Over the past six years, efforts at integrating students with disabilities in general education classrooms, otherwise known as “inclusion,” have occurred in varying degrees in response to legislative requirements; national, state, and local school district initiatives; and advocacy groups vocalizing their inclusionary philosophies and beliefs. Subsequently, the number of students with mild to severe disabilities who are placed and educated in general education classrooms has increased, yet the inclusion movement has been tremendously challenging for educators. Massachusetts Education Reform, the Title I Reauthorization, and a district-wide Inclusion Plan are compatible in several ways and have influenced inclusive efforts in the district studied. They all promote collaborative efforts in delivering services to students, as well as require that high expectations in content and performance standards be set for all students. Given special education's least restrictive environment mandate, Title I regulations encouraging inclusion as a primary service delivery model, and a mandated inclusion plan, the stage was set for this district to implement inclusion. This study examines inclusion service delivery models in second and fourth grade with particular emphasis on general education students' academic and social outcomes in inclusion versus non-inclusion classrooms. Several questions guided the study: (1) What are the effects of inclusion classrooms on the academic progress of general education students compared to the academic progress of general education students in non-inclusion classrooms? (2) What are the social benefits of inclusion to general education students? (3) Regarding general education students' success in inclusion classrooms, what are the perceptions and experiences of the teachers, the principal, the parents, and the students? A two-part literature review, an analysis of in-depth interviews, a Student Assessment Inventory, curriculum-based and norm-referenced test scores in reading and mathematics, report card grades, and attendance records are presented. Implications for this school, district, and other districts are addressed. This study documents five general findings regarding the implementation of inclusion, variables for successful inclusion, a continuum of placements for all students, the use of multiple teaching strategies, curriculum modifcations, and alternative assessment measures to address all students' needs, and the outcomes of inclusion academically and socially for general education students.

This study explored the application of theatre as an educational tool with bilingual children using theatre techniques based on the work of the theatre theorist Augusto Boal. This documentation is important because there are few studies demonstrating how children are affected by drama. Boal developed theatre as a tool for social/political change to transform educational monologue into a dialogue. The objective of this exploratory study was to applied the Theatre of the Oppressed techniques in a Bilingual elementary setting. No hypothesis was tested and the study was exploratory and descriptive by nature. The following tasks were accomplished: (1) Assessment of the use of the Theatre of the Oppressed techniques with Bilingual children. (2) Observation made during the implementation of these theatre techniques. Eighteen children were chosen to participate in the study. The research revealed that Theatre of the Oppressed games and exercises can be use with bilingual children to create a sense of self, sense of the other, sense of community, communication and to empower them. All the previous themes evolved in the study.

The purpose of this study was to explore teacher beliefs and images of students, learning, and teaching. The study was designed to elicit images and beliefs with the use of teachers' symbolic drawing and subsequent interpretation of their drawings. Twelve first grade teachers with teaching experience ranging from 1½ to 25 years, and from a variety of educational settings (i.e., urban, suburban, traditional public schools, non-traditional public or private schools) participated. Data collection utilized two primary methods of qualitative inquiry: teacher created abstract symbolic drawings and interviewing. The combination of symbolic drawings and interviewing provided an effective means for teachers to access, reflect upon, and express their tacit images and beliefs in a cohesive and holistic manner. The twelve teachers in this study appeared on the surface to have similar images of learning and teaching. Teachers talked about learning as a process that involved images of filtering, connecting, becoming stuck, and disconnecting. One major difference emerged that separated teachers into two distinct groups. The majority of teachers, ten out of twelve, viewed learning as a fact-based associative categorization where students either made connections through associations or replaced old information with new information. Only two teachers talked about learning as theory-based, describing learning as making connection through an assimilatory categorization process or making revisions to personal theories. Teachers who viewed learning as fact based also viewed teaching as fact-based. In general, these teachers used discussion, teacher questions, and a large variety of activities to help students collect new facts and make associative connections. Teachers who viewed learning as theory-based used activities, discussion, and teacher questions to promote conversation and thinking. They expected students to use new facts to build and revise theories with the use of logical reasoning.

Four elementary teachers were interviewed in a qualitative study to determine how gender was reflected in their thinking. All four teachers, three female and one male, had been at their job for 20 to 25 years and were designated by their colleagues as sensitive to issues of gender in the classroom. They grew up in the 1950's when gender roles were rigidly defined and were young adults when the women's movement began to challenge the traditional roles of women and men in society. During the past decade these teachers worked in an area in which gender equity training and resources were readily available. Although there were no references made by the teachers to the cultural changes that occurred during their earlier years or to the current emphasis on gender equity in education, the data did indicate three ways that gender was reflected in the teachers' conversations. Sometimes it was implied. At other times, although gender issues were explicitly described, they were not identified as relating to gender. There were also instances in their interviews where the teachers directly described bow gender issues affected them or their students.

