Curriculum and Social Inquiry Commons^™

Show And Tell: Integrating The Arts Into Transdisciplinary Public Health And Community Organizing Education, Bree L. Hemingway, Margaret Hawkins

The Transdisciplinary STEAM+ Journal

This field note examines the integration of arts-based pedagogy into a transdisciplinary graduate course that brings together students from public health, medicine, the social sciences, humanities, education, technology, and the arts. Central to the course is the Show and Tell assignment, in which students select and present a work of art connected to a social movement. Over three years and 42 student submissions, this assignment has served as an accessible entry point for exploring how artistic expression shapes activism, fosters community, and deepens understanding of justice-oriented work. Through an inductive content analysis of student-selected artworks and presentations, five major thematic …

Fiesta De Día De Muertos: Integración De Artes Visuales, Artes Literarias, Artes Escénicas Y Patrimonio Cultural En Una Celebración Escolar De Nivel Primaria, Mayra Urbina, Linda Judith Palafox

The Transdisciplinary STEAM+ Journal

Esta nota de campo documenta un festival transdisciplinario de Día de Muertos organizado en el Colegio México, una escuela primaria ubicada en la colonia El Tapatío, San Pedro Tlaquepaque, Guadalajara, México. El evento integró artes visuales mediante la construcción de tumbas decorativas y el montaje de un altar, artes literarias a través de calaveritas literarias escritas por los alumnos, y artes escénicas mediante coreografías de baile y representación teatral, todo ello vinculado con contenidos de estudios sociales sobre el patrimonio cultural mexicano. Aproximadamente 30 alumnos de primero a sexto grado (edades de 6 a 12 años) participaron como intérpretes, escritores …

10 Years Of The Hive: Successes, Challenges, And Lessons For Designing Creative Learning Hubs In Higher Education, Celine Bernhardt-Lanier

CMC Senior Theses

College students are often told to be “innovative” and to prepare themselves for a rapidly changing job market. Yet, most institutional learning environments are built for everything but that, focusing on efficiency, mastery, and content delivery. The Hive, formerly known as the Rick and Susan Sontag Center for Collaborative Creativity, pushes against this reality in higher ed. Founded ten years ago and nestled in a corner of East 7th Street in Claremont, California, the Hive brings together students, faculty, and staff through workshops, classes, skillshares, and events that are centered around making, reflecting, and collaborating. Drawing on eight semi-structured …

Diamond In The Rough: A Century Of Education And Democracy At Deep Springs College, L. Jackson Newell

Eastern Sierra History Journal

Deep Springs College, one of the great innovations in American higher education, is the subject of this close reading of its history, educational philosophy, and present state. Situated in the rugged eastern California high desert, the college has managed to survive, even thrive, despite innumerable challenges.

Beyond The Bin: Transforming Relationships With Waste Through A Collaborative Inquiry-Based Environmental Education Curriculum, Kaylee V. Morris

Pitzer Senior Theses

This thesis presents Beyond the Bin, a collaborative inquiry-based environmental education curriculum designed to transform how young learners understand and interact with waste. Motivated by the limitations of current downstream waste education—focused primarily on consumer behavior and individual disposal practices—this project argues for an upstream approach that identifies the underlying cause of these prevalent systems of disposability. Grounded in environmental education theory, affective learning, and ecological literacy, the curriculum encourages students to rethink waste as a material with creative potential rather than something to discard. Through creative engagement, experiential learning, and community-based initiatives, the curriculum fosters collaboration between students, teachers, …

Can Intentional Community-Engagement Bridge The Town And Gown Divide? Creating Collaborative Partnerships Between Colleges And Local Organizations Engaged In Social Activism, Anna Wilk

