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No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

This project examines how middle school students engage in new literacies practices and how they repurpose across contexts. With the use of screencast software and interviews, this project analyzes six case study participants' new literacies practices and the way they use and change ideas and strategies across physical and digital contexts. Drawing from transfer methodology, this project looks at how broadening conceptions of transfer and contexts to include repurposing increases the possibilities for finding transfer in literacies practices. Applying new literacies theory, this project explores how literacies practices that are chronologically and ontologically new (Lankshear & Knobel, 2006) are often repurposed across contexts. In addition, employing rhetorical invention and arrangement theories, this project examines how contemporary invention is repurposing and how arrangement aids in meaning making in new literacies practices. It also explores concerns over increased repurposing across collapsed contexts for literacies.

Researchers and k-12 practitioners have been struggling with inequity and diversity issues for the past four decades. These struggles have produced multiple philosophies, theoretical perspectives and educational approaches—each with strengths and limitations. The various approaches to addressing diversity indirectly and implicitly address, but have not managed, the systemic changes necessary for education to be socially just. Ideally, all diversity approaches should result in academic achievement and social change—the goals of social justice education. Past research has mainly focused on crisis intervention strategies or on meeting individually-based needs rather than on systemic practices and strategies at the school or district level. Toward this end, the purpose of this study was to explore how social justice goals are manifested in one school. The specific objectives were as follows: (1) Explore how the different members of the school community describe or define social justice. (2) Examine what current programs the participants believe support social justice-related goals. (3) Investigate current practices the participants believe to be socially just. This qualitative case study used interviews, document review and observations of administrators and teachers at the research site (Middle School). This study was designed to be exploratory in nature. Through the syntheses of the literature, I developed a tri-focal lens framework for social justice education which I use as an analytic tool. From the analysis, I offer a description of Middle School’s efforts to implement social justice goals. The findings of this study indicate that implementing social justice education theory in real contexts is a highly complex and evolutionary process, but not impossible. The purpose of this study never intended to establish a privileged binary of theory over practice, but rather I set out to explore the complexity of the intersections—the convergences and divergences of theory and practice. And, as is usually the case when moving between theory and practice, the study reveals the necessary trade offs and unintended consequences of well-intended decisions.

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Thesis (Ed. D.)--Illinois State University, 2002. / Title from title page screen, viewed Aug. 13, 2004. Dissertation Committee: Deborah J. Curtis, Kathleen Marie Crawford (co-chairs), Robert L. Fisher. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 117-119) and abstract. Also available in print.

<p> The proposed study involves the use of mixed methodological research of a conceptual model of Response to Intervention (RTI) as an instructional process aimed at increasing student achievement and thus reducing the achievement gap. The study aims to examine the relationship between implementation of a district-wide systematic process of Response to Intervention (RTI) in reading and student achievement in middle school. Embedded in this model is the possible impact of staff perception on fidelity of implementation. The construct of RTI employed in this study is the <i>hybrid approach,</i> which was developed from the modern standard protocol and problem-solving approaches, both which were born from the historical models of RTI developed by Bergan and Deno (Batsche et al., 2006). A conceptual framework was developed to conceptualize the required components of a systematic process of RTI with an academic focus, staff perceptions of the implementation process, and the potential impact on student achievement.</p>

<p> In this multiple case study design, high-performing Chinese language immersion students were investigated to better understand their profiles. This study focused on their attitudes, motivations, support systems, strategies for learning, and their social environment and how it related to them. I investigated three cases of high-performing Chinese language immersion students in a suburban school district in the Midwestern United States participating in a one-way Chinese (Mandarin) language immersion program. I utilized document analysis, solicited diaries, semi-structured participant interviews, parent interviews, Chinese immersion teacher pre-interview questionnaires, and Chinese immersion teacher interviews as data collection instruments. After analyzing the data, I wrote a case report for each of these cases and completed a cross-case synthesis to identify what was universal, variant, and divergent amongst the profiles of these high-performing individuals.</p>