Curriculum and Social Inquiry Commons^™

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 …

Focus On The Busy Intersections Of Culture And Cultural Change, Laura Elder

Journal of Global Catholicism

The dynamics of religious resurgence reveal the important ways that religious ritual and performance are meaning making spaces which are not self-contained or cut off from the rest of culture, but rather are a key locus of cultural change. A renewed emphasis on the busy intersections of meaning making – as rituals are connected, disconnected, and reconnected to other domains of social life – would improve the utility of the Catholics & Cultures website for understanding global cultural change. And a renewed emphasis on cultural change would also provide a better means for exploring reflexively by seeking to understand both …

A Widened Angle Of View: Teaching Theology And Racial Embodiment, Mara Brecht

Journal of Global Catholicism

Today’s undergraduate students are digital natives, shaped by constant access to information and countless experiences of encountering the world through the convenience of a screen. The ostensible comfort students have with difference gives way to a paradox, and one that’s made especially apparent in the theology classroom: Students are comfortable with seeing difference and particularity at a distance, but not adept at locating difference and particularity “at home.” I contend that Catholics & Cultures can help students from the dominant culture—namely, white students who comprise the vast majority of Catholic college students—destabilize their notion of the Catholic tradition as tightly …

Interdisciplinary Team Teaching Reflections On Praxis And Pedagogy In An Undergraduate Classroom, Danielle Nielsen, Diane Sabenacio Nititham, Marc Polizzi

Faculty & Staff Research and Creative Activity

Much scholarship available on team-teaching focuses on K-12 programming, with limited examples in post-secondary education. Adding to the growing research on college-level team-taught courses, this reflection describes how interdisciplinary team-teaching can offernot only a pedagogically innovative experience for students but also highlight the strengths of the faculty in their teaching and research areas. In addition to reviewing the differences between interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary curricula, we reflect on our experience deliveringGlobalization as a team-taught course, designing learning outcomes and course material, and negotiating classroom strategies, highlighting successful components and considering future iterations.

You Belong Here: A Critical Look At Community Engagement In Museum Education Through K-16 Place Based Pedagogy, Janelle O'Malley

Student Projects

Historically museums exist as object centered spaces with little consideration of the community and artists that support them. Therefore museums as pedagogical sites must reorient themselves to become people centered spaces incorporating participatory pedagogical experiences for both community members and artists.

There is a lack of research in place-based pedagogies in museum education. It is important now more than ever to recognize the need to center community in museum education. This study will seek to investigate how museums can exact meaningful change through their educational practices and create a sense of belonging in museums for their immediate community. The outcomes …

Service-Learning In The Covid19 Era: Learning In The Midst Of Crisis, Lauren Grenier, Elizabeth Robinson, Debra A. Harkins

Pedagogy and the Human Sciences

No abstract provided.

Rethinking Gaming & Representation Within Digital Pedagogy: An Instructor’S Guide, Anthony Wheeler

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This work fully analyzes the creation process and implementation of a deeply-structured social commentary in the form of a digital interactive-fiction, created in the open software known as Twine. My co-developer, Raven Gomez, and I created a game that explores the challenges of navigating spaces within higher education as someone who identifies as something considered to be “other” by the standards of the common Western curriculum. Once the infrastructure of the product itself is outlined, this work follows students in an English Composition I course throughout their experiences creating digital interactive-fiction games based on pivotal moments in their lives that …

Queering Secondary Education: An Inquiry To The Necessity Of Queer Studies For All Students, Ashlign D. Shoemaker

Honors Theses

In the current state of secondary education, queer studies are appallingly underexposed. The subject matter is often completely disregarded due to a perceived discomfort around themes and content regarding LGBTQ+ sexualities. This process of elimination is a disservice to all students as they continue their education and move on to the adult world. Queer studies must be included for all students to ensure a society of empathy and understanding. Including the queer identity in the secondary education, classroom gives LGBTQ+ students the usable past that is essential to their wellbeing and mental health, and it provides exposure and understanding for …

Introduction To "The State Of The Syllabus" Special Edition Of Syllabus Journal, Katherine Harris, Rebecca Frost Davis, Matthew Gold

Faculty Research, Scholarly, and Creative Activity

Positioning the syllabus as a key artifact in the modern academy, one that encapsulates many elements of intellectual, scholarly, social, cultural, political, and institutional contexts in which it is enmeshed, we offer in this special issue of Syllabus a set of provocations on the syllabus and its many roles. Including perspectives from full-time and part-time faculty, graduate students, and librarians, the issue offers a multifaceted take on how the syllabus is presently used and might be reimagined.

