Curriculum and Instruction Commons^™

Teacher Perceptions Of Blended Learning To Support 21st Century Learners, Nikki Hensley

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this qualitative study was to understand teacher perceptions of blended learning as an instructional methodology for addressing the needs of diverse learners. The researcher explored the perceptions of teachers who were participating in an ongoing professional development program within their school district. This program focused on improving teaching and learning through the implementation of a blended learning approach. The researcher examined the experiences of teachers as they learned to adapt pedagogical practices to address the learning needs of 21st century students through blended learning. The researcher sought to gain a better understanding of how teachers perceived that …

Availability And Perceived Effectiveness Of High School Programs, Services, And Approaches To Address Trauma-Related Outcomes In The Upper Peninsula Of Michigan, Jaime Vanenkevort

All NMU Master's Theses

Twelve administrators at Michigan Upper Peninsula (U.P.) high schools participated in 12 separate structured interviews to identify programs, services, and approaches to address trauma-related outcomes. Participants were three U.P. superintendents, eight principals, and one Intermediate School District (ISD) social worker who described a convergence of factors affecting assessment measures of programs, services, and approaches to address student trauma-related outcomes in U.P. high schools. The interviews addressed the identification of programs, services, and approaches to address trauma-related outcomes at U.P. high schools and the assessment measures in use to evaluate available programs, services, and approaches. A systems theory approach and understanding …

Impact Of Tier 2 Intervention Program On Student Achievement And Self-Efficacy, Barbara L. Georges

Dissertations

To address the challenges of drop-out rate and achievement gap, high schools have begun to implement intervention programs. Schools bear responsibility in addressing factors such as poor academic performance, lack of course credit, and low motivation to encourage post-secondary success. Intervention programs show promise in mitigating these factors despite variation due to lack of state or federal requirements. The most common frameworks used to address the skill gaps and deficiencies that prevent graduation are Response to Intervention (RtI) or Multi-Tiered Systems of Support (MTSS). The purpose of this study was to determine the impact of academic interventions on student achievement …

Effects Of Gatekeeper Course Modality, Age, Gender And High School Gpa On Kaplan Subject Area Exam Scores, Vernon Hoffman

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The question of equivalency regarding course modality has plagued and intrigued educators for as long as multiple modalities have existed. In the modern world of academia, the two prevailing modalities are face-to-face or traditional courses and online courses. A multitude of factors have contributed to the increase in online course offerings, including increasingly dependable technology and fiscal pressures on institutions of higher learning.

A great deal of scholarly research has compared modalities using within-course measures such as course grades and comprehensive final exams. Most of these studies have found the two modalities equivalent. However, a dearth of research exists which …

Students’ With Blindness And Visual Impairments Level Of Engagement In Science And Engineering Practices, Tiffany A. Wild, Natalie Shaheen, Danene K. Fast, Julia Averill, Karen Koehler, Kathleen Farrand

Journal of Science Education for Students with Disabilities

There is a lack of research on science-process skills and abilities of students with blindness and visual impairments to apply those skills (Jones, Forrester, Robertson, Gardner, & Taylor, 2012). This study aims to provide additional information on how students with blindness and visual impairment are engaged in science and engineering practices in order for teachers to gain a better understanding of how students with visual impairments can learn engineering practices. The Student Inquiry Review (Hilson & Wild, 2015) that examines the scientific and engineering practices as defined in the Framework for K-12 Science Education: Practices, Crosscutting Concepts and Core Ideas …

Covid-19 And Online Early Childhood Education, Mark Nagasawa

Straus Institute for Thriving Children & Families

This infographic summarizes some themes from a survey conducted with early childhood educators across New York in May 2020, when 65% of programs reported providing online ECE. While respondents expressed clear needs for support in providing technologically-mediated ECE - including tech support, curricular, materials, and hardware - they also displayed three key components of any ECE, commitments to relationships, flexibility, and creativity. This highlights a critical need to document educators' many creative approaches and lessons learned from the pandemic.

