Curriculum and Instruction Commons^™

Obstacles To Addressing Race And Ethnicity In The Mathematics Education Literature, Amy Noelle Parks, Mardi Schmeichel

Department of Teaching, Learning, and Teacher Education: Faculty Publications

This Research Commentary builds on a 2-stage literature review to argue that there are 4 obstacles to making a sociopolitical turn in mathematics education that would allow researchers to talk about race and ethnicity in ways that take both identity and power seriously. The obstacles discussed are (a) the marginalization of discussions of race and ethnicity; (b) the reiteration of race and ethnicity as independent variables; (c) absence of race and ethnicity from mathematics education research; and (d) the minimizing of discussions of race and ethnicity, even within equity-oriented work.

A Longitudinal Study Of Teaching Practice And Early Career Decisions: A Cautionary Tale, Marilyn Cochran-Smith, Patrick Mcquillan, Kara Mitchell Viesca, Dianna Gahlsdorf Terrell, Joan Barnatt, Lisa D’Souza, Cindy Jong, Karen Shakman, Karen Lam, Ann Marie Gleeson

Department of Teaching, Learning, and Teacher Education: Faculty Publications

Although the turnover rate among beginning teachers has been a major concern for some time, most studies do not link teacher retention with teaching practice. In contrast, this study looks specifically at career decisions coupled with practice. Guided by a view of teaching as social and cultural practice, the study used multiple qualitative data sources, including extensive observations, interviews, and samples of teachers’ and students’ work. Based on within and cross-case analysis of 15 cases at four distinct time points within a 5-year period, the authors identified multiple patterns of teaching practice linked to early career decisions, which reflect considerable …

Rural Latino High School Students Considering Identity And Belonging Through Comparative Study Of Newcomer Youth In South Africa, Edmund T. Hamann, Saloshna Vandeyar, Janet M. Eckerson

Department of Teaching, Learning, and Teacher Education: Faculty Publications

Precipitated by an arranged but unusual classroom activity — eight Latina immigrant high school students in the rural u.s. Midwest interviewing a visiting South African scholar of immigration and transnationalism — this study captures their deliberations as the consideration of youth immigration to South Africa compels their own autobiographic reflections on who they are, where they are 'of', and with what ethnic groups or nationalities they feel affiliation or welcome. For purposes of bracketing, it also juxtaposes the students' voices with those of the three coauthors: their classroom teacher of Spanish as a heritage language, the visiting scholar from South …

Accessing High-Quality Instructional Strategies, Edmund T. Hamann, Jenelle Reeves

Department of Teaching, Learning, and Teacher Education: Faculty Publications

Instructional strategies figure centrally in what happens in classrooms, are critical to educational outcomes, and central to the narrowing of achievement gaps. However, broad improvement of schools, including the narrowing of these gaps, will depend on changes in instructional strategy and improved student access to educators using these strategies. Much of the research on instructional strategies identifies universal aspects of effective instruction that pertain across subject matter, grade level and student characteristics. Other important findings from instructional strategy research are not as broadly applicable. These second kind of findings, are more specific to particular grade levels, topics of instruction, students’ …

Goal Setting And Student Achievement: A Longitudinal Study, Aleidine Kramer Moeller, Janine M. Theiler, Chaorong Wu

Department of Teaching, Learning, and Teacher Education: Faculty Publications

The connection between goals and student motivation has been widely investigated in the research literature, but the relationship of goal setting and student achievement at the classroom level has remained largely unexplored. This article reports the findings of a 5-year quasi-experimental study examining goal setting and student achievement in the high school Spanish language classroom. The implementation of LinguaFolio, a portfolio that focuses on student self-assessment, goal setting, and collection of evidence of language achievement, was introduced into 23 high schools with a total of 1,273 students. By using a hierarchical linear model, researchers were able to analyze the relationship …

Series Editors' Foreword: Placing Practitioner Knowledge At The Center Of Teacher Education., Edmund T. Hamann, Rodney Hopson

Department of Teaching, Learning, and Teacher Education: Faculty Publications

The starting point for this book is a new phase—the Carnegie Program for the Education Doctorate (CPED)—of the longstanding dilemma of whether and how to to distinguish advanced graduate education for the Doctorate of Philosophy (PhD) in education from the Doctorate of Education (EdD). EdD graduates should have gained not just in knowledge, but also in capability—to not only know new things, but to be able to do new practices and/or engage previous skills and practices more effectively.

