Curriculum and Social Inquiry Commons^™

“Why Are We Still Reading About Rosa Parks?”: Essential Questions For Continuation Schools, Samantha Mbodwam

English (MA) Theses

Continuation schools are historically constructed places of both academic and social rejection. With cultural rhetorics theory providing a context for the research, this inquiry values student stories and experiences. This IRB-approved case study analyzes continuation school education, including classroom participant-observation and interview data to explore if the current academic system is failing these children, and, if so, is failure essentially manufactured and a result of socialized oppression. Therefore, this case study provides a means to hear the voices of those students placed in a continuation school and the voice of a classroom teacher’s perspective on the school curriculum and educational …

Systemic Functional Linguistics In The Community College Composition Class: A Multimodal Approach To Teaching Composition Using The Metalanguage Of Sfl, Jennifer James

Education (PhD) Dissertations

This qualitative research study sought to understand the affordances and limitations of a systemic functional linguistics (SFL) approach to teaching composition at the community college level. The study took place over the course of a semester in two developmental college composition classes using the language of SFL to teach writing through multimodal assignments. The study was developed in response to the increasing diversity in writing skills and educational goals of students in the community college composition class. The increase in diversity is a result of legislation in California that restructures developmental class offerings and affects placement in the transfer-level composition …

Re-Centering Racial Justice In White-Dominated School Settings, Brian A. Davis

Master's Projects and Capstones

Any institution that does not give students the critical and theoretical frameworks to understand White supremacy in the United States is an active contributor in the proliferation of this hegemonic force. White supremacy is a system that produces violence educationally, socially, politically, environmentally, ontologically, and epistemologically. The study of Whiteness and White supremacy has been discounted in high school settings for various reasons. This project seeks to solve this critical issue within the field of secondary education through the implementation of a course that unpacks White supremacy while center Black history. This course will provide students with a historical framework …

Developing The Key Constructs Of Career Literacy: A Delphi Study, Kesha S. Valentine, Michael F. Kosloski

Journal of Research in Technical Careers

Career literacy is a concept that is often misunderstood, yet it is something that can be developed to enhance youth’s potential for career readiness and career growth. This study sought to determine the knowledge and skills required for career literacy and to identify the optimal time to acquire these skills. A four-round Delphi study was designed and implemented to determine such skills and the ideal corresponding time of acquisition for each. The research indicated a final list of 50 skills and knowledge, all of which fall under the categories of functional, interactive, and critical skills a student needs to be …

From Barriers To Success: How Elementary School Principals Strategically Lead Schools To Become 21st Century Learning Exemplar Schools, Heather Gold

Dissertations

Purpose: The purpose of this phenomenological qualitative study was to examine the barriers and support systems elementary principals describe, through the lens of Activity Theory, they experienced while leading their schools to achieve 21st century learning exemplar status.

Methodology: This phenomenological study examined the perceptions of 15 elementary and K-8 principals and their respective assistant principals regarding the barriers and support systems they experienced while leading their schools to achieve 21st century learning exemplar status. Participants were selected based on the criteria that they had been identified as exemplary by the Partnership for 21st Century Learning (P21); were public, non-private, …

The Times Of Our Lives, Deborah Britzman

Occasional Paper Series

I recall a remark Anna Freud once gave around the age of 85. She said there are two ages that are most challenging for the human and require the most strength: the times of early childhood and the times of old age (Sandler, with A. Freud, 1985). Within these bookends of life, Anna Freud exchanged the ideality of strength as might for that of care for vulnerability. Strength becomes the capacity for tolerating, as in living with bodily fragility, care, and dependency. Here, perception of time, or our feelings in time, are other to the function of time. It is, …

Quintessential Jonathan, Virginia Casper

Occasional Paper Series

It was only a year ago, but many worlds away, Jonathan and I took a few hours off from a conference to hike in the hills above Las Cruces, New Mexico. The conversation wandered around people we know in common, those we have lost, and ideas we shared over 25 years as friends and colleagues. We kept returning to the topic of legacy, however, based on Jonathan’s recent reconceptualization of the term (Silin, 2020) and my interest in thinking more about it. As I listened to him explain his more generative version of this venerable notion, I remember thinking how …

Enlaces In Reflections And (Re)Memberings As Latina Border-Crossers: Journeys Of Childhood And Professional Un/Welcomings, Ana Carolina Díaz Beltrán, Paty Abril-Gonzalez, Cinthya Saavedra, Michelle Salazar Pérez