A Study Of The Impact Of A University’S Program For Intellectual Disabilities On Undergraduate Students’ Perceptions And Attitudes, Tyanne N. Bailey

Doctor of Education (Ed.D)

Opportunities for individuals with exceptional needs to participate in inclusive environments have increased in recent years due to the implementation of various laws. Throughout the history of education, individuals with exceptional needs were prevented from attending higher education institutions; however, the Higher Education Opportunity Act (HEOA) of 2008 provided opportunities for individuals with intellectual disabilities to attend higher education institutions. The purpose of this study was to evaluate how a university’s program to assist students with intellectual disabilities successfully transition from high school to adulthood impacted undergraduate students’ perceptions and comfort level of working with individuals with intellectual disabilities. This …

Authoring Dis/Ability Identities Mapping The Role Of Ableism In Teacher Candidate Identity Construction, Molly B. Siuty, Margaret R. Beneke

Curriculum and Instruction Faculty Publications and Presentations

Ableism, or the belief that abled ways of being and knowing are superior, perpetuates deficit views of ability differences, and constructs dis/ability as a problem in need of remediation so that individuals achieve “normalcy.” Ableism’s entrenched pervasiveness in education systems can be a significant barrier in teacher education when preparing critical educators who can work towards radical forms of dis/ability justice. In this paper, we argue that dis/abled teacher candidates can afford particular insight into the ways in which ableism operates in educational institutions and that dis/ability should be considered an asset to inclusive and socially just teacher preparation. Using …

The Inventive Work Of The Christian Mind, Jeff Ringer

The Journal of the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning

Responding to Bizzell’s 2008 JAEPL article, this article argues that the intellectual work of religious minds involves inventing arguments grounded in the religious community’s ethos that advocate for new perspectives within that community. Using Katharine Hayhoe’s evangelical Christian environmentalist rhetoric as an example, this article prompts rhetorical educators to rethink approaches to teaching ethos.

("What if there is intellectual work to be done that can only be done by what [Shannon] Carter calls the “Christian mind”—or Jewish, Muslim, or Buddhist mind?" —Patricia Bizzell, Faith-Based World Views as a Challenge to the Believing Game)

Back Matter-Jaepl Volume 25, Wendy Ryden

The Journal of the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning

Back Matter

Front Matter- Jaepl Volume 25, Wendy Ryden

The Journal of the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning

Front Matter

The Good Enough Teacher, Natalie Davey

The Journal of the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning

This paper puts forward a pedagogical model of care for K-12 educators that is specifically focused on alternative classroom educators. In conversation with educational theorists and psychologists, a model of care that is translatable to both teachers and students in non-traditional classrooms is presented. Looking first at Arlie Hochschild’s “emotion work” in the context of alternative classroom teaching, a link is made to Nel Noddings’s “ethics of care” as a pedagogical starting point. The author then riffs on psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott’s notion of the “good enough mother,” the one who “manages a difficult task: initiating the infant into a world …

Invictus: Race And Emotional Labor Of Faculty Of Color At The Urban Community College, Kerri-Ann M. Smith, Kathleen T. Alves, Irvin Weathersby Jr., John D. Yi

The Journal of the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning

This article shares the counter-stories of four junior faculty members of color, whose lived experiences provide concrete examples of what emotional labor sometimes entails in higher education. Grounded in Critical Race Theory and antiracist methodologies, these academics identify specific ways in which they experience emotional labor: guilt, silence, anger, navigating double-consciousness and liminality, and self-regulating physical and mental health. They seek to buttress their experiences with counternarratives and, consequently, recommendations for how community college leaders may help to alleviate the emotional labor associated with junior faculty members of color through promotion, leadership, mentoring, and recognition of diverse perspectives and contributions …

Seeing Writing Whole: The Revolution We Really Need, Keith Rhodes

The Journal of the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning

Composition classes have difficulty achieving the aims of the CCCC position statement entitled Students’ Right to Their Own Language, for reasons related to why we have difficulty integrating calls for building rhetorical listening more fully into our curricula. A fundamental assumption that writers alone are responsible for the success of written communication leads to results that sustain privileged discourse and upset any sense that readers, too, have an obligation in any written transaction. A field of Writing, properly constituted, needs to challenge that assumption of readerly privilege overtly so that we can shift toward teaching students better ways to manage …

Stemm-Humanities Co-Teaching And The Humusities Turn, Hella B. Cohen

The Journal of the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning

Donna Haraway calls for a new Humanities that attends to the role of this traditionally anthropocentric field on a damaged planet. The Humusities, she offers, empower us to teach at the intersections of observation, speculation, and affective reasoning. This article considers co-teaching and interdisciplinary teaching structures as part of the Humusities model. Drawing from interviews and pedagogical materials of professors who have co-taught STEMM-Humanities classes, student feedback from these sections, and current research on interdisciplinary education, I theorize the possibilities and limitations of the interdisciplinary Humusities at the undergraduate level. The article explores how we translate the tenets of Haraway …

Contemplative Wac: Testing A Mindfulness-Based Reflective Writing Assignment, Jared Featherstone

