teachers with over 10 years of teaching experience were selected through purposive sampling. Data were collected via in-depth interviews, observations, and documentation, and analyzed using inductive content analysis with the aid of ATLAS.ti software. The findings reveal that many teachers hold misconceptions about PL, often prioritizing the mastery of physical abilities while overlooking …

A Teacher, A Tutor, A Friend: Chatgpt And The High School Experience, Saisha Gupta, Vivek Mehta, Rebecca Kam, Caroline Ehmann, Alma Orgad, Emily Kuang, Alejandro Castro Barrantes, Matthew Posada, Samay Shah, Nikhita Prasad, Tara Pai, Eileen Ho, Shirley Xi, Tianyi Zhou, Elaina Li, Stephanie Wan, Shreya Paranjape, Zoe Dearling, Siqi (Grace) Peng, Aanya Kaveti, Gwendolyn Lowrance, Angela Ziyi Xie, Mira Xu, Adhiti Hariram, Alexa Muse

The Qualitative Report

Given the increasing emergence of artificial intelligence (AI) in education, high school students' perspectives on ChatGPT are underrepresented in current research literature. As high school student researchers in an English Language Arts course, we approached this gap in literature by asking the question: In what ways do pressures within high school communities influence students’ perspectives on justifying or rejecting the use of ChatGPT? We interviewed 24 secondary students and conducted a thematic and discourse analysis, coding the interviews through the lenses of social goods (Gee, 2014), Figured Worlds (Holland et al., 1998), and positioning theory (Holland et al., 1998; Ingram …

A Teacher, A Supervisor, An Undefined Self, Alexa Muse

The Qualitative Report

This article follows the experiences and reflections of an American high school English teacher while evolving a single tenth grade memoir and grammar unit into a published student-led research project over the span of 3 years. As a partner piece, this article supplements my students’ published project, titled “A Teacher, a Tutor, a Friend,” that explores ChatGPT and student perspectives through a thematic discourse analysis under the framework of Figured Worlds (Holland et al., 1998); as their teacher-turned-supervisor, I found that preparing 10th grade students—now called the Lexington Student Research and Publication Collaborative—to grapple with such complex material was a …

Wood In Hand: Open-Ended Wooden Play, Farnaz Dastranj

Masters Theses

This project explores the design of a sustainable, open-ended wooden toy that encourages children’s creativity, collaboration, and physical development. Recognizing the important role of play in learning, the toy aims to connect children to natural materials while supporting skills like eye-hand coordination, flexible thinking, and visual-spatial processing. Free-form linear elements constructed from wood, a renewable, durable, and biodegradable material, the toy invites children to assemble and create various structures using dowels, pegs, and fabric. By offering different connection possibilities and free-form pieces, it fosters imagination, problem-solving, and group play. This project also addresses sustainability by focusing on material longevity, reusability, …

Playful Parenting, Shloka Kartikeyan

Masters Theses

“What is the next big milestone for my child, and how can I be ready for it?”

That is the question in every parents' mind as they watch their child grow. The developmental milestones being the source of guidance and cause of worry for parents.

We are in an overwhelming era of options - the global toy market was valued at around $114.4 billion in 2024 as reported by Global News Wire* - that’s the size of options in toys alone for parents to choose from. With all these products geared towards encouraging child development, parents are often left to …

Embodying Altruistic Love: The Role Of Emotions In Teaching Black Students With Disabilities Within An Inclusive Elementary School, Joshua Armentrout

Graduate Doctoral Dissertations

Teacher emotions play a pivotal yet understudied role in shaping the educational experiences of Black students with disabilities (SWDs). This study examines how five special educators in a fully inclusive elementary school understand, experience, and navigate their emotions in relation to Black SWDs. Using a qualitative approach grounded in portraiture, this study explores the intersection of race, disability, and emotion, revealing how teachers internalize, resist, and negotiate dominant ideologies within the broader educational system.

Guided by a three-dimensional space framework from the field of narrative inquiry—temporality, sociality, and spatiality—this study traces how educators’ emotions are shaped by past experiences, social …

Bodies Collapsing Together... Together As Dust., Catherine J. Wang

Masters Theses

I welcome you to a pedagogy of collapsing bodies: the teaching and learning practice between surviving occupants of Institutions.

From the villainizing of trans- bodies in K-14 public schools to the bodily removal of Palestinian discourse from universities, the 2025 presidential takeover of the Department of Education unearths systemic urgencies over the fragility, complicity, and agency of academic institutions—survivors of wars, recessions, shootings, climate disasters—that have always been collapsing. As long as educational campuses stage political and industrial performances, Institutional marriage to capitalism collapses the future of the university. Our architectural pedagogy shoulders this weight of confrontation: design education as …

Field Journal: The Excluded Middle, Carrie E. Kouts

Masters Theses

What does it look like to engage with organisms and landscapes at the periphery of anthropocentric value structures? How does one break the internalized myth that the “built” environment is excluded from the natural world? When does a hyper-mobile and hyper-commodified society confront the exponential crisis of animal death? Within this series of journal entries, field notes, collection observations, weird prose, and sensory musings, one will find questions on the nature of being human and the complex narratives of care we encounter in a world shared with more-than-humans. Each handwritten vignette and photograph from daily life weaves a non-linear and …

Healing In Relation: Honoring Post-Graduate Grief As An Opportunity For Relational Scholarship, Tanya J. Behrisch, Anna Rumjahn, Chris Yakimov

Journal of Contemplative and Holistic Education

This paper is a three-way conversation about grief that follows a graduate program. We explore our experiences with post-graduate grief in community, attending to each other’s sense of loss following separation from supervisors, theses, and graduate programs. In committing to slow scholarship, processes—such as navigating feelings and living—have been valued over producing a manuscript quickly. Slowness, including long gaps between meetings, enabled us to follow the diverse contours of quiet alchemical processes such as grieving, opening up to emptiness, self-acceptance, being enough, and letting go. After years of compression and dialogic friction with her mentor, Tanya confronts feelings akin to …

The Power Of Storytelling: Creatively Facilitating Conceptual Change In The Classroom, Mackenzie S. Rose, Marcus Johnson

Journal of Educational Research and Practice

Conceptual knowledge encompasses understanding the interrelationships among multiple pieces of information. Misconceptions of these interrelationships illustrate the need for effective educational strategies to facilitate conceptual change, with the goal of facilitating changes in learner understanding to appropriate, accurate, and complete concepts. Strategies, such as refutation texts, have proven effective in addressing science misconceptions, yet there is a prominent gap in research on conceptual change in nonscience subjects and the use of storytelling to facilitate such change. Storytelling, presented in a range of educational subjects, invites learners to engage in social discourses and problem-solving exercises. Prompted by classroom storytelling practices, creativity, …

Social-Emotional Learning Curricula's Impact On Elementary School Students, Ethan J. Sindelir

Graduate Teacher Education

Abstract

Most elementary educators might have argued that they always taught social-emotional learning (SEL) in general education classrooms. However, the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted this crucial aspect of education, with students missing out on valuable opportunities to develop their social skills at school. In response, several schools adopted more explicit social-emotional learning curricula. While this pedagogical approach has become more prevalent in recent years, educational leaders need to understand the impact that this approach has on their students.

This paper reviewed 15 literature articles to guide educational leaders, primarily in the elementary domain, seeking to understand how SEL curricula impact students. …

Staff Congress Ofice Files, 1990-2021, Staff Congress

University Archives Finding Aids

No abstract provided.

Volume Cxliv, Number 24, May 30, 2025, Lawrence University

The Lawrentian

No abstract provided.

May 30, 2025 Ereporter, University Of Alabama At Birmingham

eReporter (campus newsletter)

No abstract provided.

Experiential Learning In Lecture Settings For Ides 200: Programs, Codes & Standards, Emily Cerny

UNL Faculty Course Portfolios

In traditional lecture settings, students take notes from a lecturer’s recitations and have minimal interaction with each other and the world around them. For IDES 200: Programs, Codes & Standards, a key aspect of learning is for students to understand the connections between the concepts learned in class and the built environment. To increase this connection and get students thinking in different manners, experiential learning methodologies were introduced through in-class exercises and within the course assignments alongside typical lectures and lecture comprehension quizzes. By surveying students’ perceptions of assignments and course activities, the goal of this course portfolio is to …

Examining The Influence Of Vision And Change And A Mentoring Network On Teaching Philosophies And Strategies, Stephanie Mathews, Carlos C. Goller, Michael J. Wolyniak, Uma Swamy, Anjali Misra, Michael E. Moore, Jeremy L. Hsu, Dina L. Newman

Biology, Chemistry, and Environmental Sciences Faculty Articles and Research

The 2011 report Vision and Change: A Call to Action (V&C) resulted from a national effort to rethink biology curriculum. V&C outlines core concepts and core competencies for biology undergraduates and promotes evidence-based pedagogy, undergraduate research, and inclusive practices. However, it is unclear how much biology educators know about V&C and what motivates educators’ development of their teaching philosophy and practices. We leveraged the Promoting Active Learning and Mentoring (PALM) Network, a group that introduced evidence-based instructional practices (EBIPs) to instructors through mentoring, journal clubs, and a community of practice, to investigate how much V&C has influenced educator …

The Impact Of The Co-Teaching Model On The Academic Growth Of The General Education Student, Paula Matkov Andries

Theses and Dissertations from DePaul University

This quantitative study aimed to determine whether there is a positive impact on the academic growth of general education students' reading and math growth between co-taught classrooms compared to traditional one-teacher classrooms within a suburban public school district over the course of one academic year. The school district has implemented co-taught programming with longevity as a special education instructional model in three of the eight elementary schools and in both middle schools. This study focused on the conditional growth of standardized test scores in reading and math for fourth and fifth-graders who have not been identified with special education needs, …

Liberated Education: Sustainable Paradigms And Pathways For Black And Latino Communities Beyond Formal Education, Stephanie C. Bennett

Theses and Dissertations from DePaul University

As the innovation and educational entrepreneurship sparked by the global pandemic continues to reshape the educational ecosystem, communities are left questioning how to manage and sustain new programs. This dissertation investigates the sustainability strategies employed by founders of liberated educational programs that operate outside the formal school system. These programs are specifically designed to provide educational alternatives for Black and Latino communities in the United States. Using a qualitative, multiple case study approach, this study draws data from interviews with four program founders, program handbooks, website analysis, analytic memos, and virtual tours. The application of Bronfenbrenner’s Process-Person-Context-Time (PPCT) model guided …

"The Talk": A General Interpretive Inquiry Into The Racial Socialization Of Black Males And Their Perception Towards Policing, Kevin Cato

Theses and Dissertations from DePaul University

No abstract provided.

Reconceptualising The Role Of Academic Language And Learning Advisers In The Artificial Intelligence Age, Andrew Kelly, Katrina Strampel, Andrea Lynch

Research outputs 2022 to 2026

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools are profoundly transforming learning, teaching and assessment in higher education. These tools present a major challenge for academic language and learning (ALL) advisers, as they are increasingly capable of performing many of the individual learning support functions that ALL advisers have traditionally provided to students. This conceptual article reimagines the role of ALL advisers in an AI-dominated world. Through applying the theory of practice architectures, it argues refocusing on four areas of practice: professional learning for educators, AI literacy, peer learning communities, and self-regulated learning. By embracing these areas of practice, and through collaboration with …