Occasional Paper Series

We are humbled to be part of this special issue honoring the life work of Jonathan Silin. His scholarship and activism have opened spaces for future generations, like our own, to share our testimonios. We are straddling between being former early childhood teachers and current teacher educators—between our profe lives and our everyday lived experiences as Latina border crossers. Testimonios, which we engage in for this piece, have herstorically captured intimate tellings that connect individual struggles and strengths to the larger collective (Delgado Bernal, Burciaga, & Flores Carmona, 2012; Latina Feminist Group, 2001). It is in these testimonios that women …

Welcoming Play In Times Of Trauma: A Response To Cassie Brownell, Karen Wohlwend

Occasional Paper Series

I’m honored and delighted to welcome Cassie Brownell to a growing community of early childhood play researchers. In one sense, welcoming implies an unequal power relation where an established member of a community introduces an unknown newcomer. This feels a bit disingenuous. Cassie is already a rising star in our field and really needs no introduction! Her work is part of an exciting new trend in literacy research that blends play with social activism and community building.

Playing Through Tragedy: A Critical Approach To Welcoming Children’S Social Worlds And Play As Pedagogy, Cassie Brownell

Occasional Paper Series

Children’s play frequently reflects the ways they understand and cope with personal life experiences and those in the wider world. Drawing connections to many of the tenants of Jonathan Silin’s lifelong work, the author offers illustrative examples of why play and children's social worlds matter as well as why adults should pay attention to what children do and say in their play. Through personal stories, the author shows how integrating play(full) experiences into the daily life of a classroom can foster children's understanding of seemingly "difficult" or "adult" ideas and events that may be confusing, fear-inducing or represent significant loss. …

Mapping Common Grounds Between Mother And Child: A Response To Alyssa Niccolini, Jennifer Rowsell

Occasional Paper Series

In this short response, I connect my own mother-daughter story to Nicollini's article. Drawing on Silin and Stewart, I consider the ways that vulnerabilities lead to expression and a fluency of thought. In particular, how Covid-19 draws out affective intensities that lead to compositions. Inspired by Nicollini's honest and brave framing of her anxieties about her child, I reflected on a similar sense of fear and deep sadness years ago, at a different time and place.

Vulnerable Literacies, Alyssa Niccolini

Occasional Paper Series

We’d find them nestled behind earlobes, amidst eyelashes, between fingers, in folds of the neck, along the scalp, behind knees, cozy in armpits, in zigzagged waistband imprints, hidden in eyebrows, or brazenly mid-chest. Who knew the body had so many hiding places?

There is always a bolt of shock when the examined spot—a speck of dirt, a freckle?—comes alive with spidery legs. Mother and child then engage in a practiced routine—a submission of the body, a pinch of skin, a tug of war with a barbed proboscis, a cold swab of alcohol. The wriggling visitor is always observed with a …

Ambivalent Legacies: A Response To Harper Keenan, Jen Gilbert

Occasional Paper Series

Harper Keenan’s generous letter to beginning queer/trans teachers hinges on the question: How do we stand in that impossible moment when we are welcoming newcomers while still acknowledging our debts to those who’ve come before? Jonathan Silin, whose work this issue celebrates, grapples with these questions of legacy in an essay that reflects on his contributions as an early childhood educator and researcher and a gay rights and HIV/AIDS activist. Silin (2020) asks:

Is it possible to leave behind traditional ideas about legacy, weighted down as they are with commitments to social and biological reproduction, and reimagine it as something …

Keep Yourself Alive: Welcoming The Next Generation Of Queer And Trans Educators, Harper Keenan

Occasional Paper Series

Dear new queer/trans educator,

Welcome to the work of education. I am glad that you are here to take part in the wonderfully challenging task of supporting young people to learn more about how we might be together. I often think of classrooms and other educational spaces as something like a dance floor, where people who may not know one another gather together and learn how to interact and relate to one another in shared space.