The Great Turning: A Call For Systems-Thinkers, Gabriella M. Demarce

Undergraduate Theses, Professional Papers, and Capstone Artifacts

David Orr, in an article on ecological intelligence reminds us that the modern world was shaped by people who did not understand that our social and economic systems could not coexist with the rest of the biological or natural systems on Earth (Orr, 1994). My research is rooted in Orr’s argument and discovering ways to shift this degrading paradigm. With my belief in the power of education in empowering youth and my background in environmental and climate change studies, I see a future in great need of people who holistically understand the functions of all types of systems and can …

A Phenomenological Inquiry Into The Teaching Of Climate Change, Daniel Diego

University of the Pacific Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to explore the ways in which educators address climate change and the impacts of human activity on the environment in conjunction with the Next Generation Science Standards. This study utilized qualitative methods, a phenomenological methodology informed by Moustakas, and a Systems Theory and Ecojustice Education conceptual framework. The central research questions was: in what ways do educators who are implementing the Next Generation Science Standards address climate change and the impacts of human activity on the environment? The supporting research questions were: in what ways do educators who are implementing the Next Generation Science …

Buying A Better World: Students As Conscious Consumers, Sean Murray

Journal of Vincentian Social Action

Conscious consumer movements have given people opportunities to “vote with their dollars” – that is, buy from companies with values matching their own, and forgo products from businesses with questionable policies and practices. After providing brief context about consumerism and conscious consumption, I focus on a Conscious Consumer Project that I teach in my First Year Writing courses at St. John’s University. Excerpts of student writing emphasizing labor issues, as well as student reflections on the project, are shared as I discuss possibilities for revising and improving the assignment. The possibilities discussed include increasing opportunities for students to do academic …

Interrogating Fake News In The Composition Classroom: Pedagogical Plans, Shelly A. Galliah

The Liminal: Interdisciplinary Journal of Technology in Education

This brief article argues that the skills developed in the first-year Composition classroom, such as analyzing texts, interrogating arguments, investigating media bias, conducting research, and thinking critically are crucial for helping students recognize the various forms of disinformation and post-truth as well as how to avoid circulating these and further polluting the media and information ecospheres. It also argues that Composition instructors must remain centrist to avoid exacerbating political polarization and alienating students who might be resistant to investigating fake news. This article summarizes some key readings and practical activities that Composition instructors may incorporate into their classrooms.

Teaching Students To Critically Evaluate Textbooks, Christopher Mchale, Ian Mcdermott, Steven Ovadia

Publications and Research

This chapter is a case study describing how library faculty combined service learning and information literacy to help students evaluate textbooks, comparing commercial ones to Open Education Resources. The underlying idea was to give students not only a scholarly grounding that would help them as they move through their academic careers but also a practical vocational orientation to help them succeed in the workforce and, hopefully, become future contributors to the free culture movement.

A Three-Step Guide To Shut It Down In Your Social Science Class, Fatima Y. Van Hattum

Intersections: Critical Issues in Education

This satirical comic seeks to highlight various classroom power dynamics and colonial knowledge hierarchies in higher education. It also touches upon the pedagogies of shame that both students and educators often internalize and perpetuate in the classroom. In terms of the medium, a hand drawn comic, the intention is to utilize methods beyond those considered normative and traditional to academia, such as the written word, while still offering academic analysis and contribution to scholarship and discourse on education.

A Pedagogical Framework For The Design And Utilization Of Place-Based Experiential Learning Curriculum On A Campus Farm, Julia L. Angstmann, Amber J. Rollings, Grant A. Fore, Brandon H. Sorge

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

Campus agriculture projects are increasingly being recognized as spaces impactful to student engagement and learning through curricular and co-curricular programming; however, most campus farm activities are limited to agriculture or sustainability programs and/or co-curricular student clubs. Thus, campus farms are largely underutilized in the undergraduate curriculum, marking a need to explore the efficacy and impact of engaging a diverse array of disciplinary courses in the rich social, environmental, and civic context of local sustainable agriculture. The Farm Hub program presented here incentivizes instructors to refocus a portion of existing course content around the topic of local, sustainable agriculture, and reduces …

Flipping The Jane Austen Classroom, Lynda A. Hall

English Faculty Articles and Research

The contemporary Austen classroom might appreciate cultural and racial diversity, examine popular culture’s distortions of the original texts, and consider multimodal ways of reading. This paper reflects on a course that “flipped” the research process in order to “find” Austen and her works in the popular culture and to evaluate our understanding in the twenty-first century. Students discovered the commodification and distortion of “Jane Austen” and conducted research for creative projects to learn more about the social, cultural, and historical contexts of the written texts.

