<p> This study investigated the perceptions of teachers of grades three, four, and five regarding differentiated instruction in conjunction with Standards-Based Report Card as aligned to the Common Core State Standards. The purpose of this study was specifically seeking teacher perceptions on how these phenomenon interact, as well as teacher to parent communication, student awareness of standards, and reassessment practices. </p><p> The sample (n = 140) consisted of regular education teachers, grades three, four, and five from districts in both Illinois and Missouri. These districts used a Standards-Based Report Card at one or more of these intermediate grade levels. The participants completed a survey designed to determine teacher perceptions of the effect of differentiated instruction on the Standards-Based Report Card in conjunction with the Common Core State Standards. This survey was developed to answer the six research questions. </p><p> The researcher analyzed the data descriptively and inferentially. The researcher concluded that districts need more training and need to promote teacher buy-in. The descriptive results demonstrated teacher perceptions about communication, student awareness, and reassessment. Overall, teachers do not perceive that they are communicating more due to the Standards-Based Report Card. Teachers tend to agree that students are aware of their progress as a result of the Standards-Based Report Card and that they are reassessing in math and ELA. The researcher concluded the study by suggesting recommendations for further research in the area of Standards-Based Report Cards at the intermediate level.</p><p>

<p> This narrative inquiry explored the ways in which four mid-career English teachers construct themselves as W/writers and how those writerly identities are performed in their pedagogy. I curated data collected from extended interviews, journals, personal and professional writings to build narratives of these teachers-as-writers. Through these narratives and metaphorical thinking (Lakoff &amp; Johnson, 1980), I analyzed the wholeness of each participant&rsquo;s experience with writing.</p><p> Then, in stage two of the study, I used data collected from teaching observations to build a continuum of process &mdash;> product, employing Goffman&rsquo;s (1974) frame analysis to place the teachers within that continuum. This continuum represented the stable thread that continued through the teachers&rsquo; personal and professional identities and led to three insights: (1) Those teachers who identified as Writers were more comfortable teaching writing processes (2) The desire to be seen as a &ldquo;kind of W/writer or teacher&rdquo; brings risk writing instruction and (3) Agency provides Writers a way to mitigate the risk of teaching writing.</p><p>

<p> The purpose of this qualitative research project is to describe the scaffolding strategies used by a teacher to engage and support students as they work within the continua of biliterate development in the fifth-grade Spanish language immersion classroom. As language immersion programs and dual language schools continue to grow in popularity in Canada and the United States, this study seeks to illuminate and interpret a teacher&rsquo;s work with students in the Spanish Language Immersion Program (SLIP), a research site located in the urban Midwestern United States.</p><p> This instrumental case study employed the lens of Sociocultural Theory to explore the principal research question: How does the teacher scaffold student development of biliteracy within language and content instruction in the immersion school context? The research also explores pre-planned scaffolding versus interactional scaffolding, as well as the tensions and forces within the broader context that the teacher encounters while working with students in this bilingual educational environment. Classroom observations, teacher interviews, administration interviews, and artifacts were analyzed using methods borrowed from Grounded Theory.</p><p> Findings from this study highlight the characteristics of the Community of Practice created by the teacher in this classroom that include a focus upon encouragement, knowledge, organization, and literate habitus. Additionally, two visual models were created to present the data including: &ldquo;Scaffolding Episodes in the Development of Biliteracy,&rdquo; to illustrate the task-oriented support provided by the teacher, and &ldquo;Centripetal versus Centrifugal Forces,&rdquo; to present the forces and tensions that the teacher faced within the historical phases of the Spanish Language Immersion Program.</p><p>

<p> This dissertation focuses on the literacy practices of three focal students who composed multimodal comic memoirs about the emotional struggles and obstacles they faced related to being labeled academically gifted and talented. As a qualitative action research study (Hewitt &amp; Little, 2005; Munn-Giddings, 2012), in which the teacher of the focal classroom was the primary researcher, a sociocultural framework (Dunsmore &amp; Fischer, 2010; Wertsch, 1991) was employed to investigate the three focal students&rsquo; uses of multimodal composition to address the research questions: RQ1, In what ways do gifted secondary students use the comics medium to produce multimodal memoirs? RQ2, What experiences do gifted secondary students represent when they design comic memoirs? and RQ3, What do gifted secondary students reveal about competing representations of race, gender, class, and giftedness as they depict themselves in comic memoirs? To address the research questions, the researcher used a qualitative case study design (Merriam, 1998; Yin, 2009), collecting data over five years (2013&ndash;2017) while teaching a literature-based comics class at a summer enrichment program for gifted secondary students. Based on a conceptual framework comprising the intersections of literacy practices related to multiliteracies (Sanders and Albers, 2010) and multimodalities (New London Group, 1996) in connection with visual literacy skills (Frey &amp; Fisher, 2008), data analysis included a variant of grounded theory (Glaser &amp; Strauss, 1967), Situational Analysis (Clarke, 2005), which takes a cartographic approach to the collection and analysis of data within the study&rsquo;s situation, including its environment, social spheres, and setting. Findings point to the focal students&rsquo; deep-seated emotional turmoil related to gender, racial, and gifted identities; reports of emotionally debilitating social and academic expectations connected to giftedness; and personal narratives of being silenced and socially alienated. Implications are discussed concerning how the unique visual literacy strategies available while making comic memoirs helped the focal students gain perspective on and insight into their struggles with identity and related social and cultural practices.</p><p>

Thesis (Ed. D.)--University of Toronto, 2004. / Adviser: John (Jack) Miller.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Georgia State University, 2007. / Title from file title page. Dana L. Fox, committee chair; Celeste Compton Bates, Joyce E. Many, Amy Seely Flint, Joel Meyers, committee members. Electronic text (165 p. : ill.) : digital, PDF file. Description based on contents viewed Aug, 21, 2008. Includes bibliographical references (p. 142-150).

