Curriculum and Social Inquiry Commons^™

Breaking Barriers In Teaching And Learning: The Honors Professional Development Portfolio: Claiming The Value Of Honors For Improvement, Tenure, And Promotion

National Collegiate Honors Council Monographs: Chapters

All of us working in honors face a similar challenge when we are asked to account for the value of our efforts as teachers or leaders in our honors programs or colleges. Much of what we do is invisible to all but the most discerning and appreciative eyes: hours spent designing new courses and pedagogical approaches; advising students on curricular, career, and personal matters; coordinating faculty and student development opportunities; forging beneficial alliances across campus to grow and strengthen our institutional areas; collaborating with students on research projects; drafting grants and other proposals; maintaining alumnae relations; leading students to academic …

Breaking Barriers In Teaching And Learning: Constructing An Honors Composition Course To Support A Research-Based Honors Curriculum

National Collegiate Honors Council Monographs: Chapters

As the research focus of post-secondary honors education intensifies, the honors composition course can be designed to support this mission by introducing students to discipline-specific research tools and argumentation styles while building an interdisciplinary community of scholars who can debate issues both within and outside their fields. Not only do students develop skills in selecting, reading, and writing researched academic arguments, but they also gain insight into the publication and presentation processes as related to professional development in a given discipline. Students learn how publishers and editors serve as gatekeepers of what is considered knowledge in a field, how researchers …

Breaking Barriers In Teaching And Learning: Building And Enhancing Honors Programs Through Faculty Learning Communities

National Collegiate Honors Council Monographs: Chapters

Many important institutional concerns and opportunities, observes John R. Cosgrove, involve honors programs and colleges, such as their impact on undergraduate academic performance, retention, and graduation (Cosgrove). Another consideration for honors programs is the area of curriculum revision or enhancement, for example, increasing ethical inquiry across courses in the honors curriculum. Others involve inspiring faculty to create new honors courses, adjusting criteria for student requirements and recognition, initiating joint enterprises with liberal education and STEM programs, and advancing the role of the honors curriculum in advocating change across the institution. These opportunities beckon solutions that can be investigated and proposed …

Study Abroad In The Neoliberal Academy: Shifting Geographies, Terri Carney

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

No abstract provided.

European Spaces And The Roma: Denaturalizing The Naturalized In Online Reader Comments, Theresa Catalano, Grace E. Fielder

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

With the entry of several Eastern European nations into the European Union (EU), a “third” space has developed in the discourse for nations perceived as not fully integrated “inside” the EU system. This article investigates the construction of this “third space” in the resultant “moral panic” about undesired immigration from other EU countries and its potential drain on the social services of the United Kingdom and links it to Euroskeptic discourse in British media. The article uses construal operations from cognitive linguistics combined with critical discourse studies as a way of denaturalizing the discourse in online comments that focus on …

Breaking Barriers In Teaching And Learning: Foreword, Richard Badenhausen

National Collegiate Honors Council Monographs: Chapters

When I first stumbled upon honors education over two decades ago while team-teaching a seminar called “Poetry and the Condition of Music,” it was the freedom inside and outside the classroom that most caught my attention. Sprung from the shackles of my usual British Literature survey, one in which students trudged through a rigid chronology of canonical authors, I was free to design a course with the university’s choral director that put ancient oral poets in dialogue with rap musicians; that explored the collaboration between W. H. Auden and Benjamin Britten; that set Langston Hughes against crucial jazz influences. Additionally, …

Breaking Barriers In Teaching And Learning: Reading To Improve Teaching And Learning, John Zubizarreta

National Collegiate Honors Council Monographs: Chapters

Scholarship on teaching and learning has exploded in volume and influence in recent decades, providing all of us who are dedicated to improving our roles as professors with a dizzying array of books and other resources. Faculty development as a specific area of study and professional growth and centers designed to promote and support better teaching (often called CETLs for Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning or CATLs for Center for the Advancement of Teaching and Learning) have multiplied on campuses around the globe.

Breaking Barriers In Teaching And Learning: Teaching For Learning In Honors Courses: Identifying And Implementing Effective Educational Practices

National Collegiate Honors Council Monographs: Chapters

Teaching and learning are interesting endeavors. As faculty members, we spend a great deal of time working with students to help them understand a concept, a fact, or a point of view, but we often do not spend equal time better understanding and improving teaching and learning. Time and again, individual educators note that they were trained in a given discipline, not in the process of teaching. In most states, it takes more credentialing in teaching to become a first-grade instructor in math than it does to teach a graduate seminar in psychology. Because of the assumption that those who …

Breaking Barriers In Teaching And Learning: Using Student-Generated Questions To Promote Learning

National Collegiate Honors Council Monographs: Chapters

Faculty who teach gifted honors students often ask themselves, “How can I ask questions that foster higher-order thinking?” “How can I get more students to respond?” “How can I ensure that students are learning from question-based discussions?” Another key concern: “How can I get students to begin interacting with each other rather than conducting a discussion much like a ping-pong match where the rapid exchanges occur only between a single student and me and then another student and me?” This last question can lead faculty to a different model of questioning, one in which students generate questions that are then …

Breaking Barriers In Teaching And Learning: Honors Components In Honors Faculty Development

National Collegiate Honors Council Monographs: Chapters

In this chapter we describe the design characteristics of a professional development course about honors teaching. We claim that the principles of learning and teaching in honors are also applicable to the design of a course for honors faculty.

