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Inspired by the Municipal preprimary schools of Reggio Emilia, Italy, two art studio teachers and a researcher have explored experiences and meaning in the atelier. When studio teachers document children's thinking through digital photographs. transcribed audio tapes, quotations of a child's verbal thoughts, and copies of their work, an indescribable moment in teacher thinking interweaves with the child's learning, As teachers capture children's representations, investigate, interpret, and share their ideas with colleagues and community-an underlying question emerges. What are studio teachers' experiences o/teaching-learning in the atelier as they utilize documentation, collaboration, and reflection as a way to inform their practices? From this question, reader and researcher start a journey together into a six-month phenomenological study of studio teaching experiences. As a core member in the teaching team, the studio teacher resides in the atelier to bring teaching and learning together in a profound way, to bridge classroom experiences with representative arts, and to facilitate the community's learning about teaching-learning. The methods used to inform this study include observations, in-depth interviews, electronic journaling, description, photos, and interpretation of studio work. Overall, this study's methods inform the phenomenological research and construct an in-depth look at experiences in the artist's studio. The results of this research are retold through narratives focusing on experiences and meaning-making in the studios. Stories such as living with the cracked egg; isolation in the studio: gifts for others; rough stones polishing one another; and many others, utilize photographs to enhance meaning through picturesque artifacts. Essential themes, conclusions, and implications appear in the webbing of experiences and are explored in the final chapter. The themes include conceptual frameworks such as life eats entropy, serendipity and synergy and more. Conclusions are drawn and findings are made connecting studio experiences to participant voice, disequilibrium, listening, engaging, stepping back, and slowing time; demonstrating documentation as learning, revisiting, representation, and manageability; making meaning of collaboration as struggle, communication, and reconstruction; and reflecting back as purposeful and an act of teaching-learning. Overall, this research study exposes techniques, ideas, and wonderings from two studio teachers' and a researcher's experiences in the atelier.

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The critical role of children’s play in the development of peer relationships, social and communicative skills is reviewed and discussed. The difficulties experienced by a pre-school learner in engaging in peer relationships, communicating successfully in a classroom situation and constructively using play materials was explained. This was done through the use of anecdotal records, checklists, questionnaires, photographic evidence and a semi-structured interview with the learner’s parent. A pre-school play programme, using blocks, dough and puppets (BDP Programme) was devised and used to assess its influence on the acquisition of social and communicative skills by a non-social and non-communicative learner. The study found the BDP Programme to be very successful in assisting this learner to develop peer relationships and communicative skills in the peer group and thus played a critical role in the social development of this learner. / Psychology of Education / M. Ed. (Psychology of Education)

published_or_final_version / Education / Master / Master of Education

Behavioral skills training (BST) packages have been successful in increasing change agents’ correct implementation of various procedures. The current study evaluated the effects of a brief BST package to train daycare teachers to implement incidental teaching procedures with toddlers. The brief BST consisted of a set of written instructions, a two-minute video model, rehearsal, and feedback during session. Results demonstrated that teachers increased their correct implementation of incidental teaching procedures following training. In addition, two of the three toddlers increased the frequency of signs to request attention.

Autism is a disorder that affects children at an alarming rate. One out of every 88 children is diagnosed with autism in the United States. The disorder is characterized by communication, social, and behavioral deficits. Children with autism often require specialized teaching methods to learn basic skills that most children acquire without specialized instruction. Relatively few studies have examined strategies for teaching safety skills to individuals with autism. The current study utilized a multiple baseline across participants’ design to evaluate whether a modeling and rehearsal strategy is effective for teaching fire safety skills to children with autism between 4 and 5 years of age. Results indicated that modeling and rehearsal were effective in teaching fire safety skills, the skills generalized to novel settings, and maintained 5-weeks following the completion of training. Implications for safety skill instruction and future research are discussed. / Includes bibliography. / Dissertation (Ph.D.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2013.

The critical role of children’s play in the development of peer relationships, social and communicative skills is reviewed and discussed. The difficulties experienced by a pre-school learner in engaging in peer relationships, communicating successfully in a classroom situation and constructively using play materials was explained. This was done through the use of anecdotal records, checklists, questionnaires, photographic evidence and a semi-structured interview with the learner’s parent. A pre-school play programme, using blocks, dough and puppets (BDP Programme) was devised and used to assess its influence on the acquisition of social and communicative skills by a non-social and non-communicative learner. The study found the BDP Programme to be very successful in assisting this learner to develop peer relationships and communicative skills in the peer group and thus played a critical role in the social development of this learner. / Psychology of Education / M. Ed. (Psychology of Education)

The goal of this project is to suggest a way to combine a functional curricula (domains) with literacy experiences.

Many studies have shown that an overwhelming number of classroom teachers are encountering increasing diversity issues in both the content of what they teach and among the students they are teaching The purpose of this project is to provide elementary teachers with a resource of multicultural literature that can be integrated into any curriculum, whether it is Language Arts, Social Studies, or story time.