Scripps Senior Theses

In higher education spaces, there tends to be a divide between on-campus and off-campus communities creating dissonance between the activism conducted by the students and faculty and that taken on by the surrounding communities; this is known as the “town and gown divide”. For the sake of each of these individual groups it is pivotal to attempt to rectify this division so that the institutions and the communities that they find themselves within can work together to strive for justice and innovation. A crucial aspect of diminishing the town and gown divide involves addressing students' preconceived notions of the community …

Let Us Be The Fish Who Grow Legs: A Curriculum Guide For Linking Prison Industrial Complex Abolition, Environmental Justice, And State Power, Tess Gibbs

Scripps Senior Theses

This curriculum guide is designed to connect students’ understandings of environmental problems and injustices to their understandings of prison industrial complex (PIC) abolition, with the ultimate intention of cultivating the knowledge and imaginative practices to develop abolitionist-aligned solutions to environmental justice (EJ) problems outside of frameworks that rely upon state sanction. Students will connect the mutual causal forces of environmental injustices and the carceral state; explore intersections of environmental and carceral politics; and finish the course with broadened understandings of humans’ real and unrealized relationships with each other and the more-than-human world. The guide is intended to be worked through …

Ecodrama And Sustainable Theatre: A Handbook For Creating Remarkable Change, Gigi Buddie

Pomona Senior Theses

The climate crisis is not new to us, nor are the art forms that have taken shape as vital components of the many activist movements that seek to save the planet. Yet, for the first time at Pomona College, a play about environmental devastation and our hand in it finally graced the stage of this progressive institution this past year. This mini handbook is a call-to-action (of sorts), one that stems from the idea that this should not be the last ecodrama performed at Pomona College. These chapters are structured and supported by both experience and research – formulated from …

Mathematics Education As Dystopia: A Future Beyond, Peter Appelbaum, Charoula Stathopoulou, Constantinos Xenofontos

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

We argue that scholars and practitioners of mathematics education need to find new directions through recognition of its dystopic characteristics, and embrace these characteristics as both the source of challenges and method of response. This contrasts with the generally utopic approach of most scholarship in the field. We offer critical ethnomathematics education as a model, since it has its own origins in lingering dystopic legacies. A perpetual hopelessness and disempowerment is one implicit curriculum of contemporary mathematics education, where the mathematics one learns might help to describe things, yet hardly assists in transforming the reification of power and agency in …

Book Review: Reckonings: Numerals, Cognition, And History By Stephen Chrisomalis, Milton Rosa, Daniel Clark Orey

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

This review of Reckonings shares our thoughts on the diverse insights presented by Stephen Chrisomalis’s version of the history of numerical notation. Chrisomalis suggests that members of distinct cultural groups write numbers as an active choice in accordance with their own sociocultural contexts, which reflect the influences of historical, cognitive, social, economic, political, environmental, and cultural factors. This book integrates comparative, cognitive, and evolutionary understandings on numerical cognition with historical and linguistic evidence on the use and transformation of numeral systems through the historical advancement of numeracy. Chrisomalis offers an interesting historical perspective on numbers that builds upon three main …

Critical Race Theory And The Civic Education Debate: Why Race Should Be A Part Of The Curriculum, Reilly Scott

CMC Senior Theses

If we accept the purpose of civic education is to teach students how to be good citizens, I argue the way civic education currently exists and operates is failing to achieve this goal. Traditional and mechanical civics has been the norm in education for decades. This has failed to teach students how to be good citizens because it 1) often isolates students with non-dominant identities 2) it does not encourage the motivation nor skills needed for civic engagement after high school and 3) does not include race as part of the curriculum. I argue race needs to be included in …

“¿Te Acuerdas?” An Anecdotal And Critical Analysis Of Storytelling As A Pedagogical Tool For Chicano Nationalism And Pride, Lesley Chavarria

CMC Senior Theses

This thesis examines the validity of storytelling as a pedagogical tool for students, particularly students of color. The project begins by presenting the value of storytelling and communal education using Zapatista philosophy and indigenous examples. The goal of this theoretical foundation is to begin to critically think about what education is, versus what it can be. Then, the main case study is introduced in the next section: Escuela Tlatelolco. Escuela Tlatelolco is a Chicano centric school in Colorado that closed in 2017. Through numerous primary sources, my discussion of the school will illuminate how this community used storytelling to support …