This dissertation is an investigation of how preschool children understand the meaning of determiner universal quantifiers such as English every and all. Although grasping the distributive force of such words, and generally showing adult-like comprehension of simple universally quantified sentences, the typical four-year-old is seen often to have a strikingly nonadult-like understanding of the meaning of such sentences. This is shown by the child's comprehension performance under certain experimental conditions. The principal claim of this dissertation is that the child comprehension phenomena in question is essentially linguistic in etiology and derives from a preference for quantification over individual events/situations rather individual objects.

Using a feminist poststructuralist framework, "the self," language, gender, writing, and schooling are retheorized in this study. An undergraduate course focused on developing thinking in writing was taught to nine female students. The intent of the study was to learn more about writing as an active socio-cultural site where writers could be found negotiating their ways through networks of power relations. Data were gathered to provide a description of the content and process of the course and the creative space it provided for students to develop their own writing practices; to examine subjectivity in flux and how writing came to influence it; and to consider the students' thinking as conveyed in their writing in terms of its discursive content. Several significant features of the course emerged. Most importantly the course was structured around an array of intertextual layers, including continual opportunity for writers to hear each other's in-class writing and feminist readings. Other aspects that are discussed include the teacher-student relationship and the provocative edge that emerged in the course by setting aside a more traditional disciplinary focus and dramatically increasing polyvocality. The writing of two students across the semester is examined in-depth. Feminist poststructuralist theorists describe subjectivity as pieced together, as in process, and under construction. By looking at the students' writing, these features were found but from the point of view of lived subjectivity. Using Foucault's theory of discourses as a starting point, the following content was discovered in the students' writing and is explored as a function of discourse: struggles within heterosexual relationships; preoccupation with the female body; and New Age Thinking. The intertextual layers of the course together offered these female student writers an alternative version of the social world. The writing did not bring the students to any definitive point, but rather it became a way for each to articulate and follow her own movement in and out of struggle. These writers negotiated their way through these relations of power at the same time that a new subject position--that of female thinker/writer--presented itself through the course structure.

This dissertation contextualizes and analyzes community/university partnerships through which college writing is paired with community action. Over the past few years a range of community-based and service-learning initiatives have been launched in departments of English. While some research is available on particular projects, little considers the wider movement. In response, I propose a typology for programs, distinguishing between those that write for, about and with the community; further, I investigate three exemplar programs. Throughout the study I explicate how such practices are situated within (and extend) the discourse of rhetoric and composition. The opening provides an overview of community-based writing initiatives at a range of colleges and universities, and how these programs position themselves in relation to current disciplinary discourses. I then propose a typology which sorts community-based writing pedagogies into three paradigms: those that write for the community, about the community, or with the community. These paradigms are distinguished according to the different aims, literacies and discourses most valued by each. The typology is intended not as a rigid means of categorization, but as a heuristic. John Dewey and Paulo Freire are established as the primary theoretical frames of reference for through a survey of their respective educational philosophies and pedagogical approaches. The places where Dewey's liberal progressivism and Freire's critical pedagogy overlap are emphasized, as are the issues on which they diverge. To put such theoretical discussions in dialogue with lived experience, the dissertation includes three empirical case studies. A junior-year writing-across-the-curriculum course at the University of Massachusetts is studied as an example of "writing for the community." A first-year service-learning composition course at Bentley College offers an example of "writing about the community." And the Community Literacy Center (CLC), a collaboration of Carnegie Mellon and a community center, stands as a representative of "writing with the community." An in-depth and comparative analysis of each results in a sharper understanding of their distinct theoretical, rhetorical and ideological assumptions. To close, this study looks forward, suggesting how community-based and service-learning programs both draw upon and enrich significant disciplinary debates in composition studies.

The purpose of this study is to explore, identify, and describe the causal relationship between leadership and the phenomena that produce an environment conducive for growth of the arts in higher education, by recording the thoughts, perceptions, and experiences of individuals who are, or were, in leadership roles at selected institutions. The institutions chosen for this study were The Ohio State University and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Each institution is noted for distinction in the arts. Both institutions are state funded land-grant universities, with comprehensive arts programs in the performing and visual arts and have professional arts presenting centers on campus. Through “expert nomination,” over fifty participants were invited to take part in this study. The participants were central administrators, mid-level administrators, chairs, and arts faculty. Qualitative research methods were used in collecting the data through the use of a guided, open-ended and in-depth interview with each participant. The research questions for this study focused on the participant's view of: (1) how the history of the campus connected with the history and growth of the arts at the institution, (2) what were the most significant integrative components of the arts on the campus, (3) what accounted for the growth of the arts on the campus, (4) what was the perception of the educative role of the arts on campus, and (5) what would be the ideal situation for the arts on campus. The analysis of the data revealed three major areas where leadership had effected the growth of the arts on these two campuses: (1) the creation of an environment that encourages collaborative and outreach ventures, (2) the creation of an environment that is based on a shared vision and goals, (3) the creation of an environment that generates faculty and staff excitement and high morale.