The context of our research is Utrecht University in The Netherlands, a large and high-ranking research university that offers undergraduate and graduate programs in a wide variety of academic disciplines. Dutch higher education does not have a longstanding

tradition in honors; Utrecht University was among the first research universities that started experimenting with honors programs in the 1990s. The rationale was …

Breaking Barriers In Teaching And Learning: Linking Honors Courses: A New Approach To Defining Honors Pedagogy

National Collegiate Honors Council Monographs: Chapters

The shift in higher education toward outcome-based learning represents a significant opportunity for honors. By removing disciplinary boundaries related to teaching content knowledge, outcome-based learning increases opportunities for connecting student learning across courses within well-defined honors curricula. It also empowers honors students, many of whom are eager to take leadership of their educational experiences, to extend their learning in new ways. This essay presents an example of how drawing connections across honors courses within a curriculum creates unique opportunities for engaged, transformative learning and, unexpectedly, for the development of an honors program identity.

Breaking Barriers In Teaching And Learning: Perspectives On Twentieth-Century American Identity

National Collegiate Honors Council Monographs: Chapters

At Southern Oregon University, a course designated as HON 315: Perspectives on Twentieth-Century American Identity has been developed and offered with a high degree of success for several terms. Its pedagogical flexibility, high level of student participation, and exceptionally high course-evaluation ratings from students indicate that it might serve as a useful model for honors programs and colleges as a lower-level honors course in United States history or perhaps adapted to other disciplines. The course description is as follows:

This course is a study of the development of the United States in the twentieth century and early twenty-first century, focusing …

Breaking Barriers In Teaching And Learning: Innovative Discussion-Based Pedagogy

National Collegiate Honors Council Monographs: Chapters

Psychologists have identified a series of specific kinds of learning experiences that confer broad and lasting educational benefits, contributing to overall professional success regardless of field. These benefits include developing creativity, problem-solving, cognitive complexity, and flexibility (Maddux et al.); working well in diverse or dispersed groups; negotiating interpersonal problems (Tadmor et al.); tolerating ambiguity; pursuing cultural engagement; appreciating diversity; and being open to experience (Shadowen et al.). This research is important because it provides evidence for the longterm impact of certain experiences on ways of thinking rather than their short-term ability to help students pass exams. The research argues powerfully …

Breaking Barriers In Teaching And Learning: Bending Time And Space: Three Approaches For Breaking Barriers In The Honors Classroom

National Collegiate Honors Council Monographs: Chapters

Varying the typical format of the honors classroom is a great way to encourage creative thinking. When students become accustomed to what to expect from a class, they are often able to fulfill requirements with minimal effort. An unusual and challenging course experience requires students to focus, to think in new ways about their learning. This is part of why courses abroad are often so transformational: students constantly have to adjust to their new environment. The challenge for teachers like me who love leading courses abroad is how to create similarly engaging experiences at home. Using unusual course structures, meeting …

Breaking Barriers In Teaching And Learning: Growing Pains In Honors Education: Two Courses Designed To Build Community

National Collegiate Honors Council Monographs: Chapters

Honors programs and colleges that seek substantial growth face a number of challenges. Two of the most prominent are maintaining a strong sense of community within the honors student population and finding sufficient faculty to teach honors courses. A different, but not entirely unrelated, challenge is presented by part-time students, some of whom may be excellent candidates for honors but whose outside commitments make it impossible for them to carry a full course load or regularly attend classes during business hours. In what follows, I will provide an overview of two honors courses whose design can help meet the two …

Breaking Barriers In Teaching And Learning: Introduction

National Collegiate Honors Council Monographs: Chapters

At times, when honors education comes up in academic or popular conversations, a common and automatic response seems to prevail: an assumption that honors means faster, broader, more complicated, and more expert delivery of content information on the part of the teacher and greater, more efficient acquisition of disciplinary knowledge and higher achievement on tests or essays on the part of the student. What the instructor teaches in terms of countable amounts of information and what the student produces in terms of quantitatively measurable outcomes rule the day.