Ungrasping The Other: The Parent, The Child, And The Making Of Solidarities. A Response To Esther Ohito, Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández

Occasional Paper Series

The child reaches forward with his toes, extending to touch the world from the comfort of his mother’s lap. She smiles, wide brown eyes into the camera, left hand resting on her left knee while the index finger of her right hand clinches the child’s overalls near his belly, holding him in place. He smiles, wide eyes into the camera, right hand resting on her right wrist while the index finger of his left hand points forward. He feels the warmth of his mother’s chin resting on his nearly bald head, nested in the safety of her crossed legs. The …

What Can We Not Leave Behind? Storying Family Photographs, Unlocking Emotional Memories, And Welcoming Complex Conversations On Being Human, Esther Ohito

Occasional Paper Series

Everyone was startled by the flood that burst forth from my previously dry tear ducts, even me. What was supposed to be an ordinary oral presentation of a culminating assignment for Wendy Luttrell’s popular graduate school course on visual methodologies, Doing Visual Research with Children and Youth, had morphed into a strange waterworks festival starring me as the headlining performer. In addition to Wendy, a professor at the City University of New York’s Graduate Center, the audience included Tran Templeton and several other peers who were also my fellow doctoral students at Teachers College, Columbia University.1 The course drew on …

What Grown-Ups Aren’T Thinking About: A Response To Tran Nguyen Templeton, Wendy Luttrell

Occasional Paper Series

Tran Templeton opens her article “Whose Story Is It?: Thinking Through Early Childhood with Young Children’s Photographs” with a compelling adult-child encounter. Tran and 6-year-old Saloma are viewing photographs taken of Saloma by early childhood teachers in the preschool classroom where Tran taught and conducted her research. Saloma offers a piercing analysis of “grown-ups” who neglect to consider children’s own wishes. “Maybe the people [children] don’t want you to take a picture of them when they’re like that,” Saloma cautions. But it isn’t just that adults are taking pictures that may be unwanted; what bothers Saloma is how we as …

Whose Story Is It? Thinking Through Early Childhood With Young Children’S Photographs, Tran Nguyen Templeton

Occasional Paper Series

Child-centered practices and pedagogies of listening to children are part and parcel of progressive early childhood education. As critical early childhood teachers and researchers, we demonstrate that we value the voices and narratives of children by placing them at the center of our classroom and research agendas. Simultaneously, however, young children’s social position can put them at the mercy of adults’ (teachers’ and researchers’) whims, and their stories may easily be consumed in the name of provocative classroom displays or academic articles. This work explores the potential for visual participatory research, guided by critical childhood studies, to grasp the stories …

What Stories, Like Water, Hold: A Response To Fikile Nxumalo, Debbie Sonu

Occasional Paper Series

The stories we tell carry our beliefs, our histories, and our relationships. They orient us toward particular ways of living and being, both with each other and with the natural world, and guide us into our sense of self and our encounters with difference. They describe what is made alive and what is rendered in service.

Witnessing Encounters: A Response To Nicole Ineese- Nash’S “Ontologies Of Welcoming”, Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw

Occasional Paper Series

Responding to Nicole Ineese-Nash’s beautiful offerings is exhilarating and humbling. “Ontologies of Welcoming” invites us to create openings that those of us who have been educated within a Western tradition are unequipped to do. Before writing, I read Nicole’s contribution more than 10 times, unsure how to respond to it as a non-Indigenous scholar in Anishinaabek, Haudenosaunee, and Lenapewak and Attawandaron territory. Reluctant to appropriate knowledge that isn’t mine, I was aware that not responding for fear of implicating myself in ongoing colonization would be yet another way to enact my privilege.

Ontologies Of Welcoming: Anishinaabe Narratives Of Relationality And Practices For Educators, Nicole Ineese-Nash

Occasional Paper Series

No matter which culture you belong to, or where on the planet you call home, each of us has an ethical responsibility to our first mother, the Earth. I would like to demonstrate what I have come to understand about relational ethics through Anishinaabe storywork and land-based knowledge systems as they may invite us to think differently about our relations to one another and the non-human world. Indigenous storywork is not merely fictional. Rather these stories exemplify our cultural teachings, understandings, and ways of living so that they may be carried through generations (Archibald, 2008).

Relationships At The Core: A Story Of Jonathan Silin, Lisa Farley, Gail Boldt

Occasional Paper Series

Issue 45 of the Bank Street Occasional Paper Series was conceived to pay tribute to Jonathan Silin for his 17 years as Editor-in-Chief, for his contributions to education through his research and publications in early childhood education, curriculum, and gender/sexuality studies, and for the remarkably generous and caring mentor, teacher, and friend he has been and continues to be to so many.

Welcoming Narratives In Education: A Tribute To The Life Work Of Jonathan Silin, Lisa Farley, Gail Boldt

Occasional Paper Series

Issue 45 of the Bank Street Occasional Paper Series is a labor of love. It testifies to our love for Jonathan Silin, who for 17 years served as Editor-in-Chief of the Occasional Papers. The issue is also a testament to our respect for the things that matter to him. We have designed Issue 45 to exemplify two commitments that have shaped the decades of Jonathan’s career and that we believe will resonate with readers of the Occasional Papers.

