Higher Education and Teaching Commons^™

Egalitarian Teams In Action: Organizing For Library Initiatives, Linda Miles, Miriam Laskin, Kate Lyons

Urban Library Journal

In 2006 Peter Senge, who coined the term the learning organization, wrote, “As the world becomes more interconnected and business becomes more complex and dynamic, work must become more ‘learningful’... It’s just not possible any longer to to figure it out from the top, and have everyone else following the orders of the ‘grand strategist’” (p. 4). Senge documented the need for professions and organizations that can change, that can quickly adapt, be nimble, learn, and find new opportunities in the changing information landscape. Libraries are not immune from this kind of pressure. In this case study, first presented at …

Teaching College: The Ultimate Guide To Lecturing, Presenting, And Engaging Students, Norman Eng

Publications and Research

Your students aren’t reading. They aren’t engaged in class. Getting them to talk is like pulling teeth. Whatever the situation, your reality is not meeting your expectations. Change is needed. But who’s got the time? Or maybe you’re just starting out, and you want to get it right the first time.

If so, Teaching College: The Ultimate Guide to Lecturing, Presenting, and Engaging Students is the blueprint. Written for early career instructors, this easy-to-implement guide teaches you to:

• Think like advertisers to understand your target audience—your students
• Adopt the active learning approach of the best K-12 teachers
• Write a syllabus …

Creating Art Patterns With Math And Code, Boyan Kostadinov

Publications and Research

The goal of this talk is to showcase some visualization projects that we developed for a 3-day Code in R summer program, designed to inspire the creative side of our STEM students by engaging them with computational projects that we developed with the purpose of mixing calculus level math and code to create complex geometric patterns. One of the goals of this program was to attract more minority and female students into applied math and computer science majors.

The projects are designed to be implemented using the high-level, open-source and free computational environment R, a popular software in industry for …

Spectators Or Patriots? Citizens In The Information Age, Amrita Dhawan

Publications and Research

In theory, a strong democracy rests on robust citizen participation. The practice in most democracies is quite different. This gap presents a challenge, which can be narrowed by augmenting civic education to bring it up to date with the current information environment and thus give citizens the opportunity to participate. Robert Dahl’s work on democracy provides a model that looks at this problem structurally. He writes about the ideals and the actual institutions necessary for a democracy and if we situate his model in the modern information environment we get a better idea of how to improve civic education. Successful …

Multiple Problem-Solving Strategies Provide Insight Into Students’ Understanding Of Open-Ended Linear Programming Problems, Marla A. Sole

Publications and Research

Open-ended questions that can be solved using different strategies help students learn and integrate content, and provide teachers with greater insights into students’ unique capabilities and levels of understanding. This article provides a problem that was modified to allow for multiple approaches. Students tended to employ high-powered, complex, familiar solution strategies rather than simpler, more intuitive strategies, which suggests that students might need more experience working with informal solution methods. During the semester, by incorporating open-ended questions, I gained valuable feedback, was able to better model real-world problems, challenge students with different abilities, and strengthen students’ problem solving skills.

Zines In The Classroom: Critical Librarianship And Participatory Collections, Robin Potter, Alycia Sellie

Publications and Research

This lesson plan outlines using zines in a library classroom with a critical pedagogy approach. It was written based upon the teaching each author did with the Brooklyn College Library Zine Collection.

Improving Motivation, Engagement And Differentiation In Lesson Development Using An Interactive White Board: 10-Hour Workshop Cycle Toward Professional Development Certificate, Leslie Lieman, Jenelle Fiori, Naliza Sadik

Publications and Research

The School of Education prepares aspiring teachers for teaching in 21st century classrooms by offering intensive interactive white board training cycles. In designing interactive lessons, the workshop cycle focuses on the pedagogical decision making that can improve classroom teaching and student engagement and understanding.

Lessons Learned From Lesson Study: Focusing On Differentiation For Ells And Students With Special Needs, Anne Marie Marshall, Khalilah Arrington

Publications and Research

This poster will present an overview of the lesson study process within the MATH-UP program. The poster will summarize the components of lesson study and highlight candidate learning from the process. Specifically, the lesson study selected will demonstrate evidence of candidate learning about emergent bilinguals.

Collaborative Power: Graduate Students Creating And Implementing Faculty Development Workshops On Multilingual Writing, Brooke R. Schreiber, Dorothy Worden, Eunjeong Lee

Publications and Research

A description of how a group of graduate students was able to coordinate institutional resources and connections to put on faculty development sessions for working with multilingual writers (often called ESL students) across the curriculum.