Breaking Barriers In Teaching And Learning: The Importance Of The First-Semester Experience: Learning Communities And Clustered Classes

National Collegiate Honors Council Monographs: Chapters

I served as Director of the Honors College at William Paterson University for ten years in a half-time capacity while I also worked as a Professor of History. Last year, I took a new position as the Dean of the Pforzheimer Honors College at Pace University. Both honors colleges have special courses for first-semester honors students that are meant to help successful high school students transition into successful college students. First-semester consolidated courses can offer honors students an experience that is challenging and rigorous and that helps them to better understand the expectations of professors and the staff of the …

Breaking Barriers In Teaching And Learning: Selected Book Resources

National Collegiate Honors Council Monographs: Chapters

Achacoso, M. V., and M. D. Svinicki, editors. Alternative Strategies

for Evaluating Student Learning. New Directions for Teaching

and Learning, No. 100. Jossey-Bass, 2005.

Allen, M. J. Assessing Academic Programs in Higher Education,

Jossey-Bass, 2004.

Anderson, L. W., D. R. Krathwohl, and B. S. Bloom. A Taxonomy

for Learning, Teaching, and Assessing: A Revision of Bloom’s Taxonomy

of Educational Objectives. Longman, 2001.

Angelo, T. A., and K. P. Cross. Classroom Assessment Techniques: A

Handbook for College Teachers. 2nd ed., Jossey-Bass, 1993.

Arreola, R. A. Developing a Comprehensive Faculty Evaluation System:

A Handbook for College Faculty and …

Bursting The Filter Bubble: Information Literacy And Questions Of Valuation, Navigation, And Control In A Digital Landscape, Komysha Hassan

Honors Undergraduate Theses

The evolution of social media platforms and other public forums in the digital realm has created an explosion of user-generated content and data as a component of the already content-saturated digital landscape. The distributed, horizontal nature of the internet as a platform makes it difficult to ascertain value and differentiate between texts of varying validity, bias, and purpose. In addition, the internet is not an inanimate interface. As Pariser (2011) argues, content aggregators, such as Google, actively filter, personalize, and therefore limit each individual's access to information, in both range and type. This has created a crisis of information valuation …

Emancipatory Learning, Open Educational Resources, Open Education, And Digital Critical Participatory Action Research, Jason Leggett, Jay Wen, Anthony Chatman

Publications and Research

Given that we must prepare students for the future workforce today how can we use the power of Open Educational Resources (OERs) and Digital Social Science research to improve student learning and help students develop technical skills needed for the high-tech workforce? In this article, we use transformative learning theory (Mezirow, 1978) and Digital + Critical Participatory Action Research (D+CPAR) to analyze the effectiveness of integrating OERs into a course and reflect on how we used OERs to support student learning and make civic engagement more equitable at an urban community college. In a criminal justice course analyzing the legal …

(Re)Learning To Question: Curriculum Studies And (Re)Thinking Science For The 21st Century, Anthony Jerome Stawiery

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

This dissertation proposes a science literacy which revisits the nature of science and how it has fallen away from its inquiry-based roots and has become a tool for oppression and exclusion. The epistemological roots of science begin with curiosity and questioning. Asking questions is also foundational to democratic society. A critical science literacy emphasizes the need to question and to remain curious. Such skills can be incorporated across multiple disciplines. Therefore, this dissertation proposes science literacy not as a literacy in the life or physical sciences, but as a methodology of inquiry, a skillset that nurtures curiosity and strengthens critique. …

The Exertion Of A Choice: An Ecofeminist Vision ~ Aesthetic, Embodied, And Connected Learning, Sharon M. Eswine

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

In this dissertation, I build upon Darwin’s (1859/1964) metaphor of the complex biological tangle of a river bank - plants, birds, insects, and earth - to paint a picture of transformative learning as aesthetic (Dewey, 1934/2005; Eisner, 1998, 2002b; Greene, 1995, 2001; Liston, 2001), and embodied (Dewey, 1958; Johnson, 2007; Shusterman, 2006), and thereby connected to the learner’s life experience, including his/her/their ecological, cultural, and historic situatedness. I call this complication of Darwin’s metaphor the ecofeminist tangled bank. For my purposes, an ecofeminist theoretical framework provides a means of analyzing oppressive conceptual frameworks that perpetuate hierarchy and domination, and which …

I, Too, Am A Woman: An Emancipatory Text On The Intersections Of Race, Gender, And Sexuality, Michelle M. Allen

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

This inquiry builds upon Black Feminism and Critical Race Feminist frameworks by exploring the juxtaposition between Black Women and Queer Black Women. It is also an exploration of the similarities between Queer Black Women and Black Women and how they interact with femininity and masculinity, patriarchy, and heteronormativity. Claiming digital space through podcasting, it honors the power of counter narratives by employing autoethnographical story telling. It examines the multivalent ways in which critical geographies, safe spaces, and homeplaces nurture or alienate Black Women on the basis of sexual orientation, gender performance, race, and social class. Employing tenets of Black Feminist …