From Remediation To Acceleration: Recruiting, Retaining, And Graduating Future Culturally And Linguistically Diverse (Cld) Educators, Socorro Herrera, Amanda Morales, Melissa Holmes, Dawn Herrera Terry

Department of Teaching, Learning, and Teacher Education: Faculty Publications

This ethnographic case study explores one mid-western state university’s response to the challenge of culturally and linguistically diverse (CLD), especially Latino/a, student recruitment and retention. BESITOS (Bilingual/ Bicultural Education Students Interacting To Obtain Success) is an integrated teacher preparation program implemented at a predominantly White university that seeks to both increase Latino/a students’ initial access to higher education and provide institutional support to facilitate a high rate of graduation. The researchers consider key elements of the BESITOS program model as they relate to and support the sociocultural, linguistic, academic, and cognitive dimensions of the CLD student biography. For each dimension, …

The Fear Of Art And The Art Of Fear, Stephanie A Baer

Department of Teaching, Learning, and Teacher Education: Faculty Publications

Prospective teachers often walk into my course, Arts in the Elementary Classroom, carrying a guarded consciousness that constrains unencumbered artistic exploration. My responsibility as their instructor is to question mantras that reflect insecurity in process and make pedagogical use of their fears. Through studying the nature of these fears throughout the course, I find growing awareness of how students’ fears can lead to more embodied understandings of what it means to learn and teach with the arts, recovering a more complex process of reflection and a holistic understanding of what it means to be an artist and teacher.

Are The Challenges And Opportunities In Contemporary Diverse Classrooms Being Met?, Loukia K. Sarroub, Lisa Patel Stevens, A. Jonathan Eakle

Department of Teaching, Learning, and Teacher Education: Faculty Publications

The following two essays underscore novel and powerful dimensions of the multiplicity of cultures and education. Unlike many of the essays in the present volume, both authors chose to write in the first person. This is not coincidental because culture is based on identifications—what allows one to articulate the “I” of group alliances and identity. In contrast, scientific writing style, such as that of the American Psychological Association (APA)—which is the standard for much professional publication in education—typically pushes the author “I” to the side, which can give an inaccurate view of how subjectivity influences research and writing. Such narrative …

Examining Students’ Experiences As A Foundation For Multicultural Curriculum Development, Candace Schlein, Elaine Chan

Department of Teaching, Learning, and Teacher Education: Faculty Publications

CANADA IS BECOMING increasingly diverse through immigration and the birth of children into immigrant families (Statistics Canada, 2007a, 2007b, 2007c, 2008). This cultural pluralism is also reflected in school communities. Thus, there is a related growing requisite for issues of educational quality to be defined according to notions pertaining to multicultural education in order for educators to identify and to develop innovative ways of meeting the needs of diverse classroom populations. Moreover, there is a progressive need for pre–service and in–service educators to learn about effective ways of working with English Language Learners (ELLs) to support their rapid integration into …

Good Teaching? An Examination Of Culturally Relevant Pedagogy As An Equity Practice, Mardi Schmeichel

Department of Teaching, Learning, and Teacher Education: Faculty Publications

The adoption of educational policy measures to close the achievement gap, as well as the significant amount of scholarship dedicated to the subject, are just some of the indicators that reflect the tremendous concern in education about the academic performance of students of color. Within research aimed at promoting equitable practices in education, culturally relevant teaching has emerged as a good teaching strategy to improve achievement. Using genealogical methods to examine the ways in which culture has become relevant to classroom practice, the author argues that the perceived difference from white students that made it possible to conceive of children …

Improving Elementary American Indian Students’ Math Achievement With Inquiry-Based Mathematics And Games, Jamalee Stone, Edmund T. Hamann

Department of Teaching, Learning, and Teacher Education: Faculty Publications

Project Inquiry-Based Mathematics was a National Science Foundation Math-Science Partnership implemented in a Great Plains city school district with a significant K-12 Native American population. One goal of the project was to reduce the achievement gap between Native American and non-Native students enrolled in the district. This gap reduction was to be achieved using inquiry-based mathematics curricula along with cognitively guided instructional strategies, particularly at the elementary level. This study focuses on whether inquiry-based mathematics strategies were consistently implemented in three fifth-grade classrooms at K-5 elementary schools with significant Native American student populations. Test result of Native American students at …

Contextualizing The Path To Academic Success: Culturally And Linguistically Diverse Students Gaining Voice And Agency In Higher Education, Melissa Holmes, Cristina Fanning, Amanda Morales, Pedro Espinoza, Socorro Herrera

