Using archival records preserved by Iowa’s community colleges, private four-year colleges, and public universities, this dissertation examines how Iowa’s established higher education institutions responded to and adjusted to the presence of new two-year colleges from 1965 to 1975. This decade was a critical period of development for Iowa two-year colleges as they were most vulnerable to and influenced by other education institutions during an economic downturn. This study also explores how the curricular tension between vocational education and liberal arts education shaped early relationships between Iowa’s new two-year colleges and other higher education institutions. Specifically, this dissertation examines six two-year colleges, seventeen private four-year colleges, and three public universities to understand how the curricular purpose, mission and identity, position in the higher education hierarchy, and reputation of each type of institution played a role in early relationship-building. Ultimately, this study sought to answer the question whether the state’s new two-year colleges developed relationships with other higher education institutions that increased educational opportunities for Iowa students. Chapter 2 explains how officials from Merged Area I and Western Iowa Tech, two of Iowa’s two-year colleges founded as vocational-only institutions, persisted in their efforts to offer liberal arts education. Officials from neighboring private colleges resisted their efforts because they believed two-year colleges that offered liberal arts education posed a competitive threat. Chapter 3 explores how Iowa’s two-year colleges posed a financial threat, as well as a curricular threat. Part I highlights how Iowa private college officials confronted the financial threat by collaborating with the Iowa Association of Private Colleges and Universities to advocate for the Iowa Tuition Grant. Part II shows how eight private colleges responded to the curricular threat in three distinct ways: strengthening their role as a liberal arts college, making significant institutional changes for long-term survival, and changing or creating new curricular programs. This dissertation also considers the contributions of Iowa’s three public universities, Northern Iowa, Iowa State University, and the University of Iowa. Chapter 4 explains how each university responded in a distinct way to the presence of two-year colleges. This dissertation concludes by explaining how this study contributes to the debate between scholars about whether two-year colleges were egalitarian institutions or diversion institutions, specifically, whether two-year colleges and their relationships with other higher education institutions provided Iowa students with more educational opportunities and the path to a baccalaureate degree. I concluded that the presence of Iowa’s two-year colleges pressured private college officials to respond in ways that increased educational opportunity, and officials from Iowa’s three public universities to respond in ways that helped two-year colleges secure a stronger position in the higher education system hierarchy, which strengthened the ability of two-year colleges to provide a path to a baccalaureate degree.

This thesis describes a one-year study of 120 fifth grade students whose teachers participated in a program entitled Project SMILE (Science and Mathematics Integrated with Literary Experiences). The purpose of the study was to investigate the extent to which the classroom implementation of Project SMILE positively influenced the classroom environment and student attitudes toward reading, writing and mathematics. This was accomplished by, first, facilitating a series of five professional development workshops with the teachers and, subsequently, asking these teachers to use the strategies with their students. Because Project CRISS (CReating Independence through Student-owned Strategies), the foundation of SMILE, had already proven to be successful nationwide for secondary students, this study focused on elementary (K-5) school students and their teachers. My evaluation of this unique program, that integrates children's literature and mathematics, focused on student attitudes and the nature of the classroom learning environment. My research represents one of the relatively few studies that have employed learning environment dimensions with students in the elementary school mathematics classroom as criteria of effectiveness in the evaluation of educational innovations. The My Class Inventory (MCI) and an adaptation of the 1988 NAEP (National Assessment of Educational Progress) Attitude Survey were administered to a sample of 120 Grade 5 students as measures of students' perceptions of the classroom learning environment and their attitudes. Qualitative data were composed of student and teacher interviews, classroom observations and work samples. Methodologically, my study supports previous research that successfully combined qualitative and quantitative methods of data collection. / The learning environment and attitude scales exhibited satisfactory internal consistency reliability and discriminant validity; additionally, the actual form of most learning environment scales was capable of differentiating between the perceptions of students in different classrooms. The implementation of SMILE was found to have a positive impact on the students and classes of the teachers who participated in the inservice program. In particular, students' attitudes to mathematics and reading improved, and there was congruence between students' actual and preferred classroom environment on the scales of satisfaction and difficulty. Therefore, others can implement SMILE with confidence. As well, prior research was replicated in that students' satisfaction was greater in classrooms with a more positive learning environment, especially in terms of student cohesiveness.