Transformative Social Work Education: Student Learning Needs And The Truth And Reconciliation Commission's 94 Calls To Action, Garrison Mccleary

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

The social work profession has played, and continues to play, an integral role in the development and implementation of discriminatory and harmful practices against Indigenous individuals, families, and communities across Canada (Blackstock, 2011). The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada’s (TRC) 94 Calls to Action provide a comprehensive list of recommendations of which the primary focuses on child welfare. This Call to Action centres on ensuring that social workers are, “properly educated and trained about the history and impacts of residential schools” (TRC, 2015). This responsibility falls to Faculties and Schools of Social Work Social work to ensure social work …

“College Material” Structural Care At A New York City Transfer School, C. Ray Borck

Publications and Research

Based on ethnographic research at Brooklyn Community High School (BCHS), a transfer high school in New York City I demonstrate that students narrate their educational histories in terms of their experience of care, or lack of care, from teachers. Contributing to research on student-teacher relationships, care, resilience and retention, I develop the concept structural care, arguing that teachers’ ability to demonstrate care for their students, and students’ ability to perceive that care, is enabled or constrained by larger, socio-structural forces such as the national educational policy landscape, widespread cultural beliefs about schools and students, and processes of racialization, criminalization, and …

Voices Of Notators: Approaches To Writing A Score--Special Issue, Teresa L. Heiland

Journal of Movement Arts Literacy Archive (2013-2019)

In this special issue of Voices of Notators: Approaches to Writing a Score, eight authors share their unique process of creating and implementing their approach to notating movement, and they describe how that process transforms them as researchers, analysts, dancers, choreographers, communicators, and teachers. These researchers discuss the need to capture, to form, to generate, and to communicate ideas using a written form of dance notation so that some past, present, or future experience can be better understood, directed, informed, and shared. They are organized roughly into themes motivated by relationships between them and their methodological similarities and differences. …

Michalski Ma Portfolio: Finding My Path, Victoria L. Michalski

Master of Arts in English Plan II Graduate Projects

This portfolio is the culmination of my work in the English Teaching specialty Master's program at Bowling Green State University. In addition to the works I produced for my classes and subsequently re-wrote for my portfolio, I've added an analytical reflection about my growth and evolution during my studies in the English MA program, and about overcoming my difficulties until I finally found the connection between English and historical interests that I sorely needed in order to heighten my enthusiasm and motivation. This reflection brings together the reasons I chose the works in my portfolio to represent my initial discomfort …

Classroom Ideas For Promoting Social Justice: Encouraging Student Activism In Intercultural And Gender Communication Courses, Amy Aldridge Sanford

Journal of Communication Pedagogy

Communication courses (e.g., intercultural communication and gender communication) dedicated to the promotion of social justice often result in students’ raised consciousness regarding privilege and the oppression of people who have been marginalized historically. Affected students, however, often are at a loss about what to do with the newly acquired knowledge; consequently, they may experience anger and frustration that causes them to feel overwhelmed and leaves them with a sense of hopelessness. This essay provides 10 suggestions to help communication pedagogues guide students from anger and hopelessness to action and empowerment. Tips offered center on classroom discourse, curriculum choices, and potential …

Adopting The Principles Of Universal Design Into International And Global Studies’ Programs And Curriculum, Kimberley Brown, Rosa David, Shawn Smallman

International & Global Studies Faculty Publications and Presentations

The ideals of universal design have profoundly impacted instruction, policy, and infrastructure in course architecture and design within elementary education and at some universities. Within international and global studies, however, these principles have not deeply affected either pedagogy or scholarship despite the fact that classes in international studies may include more international students and third culture kids than classes in other programs. Instead, in North America (as well as in much of Latin America and Europe), the current pedagogical model calls for students either to develop strategies on their own to succeed in class or to self-identify with documented disabilities …

On Cheating And Prosperity, Trey Conatser

Greater Faculties: A Review of Teaching and Learning

At the outset of a new academic year, we'd do well to reflect on how we pitch academic integrity—and the concept of cheating—to our students. Not only does it affect how they see us as teachers and scholars; it also affects in profound ways how we see (or don't see) students as complex human beings. And this asks us to go against our gut reactions to the apparent moral legibility of cheating. If we understand cheating as an evasive concept, and as a product of our institutions, we're much less likely to incentivize it.