Department of Teaching, Learning, and Teacher Education: Faculty Publications

This ethnographic case study documents the experiences of culturally and linguistically diverse (CLD) first-generation immigrant students as they developed their sense of voice and personal agency at a predominantly White, Midwestern university. The study is framed within the larger context of an ongoing, longitudinal study on the BESITOS (Bilingual/Bicultural Education Students Interacting To Obtain Success) model of recruitment and retention (Herrera & Morales, 2005; Herrera, Morales, Holmes, & Terry, 2011-2012), which was developed in 1999 to address the multifaceted assets and needs of Latina/o learners in higher education. The model takes into account literature on CLD student recruitment and retention …

Growing Effective Cld Teachers For Today’S Classrooms Of Cld Children, Gayla Lohfink, Amanda Morales, Gail Shroyer, Sally Yahnke

Department of Teaching, Learning, and Teacher Education: Faculty Publications

Using a case study design, this investigation examined the effective teaching characteristics of nontraditional, culturally and linguistically diverse (CLD) student teachers placed in rural, elementary schools with high populations of Latino/a students. Data collected reflected high percentages of effective teaching characteristics in multiple domains with specific indicators reflective of consistent teaching over time. A discussion of these findings considered aspects within the distance-delivery model that facilitated the CLD participants’ development of effective teaching and noted (1) consistent leadership, (2) explicit teacher instruction within CLD school settings, and (3) the strong cohesive nature of the CLD participants’ cohort as positively affecting …

Enriching Science And Math Through Engineering, Adrienne Redmond, Julie Thomas, Karen High, Margaret Scott, Pat Jordan, Jean Dockers

Department of Teaching, Learning, and Teacher Education: Faculty Publications

This case study reviewed the collaborative efforts of university engineers, teacher educators, and middle school teachers to advance sixth- and seventh-grade students’ learning through a series of project-based engineering activities. This two-year project enriched regular school curricula by introducing real-world applications of science and mathematics concepts that expanded opportunities for creativity and problem-solving, introduced problem-based learning, and provided after-school programming (for girls only) led by engineering students from the local university. This engineering education initiative showed significant impact on students’ (1) confidence in science and mathematics; (2) effort toward science and mathematics; (3) awareness of engineering; and (4) interest in …

A Distance-Delivered Teacher Education Program For Rural Culturally And Linguistically Diverse Teacher Candidates, Gayla Lohfink, Amanda Morales, Gail Shroyer, Sally Yahnke, Cecilia Hernandez

Department of Teaching, Learning, and Teacher Education: Faculty Publications

This article describes a collaborative, distance-delivered, teacher preparation program for rural, culturally and linguistically diverse (CLD) teacher candidates. Multiple institutions partnered with one university in order to diversify the teaching force in the region and meet the needs of CLD students living there. In describing the program's design and implementation phases, a focus on cultural responsiveness to the candidates ' needs, their rural settings, and high populations of Latino/a students in the rural areas in which they were trained is presented. Assessment of each implementation phase guided program practice for the participants ' training as effective teachers. Relevant discussion indicates …

Teacher? Learner? Both!, Deborah L. Hanuscin, Delinda Van Garderen, Deepika Menon, Jeni Davis, Eun Lee, Rena Smith

Department of Teaching, Learning, and Teacher Education: Faculty Publications

February 2011 55 It may be cold and snowy, but it’s not too early to begin seeking summer professional development (PD) opportunities. Summer is a great time for teachers to attend PD workshops and learn new techniques to bring back to their classrooms. However, teachers often wonder if by the time September rolls around, they’ll remember everything they learned. Will they have the necessary knowledge and skills to implement new ideas and content in their classrooms? Teachers often have questions about how the strategies they learned at the workshop will work with their students. Wouldn’t it be great if teachers …

What Makes The Anthropology Of Educational Policy Implementation 'Anthropological'?, Edmund T. Hamann, Lisa Rosen

Department of Teaching, Learning, and Teacher Education: Faculty Publications

As sociocultural theorists (e.g., Gutierrez and Rogoff, 2003; Orellana, 2009) have recently asserted, "culture" is something one does, rather than something one has. That is, human beings produce, perform, and reproduce culture every day. Policy implementation — or what Milbrey McLaughlin (1987: 175) has called "muddling through" — is deeply implicated in these processes of cultural production and thus invites anthropological inquiry. Indeed, it is possible to link the study of policy implementation to some of the foundational efforts of anthropology, particularly cultural anthropology (Wedel et at., 2005). Our discussion in this chapter thus borrows explicitly and centrally from an …

Evolution And Personal Religious Belief: Christian University Biology-Related Majors’ Search For Reconciliation, Mark Winslow, John Staver, Lawrence C. Scharmann

