This project is designed to use the strategies of environmental education to teach fourth grade curriculum. By learning about the San Bernardino Mountain's ecology, the hope is that students will discover the importance of these natural systems and stimulate their interest and awareness of the natural world.

Thesis (M. Ed. (Curriculum Studies)) -- University of Limpopo, 2016 / Some teamwork in learning are effective and others are not. There are a number of factors or attributes that are needed for the implementation of an effective teamwork. The aim of this study was to describe how learners grapple with the use of teamwork for effective teaching and learning in impoverished rural secondary schools. A case study research design was adopted to gather data. The study was conducted in Luthuli Park Combined School in Limpopo Province. The research participants were learners from this school. The study was oriented in an interpretive paradigm following mixed methods approach. Multiple methods of data collection were used. First, data were collected through individual interviews with learners. Second, questionnaires were distributed to the learners to gather quantitative data. Finally, an observation method was used to collect data such as time management by learners, their behavioural patterns and the way they team themselves in the classroom. The study found that the majority of the learners did not listen to suggestions from their team members; they lacked listening skills. In particular, the study indicated that 46% of the learners listened to each other’s suggestions while 54% reported that they did not listen to each other’s suggestions. The main finding of the study is that teamwork among learners is still problematic. The conditions within the classroom prohibited the effectiveness of teamwork. For example, lack of textbooks, physical resources (chairs, desks, data projectors, et cetera). The findings of the study reveal an indecisive and autocratic mind-set among learners regarding the involvement of teamwork. The study recommends that the implementation of effective teamwork will play a vital role in improving performance of the learners.

In this dissertation, I explore and continue to ponder the work of intercultural teacher education in Chile in a context of ongoing and varied violence over territory. I analyzed how teacher educators talk about their work and looked at how the programs address or not, the context of violence and Mapuche resistance. In addition, how the programs present themselves in different documents to see what questions arise from this exploration of teacher education discourse.I asked: 1. In what ways do teacher educators talk about intercultural education? 2. In what ways do program documents, in two teacher education programs discuss intercultural education? I am not trying to provide answers on how to improve teacher education, rather to provoke, inform, generate, and open questions about teacher education in settler contexts. In Chile, the struggles over land for the Mapuche are ongoing and a constant focus of governments and industry that continually label and persecute this struggle as acts of terrorism. This conflict is part of the everyday lives of students and teachers across the area where the Mapuche claim ancestral land. In teacher education there is an increasing amount of scholarship around land education (Calderon, 2014), and place-based education that focuses on bringing, alternately, place, land and water, and territory into the conversations of teacher education. In the various articles and debates about this focus, there are critiques of the ways in which earlier scholarship engaged with place without considering how it came to be occupied through settler violence, as well as with the lack of reflection of indigenous communities in that same land. In my research, I build on this work to examine the work of intercultural teacher education through two theoretical frameworks, settler colonialism, and Foucauldian theory of power/knowledge and discourse to think through this context. I used a case study methodology and interviewed nine teacher educators from two different programs in intercultural teacher education. One program is one of two fully intercultural programs and the other a branch from one of the two most prestigious universities in Chile. I also collected documents and kept a multimodal researcher journal with photos, descriptions, feelings, memos, and other items like news, op-eds, Facebook posts from Mapuche communities. I analyzed my data through three conceptual frames, place, education sovereignty, and personhood. In my analysis of place, I considered the context of intercultural education and examined how public and government-sponsored areas communicate an ideal of peaceful coexistence between two cultures, and how, while I was there, and before, and since, this discourse is interrupted and resisted by Mapuche communities. I also analyze the architecture of the programs and the ways on which teacher educators talk about place in their work to look at the ways in land, territory, and place are in tension in the work of intercultural teacher education in this specific context. On education sovereignty, I examined my interviews and documents from the lens of indigenous education sovereignty and from the concept of sovereignty as necropolitics. In the ways in which teacher educators talk about their work there are differences regarding the ways in which they frame why they teach their students what they teach them and for what purpose. The Mapuche teacher educators, across programs, express ideas of understanding their context and history of dispossession and the work of intercultural education as survivance, through reculturation, language, and self-determination. In my analysis of personhood and the ways teacher educators talk about teaching their students, I looked at how the focus on identity relates to ideas of diversity and inclusion that are related to the concerns some Non-Mapuche professors have about indigenous radicalism or supremacy. I traced these ways of talking about their work to the notion of culture as a way of classifying otherness to their pedagogical approaches to teaching diversity by looking at the Mapuche communities as those who are the most different. I explored their ways of talking about their work through the lens of productive inclusion, and how their concern over the inclusion of newly-arrived, migrant families can be deployed to erase the reculturation, self-determination of indigenous intercultural education. This research will contribute to the literature in Chile regarding intercultural teacher education as well to broader conversations about including settler colonial perspectives in teacher education in general. I hope that it will also help teacher educators and new teachers have an increased sense of the assumptions of intercultural education discourse in their processes of education as well as inform discussions regarding what these discourses do in initial teacher education.