Voices From On High: Rhetorical Education In A Jewish Women's Writing Center, Andrea Rosso Efthymiou

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This ethnographic dissertation looks at how the mission statement at one institution of higher education--Yeshiva University (YU)--establishes rhetorical education for its undergraduate students. The research site for this study of rhetorical education and institutional mission is the college writing center at YU's women's campus, Stern College for Women. This study defines rhetorical education as the way an institution authorizes written, spoken, and behavioral communication, with the goal of developing its students as civic beings, through its institutional mission. My findings demonstrate how undergraduate writing tutors disidentify with institutional rhetorical education to subvert, resist, and revise institutional rhetorical education, offering alternatives …

Between Sites: Critical Convergences At The Personal, Interpersonal, And Institutional Levels In A Service Learning Course, Kendra Rashaun Brewster

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Set within the context of the increasing emphasis on civic engagement and transformative education, this work addresses service learning as a form of civic engagement that holds both the risks of acriticality and critical potential. This study examines the capacity for the critical consciousness and relationality that define the primary commitments of critical service learning (see Kinefuchi, 2010). Thus, this study is grounded in the ways that the circuits of privilege and dispossession were breached in a service learning course where college students travelled to mentor adolescent girls who were in a secure residential facility. The narratives of former service …

From The Bx To A Ba: Latino Male Students And The Transition From High School To College, Alejandro Eduardo Carrion

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study aims to provide a counter narrative to the deficit filled discourse surrounding Latino males by informing teachers, policymakers and researchers of the barriers and resources encountered by this population as they make the transition from high school to college. A qualitative research design was utilized for this study, which focused on 10 Latino males who mainly identified as Puerto Rican and Dominican, from the Bronx. Bourdieu's Theory of Practice, and his theoretical tools of field (structures), habitus (dispositions) and capital (social, cultural and economic), was used as the theoretical framework guiding this study. Participants shared the nuances of …

The Over-Education Of The Negro: Academic Novels, Higher Education And The Black Intellectual, Archie Lavelle Porter

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation focuses on the academic novel - a literary genre which fictionalizes the lives of students and professors in institutions of higher education. In particular this project focuses on academic novels written by black writers and which address issues in black higher education. This dissertation has two concurrent objectives: 1) to examine the academic novel as a particular genre of literature, and to highlight some specific novels on black American identity within this genre, and 2) to illustrate the pedagogical value of academic fiction. Through the ancient practice of storytelling, academic novels link the travails of the individual student …

An Overview Of Undergraduate Research In The Cuny Community College System, Avrom J. Caplan, Effie S. Maclachlan Phd

Publications and Research

CUNY community colleges occupy a unique niche because they are part of a larger geographically focused university system in which all faculty members are governed by a single set of standards for professional development. Research is clearly a part of the wider institutional culture, and dedicated faculty members who obtained support from state and federal funding agencies have conducted successful student-research programs. Close partnerships between community colleges and their four-year counterparts can contribute to positive student outcomes and to the subsequent transfer of students. The main roadblock to broadening participation is the small number of students who can be supported …

Evolución Y Desarrollo Conceptual Del Texto De Especialidad Desde El Análisis Del Discurso Hasta Las Lenguas Con Propósitos Específicos, David Sánchez-Jiménez

Publications and Research

Writing evolves in society and so do kinds of text in a discourse community in specific ways. The disciplines involved in the analysis of these written texts follow these changes and explain these adjustments. This article reviews the idea of texts when discourse analysis began. Its objective is to look at how this concept has evolved within each discourse community through the several changes that have occurred in the society during the last few decades.

Review: Digital Humanities Pedagogy: Practices, Principles, And Politics, Stephen Brier

Publications and Research

Review of Digital Humanities Pedagogy: Practices, Principles, and Politics, edited by Brett D. Hirsch, multiple authored collection of articles on the theory as well as the practices and principles of the digital humanities and how DH can and has begun to reshape pedagogy in college teaching and learning.

A Primer For Mathematical Modeling, Marla A. Sole

Publications and Research

With the implementation of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics recommendations and the adoption of the Common Core State Standards for Mathematics, modeling has moved to the forefront of K-12 education. Modeling activities not only reinforce purposeful problem-solving skills, they also connect the mathematics students learn in school with the mathematics they will use outside of school. Instructors have found mathematical modeling difficult to teach. To successfully incorporate modeling activities I believe that curricular changes should be accompanied by professional development for curriculum developers, classroom teachers, and higher education professionals. This article serves as an introduction to modeling by …

Queer Pedagogical Desire: A Study Guide, Matt Brim

Publications and Research

This essay explores the queer pedagogical desires that attended my writing of the Study Guide for the documentary film United in Anger: A History of ACT UP (Jim Hubbard, 2012). The analysis takes up Robyn Wiegman’s central question in Object Lessons, “What is it we expect our relationship to our objects of study to do?”, which is of particular importance to the discipline of queer studies insofar as the field is oriented around the desire to meld social justice with critical pedagogy. The queer professor’s desire in the case of the Study Guide-as-object was to create a text that …

Educational Uses For The Ipad, Philip G. Swan Jr.