Department of Teaching, Learning, and Teacher Education: Faculty Publications

The goal of this study was to explore Christian biology-related majors’ perceptions of conflicts between evolution and their religious beliefs. This naturalistic study utilized a case study design of 15 undergraduate biology-related majors at or recent biology-related graduates from a mid-western Christian university. The broad sources of data were interviews, course documents, and observations. Outcomes indicate that most participants were raised to believe in creationism, but came to accept evolution through evaluating evidence for evolution, negotiating the literalness of Genesis, recognizing evolution as a non-salvation issue, and observing professors as Christian role models who accept evolution. This study lends heuristic …

Developing Pck For Teaching Teachers Through A Mentored Internship In Teacher Professional Development, Deborah L. Hanuscin, Deepika Menon, Eun Ju Lee, Suleyman Cite

Department of Teaching, Learning, and Teacher Education: Faculty Publications

Pedagogical Content Knowledge (PCK), according to Shulman (1987), is what makes possible the transformation of disciplinary content into forms that are accessible and attainable by students. This includes knowledge of how particular subject matter topics, problems, and issues can be organized, represented, and adapted to the diverse interests and abilities of learners and presented for instruction (Magnusson, Krajcik, & Borko, 1999). Recently, researchers have argued that a parallel form of PCK exists for science teacher educators (Abell et al., 2009). Nonetheless, little is known about the process through which teacher educators develop their PCK, and more specifically, how doctoral programs …

Exploring Us Textbooks’ Treatment Of The Estimation Of Linear Measurements, Kuo-Liang Chang, Lorraine Males, Aaron Mosier, Funda Gonulates

Department of Teaching, Learning, and Teacher Education: Faculty Publications

Learning to estimate a linear measurement is critical in becoming a successful measurer. Research indicates that the teaching of the estimation of linear measurement is quite open and that instruction does not make explicit to students how to carry out estimation work. Because written curriculum has been identified as one of the main sources affecting teachers’ instruction and students’ learning, this study examined how estimation of linear measurement tasks were presented to students in three US elementary mathematics curricula to see how much and in what ways these tasks were presented in an open manner. The principal result was that …

Navigating The Waves Of Social And Political Capriciousness: Inspiring Perspectives From Dream-Eligible Immigrant Students, Amanda Morales, Socorro Herrera, Kevin Murry

Department of Teaching, Learning, and Teacher Education: Faculty Publications

This article examines the psychological and sociological impacts of the proposed Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act and instate tuition legislation on DREAM-eligible students in the Midwestern United States. The researchers sought to capture the lived experiences of undocumented immigrant students through their rich interpretations of current immigration policy and how participants described their situation, their identity, and their dreams in relation to the volatility of their external environment.

Resumen: Este manuscrito examina el impacto psicológico y sociológico del propuesto Acto de Desarrollo, Asistencia, y Educación para Menores Extranjeros (DREAM) y la ley de educación para …

Seriously Popular: Rethinking 19th-Century American Literature Through The Teaching Of Popular Fiction, Lauren Gatti

Department of Teaching, Learning, and Teacher Education: Faculty Publications

A teacher breathes new life into canonical works—such as those of Hawthorne, Melville, and Longfellow—by asking students to examine the differences and similarities between their own reading tastes and those of 19th-century American readers.

taste. What do our students expect from the books they read? And that question sur faces a related one about readers in Hawthorne's time: What did 19th-century readers expect from their texts and how did Melville's and Hawthorne's work address or interact with those expectations? Curious about the connections between my stu dents' reading tastes and those of 19th-century readers, I read Nina Baym's excellent text …

Common Ground With A Common Faith: Dewey’S Idea Of The “Religious”, Bradley Baurain

Department of Teaching, Learning, and Teacher Education: Faculty Publications

In A Common Faith, Dewey rejects organized religion and belief in the supernatural, instead arguing for an authentically “religious” attitude which this interpretive essay analyzes in terms of four propositions: 1) Knowledge is unifi ed. 2) Knowledge is democratic. 3) Th e pursuit of moral ideals requires moral faith. 4) Th e authority for moral ideals is experience as explored via inquiry. Th e author responds from the perspective of his own religious faith and outlines conceptual relationships with modern spirituality in education writers. Th e common ground is that the “religious” must be seen as a signifi cant way …

Creating A “Third Space” In Student Teaching: Implications For The University Supervisor’S Status As Outsider, Alexander Cuenca, Mardi Schmeichel, Brandon M. Butler, Todd Dinkelman, Joseph R. Nichols Jr.