Using Young Adult Literature To Confront Mental Health: A Culturally Relevant Approach, Briana Hendrickson

Masters Theses

This thesis highlights the need for addressing mental health in secondary school settings and argues that high school English educators can help eliminate the stigma surrounding mental illness using young adult (YA) literature. I discuss the benefits of using YA literature in the secondary English classroom and why YA literature is an effective tool for introducing timely topics like mental health. I analyze the limitations of popular YA novels such as Jay Asher's Thirteen Reasons Why and Jennifer Niven's All the Bright Places and argue that the mental health representation in these novels hinders students' ability to challenge the current …

Language, Literacy, And Conscientização In American Public Schools, Julie Ward

Theses and Dissertations

Language, Literacy, and Conscientização in American Public Schools synthesizes poststructural language theory to critique literacy teaching and assessment norms in American public schools in order to theorize a pedagogy of racial and economic justice that embraces globalization and immigration. Chapter I creates a theoretical framework for language that rests firmly on both Lev Vygotsky’s and Jacques Lacan’s sociohistorical approach to language acquisition and language use. Mikhail Bakhtin’s work demonstrates the heteroglossic nature of discourse, while Antonio Gramsci politicizes this framework through an understanding of hegemony. Chapter II sketches ethnographic research on teaching practices of various American communities, focusing on ideology …

"We Are...": Creating Discursive Spaces For The Construction Of Counter Narratives Through Photovoice As Critical Service Learning, Amanda F. Hall

Theses and Dissertations

Broader social issues that affect students’ lives manifest in the classroom and the current neo-liberal reform structures in education (e.g., the accountability movement combined with punitive discipline measures and structural classism/racism) fail to acknowledge the impact of these issues on student identity within school and community. While this era of standardized testing has brought about anti-democratic realities in schools of all sorts, it is also the case that schools that pass tests often enjoy a more liberatory climate while schools struggling to meet testing requirements are more likely to possess oppressive qualities. Not coincidentally, the more oppressive schools are often …

Paulo Freire And Liberation Theology: The Christian Consciousness Of Critical Pedagogy, Peter Mclaren, Petar Jandrić

Education Faculty Articles and Research

"In this article we expand our work towards intersections and relationships between liberation theology and Paulo Freire. While Freire addressed liberation theology in his writings fairly sporadically (e.g. »The Politics of Education« [1985]), there is no doubt that he »lived a liberating Christian faith« and »significantly contributed to the thinking of liberation theology« (Kyrilo 2011, p. 167). Now that Paulo Freire is no longer with us, arguably the best way to reinvent his works for the present moment is through dialogue with Peter McLaren: Freire’s close friend, »intellectual relative« (Freire 1995, p. x), and one of the key contemporary thinkers …

Assessment As Critical Programmatic Reflection, Vicki Reitenauer, Rowanna L. Carpenter

Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Faculty Publications and Presentations

This article argues that general education assessment is an opportunity for engaging faculty and the general education program as a whole in critical reflection on the practices and pedagogies that affect the entire undergraduate body. Through intentional assessment practices tied to learning outcomes, pedagogical expectations, and faculty and student classroom experience, an assessment program can meet accreditation expectations while serving as a rich location for critical reflection and continuous improvement. To illustrate, this article takes the reader through a year in the life of University Studies' assessment at Portland State University. It provides details about the individual elements of our …

Taking High-Impact Practices To Scale In Capstone And Peer Mentor Programs, And Revising University Studies' Diversity Learning Goal, Óscar Fernández, Dana Lundell, Seanna M. Kerrigan

University Studies Faculty Publications and Presentations

University Studies, Portland State University's general education program, is now more than twenty years old; its leaders frequently answer questions from other higher education institutions regarding how the program takes high-impact practices to scale. In this article, three program leaders detail how University Studies' Peer Mentor and Senior Capstone Programs and one recently revised diversity learning goal demonstrate the opportunities and challenges of taking high-impact practices to scale. This article used published assessments of the program, experiences by current program leaders, and interviews from faculty members and peer mentors. Overall, the coauthors conclude that three dynamic qualities contribute to a …

Contemplating Positionalities: An Ethnodrama, Neera Malhotra, Veronica Hotton

University Studies Faculty Publications and Presentations

This article is an ethnodrama playscript that examines the role of positionality in an interdisciplinary general education program called University Studies at Portland State University. Drawing from both the literature and from the practice of critical reflection, the authors share their experiences as faculty members relative to their institutional and social positionalities. The authors perform this ethnodrama through the construction of this article for an audience of teaching faculty and administrators in higher education. Throughout the ethnodrama, the audience/readers are invited to interact with the playscript through prompted critical reflection on their own positionalities in their professional lives.