The Journal of the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning

This qualitative study examines the effects of the Mindfulness Journal Assignment (MJA), a semester-long integration implemented in five different university courses, to understand its potential for teaching and learning. Of particular interest were the patterns found in the reflective writing of students engaging in the MJA and the connection of those patterns to both classroom and Writing Across the Curriculum learning objectives. The most frequent themes occurring in the 111,906-word dataset were metacognitive awareness and self-regulation, both of which are significant for learning transfer and WAC. The findings of this study are promising in that the inclusion of a contemplative …

Connecting: On “Showing Up” In Teaching, Tutoring, And Writing: A Search For Humanity, Christy Wenger, Nicole J. Wilson, Angela Montez, Sara Y. Chung, Christina M. Lavecchia, Cristina D. Ramirez, Patricia D. Pytleski

The Journal of the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning

The pieces collected in this section of Connecting all exhibit ways of “showing up” in writing. They do so by modeling how we might claim very specific, very material conditions of learning and thinking and speak from the authority of personal experience. They are full of voice. They show up by revealing the presence of their writers and by making intentional space for readers to show up in response, as a writer’s presence begets the readers’. The writing contained within this section also offers practices that might help us think through the dynamics of a pedagogical praxis of “showing up.”

Volume 25 Of The Journal Of The Assembly For Expanded Perspectives On Learning, Wendy Ryden, Peter H. Khost

The Journal of the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning

The Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning (AEPL), an official assembly of the National Council of Teachers of English, is open to all those interested in extending the frontiers of teaching and learning beyond the traditional disciplines and methodologies. JAEPL is especially interested in helping those teachers who experiment with new strategies for learning to share their practices and confirm their validity through publication in professional journals.

Book Reviews, Irene Papoulis, Nate Mickelson, Paul Pucccio, Erin L. Frymire, Tracy Lassiter

The Journal of the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning

All of this year’s books circle around issues of healing, a richly faceted subject always dear to members of the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning. Nate Mickelson reviews Burt Bradley’s After Following, in which the poet takes solace in writing his own meditations on the work of other poets; Paul Puccio responds to Peter Khost’s Rhetor Response: A Theory and Practice of Literary Affordance, which explores the potential connections to life that literature could provide readers in our classrooms and beyond; Erin Frymire addresses Jessica Restaino’s Surrender: Feminist Rhetoric and Ethics in Love and Illness, which combines rhetorical analysis …

Complaint As ‘Sticky Data’ For The Woman Wpa: The Intellectual Work Of A Wpa’S Emotional And Embodied Labor, Anna Sicari

The Journal of the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning

There is rich scholarship on emotions in writing program administration, and the labor this work requires from WPAs (Holt; Micciche; McKinney et. al; Ratcliffe and Rickley; Vidali) and on the feminized nature of writing programs and the way gender informs this type of emotional work (Enos; Flynn; Miller; Schell). Many WPA scholars advocate that our administrative work is intellectual work, yet little attention has been given to the emotional and embodied labor of WPA work as intellectual and as defining components of WPA work. Drawing from Sara Ahmed’s recent work on complaint and data I collected from thirty interviews with …

Fyc Students’ Emotional Labor In The Feedback Cycle, Kelly Blewett

The Journal of the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning

This essay explores the emotions first-year composition students experience when receiving feedback on their writing. Culling data from 32 hours of interviews with students, as well as two different data streams students provided regarding their emotional reactions to feedback, I argue that students undergo what Arlie Hochschild calls transmutation as they process feedback on their writing. Two implications are suggested: first, that future studies should utilize non-alphabetic tools for capturing emotion; second, that teachers wishing to assist student reception of feedback should be attentive to building rapport in the classroom. Finally, the essay calls for additional study of the impact …

The Toil Of Feeling: Education As Emotional Labor - Teaching At The End Of Empire, Wendy Ryden

The Journal of the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning

The editor's introduction to the Special Section, The Toil of Feeling: Education as Emotional Labor.

“So, That’S Sort Of Wonderful”: The Ideology Of Commitment And The Labor Of Contingency, Sarah V. Seeley

The Journal of the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning

This article explores the emotional outcomes related to language commodification within an organizational context: the first-year writing program at Binghamton University, which is a public research university in upstate New York. In this setting, the meanings of effective writing instruction are discursively constructed in terms of a multi-faceted commitment to ‘the process.’ This entails an ideological commitment to both recursive process writing and the process of collaboratively evaluating the product that derives from it. I first offer an overview of the Binghamton context, including the details of collaborative portfolio assessment. I then analyze a specific sociolinguistic strategy: pep talking. I …

Rhetoric And Emotion Save Science: Lessons From Student Eco-Activists, Jesse Priest