Includes vita. / Title from PDF of title page. / Document formatted into pages; contains 160 pages. / Thesis (PH.D.)--University of South Florida, 2003. / Includes bibliographical references. / Text (Electronic thesis) in PDF format. / ABSTRACT: This study describes in-class and home literacy events that occur when students work in groups to create web pages as evidence of learning the academic content that was presented within a fourth grade classroom. The constructivist approach to learning was the underpinning idea examined as well as its connection to technology and group work. Data were collected in a variety of ways to obtain a picture, as comprehensive as possible, of the oral, listening, viewing, and written on-task communication and interactions that occurred. As the in-class and home literacy events emerged, the competencies and strategies that students used while interacting with traditional text were uncovered. These events encompass the strategies that the students used after they encountered the text and had to modify it for one reason or another. / ABSTRACT: These literacy events illustrate how the Internet supports reading and writing in the elementary classroom when it is utilized as a tool for promoting instruction. / System requirements: World Wide Web browser and PDF reader. / Mode of access: World Wide Web.

This case study investigates how a situated learning model can contribute to positive youth development as seen through a youth focused, community-based arts program, Creative Teen. Creative Teen is a seven-month collaborative mentorship program, which pairs twelve professional artists with twelve high school students. The partnerships work together one-on-one over the course of the program to become more knowledgeable on a given art medium and to ultimately collaborate on an artwork for the culminating Creative Teen exhibition. I sought to determine how this mentorship model would not only foster artistic development amongst youth, but how participation in the Creative Teen program would contribute to the overall development of the young adults involved. I accomplished this by limiting observational research and supplemental interviews to the interactions of one mentor partnership, Jessica and Carly. Over the course of the program, I attended their weekly meetings and watched them as they worked together to develop a large-scale installation, Lydia the Tattooed Ladies, for the culminating exhibition. Initially it was unclear to me the extent to which involvement in the Creative Teen program would have on the development of youth participants. However, through conducting this case study, I was able to identify various developmental characteristics that were cultivated through participation, which include artistic, social, and professional development. In addition to personal developmental characteristics, many practical skills were developed and exercised during the course of the Creative Teen program, which include time management, communication, financial management, public speaking, commitment to a long term project, and working with others. / text

Childhood is the period of life, when a child is supposed to find oneself and the environment where one lives and acts making social experience meaningful. A child is exposed to a number of different factors, which decide one‘s bringing up. The socelization of a child is taking place interacting wish the environment spontaniosly and also by the impact of the society and the control of socializing process. So, the social environment influence of the development of a child is an actual pedagogical problem. The aim of this paper is to reveal parent‘s and teacher‘s as the main factors which influense directly a child, outlook on training, art. The search methods are: systematic literature analysis, empiric the teacher‘s interview in writing, the parents written interview, the children‘s oral interview, the method of mathematical. Having alone the research it has become clear that during the period of an early childhood the child‘s social environment, experience, comunications with grown up and nature have the greatest impact on the development of the creative abilities. Parents agree that artistic development of a child is very importent, but the paticipation of themselves is rather pasive. Teachers act actively in this process understanding the importance of art in development of an artistic personality. Artistic training for children is atractive but their activity depends on their social environment. Practical importance of the paper: defined social factors of the influence... [to full text]

Arts education must continually provide justification for its inclusion in the K-12 curriculum. This dissertation utilizes philosophical and conceptual analysis to probe the tensions, ironies, and contradictions that permeate the arts education advocacy discourse. Using evidence from advocacy materials published online, scholarly critiques of themes in the advocacy discourse, and research reports describing school-based arts programs, I construct an argument that posits generative consequences for student learning when arts-centered inquiry is reimagined as pragmatic instrumentalism. Such a reimagining of arts-centered inquiry seeks to draw a distinction between utilitarian justifications for the arts and instrumental benefits the arts provide individual students in mediating complex and connected learning. In reclaiming the term “instrumental” for arts-centered inquiry, I offer a way to restore the notion of generativity to arts learning and a means to promote greater understanding among practitioners, researchers, policymakers, and advocates.