This qualitative narrative study investigated the relationship between emerging adults’ understandings of themselves as writers and their autobiographical memories of writing. Narrative data, largely elicited through semi-structured interviews, were collected from 14 participants who were recruited from six postsecondary institutions. Recruitment efforts aimed to yield participants who had divergent educational experiences, career ambitions, and dispositions towards writing, and who inhabited divergent racial, social, and cultural identities. The study contributes to writer identity research by applying a sociocultural framework that holds memory, narrative, identity, and culture as reflections—and, often, distortions—of each other. The research questions, asked through this lens, aimed to provide insight into the emotional residues of pre-college writing experiences, the potential patterning of narrated memories or identities among participants, and the ways in which the stories participants shared and the identities they storied shape each other. While this is fundamentally an inquiry into the narrative features of writer identity, it is also a study about how certain lived writing experiences reincarnate as highly emotive autobiographical memories; even if such memories tend to be unstable, unreliable, and suggestable, they are nonetheless meaningful reflections of the lingering effects of the past. Through this retrospective study, a portrait emerges of classroom conditions and writing experiences that are particularly hospitable to the nurturement of positive memories and healthy writing identities, as well as to the inverse. This research is intended to speak to both secondary English teachers and English teacher educators and college composition instructors by bridging secondary and postsecondary understandings of how student writers are moving between worlds, the memories they are bringing with them, and the ways in which they might be storying their writer identities en route.

Choral ensembles often operate as hierarchical institutions where the conductor maintains a position of control over the musical, educational, and social aspects of singing with little or no input from singers. This dissertation reconceptualizes the choral experience as a dialogical process where conventional boundaries between conductor and singers blur. This study was conducted online with a vocal ensemble of ten experienced adult avocational singers and asks how a collaborative spirit may transform the ensemble, individual singers, and the conductor. Using a critical participatory action research approach, we engaged in dialogue and group problem solving as we created collective and individual musical projects over the course of ten rehearsals. The research design emphasized collective reflection and democratic decision making. This research journey is presented through a collection of multimodal data fragments such as musical recordings, practitioner reflections and collated singer reflections, rehearsal transcriptions and narratives, photographs, and poetry. Informed by decolonizing and post-qualitative methodologies, this dissertation highlights the ethical dilemmas, rewards, and uncertainties of both collaborative research and learner-centered approaches to education. In investigating how singers might increase their influence within the ensemble setting, we discovered that singers talking back to the conductor set in motion conditions for a choral paradigm that I describe as back talk choral pedagogy. This pedagogical orientation draws on critical and relational perspectives and is characterized by four interconnected commitments: (a) relational accountability; (b) mutual recognition of knowledge; (c) cultivation of a public square; and (d) responsiveness to input. Singer back talk manifested itself in myriad ways, including the reporting of information or observations, sharing opinions and suggestions, directly contesting the conductor, storytelling, and silence. Singer back talk produced noticeable fruits—a culture of shared vulnerability and trust, unique singer contributions, role fluidity between conductor and singers, and choral communion—which positively impacted the learning environment. This inquiry suggests that by centering relational and ethical aspects of musical collaboration, back talk choral pedagogy has the potential to build flourishing, dynamic musical spaces, increase singer ownership, and challenge conductors to expand their teaching practice.

Humanity is facing problems on a scale never before encountered. This dissertation traces the roots of modern culture's destructive relationship to the planet with its habits of over-consumption and exceeding the limits of the planet's ecological systems. Educational institutions are embedded in and replicate an unsustainable culture. As educational leaders, we need to challenge a system that is morally and ecologically bankrupt while providing a path toward sustainability at the center of teaching and learning. Using a narrative scholarship approach and theoretical frameworks drawn from ecological thinking and place-based learning, this dissertation provides models for transforming secondary education. While critiquing the current model of high school, this dissertation argues that education for sustainability needs to be not only about curriculum change, but a change in the way we think about schooling, the buildings in which we educate, the food we provide and the relationships between schools and the communities in which they exist. It directly addresses social studies curriculum and offers a way of examining career pathways through the lens of education for sustainability.