The Journal of the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning

This essay is a qualitative study of the experience of undergraduate students learning how to teach issues of sustainability to their campus communities through an innovative outreach program at a large northeastern research university, while at the same time learning to navigate complex emotional labor required by their outreach and activist work. While most previous work on science writing and rhetoric focuses on disciplinary, publishing, or genre practices, I examine the holistic student experience by placing outreach, writing, and the classroom in conversation with each other, illuminating how discourses can cross institutional and contextual borders. Additionally, while most previous work …

Culturally Responsive Teaching And Learning For Success, Fred A. Hunter

Dissertations

The enduring gap between White and Black student achievement has challenged our educational systems for decades. This study evaluates an instructional pedagogy that values and embraces students’ culture and experiences. Participants in this study include one teacher trained to implement culturally relevant instruction, her middle school students, and teacher leaders at the school where I served as principal during the time of the study.

The results of this study reveal the positive impact that a culturally relevant teacher yields for students and teacher. Students receiving an affirming instructional pedagogy benefit from improved academic outcomes. Teachers embracing this method of teaching …

How Does Student Self-Efficacy Affect Achievement?, Meghan E. Taylor

PANDION: The Osprey Journal of Research and Ideas

How does student self-efficacy affect achievement?

Special Education Inquiry Research

This presentation highlights the systematic integration of teacher inquiry within the undergraduate special education program at the University of North Florida. Inquiry is embedded across courses each semester and put into practice in a variety of ways in our PDS network. In all, inquiry serves as a tool for capturing student learning as candidates collaborate with mentor teachers to intervene and meet the needs of diverse learners. During the Fall 2019 semester, I implemented high leverage practices, collected and analyzed data of my students’ learning, and presented outcomes to my …

Exploring The Impact Of Musical Mnemonic Strategies On Student Achievement And Engagement In Inclusive Science Classes, Zinna Eaton

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

Students with disabilities often struggle with comprehending material and performing at grade level, and teachers often find new ways to help their students comprehend the curriculum. A common challenge for special education teachers is incorporating different learning styles and various instructional strategies to better assist their students. One teaching strategy and resource that many teachers incorporate is the use of music in their instruction. This research project examines how incorporating music teaching strategies into daily instruction impacts the level of engagement and the academic achievement level of sixth-grade students with and without mild/moderate disabilities within inclusive science classrooms. The study …

Tactviz: A Vmd Plugin For Tactile Visualization Of Protein Structures, Olivia R. Shaw, Jodi A. Hadden-Perilla

Journal of Science Education for Students with Disabilities

Scientific disciplines spanning biology, biochemistry, and biophysics involve the study of proteins and their functions. Visualization of protein structures represents a barrier to education and research in these disciplines for students who are blind or visually impaired. Here, we present a software plugin for readily producing variable-height tactile graphics of proteins using the free biomolecular visualization software Visual Molecular Dynamics (VMD) and protein structure data that is publicly available through the Protein Data Bank. Our method also supports interactive tactile visualization of proteins with VMD on electronic refreshable tactile display devices. Employing our method in an academic laboratory has enabled …

Astrodance: Engaging Deaf And Hard-Of-Hearing Students In Astrophysics Via Multimedia Performances, Jason Nordhaus, Manuela Campanelli, Joe Bochner, Thomas Warfield, Hans-Peter Bischof, Jake Noel-Storr

Journal of Science Education for Students with Disabilities

The dynamics of gravitating astrophysical systems such as black holes and neutron stars are fascinatingly complex, offer some of nature's most spectacular phenomena, and capture the public's imagination in ways that few subjects can. Here, we describe AstroDance, a multi-media project to engage deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) students in astronomy and gravitational physics. AstroDance incorporates multiple means of representation of scientific concepts and was performed primarily for secondary and post-secondary audiences at ~20 venues in the northeastern US prior to the historic first detection of gravitational waves. As part of the AstroDance project, we surveyed ~1000 audience members roughly split …

Visualization Without Vision – How Blind And Visually Impaired Students And Researchers Engage With Molecular Structures, Croix J. Laconsay, Henry B. Wedler, Dean J. Tantillo

Journal of Science Education for Students with Disabilities

This article examines the tools and techniques currently available that enable blind and visually impaired (BVI) individuals to visualize three-dimensional objects used in learning chemistry concepts. How BVI individuals engage with and visualize molecular structure is discussed and recent tactile (or haptic) and auditory methods for visualization of various chemistry concepts are summarized. Remaining challenges for chemistry education researchers are described with the aim of highlighting the potential value of educational research in further enabling BVI students to pursue careers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields.