In recent years in the United States, an increasing number of people are learning Mandarin, the dominant Chinese language in China. Because of the shortage of Mandarin teachers, many visiting teachers from China with Chinese educational background are teaching Mandarin in the U.S. schools. In the U.S. classrooms, these teachers are challenged to adapt to a new setting. This experience can lead them to changing their teaching identity, that is, their basic beliefs, attitudes and practices about teaching. Understanding how Chinese teachers may form a new teaching identity in the U.S. context serves to inform future professional development activities designed to increase their competence as teachers in U.S. classrooms. The purpose of this study was to describe and explain what is visiting Chinese language teachers' identity and how the identity changes might take place when they teach Mandarin in U.S. classrooms. The broader goal is to find ways to encourage Chinese language teaching competency in the U.S. classrooms and to foster cross-cultural communication. In this study, I used mixed methods research to study 14 visiting Chinese language teachers with Chinese educational background to find out how they perceive their teaching and how they teach in the U.S. classrooms. My findings were: (a) visiting Chinese language teachers changed their teaching attitudes, beliefs, and teaching practice in U.S. classroom; (b) teachers with a high teaching identity on Teaching Identity Survey maintained a high level of teaching identity after four months of teaching in U.S. classrooms; and, (c) visiting Chinese language teachers who changed their teaching identity engaged in critical reflections on their teaching practice, and learned from both Chinese and U.S. teachers. To have a positive impact on Chinese language teachers' identity and increase the likelihood of success, two implications are evident. First, Chinese language teachers could benefit from the professional development program with a focus on cultural differences and U.S. classroom management strategies. Second, U.S. schools and Chinese language programs need to create opportunities for teachers to learn from each other and build a professional community.

This study uses anti-carceral feminist logic to explore the cultural meanings, criminal implications, and neoliberal influence that shape the landscape of social work education about the sex trades in the United States and transnationally. "What are social work instructors teaching students about the sex trades in coursework?" is the question that directs the study, which uses a feminist qualitative methodology inclusive of intersectional feminist epistemology as well as direct content analysis. To answer this question, I analyzed 20 social work course syllabi from sex trade related courses across the contiguous United States and interviewed 20 social work instructors from 14 different states. Study findings show that course content represents people in the sex trades primarily as victimized cisgender women and girls with a significant focus on sex trafficking, especially within the Global South. While there is some course content that portrays sex trade workers as having complex and autonomous experiences, this material is limited to courses that have "sex" or "sexuality" in the title (i.e. "sex trafficking" or "sexuality and social work" courses). Furthermore, course content that represents the intersectional experiences and impact of systemic violence encountered by trans women of color and LGBTQ+ people is underrepresented in the sample--confined to two course syllabi and visibly absent from remaining syllabi. The sample indicates the prevalence of carceral approaches to the sex trades with an unexamined and racially-biased emphasis upon rescue and/or incarceration. This project provides significant implications for social work education about the necessity of an anti-carceral feminist, intersectional, and consequently, an anti-oppressive approach to teaching about the sex trades.

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A qualitative study of how first year foreign language students perceive different interactions in an online environment. In depth interviews were conducting with ten students after the completion of an online second semester Spanish course. Individual case studies recorded the unique experiences of each study participant and those experiences were then compared and analyzed for common themes. Emerging themes included the value of explanatory feedback programmed into the course, the use of message boards for making interpersonal connections, the difficulty of conducting online chats, the role and value of announcements and the importance of immediacy behaviors for creating social presence. The themes were then applied to the following research questions: 1) What is the effectiveness of the available interactions in a web-based Spanish course as perceived by community college foreign language learners? 2) How do these interactions work together to facilitate learning based upon their purpose? 3) How do these interactions work together to facilitate learning in an online foreign language learning environment based upon with whom or what the student is interacting? The results of this study included three attributes of effective interaction. The participants indicated a need to make a connection between their personal learning goals and the available interactions. Timeliness was also identified as a key component of effective interactions. Automatic feedback, archives for previous information and a quick turnaround on email correspondence were listed as important aspects that created a feeling of timeliness. The third attribute was identified as a low level of frustration when compared to the potential benefit of an interaction. The study participants indicated a willingness to endure some frustration if they thought it would be worth it in the end. Final recommendations suggested that designers of online foreign language courses should include non-linear instructional activities, carefully designed chat opportunities, quality automatic feedback and reading and listening passages that are level appropriate. Instructors should engage in behaviors that enhance the effectiveness of interactions by making regular announcements, helping learners draw connections between the interactions and their learning goals, maintaining and organizing archives and keeping response times as close to 24 hours as possible. / text

This thesis will critically examine the project on globalization as articulated by the Association of Theological Schools in the United States and Canada (ATS) in an effort to uncover the presuppositions and motivations that underlie the project, and to situate them historically and with reference to current North American trends in education and politics. It will argue that the project, as it has been described and defined, comes out of the ethos of Protestant liberalism, particularly as this is embodied in missiology and the 19th century Social Gospel Movement, and that this liberal foundation has been influenced since the 1960's in North America by the Civil Rights Movement, the Women's Movement and the more recent concern related to minorities and North American pluralism. Although lip service is paid to evangelism, ecumenism and interreligious dialogue, the globalization agenda is expressed in terms of social ethics, predominantly justice or liberation theology.

The purpose of this qualitative study was to describe and report the relationship between teaching and research as experienced by twelve faculty members at a medium sized, doctoral granting, state assisted university in the Midwest. Research review revealed that the relationship between research and teaching in higher education was supportive, conflicting, or neutral (Marsh & Hattie, 1996).Twelve faculty members from five different departments at Teachers College participated in this study. Evidence was gathered using semi-structured interviews. Analysis of evidence revealed several findings.Faculty members in this study described activities needed to produce publishable research, which included participating in professional meetings (conferences, workshops, and seminars), contributing to professional associations, reading publications, and writing activities. Faculty members engaged in research projects, and worked with students on their dissertations and research papers. Many of faculty members' research ideas came from their reading and their participation in learning activities needed to produce quality teaching.In this study, faculty members reported that research and teaching were intertwined activities that produced two different products. Faculty members reported that some of the activities in both teaching and research were similar and overlapping. They found ways to make progress in both activities at the same time. The activities used to produce quality teaching were influenced by the demands of producing publishable research and vice versa.For faculty members, many of their activities as scholars produced both research and teaching. While teaching was identified as the highest form of scholarship, research was considered also an important form of scholarship. Scholarship includes discovery of new knowledge, looking for connections, and building bridges between theory and practice. Teaching is scholarship applied. / Department of Educational Leadership

The purpose of the study was to determine the "interlanguage" characteristics in Chinese-American college writers' texts. Also, the study sought to determine the connections between their "interlanguage" characteristics at the syntactic and discourse levels and their cultural values and linguistic backgrounds. The population of the study consisted of 3 randomly selected Chinese-American students who have taken freshman writing classes at UCLA.The methods employed in this case study were context-sensitive textual analysis and qualitative techniques. In the context-sensitive analysis, twenty-four academic papers by these students were analyzed from four angles--error analysis, syntactic fluency analysis, cohesive ties analysis, syntactic construction analysis, and discourse organization pattern analysis. In the use of qualitative techniques, twenty-seven interviews were carried out, two recordings of family dinner and party were analyzed, and answers to questionnaires were studied.Findings support the hypothesis of the study--there are characteristic features in the texts by Chinese-American writers, and these characteristics at both syntactic and discourse levels have correlations to their linguistic background and cultural values. At the discourse level, the essay organization in these students' essays tends to follow an indirect pattern as Kaplan has claimed in his 1966's study. At the syntactic level, thekinds of errors occurring in these students' texts are the same as ESL Chinese students' errors, which supports the research findings by Zhu Hong, Hu, and other ESL researchers. Thus, the study has made two-fold connections--between Chinese-American college writers' texts and their cultural and contextual backgrounds and between ESL studies and composition studies.The implications of the research findings for the teaching of basic writing and future research in the field are discussed in the last chapter to enhance Chinese-American students' as well as their writing teachers' awareness of their writing characteristics and of connections between their cultural values and linguistic background. / Department of English

Thesis (Ed. D.)--University of Hawaii at Manoa, 1995. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 161-167). / Microfiche. / x, 167 leaves, bound ill. 29 cm

The problem of this study was to investigate the value of various entry-level employment skills and areas of knowledge for broadcast education graduates as perceived by commercial broadcasters. Particular attention was placed on identifying entry-level employment positions and on analyzing the skills and areas of knowledge preferred for each position.

This study surveyed 15 teachers from an elementary school in Southern California regarding their perceptions of their use of the computer lab as an educational tool to develop student higher order level thinking skills, and compared the results to the actual computer lab activities they assigned. Data regarding actual computer lab practices was collected over a period of one school year. This data was analyzed and categorized by using Bloom's Taxonomy descriptors. Each computer lab activity was scaled and given a value using these descriptors of higher order thinking skills. Results indicated a difference between teacher's perceptions and skills targetted in assigned computer activities.