<p> The educational connoisseurship and criticism method was used to research the challenges elementary teachers go through each day. This study's findings are taken from observations and interviews with three veteran elementary teachers who have experienced challenges and burdens due to the intensification of their jobs, student behavior, parental involvement, and teacher pay. Veteran elementary teachers were chosen as participants, as they have been through many changes that often happens in education and are able to provide insight that only veteran elementary teachers can provide. The results showed that although elementary teachers have many challenges, they are still able to find a sense of presence, bringing their whole self into the moment, in the classroom and a level of existential joy in teaching. These veteran elementary teachers reveal how having a sense of humor helps to keep their sense of presence. Also, elementary teachers find moments when the mandated curriculum needs to take a back seat while they reconnect with their students.</p><p>

<p> For low-income minority and marginalized communities, American democracy&rsquo;s educational mission remains unfulfilled. Student voices have provided insight into ways that schools disserve and serve students and how schools can improve in promoting academic achievement; however, academically successful low-income students&rsquo; voices&mdash;particularly those at the elementary school level&mdash;are largely excluded from the literature. Providing a platform for student voices, this qualitative, intrinsic critical case study explored six high achieving low-income students&rsquo; views of their academic success and how that success was achieved. Participants were six fifthgrade students, their parents, and teacher, in a school-wide Title I urban public school. Data were collected over a 12-week period through individual interviews, observation, participation, and semiformal conversations. Using an immersive pattern analysis, four main categories emerged from the student interview data: student beliefs about their role; classroom structures; teacher practices; and family support. The study found four principal success factors: a dynamic effortdriven view of success and intelligence; a rigorous dialogic classroom that prioritized student voice, critical thinking, collaboration, and social imagination; an accountable classroom culture viii of high expectations and mastery learning; and the richly diverse experiences and teachings of parents and families as valuable funds of knowledge. Implications and recommendations are included for policy, practice, and future research.</p>

<p> Committed elementary teachers of science and engineering, members of a professional learning community called Collaborative Conversations in STEM, were studied to elicit their perceptions of experiences that influenced their commitment to, and their pedagogical content knowledge of, STEM teaching and learning. The hermeneutic phenomenological interviews enabled the teachers to express their beliefs in their own words. Data analysis employed a theoretical framework that investigated teacher epistemology and knowledge in light of their experiences. Findings revealed a web of lifelong experiences unique to each individual, and evidential of the committed elementary scientist-teachers&rsquo; present day values, teaching epistemology, lifelong learning, and emotional and intellectual engagement. Scientist-teachers are individuals whose teaching and learning characteristics reflect those of scientists and engineers.</p><p> Evidence indicated that no single transformative learning experience resulted in those elementary teachers&rsquo; commitment to STEM teaching and learning, but recent professional development activities were influential. Formal K-16 STEM learning was not uniformly or positively influential to the teachers&rsquo; commitment to, or knowledge of, STEM.</p><p> Findings suggest that ongoing professional development for STEM teaching and learning can influence elementary teachers to become committed to actively teaching STEM. The Collaborative Conversations in STEM provided intellectual and emotional engagement that empowered the teachers to provide STEM teaching and learning for their students and their colleagues overcoming impediments encountered in a literacy-focused curriculum. Elementary teachers actively committed to teaching science and engineering can undergo further transformation and emerge as leaders.</p>

School feeding programs enhance the efficiency of the education system by improving enrollment, reducing dropouts and increasing perseverance. They also have the potential to reach the poor, directly making them an effective social safety net. In many low-resource countries, school feeding programs are designed to protect children from the effects of hunger. Unfortunately, the continuity of such programs is threatened by over-reliance on external funding. Given the patterns of withdrawal of external support, countries that rely on donor funds to implement such programs need to develop plans that will move them from external to localized support. It is well documented that programs that involve community members are self-sustaining. Regrettably, even though community members are involved in school feeding programs in Malawi, their participation is restricted to food storage and preparation and doesn't include decision making. Thus the transition plan for Malawi has to deliberately involve community members and influence them to take ownership of the school feeding programs. This dissertation explored the use of Social Marketing, a strategy for influencing behavior change that applies traditional marketing techniques to persuade a target audience to adopt, adapt, maintain or reject a behavior for the benefit of individuals, groups, or society as a whole to plan school food programs in Malawian primary schools. Using focus groups and individual interview techniques, I carried out a qualitative study at a primary school in Malawi where the community has initiated a school feeding program with the aim of understanding the barriers and benefits of supporting such an initiative from the community members' perspective. The results show that the cost of producing food, particularly the use of chemical fertilizer, is the main barrier whilst ensuring that all children regardless of social-economic status have access to a meal at school is the drive behind this initiative. The Social Marketing campaign therefore focuses on promoting the use of eco-san toilets whose output is humanure in this school community so as to minimize the cost of producing food to ensure sustainability of this initiative.

The adoption of Free Primary Education in 2003 has expanded access to millions of children in Kenya. However, large numbers of children are still out of school. The majority of the out-of-school children belong to ethnic minority groups and the rural and urban poor, who live in abject poverty. This situation is disturbing given that free primary education was intended to universalize access to primary education, particularly for the poor. In Kenya, where gender parity has been achieved in primary education, gender disparities become obvious when analyses include geographical region and high levels of poverty. The degree to which gender parity is met varies from region to region and across ethnic groups. However this experience is not unique to Kenya. Recent global assessments of education reveal that out-of-school girls are disproportionately represented in excluded groups. But what helps explain this disproportionate representation of poor marginalized girls among those who are out of school? Understanding and addressing discrepant rates of participation requires close examination of factors underlying poor educational participation among those at the margins of society. However, such investigation must take into account the unique ways in which culture, poverty, ethnicity, and gender interact to affect educational processes. This study adopts a feminist theory of intersectionality to argue, based on the experiences of urban poor and rural girls in Nyanza Province of Kenya, that the educational marginalization of poor girls can be understood as an outcome of intersecting, socio-political and economic processes that emerge from their social locations within sexism, poverty, ethnic chauvinism, classism, and the simultaneity of oppression related to multiple discrimination. Based on the perspectives of the poor girls themselves, the study argues that greater acknowledgment be given to the intersectional framework within which educational exclusion occurs, paying particular attention to the interactions of culture, economy, home, and school as domains of intervention.