Publications and Research

These are bullet points of a talk regarding iPad apps suitable for use in higher education.

The Mathematics Portfolio: An Alternative Tool To Evaluate Students’ Progress, Marla A. Sole

Publications and Research

This article describes the need for more thorough and varied forms of assessment to evaluate students’ level of understanding in mathematics. Portfolios are one type of assessment tool that, when added to a teacher’s repertoire can improve students’ comprehension and retention and enable students to monitor their own progress and to take more responsibility for their own learning. Portfolio assignments can also help students and teachers to detect and remedy weaknesses and misunderstandings and can increase students’ self-confidence in mathematics. This article discusses what a portfolio is, gives an example of a unit portfolio used in an undergraduate Finite Mathematics …

Libraries And General Education: New Strategies To Enhance Freshman Orientation, Faculty Collaboration, And Curriculum Development, Carl R. Andrews

Publications and Research

My research will attempt to re-evaluate the academic library's role in supporting a general education program. The emphasis will focus on student centeredness, faculty collaboration, outreach and curriculum support. In the short time that I have worked in academic libraries I have learned that quality customer service and reference desk work is far from the list of priorities in some settings. Coming from the public library I found this to be unacceptable. We are service providers and the way in which we communicate with students and faculty is important. As professionals we should do more in the way of making …

Academic Libraries Supporting The Research Needs Of Student Veterans: A Bibliography, Rebecca Arzola

Publications and Research

The number of Student Veterans entering higher education is growing especially after the passing of the new Post-9/11 GI Bill in 2008. Veterans are using their educational benefits and transitioning from a military to civilian environment. In order to meet the needs of student veterans, administrators, faculty and staff are trying to make available support services for veterans. There is a range of services that can be provided and the library is one that can provide both a physical and virtual environment to support veterans. Although not always mentioned in articles on student veteran transition, it is important that libraries …

La Elaboración De La Tesis Doctoral En Las Universidades De Habla Hispana: Dificultades Y Planteamientos De Mejora, David Sánchez-Jiménez

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

El Uso De Las Funciones De Las Citas En La Estructura Retórica De Las Introducciones De Memorias De Máster Escritas En Español Por Estudiantes Nativos Españoles Y No Nativos Filipinos, David Sánchez-Jiménez

Publications and Research

This article analyzes the correlation between the use of functions of citations and the organizational structure of the Introduction section of a corpus of sixteen (16) master´s theses written in Spanish in the field of Applied Linguistics by native and non-native writers. The quantitative and qualitative analysis in this study arises from the model proposed by Carbonell- Olivares et al. (2009) which aims to define the organization of the Introduction section of the doctoral thesis in Spanish and the classification of the functions of citations made by Sánchez Jiménez (2011). The research results show that there is a direct relationship …

Computational Insight With Monte Carlo Simulations, Boyan Kostadinov

Publications and Research

We introduce Monte Carlo simulations for estimating areas by playing a game of "darts". We also introduce simulations of random walks. We use compact, vectorized programming, based on the R language, for all computer simulations and visualizations, aimed at high school students. This presentation is based on the Invited, prime time lecture given at the summer camp for gifted high school students at City College of New York, July 13, 2011.

The Learning Profiles Of Hostos Community College Students, Christine Mangino

Touchstone

One hundred sixty-six students took the Productivity Environmental Preference Survey (PEPS) and were included in the analyses of learning styles preferences. The following is a description of the Dunn and Dunn Model and our students’ learning styles.

Education For Sexual Harassment Prevention: Which Training Technique Works Best?, Amy Ramson

Touchstone

No abstract provided.

Fostering Liberatory Teaching: A Proposal For Revising Instructional Assessment Practices, Jane E. Hindman

Publications and Research

Appraises the assumptions that drive standard evaluation methods and compares them to those assumptions that undergird more critical approaches to teaching. Presents an alternative teacher evaluation instrument and explains how it more accurately measures what is said and believed to be effective teaching. Offers statistical evidence supporting the instrument and suggests further steps to foster teaching practices

Reinventing The University: Finding The Place For Basic Writers, Jane E. Hindman

Publications and Research

A poststructuralist critique of basic writing placement and pedagogy, this paper argues that our notions of good writing (i.e., the criteria by which we as English professors and compositionists authorize and "place" students) come not from some general or transcendent standards, but rather from the practices by which we self-authorize within our own discourse community. Using Bartholomae and Petrosky's curriculum presented in Facts, Artifacts, Counterfacts as a point of departure, I propose a language-centered curriculum which uses discourse itself as the subject of the semester-Jong project wherein students eventually learn to critique our practices and create their own discourse communities. …

El Biólogo, Profesional Maldito, Aldemaro Romero Jr.

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.