In Community With Students As Changemakers, Robyn Orozco

Claremont Graduate University School of Education Teacher Education

The purpose of reflection is to analyze experiences in order to raise questions, decide what works best, and be in a constant state of learning and growing as a person. This ethnography is a written account of my journey as a first year teacher and social justice educator in which I share stories, artifacts, and ongoing reflection of myself and my teaching practice. Through this reflection, I explore my background and positionality, connections made with students, and sensemaking of various practices in my classroom. In addition, I describe our shared class experience of examining social issues and the power of …

Claremont College Students’ Perceptions Of Sexual Education Effectiveness: An Analysis Of Demographic Characteristics And Values, Michelle Calcany Blair

Pitzer Senior Theses

The purpose of this paper is to determine college students’ attitudes and evaluations of their K-12 sex education while considering demographic factors; in doing so, one can provide young adults with more autonomy over their education while better understanding how to make sex education more effective. The demographic factors that were considered along with student responses were: state of schooling, whether their schooling was religious or non-religious, whether one’s school was public or private, political affiliation of the school and neighborhood, race of the participants, and gender of the participants. These factors were deemed relevant for helping shape how people …

Get Out: Schooling As Spirit Possession, Amiri Mahnzili

The Annual Black Intersections Conference

In this chapter, the authors propose that education, which historically has been mainly under the jurisdiction of religious institutions and has been administered by spiritual leaders and attendants, is a sacred and spiritual transaction. Thus, churches and schools are equivalent and have the same spiritual obligation , which is to create in an individual a new spirit. Given the spiritual nature of education, we see the colonial schooling system as a conduit for spirit infusion that provides the opportunity for not only “acting White” but also for the possibility of becoming White by spirit possession. This line of thought leads …

Perfecting The Craft Of Teaching, Stephanie Nunez

CGU Theses & Dissertations

This ethnographic narrative follows my journey as a fifth grade teacher in the greater Los Angeles area. The purpose of this ethnography is to follow the development of my journey as a first-year teacher. In this ethnography, I explore my positionality and the levels of community, school, and classroom as ways to inform and improve my teaching practices as a social-justice educator. I begin this four part narrative by discussing my positionality and how it relates to my desires of becoming a teacher. Through this narrative, I was then able to conduct three case studies of students with different identities …

Parent Involvement In Contested Times: A Brief Analysis Of The Effects Of Anti-Immigrant Policies On Latinx Immigrant Parent Involvement, Maria Isabel Morales

CGU Theses & Dissertations

How do perceived community and school cultural values affect Latinx immigrant parents’ decisions to engage with their children’s schools? What lessons might their experiences have for our understanding of parent involvement beyond the parameters of traditional models of parent involvement? Engaging parents as advocates for school success in the home is particularly important for English Language Learners (ELs). Tapping into the experiences of EL parents is a resource educators can use to increase parental involvement and, consequently, student academic achievement.

This qualitative case study grounded in Critical Inquiry and Cultural Historic Activity Theory examined the perceptions and experiences of 5 …

Putting Educational Reform Into Practice: The Impact Of The No Child Left Behind Act On Students, Teachers, And Schools, Timothy Song

CMC Senior Theses

This thesis seeks to investigate the effects of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) on U.S. student achievement and teacher effectiveness. By combining the results from various data sources, I am able to indicate the levels of student preparedness, school spending, and specific classroom practices. After an analysis of my results, I suggest that NCLB has found moderate success in increasing the level of math preparedness for younger students from historically disadvantaged backgrounds. On the other hand, the data also suggests that there have been no statistically significant gains in reading achievement after the implementation of NCLB. Additionally, spending …

Memories Of The Teacher: A Reflection Of Enduring Ideals, Katherine Cooke

CGU Theses & Dissertations

In order to educate my students in my first year of teaching, I embarked upon a research project that would allow me to get to know their strengths and needs in addition to identifying my own possible biases and pre-conceived educational ideas. My research spreads from my own life to the lives of three focus students from various populations: one English learner, one student who receives special education services, and one student who has had significant life experiences that might contribute to his academic work. I interviewed all three students and their families to develop an action plan to help …

Young Chicanx On The Move: Folklórico Dance Education As A Mechanism Of Self-Assertion And Social Empowerment, Maya Salas

Scripps Senior Theses

In the context of Chicanx experiences in the United States, where varying generations of Chicanxs experience bicultural realities, this study shows how embodied knowledge performed through the body’s movements in folklórico dance by Chicanx youth from multiple generations, acts as a mechanism for reconnecting youth to cultural ties, reevaluating educational practices, and emplacing within youth, the ability to foster the confidence to express and create imagined futures. Data collection incorporated a series of interviews with eight Chicanx youth and adults who have either taught or danced folklórico in the Phoenix, Los Angeles, or Coachella Valley areas. Interview participants revealed a …

Education's Loss Of The Public: An Archival Exploration Of American Public Schools' Diminishing Social Returns And The Emerging Utility Of Social Entrepreneurship, Tia Ha-Quyen Ho

Scripps Senior Theses

The literature presented in the following pages explores the shortcomings of the American public education system in the context of creating long-term, sustainable social change. Using financial illiteracy and its relationship to low quality of life as an entry point, the first section exposes public schools’ shortcomings as agents of social change by delving into the hardships endured by the original public school promoters of the 19^th century, the pitfalls of President George W. Bush’s 2001 enactment of No Child Left Behind, and the shortcomings of the financial literacy programming that found traction in urban schools following the subprime …

Lived Legal Expertise: Mobilizing The Political Agency Of Incarcerated Youth, Ian S. Schiffer

Pomona Senior Theses

This thesis analyzes how caring relationships and an emancipatory approach to law related education (LRE) within juvenile justice facilities can cultivate political agency. I focused specifically on Camp Afflerbaugh-Paige, an LA County juvenile probation facility, in La Verne, CA, as a case study. During three months of teaching a law related education class and embedding myself at the facility with an asset-based framework, I encountered a wealth of knowledge that incarcerated juveniles possess, not from formal education or research, but based in their own lived experiences. Los Angeles County Probation spends $233,000 per student per year; assuming best intentions of …

Using Geospatial Analysis For High School Environmental Science Education: A Case Study Of The Jane Goodall Institute's Community-Centered Conservation Approach, Madison G. Vorva

Pomona Senior Theses

Given my experiences as a young conservation advocate, I saw a need to teach students the importance of interconnectedness, cultural awareness and systems-thinking skills through a spatial lens. I believe these skills are required for holistic, equitable and sustainable conservation decision-making in local and international contexts. This thesis uses geospatial tools to teach conservation ecology vocabulary and concepts from high school environmental science curriculum in two online resources. The purpose of my lesson plan is to show students how conservationists address complex conservation and land-use challenges using the Jane Goodall Institute’s community-centered conservation approach as a case-study. My hope is …

Infusing The Arts Into Science And The Sciences Into The Arts: An Argument For Interdisciplinary Steam In Higher Education Pathways, Christopher W. Thurley

The Transdisciplinary STEAM+ Journal

This article presents an argument for the integration of science into English courses in order to emphasize the usefulness of a Science, Technology, Education, Arts, and Mathematics (STEAM) education. The idea for this approach arose after the implementation of a divisional initiative to create learning communities with a STEM cohort of students called Student Persistence and Retention via Curricula, Cohorts, and Centralization (SPARC³). The author’s involvement in teaching a science-infused English course for this program inspired the argument that follows, which outlines why/how the sciences should learn from the humanities and why/how the humanities should learn from the sciences. The …