This qualitative multiple-case study examined the pedagogical role that performance arts training played in the emergence of students’ mature artistic identities. As one of many instructors in the musical theatre program of a post-secondary college, the author fulfilled both the roles of researcher and studio music teacher. Multiple learning contexts were observed for eight first-year students; these contexts included the regimens in various artistic classrooms and in the vocal studio. The data comprised field observations from studio and classroom settings, individual interviews with eight students from the vocal studio, and audio recordings from their studio sessions. Data analysis revealed that the students’ construction of identity was positively impacted by: the “triple-threat” program components, the unique dyad relationship between the vocal studio teacher and her students, and the rigorous, professional training the students underwent. A study of the interactions amongst the disciplines of music, dance, and drama exhibited several implications in relation to the students’ acute identity experiences. Recommendations for improved musical theatre curricula centred on improved integration of the three disciplines, enhanced studio time, and greater skill development in the studio. Suggestions for future research in performance arts education were also offered. / Thesis (Master, Education) -- Queen's University, 2008-08-12 23:23:52.131

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Michigan State University. Dept. of Linguistics and Germanic, Slavic, Asian, and African Languages, 2008. / Title from PDF t.p. (viewed on July 2, 2009) Includes bibliographical references (p. 253-272). Also issued in print.

abstract: ABSTRACT This narrative study traces the development of a dance curriculum as it unfolded in an inner city public school. It examines the curriculum emergence through intersecting worlds of artistic practice, improvisation, lived experience and context. These worlds were organized and explored through themes of gender, emotion, longing and intersections and examined through lenses of critical theory, aesthetics and currere. It examines the interior dialogue within one individual educator who is both a dance artist and a teacher and reflects the differing and at times conflicting perspectives within those two positions. The curriculum acquired the name "curriculum by accident" because several highly unexpected events contributed to its development. The students were initially suspicious and hostile and presented significant resistance to classical dance as an artistic form. This resistance was circumvented through creative process and improvisation. The act of improvisation became both a way to approach teaching and curriculum development and as an artistic process. Improvisation courts chance, the unplanned and the accidental through a structure in which the unknown is as valued as the known. The school setting is one full of known subjects; curriculum, settings, procedures, people and expectations. Curriculum by accident was a circumstance in which a known (school) and an unknown (the evolving curriculum) melded. The development of curriculum by accident was a response to an array of intuitive and serendipitous cues. The curriculum seeped through the cracks of school experience and transmuted into a curriculum that was very successful. / Dissertation/Thesis / Ph.D. Curriculum and Instruction 2010

Dans les années d’après-guerre entrent en ligne de compte des données démographiques et économiques nouvelles qui font évoluer la société française et lui imposent d’adapter son système éducatif, de décloisonner les disciplines et de favoriser l’interdisciplinarité. Seule l’école peut vaincre le déterminisme social lié à la naissance. C’est le colloque d’Amiens (1968) qui pose les bases d’une réflexion qui a nourri toutes les avancées sur l’éducation artistique depuis. Les années 70 sont celles de la réforme pour l’Education nationale et celles de la réflexion et des premières expérimentations pour la Culture. Les années 80 marquent une réelle ouverture de l’école, que ce soit vers les établissements culturels, à l’intervention de partenaires extérieurs au milieu scolaire ou à de nouvelles matières. Ouverture, mais aussi compromis entre les acteurs. Le protocole d’accord d’avril 1983 signé entre le ministère de la Culture et celui de l’Education nationale et la loi sur les enseignements artistiques de 1988 ont cédé aux compromis. Dans les années 90, penser l’éducation artistique de manière globale et à l’échelle d’un territoire apparaît comme le meilleur moyen de faire travailler ensemble les écoles et les équipements culturels à l’échelle d’une ville, d’un département ou d’une région, de garantir un maillage parfait du territoire et donc d’atteindre à la démocratisation culturelle. Mais finalement s’impose surtout le constat d’un empilement quelque peu désordonné des dispositifs. Le plan Lang/Tasca qui doit se réaliser sur cinq ans à partir du 14 décembre 2000 ouvre un nouveau chapitre. Mais l’exécution de ce nouveau plan n’est pas garantie par sa décision. / After the 2nd world war, the french society has to deal with new demographic and economic datas. It has to be taken into account by the french education system which should adapt, break down barriers between disciplines and promote intedisciplinary because just school can overcoming social determinism linked at birth. The Amiens’ symposium (1968) lays the foundation for reflection which fed all the thoughts about artistic education. The seventies see the amendment for School and first thinking and experimentations for Culture. Eighties tag an actual opening of school for cultural institutions, the mediation of external partners and new topics. Opening, but also agreement between all the characters. The protocole d’accord signed in April 1983 between ministry of culture and ministry of education and the law about arts education (1988) are the results of an agreement. In the nineties, thinking globally about arts education and on a territory scale seem to be the best way to make work together schools, cultural facilities and to ensure a perfect network coverage, and so to reach cultural democratisation. But actually, we observe a stack of messy contracts. The plan Lang/Tasca which should come true till december 14, 2000, opens a new chapter. But the achievement of that brand new plan is not insured by its decision.