A Phenomenological Study Of Graduate Chinese Students’ English Writing Challenges, Papia Bawa, Sunnie Lee Watson

The Qualitative Report

More students from China are looking to the United States for learning opportunities. However, such students have serious English writing deficiencies. This is due to significant differences between the two languages. This phenomenological study of five Chinese, graduate level students in the United States, informs us of these issues and provides a basis upon which we can explore viable instructional strategies to deal with such issues. The key findings suggest that the participants feel marginalized due to English language deficiencies, which is complicated by a deficiently structured English language instructional system. Based on these findings, several themes are presented that …

Multimodal Pedagogies, Processes And Projects: Writing Teachers Know More Than We May Think About Teaching Multimodal Composition, Jessica B. Gordon

Theses and Dissertations

Multimodal writing refers to texts that use more than one communicative mode to convey information. While there is much scholarship that examines the history of alphabetic writing instruction and the alphabetic composing processes of students, little research explores the historical origins of multimodal composition and the processes in which students engage as they compose multimodal texts. This two-part project takes a fresh approach to studying multimodal writing by exploring the multimodal pedagogies of ancient Greek and Roman rhetoric and writing teachers, analyzing the role of mental and physical images in modern writers’ composing practices, and investigating contemporary students’ processes for …

Media Literacy As Mindful Practice For Democratic Education. A Response To “Transaction Circles With Digital Texts As A Foundation For Democratic Practices”, Theresa Redmond

Democracy & Education

This essay is a response to Brown’s (2015) article describing her strategy of transaction circles as a student-centered, culturally responsive, and democratic literacy practice. In my response, I provide further evidence from the field of media literacy education (MLE) that serves to enhance Brown’s argument for using transaction circles in order to promote democratic discourse, specifically augmenting her ideas by connecting the purposes and processes of transaction circles with key implications of media literacy pedagogy. I invite Brown to consider how her concept of transaction circles may be extended in three ways: (a) through acknowledging the indispensable role of the …

Developing Blended Learning In Library Instruction To Cultivate Research And Critical Thinking Skills In The Undergraduate Student Population, Bernadette López-Fitzsimmons

Georgia International Conference on Information Literacy

The ever-evolving digital resources in multiple types and formats have introduced numerous opportunities for enhanced teaching-and-learning environments focused on student–driven activities. Many of these strategies have already been implemented at educational institutions throughout the world.

This presentation will demonstrate how blended learning pedagogies in a library’s one-shot and for-credit courses cultivate research and critical thinking skills. The presenter will discuss how to customize library instruction for diverse student populations who have a complex history of multiple learning styles and varying literacy levels.

The presenter will describe several strategies that activate prior knowledge so that building new knowledge is seamlessly organic. …

The Arts Community Without Community: Imagining Aesthetic Curriculum For Active Citizenship, Seungho Moon

Education: School of Education Faculty Publications and Other Works

This article is about teaching art-based inquiry and equity pedagogy. The author introduces an aesthetic-inspired afterschool curriculum in the urban context in the United States and theorizes the meaning of active citizenship and community. Conceptually framed by “community without community,” this article explicates the ways in which the ARtS children (Aesthetic, Reflexive thoughts, & Sharing) investigated the meanings of community through dance, poetry, and clay art. The author imagines and theorizes community that goes beyond emphasizing solidarity and a collective “we”-ness in the pursuit of social transformation. Rather, the author argues that “community without community” could be an important framework …

The Empathy Project: Using A Project-Based Learning Assignment To Increase First-Year College Students’ Comfort With Interdisciplinarity, Micol Hutchison

Interdisciplinary Journal of Problem-Based Learning

Empathy and interdisciplinarity are both concepts that are current and relevant—across professions, in research, and in academia. This paper describes a large, interdisciplinary, project-based assignment, the Empathy Project, which allows students to delve into and increase comfort and skill with interdisciplinary thinking and collaborative learning, while improving the core college skills of written and oral communication, ethical and quantitative reasoning, and critical thinking. As I revised the assignment based on student feedback and results, I found that group conferences and time in class to work collaboratively were beneficial. Additionally, building increased scaffolding into the assignment, including greater student and group …