Humanizing Mathematics Through Ethnomodelling, Milton Rosa, Daniel Clark Orey

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

Ethnomathematical techniques and modelling tools allow us to examine systems taken from the real world and offer us insight into forms of mathematics performed in holistic contexts [3]. A pedagogical approach that connects a diversity of cultural forms of mathematics can be implemented by the use of ethnomodelling, a process of translation and elaboration of problems and questions taken from non-academic systems. Here, we offer examples of studies conducted in Brazil and in the United States that explore this pedagogical approach. Our goal is to broaden the discussion of possibilities for ethnomathematics and associated ethnomodelling perspectives that respect the …

The Common Core: An Enhancement Or Hindrance For The Youth Of America?, Haley L. Alderete, Haley L. Alderete

CMC Senior Theses

Education in America differs from other nations and may benefit from modeling some of these foreign practices. Although there are many improvements that the country could make, curriculum could be one of the sources of inadequacy in the education system and is often what receives the most attention. Therefore, the subsequent sections will explore the United States’ major attempt in improving education through creating consistency through the Common Core curriculum. In all, if the United States seeks to maintain its power in various sectors, it must strengthen its education system to ensure success.

Increasing The High School Graduation Rate Of Native American Students In Public Schools, Sierra M. Gibson

CMC Senior Theses

Native American students obtain the lowest on-time high school graduation rate among all races and ethnicities in the United States. Through an analysis of previously published literature and seven interviews conducted by the author, this paper sets out to identify the key barriers Native students face when working toward their high school diploma. This paper will argue that, together, a history of abusive educational tactics and an institutionally racist policies and practices adopted by the U.S. Department of Education have made it challenging for Native students to complete high school on time.

La Educación Como Camino Hacia La Revitalización De Lenguas Indígenas: Problemas Y Prospectivas, Isabella Hendry

Scripps Senior Theses

Many indigenous languages have suffered irreparable damage or even extinction due to the violence of colonization and the violences that continue to be perpetrated by its successor institutions of neo-liberalism and global “development” projects. This thesis focuses on the attempts of two groups of indigenous people, the Imazighen (or Berbers) of Algeria and Morocco and the Runa (or Quechua) of Peru and Bolivia, to break these cycles of repression and revitalize their languages. A close comparison of these two groups’ struggles reveals the difficulty of transcending this assimilationist, imperialist framework, but it also highlights several successes that bode well for …

Riding The Wave: Open Access, Digital Publishing, And The Undergraduate Thesis, Char Miller

Pomona Faculty Publications and Research

Char Miller, W. M. Keck Professor of Environmental Analysis at Pomona College, Claremont, CA., gave the Opening Keynote for the USETDA 2013 Conference, July 24-26, held on the Claremont McKenna College and Scripps College campuses.

In this keynote address, Dr. Miller discusses the importance of building the educational foundation to support students and then incorporate opportunities for undergraduates to share their research.

Dr. Miller draws from his experience collaborating with librarians to integrate information literacy into the curriculum and requiring that all senior theses in the program be posted on the Claremont Colleges' Open Access institutional repository, Scholarship@Claremont.

Choose Your Own Adventure: Integrating An Information Literacy Rubric Into Seven (Very) Different Colleges, Natalie Tagge, Char Booth, Alexandra Chappell, M. Sara Lowe, Sean M. Stone

Library Staff Publications and Research

It is no small feat to develop a replicable, dependable information literacy rubric that is appropriate to an institution’s unique student population. But once the rubric is created, how does it become edited, adopted, and utilized by campus stakeholders to actually improve information literacy learning? And, what happens when you multiply this by a consortial context, wherein one information literacy rubric is presented to five undergraduate colleges and two graduate schools, each with unique governance models, assessment profiles, and relationships with the library they share?
The visual nature of a poster will provide a perfect means to map out the …