Previous research has identified student engagement as an important antecedent to student learning in higher education. Although student engagement is viewed as important for learning, a significant number of college students still report frequently feeling bored in their courses. The use of music as a pedagogical tool is believed to be beneficial for promoting student engagement and student learning in higher education sociology courses, yet it has been suggested that sociology faculty members do not commonly incorporate the technique into their courses. The purpose of this comparative interview study is to explore higher education sociology faculty members' understandings of the use of music as a pedagogical tool, and the perceived importance of student engagement to student learning among higher education sociology faculty members. In this study, it is found that higher education sociology faculty members believe student engagement can lead to increased student learning. It is also found that higher education sociology faculty members generally identify music as an effective pedagogical tool for promoting student engagement and learning in higher education sociology courses. Interestingly, participants believed the use of music as a pedagogical tool to be an uncommon practice in higher education sociology courses in the United States. As part of their efforts to explain their choices to use or not use music as a pedagogical tool, faculty participants described potential barriers that may impact faculty member choices to use music in their higher education sociology courses. Sociology faculty participants in this study agreed that a lack of discussion of pedagogical tools among colleagues and in teaching courses might serve as a potential barrier for the use of music as a pedagogical tool. Higher education sociology faculty participants also identified a lack of knowledge of how to use music as a pedagogical tool as a potential barrier for the use of music in sociology courses. This research suggests that the lack of faculty knowledge of music as a pedagogical tool may be due to the lack of discussion of pedagogical tools both among colleagues and in the teaching courses completed by higher education sociology faculty members. Past research has suggested that sociology faculty members need to create an environment that encourages students to be active and engaged participants in their own learning through building a community of learners. This study suggests that higher education sociology faculty members may successfully build a community of learners through using music as a pedagogical tool in their courses. This study recommends that changes at the departmental level need to occur in order to make it easier for sociology faculty members to gain the knowledge required to use music effectively in their courses. Suggestions for practice and future research are provided.

The use of hybrid learning (a blend of face-to-face and distance learning) is rapidly increasing in higher education. However, educational leaders have raised concerns about the proliferation of hybrid programming as an efficiency measure without appropriate attention to learning. This study examined the relationship between social, teaching and cognitive presence, pedagogical design, and students' perspectives on hybrid learning effectiveness. Data from thirty-nine undergraduate courses representing 1,886 students were analyzed to identify indicators of best hybrid practice. Aspects of social and teaching presence significantly influenced students' perceptions of learning, including facilitation of student interactions, assignment feedback and guidance, effective use of class time, and organizational integration of course concepts. Recommendations for hybrid institutional initiatives and programming include attention to framing "presence" in hybrid settings, using integrated inquiry to encourage integrated course design, and encouraging communities of inquiry to promote cross-institutional investigation of hybrid effectiveness.

For 10 weeks, an online writing club was a place where seven children, ages 5 to 8, came together to co-construct a space for sharing favorite texts and composing practices. This study documents the ways that the writing club offered a space for children to construct shared literacy practices that allowed for new meaning-making, social relationships, and literate identities. As the researcher and facilitator of the writing club, I took up an inquiry as stance position, which provided a generative space for exploring the tensions between practice and theory. Additionally, literacy dig analysis provided an opportunity to understand the discursive elements of the popular culture texts that young children bring into their literacy practices. Taking up sociocultural and critical childhood frameworks as well as multiliteracies and multimodal models of literacy, I explored the following questions: How do young children narrate their identities and social worlds through text? What stories (narratives) and resources do young children value and take up when writing? How do young children take up the space of an informal, online writing group to pursue intellectual, social, cultural, and composing lives? Over the 10 weeks, the writing club developed into a space where telling jokes, grabbing a notebook to learn how to draw like Dav Pilkey, and creating a plan for surviving “infinity holes” signaled belonging. Children shared interests often deemed inappropriate for school spaces (e.g., consumer culture, violence, and video games) and took up ideas from popular culture (e.g., Minecraft, LOL and Calico dolls, and Captain Cage) in their composing practices. The literacies of the children in this study were mobilized by family participation, the shared and private spaces in homes, and opportunities to experiment outside of the constraints of school curricular goals and expectations. As the children engaged in transmedia and multimodal composing practices, new literate identities were revealed and established expertise in knowledge of popular culture and digital composing practices helped reposition how children were seen by their peers in the writing club. The social and composing practices of the young children in this online writing club have important implications for the ways we design writing spaces and curriculum for young children that center children’s culture, composing practices, and ways of knowing and being as important resources for teaching and learning.

With the passage of P.L.94-142, the Education for All Handicapped Children Act of 1975, a national statement was made regarding the rights of handicapped students to a free, appropriate education. Since passage of the law, the cost of implementing P.L.94-142 has been a topic of concern for policymakers, school administrators and taxpayers. The rising cost of special and general education has placed a greater emphasis on accountability for the quality of the programs to justify the expenditures. Thus, the need for cost analysis in education is becoming more important as the competition with other governmental agencies for available funds becomes more acute. Previous studies of special education finance related to cost accounting have indicated the difficulties in gathering accurate data on a uniform basis. As evidenced in this study, not all expenditures were properly charged to special education. When this occurs, benefits of cost analysis are diminished by the inaccuracy. An effective cost analysis system should be accurate, comprehensive and precise, and should not be cumbersome. The Larson Model (1985) can be used to calculate the cost of individual programs and services, and the aggregate costs by handicapping condition or environment. The purpose of this study was to test an instrument that would provide a descriptive cost analysis of the special education programs and services in Frederick County, Maryland, Public Schools during the 1984-85 school year. Per pupil costs were determined by environment or level of service as defined by the Maryland State Bylaw Continuum of Services for special education. This study provides additional testing and development of a common framework or model for descriptive cost analysis of public special education programs and services by local educational agencies. / Ed. D.