Welcoming Narratives In Education: A Tribute To The Life Work Of Jonathan Silin

Occasional Paper Series

Issue 45 of the Bank Street Occasional Paper Series is a labor of love. It testifies to our love for Jonathan Silin, who for 17 years served as Editor-in-Chief. The issue is also a testament to our respect for the things that matter to him. We have designed Issue 45 to exemplify two commitments that have shaped the decades of Jonathan’s career and that we believe will resonate with readers of the Occasional Paper Series.

Community Engagement In Tpc Programs During Times Of Crisis: Embracing Chicana And Latina Feminist Practices, Nora Rivera, Laura Gonzales

English Faculty Articles and Research

Drawing on lessons gathered while teaching community engagement in technical communication courses during the COVID-19 pandemic, two Latina instructors, one in New Mexico and one in Florida, highlight the value that Chicana and Latina feminism can bring to technical communication pedagogies. The authors share course assignments and student examples that demonstrate their applications of Chicana/Latina feminist practices in technical communication. Through pláticas and testimonios, methodologies and methods grounded in Latina/Chicana feminism, the authors demonstrate how they navigate the challenges of the pandemic while also creating spaces for students to share, heal, and contribute to the activist work taking place in …

The Corridor Of Shame: An Immersed Analysis Of South Carolina Schools, Darren R. Burton

Senior Theses

This research project discusses school funding instruments of rural and urban schools in South Carolina and uncovers its effect on student academic achievement. Educational achievement is assessed based on report card datasets between 2018 and 2019, containing South Carolina Assessment of State Standards (SCPASS) score data and South Carolina College and Career Ready Assessment (SCREADY) score data. This research project uses a comparative analysis to evaluate each group’s performance in the subjects of English Language Arts and science. The statistical analysis tools that this research project uses include analysis of variance (ANOVA), linear regression analysis, and Microsoft Power BI. The …

Ritual Among The Scilohtac: Global Catholicism, The Nacirema, And Interfaith Studies, Anita Houck

Journal of Global Catholicism

More than six decades after its publication, Horace Miner’s 1956 article “Body Ritual among the Nacirema” remains a reliable pedagogical tool, remarkably successful in helping students see their own ethnocentric biases. Catholics & Cultures has potential to do similar work. The site lacks some of what makes Miner’s text so effective, in particular its capacity to bring about a sudden shift in perception. The site also shares some of the article’s limitations, particularly in focusing on ritual to the relative exclusion of other aspects of religion. That said, the site can help students gain the religious literacy and develop the …

Barriers To Post-Secondary Success, Douglas Swanson, Najeana Henderson, Maritza Sloan

Dissertations

This study reviews factors that prior studies have identified or failed to consider as barriers to post-secondary success. The three main areas include academic success for Latinx students after high school, organizational systems and their impact on African-American students’ postsecondary readiness, and what workers think of their high school education with regards to career preparedness.

Five factors are identified as major barriers for Latinx students to continue in a higher education system. A survey of former students from Saint Louis, Missouri, and Dallas, Texas, metroplex area identified 56 Latinx students that participated in an initial survey. This led to a …

Fyc’S Unrealized Nnest Egg: Why Non-Native English Speaking Teachers Belong In The First-Year Composition Classroom, Asmita Ghimire, Elizabethada Wright

Academic Labor: Research and Artistry (2017-2022 archives)

Overviewing rhetoric and composition's evolution from “English” to “Englishes,” this article shows how the denigration of non-native English-Speaking Teachers (NNEST) of writing on the basis of English difference disregards linguistics’ understandings of the evolutions of language. Additionally, this essay demonstrates that when we consider writing via the lens of the threshold concepts and see writing as an exercise of mind, ideas and thinking, NNEST of writing can be a strength in twenty-first century First Year Composition (FYC) course.

Close Encounters: Mass Incarceration Tactics, Kevin L. Jones

The Journal of Faith, Education, and Community

As a Black man living in America, my Christian faith walk began at an early age. Growing up in a suburban environment, I had several encounters with law enforcement that shaped my belief system. These encounters were and still are a stark reminder that Black boys and men are under attack. Policing negatively impacts Black boys and men when compared to other races of people. I realized that I was in their cross hairs and I was almost consumed by the criminal justice system on many occasions. Through the lens of Critical Race Theory, this work focused on the centrality …