Department of Teaching, Learning, and Teacher Education: Faculty Publications

The work of teacher education during student teaching typically takes place in two distinct “spaces”: placement sites and college/university settings. The program featured in this article is structured in ways that clearly mark out those two spaces. Yet this configuration led our university supervisors, whose work primarily took place in the field, to feel like “outsiders.” To redress this concern, a third learning space was incorporated into our student teaching seminar. We suggest that “third spaces” in combination with return-to-campus courses not only mitigates the peripherality of university supervisors but also amplifies the influence of a teacher preparation program.

Feminism, Neoliberalism, And Social Studies, Mardi Schmeichel

Department of Teaching, Learning, and Teacher Education: Faculty Publications

The purpose of this article is to analyze the sparse presence of women in social studies education and to consider the possibility of a confluence of feminism and neoliberalism within the most widely distributed National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS) publication, Social Education. Using poststructural conceptions of discourse, the author applies second-wave feminist theory and Fraser’s (2009) work on neoliberalism as lenses to illuminate the limited attention to women and feminism in this text during the 1980s in order to better understand how women have been marginalized in social studies education and to consider the possibility that the …

Laboratory Earth: A Model Of Online K-12 Teacher Coursework, David C. Gosselin, Julie Thomas, Adrienne Redmond, Cindy Larson-Miller, Sara Yendra, Ronald J. Bonnstetter, Timothy F. Slater

Department of Teaching, Learning, and Teacher Education: Faculty Publications

Laboratory Earth, a series of three NASA-sponsored, online graduate courses for K–8 teachers, was designed to meet a variety of learning styles and appeal to teachers “motivation to learn the content and improve their teaching.” This is especially important to teachers as they seek to demonstrate “highly qualified” status to meet No Child Left Behind standards. These graduate-level courses consist of four modules of two to four lessons each. Pre- and post-course surveys indicated significant increases in teachers “(n = 51) content knowledge, science teaching efficacy beliefs (STEBI-A), sense of community within the course (LEO), and science teaching …

Multicultural Education, Elaine Chan

Department of Teaching, Learning, and Teacher Education: Faculty Publications

North American society is becoming increasingly diverse through immigration and the birth of children into immigrant families. The foreign-born population in the United States (U.S.) represented 11.1% of the total population in the year 2000, for a total of 31.1 million people who were born outside of the country. In addition, over 22 million people in the U.S. changed their state of residence between 1995 and 2000. In Canada, 18.4% of the total population, for a total of 5.4 million people, were born outside the country, and 11.2% of the population identified themselves as members of a visible minority group. …

Cognitive Conflict And Situational Interest As Factors Influencing Conceptual Change, Hunsik Kang, Lawrence C. Scharmann, Sukjin Kang, Taehee Noh

Department of Teaching, Learning, and Teacher Education: Faculty Publications

In this study, we investigated the relationships among cognitive conflict and situational interest induced by a discrepant event, attention and effort allocated to learning, and conceptual change in learning the concept of density. Subjects were 183 seventh graders from six middle schools in Seoul, Korea. A preconception test, a test of responses to a dis-crepant event, and a questionnaire of situational interest were administered as pretests. Computer-assisted instruction was then provided to the students as a conceptual change in-tervention. Questionnaires regarding attention and effort, and a conception test were admin-istered as posttests. The conception test was administered once more as …

Guía Didáctica: Alumnos Transnacionales. Escuelas Mexicanas Frente A La Globalización, Juan Sánchez García, Victor Zúñiga, Edmund T. Hamann, Ilian Dorantes Bollain Y Goytia, Marcela Castellanos Soto, María Gabriela Martínez Kalifa, Nancy Ayala De León

Department of Teaching, Learning, and Teacher Education: Faculty Publications

This teachers guide is directed at Mexican educators and professional developers to help them use “Alumnos Transnacionales: Escuelas Mexicanas Frente a La Globalización” (Zúñiga, Hamann, & Sánchez Garcia, 2008) to build teachers’ capacities to meet the needs of transnationally-mobile students (i.e., students with experience in both US and Mexican schools).

Esta Guía Didáctica tiene como propósito brindar sugerencias y estrategias didácticas para el desarrollo del libro Alumnos transnacionales. Escuelas Mexicanas frente a la Globalización (Zúñiga, Hamann y Sánchez, 2008). Este libro es un producto de la investigación: Migración internacional, trayectorias escolares y pobreza: inclusión/exclusión en las escuelas mexicanas y transnacionalismo …