This dissertation documents the implementation of new writing curriculum and the development of a Writers' Workshop in a multicultural/urban fourth and fifth grade classroom. It is my personal account of how I as teacher-researcher worked to raise the expectations of my children by creating a positive climate in which to learn and a classroom that haled writing as part of the original curriculum. The study began with a writing party for three hundred, fifty third, fourth and fifth grade students, their parents and family members after which they received writing bags to take home. The Writers' Workshop described in this dissertation is a one-classroom initiative and progression of change. There are seven conclusions that I have drawn through the implementation of the Writers' Workshop in the classroom. First, it is essential that teachers have high expectations for the success of their students. Second, children's writing displayed for everyone to see builds a positive classroom climate for both teacher and students. Classroom climate and management influence students' sense of belonging to the classroom. Third, children need the right tools and materials to help them to be creative. Fourth, children need opportunities to explore many genres, forms and purposes for writing within a writing process model. Fifth, the writers' workshop model defines every child as a writer right now. Children need to know that all writers go through the same steps for creating a good writing piece as they do. They experience the same frustrations when trying to find the right words to phrase a line in a poetry piece or to make a message clear in a writing piece. Sixth, opportunities for cross-curriculum writing are essential to help children expand their writing ideas and topics for writing. Math comic strips helped my students to create word problems pertaining to everyday situations. Seventh, technology is essential in support of writing and publishing. Five computers were available in the classroom for use by the children. Use of the computers and access to the Internet increased the volume of published work by the children as well as their knowledge of how to operate the software.

This dissertation explored the perspectives of mentor teachers, program supervisors and interns in a preservice licensure program in a research-based flagship university in northeast on the roles, influences and preparation of mentor teachers, program supervisors, and peer coaching. Surveys were designed and administered to all 15 program supervisors, 69 mentor teachers and 69 interns in the program (with effective responsive samples of 12, 50 and 52 and responsive rates of 80%, 72% and 75% respectively) to capture a quick snapshot of the samples' descriptive characteristics, such as attitudes, opinions, and preferences towards the three components and to provide additional prompts of inquiry. An interviewing approach was utilized. Totally 24 participants were selected—program coordinator, 8 program supervisors, 7 mentor teachers, and 8 interns. Each participant received two semi-structured in-depth interviews, each of which lasted about 90 minutes. Program documents were collected to reveal the requirements and expectations of the program. Results demonstrated that mentor teachers were the most vital to interns learning to teach; that program supervisors helped interns the most in learning about clinical supervision; and that peer coaching was the most helpful to interns in emotional support. Each role was compared to a unique set of analogies, the utilization of which concretized the descriptions of each role's responsibilities and influences. Each member of the triad was not programmatically prepared for his/her specific role. Based on the issues and concerns emerged from the practice of each component, a rationale and an implication plan of action for the preparation of each role were developed.

The purpose of this year long strategic ethnography is to discover how introducing digital storytelling into an urban second grade classroom impacts the study of language arts and repositions students as literacy learners. Research questions include: (1) In a classroom where most of the students have never used computers before as learning tools, what happens as they learn to create books using digital means? (2) How do the students position themselves as authors, and how do they use imagery in representing their alphabetic (or regular print) texts? For this study, the students write stories in cooperative writing groups and choose their own topics. The students illustrate their stories and the illustrations are scanned for digitalization. The students learn how to word process their stories, and the students also learn how to incorporate both image and text onto a page using a computer application. The researcher is a participant/observer, spending one language arts period per week in this classroom. The methods of data collection include: fieldnotes, digital photographs, audio tapes, video tapes, student surveys, teacher interviews, news stories and demographic information collected from Winterdale school system, student generated texts and other student artifacts. The frameworks of this study include: The New London Group’s theory of multiliteracies, Kress and van Leeuwen’s theory of semiotics, and Spradley’s analysis techniques based on ethnographic participant observation. Analysis of these student generated texts using the frameworks mentioned, critical discourse analysis and domain analysis help to reveal emerging themes and how the students position themselves as writers. Video footage, fieldnotes, participant observation and dialogical data show that the students in this study were excited and energized by their involvement with the Digital Storytelling Project (DSP) and that the use of computer and digital media technology was very well received. As the students shared in the decision making involved in designing a story, they positioned themselves and one another as authorities, and as successful and creative writers and illustrators. Creating the images for their stories opened up yet another mode of communication and became a source of competence for the students. They used their imaginations and elaborated on their story lines as they added visual details that were not found in the written texts. The DSP also raised the classroom teacher’s awareness of computer technology and gave her the courage to be an active participant in the realm of technology alongside her students. Three of the student participants exhibited positive behavior changes as a result of participating in this project. This study implies that pairing social semiotics with computer technology can enable students, including at-risk students, to find modes of communication that they can employ, and this has the potential to increase active engagement with literacy learning.

In recent years there has been increasing attention to the field of family literacy. A number of qualitative and ethnographic studies (Taylor, 1982; Taylor & Dorsey-Gaines, 1988, Paratore, 1999, 2001 Auerbach E. R., 1989, 1995; Rogers, 2002) have documented the importance of the family in the acquisition of literacy within the context of the home. These two case studies of Denise and Shrieffe address the question of whether and how parents who are introduced to reading strategies in a family literacy program use these strategies in their own home when they read with their children. The use of a qualitative paradigm (Teale, 1986) enabled me, as a family literacy teacher-researcher, to document the home teaching by these two parents and to generate broad questions that would help describe these reading interactions. This study suggests several conclusions. First, a reading intervention designed by a family literacy teacher for parents who are enrolled in a family literacy program needs to take into consideration a parent's personal literacy needs as well as any fabricated literacy support strategies a parent displays when interacting with his/her children while reading. Second, parents not only adopted the reading strategies to use as they read with children at home, but also adapted the strategies, changing them to better meet their own child's literacy needs and stage of literacy development. Third, parents transformed themselves from silent observers of their children's literacy learning to active participants in it, reading with their children and offering them reading support. Fourth, school-based literacy instruction transferred from the school to the homes of the families by the family literacy teacher-researcher, added new understandings to the home literacy environments of both families. Lastly, the role of teacher-researcher required me to attempt to understand complex questions about the intersections of reading and families' lives by using rich qualitative methods of analysis. This study contributes to a further understanding of family literacy reading as a way to help shape parent/child literacy interactions and ultimately, the parent and child's literacy learning. This study also has implications for curriculum design in family literacy programs in the United States. That is, to advocate for a family literacy teacher expanding her role to include responsibilities of modeling literacy strategies and skills in the homes of the parents and children as well as introducing children's literature and other learning materials.

Researchers, theoreticians, and teacher educators often treat the strategy of providing students with choices related to their curriculum as a simple one and individual studies generally consider only a few variables. In practice choice provision is a complex strategy that cannot be isolated from the institutional and instructional contexts within which it is utilized and many teachers do not use it well or often. This dissertation describes an analytical action research case study designed to provide a holistic, in-depth examination of the contexts, processes, structures, and outcomes of academic choice provision for a fourth grade teacher, Ann, and her students as they developed their use of this strategy over one school year. In order to address practical problems of choice provision as they arose and to support the teacher in her development of expertise with this strategy, the researcher worked as a supporter, and facilitator for the teacher and structured interactions with her based upon Stringer's (1999) look, think, act cycle for action research. This process was documented through classroom observations, interviews with the teacher and students, and collection of documents. Data were analyzed using Strauss and Corbin's (1998) methods for developing grounded theory. An inter-related set of contextual factors influenced the nature of Ann's work and its outcomes as well as her interpretations of key concepts related to academic choice provision. These factors included (a) time pressures, (b) high stakes testing, (c) required curricula, (d) students' prior knowledge, and (e) teacher support. Ann's development of academic choice was characterized by her efforts to find and enact an optimal balance between student and teacher input into the curriculum within contextual pressures that worked both for and against such a balance. Within this central theme Ann grappled with (a) treating academic choice as peripheral versus integral to the curriculum, (b) focusing on student products versus student learning processes, and (c) nurturing student dependence versus independence. Choice provision was associated with a high degree of student engagement including enjoyment, on task behavior, and increased individual initiative.

These collective case studies highlight the experiences of the preservice teachers, mentor teachers, university facilitators and other participants in three teacher training programs. The meaning that the participants make of their professional development in teaching, alongside the ways in which they describe their experiences as developing professionals, provides the framework for an exploration of what contributions professional development makes to the capacity of teachers and schools to reform. In essence this dissertation is a window into how all the participants who are currently working in a reform active environment are affected, in their practice, in their professional growth, and in their commitment to the profession. Key themes that were extracted from the data include the impact of working in a culture of collegiality; the importance of connectedness between schools and universities, practice and theory; the validity and value of practioners' voices and views on educational renewal and change; and the importance of building understandings of teaching as a learning profession. Prompted by the current standards based reforms and high stakes assessments being implemented in schools and teacher training programs across the country, this dissertation seeks to highlight the importance of teacher agency and ownership across the professional lifespan. It asserts that teachers who assume an inquiry stance (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 1993, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001) will be best able to meet the current demands of students in classrooms, schools as learning communities and teacher training as preparation for lifelong learning. The data suggests that if the rhetoric of reform that pushes for changes in standards and assessments, new modes of school organization and decision making, and revised curriculum are to become a reality, teachers' professional development across the lifespan from preservice training to lifelong learning needs to become a central focus in the process and implementation of educational change.