Browsing by Subject "culturally relevant pedagogy"
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Item A Balanced Curriculum For Student-Oriented Learning In Art + Design Education: Toward Community-Based Participatory Design Research(2020-06) JEKAL, MEEThis study started from my own experiences as a Korean international student living in a different culture and studying in a different higher education system within the U.S. Asking why my previous knowledge and learning of arts-based top-down design processes (ABTD) in South Korea are different from learning engineering-based bottom-up design processes (EBUD) in the U.S., guides this study of different cultural norms and educational systems in South Korea and the U.S. Through my own stories of art + design education in these different settings, I draw upon critical pedagogy (CP) (Freire, 2000; Kumashiro, 2004), culturally relevant pedagogy (CRP) (González, 2005), and Dewey’s (1934, 1938) philosophy stressing the value of lived experiences, to research student-oriented creative learning in art + design. My research addresses the clash of cultural and pedagogical issues in higher education design programs. Through a comparative accounting of different art + design education approaches in South Korea and the U.S., I explore what a balanced culturally relevant curriculum development process looks like if students’ lived experiences are valued and critical pedagogy leads to reflexive and creative student-oriented learning in art + design education. My research questions ask: 1) How do international students from South Korea adapt to different teaching and learning approaches in a U.S. art + design education program? 2) How do lived experiences affect Korean students’ response to U.S. art + design education practices? and 3) How would Korean students improve the educational environment for student-oriented learning in art + design education? The study used arts-based research methodologies (ABR) including poetry to address and explore cultural issues in the emotional aspects of social life, lived experiences, and identity work, within an autoethnography. My qualitative in-depth interview process also added autoethnography to support personal perspectives in art + design education. Through the multi-layered data collected from the study, I could generate three themes: 1) Students with diverse funds of knowledge and lived experiences are struggling with flatten curriculum and would like to learn diverse design approaches in studying art + design education. 2) Lived experiences inside and outside the classroom influence creative design thinking, learning and the teaching process in art + design education. And 3) Art + design educators play a role in encouraging students to learn about cultural differences inside and outside the classroom, and how creative design abilities contribute to our society and students from diverse communities. Based on these three themes, I confirmed the value of balancing curriculum for student-oriented learning toward community-based participatory design research (CBPR). Through the iterative process of the research, I confirmed autoethnography, as ABR, can expand one’s view of inquiry in art + design education and allow researchers to address diverse cultural issues, expressing emotional feeling and interweaving multi-layered data kinds. On the research, I could acknowledge how my teaching philosophy was improved through self-study, and how I could grow as an educator beyond being a good designer. I express my long journey becoming an art + design educator via several poems and conversational stories with my colleagues.Item The Body Talks Back: An Embodied Expansion of Critical Consciousness(2019-07) Hamel, TracyIn this post-intentional phenomenological study, I investigated the phenomenon of critical consciousness taking shape for young people and adults engaged in a youth participatory action research project. Sixteen participants, including the author, collaborated to examine health, well-being, and barriers to health and well-being over the course of a six-week summer research project. I analyzed sources of post-intentional material including transcripts of work sessions, discussions, focus-group interviews, and my post-reflexion journal entries. Drawing on a neuroscience perspective (van der Kolk, 2014) and more recent considerations of Ladson-Billings’ (1995, 2006, 2014) culturally-relevant pedagogy (CRP)—especially her concern over the unequal attention paid to the development of sociopolitical consciousness (when compared to the attention paid to student achievement and affirmation of student’s cultural identities) in enactments of CRP. My research explores the brain-body connection and suggests that historical trauma (Menakem, 2017) lives in our racialized bodies and our social justice commitments and work cannot be addressed through our rational, thinking brains alone. This work suggests that an important part of fostering our own and one another’s critical consciousness involves recognizing, listening to, and learning from the information our bodies communicate. When we are able to notice the physical sensations we experience, process the emotions that we feel, and begin to notice when our bodies are and are not settled, we have initiated the necessary body work that must take place. This bodily-knowledge can be leveraged when coupled with our cognitive knowledge and skills to better understand ourselves and the world around us, while also better informing our decision-making and action-taking. This study has the possibility to attract the attention of adults who care for young people, youth-workers, and educators that may imagine another way they can be with, care for, and work alongside young people. It offers important insights for understanding how critical consciousness takes shape for both young people and adults; and it explores the ways historical trauma is stored within our racialized bodies and how we might metabolize pain to find ways to heal ourselves and be in new ways with one another in educational contexts.Item A Post-Intentional Phenomenological Exploration of Reading Whitely(2019-06) Sterner, SaraSince its beginning, children’s literature has been influenced by white gatekeepers and power brokers. From authors, illustrators, and publishers to librarians, educators, and booksellers, the people creating and promoting children’s literature have been predominantly white (Borsheim-Black, 2015, Thomas, 2016, Welch, 2016). Due in no small part to this dominance, literature for young people has served as a platform that promotes white cultural supremacy, indoctrinating readers of all races into a default of whiteness beginning at very early ages (Elliott, 2016; Welch 2016). Given that children’s literature is an important pedagogical tool in classrooms (Gebhard, 2006; Hoewisch, 2000), it is crucial for preservice and in-service teachers to build critical consciousness of the dominant reading experiences that have been produced and provoked by this reality (Sterner, 2019). Drawing on post-intentional phenomenology (Vagle, 2014, 2015, 2018) and multilayered narrative inquiry (Clandinin & Connolly, 2000; Connolly & Clandinin, 2006; Lather, 2007), this dissertation investigates the ways in which these dominant reading experiences—the phenomenon I have named reading whitely—shapes readership. To understand reading whitely, I consider, explore, and theorize its productions and provocations as they took shape in the learning experiences and course interactions of the preservice teachers and other students enrolled in an undergraduate children’s literature course I taught. Informed by this context, I situate reading whitely at the conceptual nexus of children’s literature (Bishop, 1990; Derman-Sparks, 2013; Thomas, 2016), teacher education (Darling-Hammond, et al, 2005), second-wave white teacher identity studies (Jupp, Berry & Lensmire, 2016; Jupp & Lensmire, 2016) and culturally relevant pedagogy (Ladson-Billings, 1995, 2006, 2014). To engage with reading whitely, I selected a single course assignment, the Readerography, as my focal phenomenological material. The Readerography is a reading biography that asks students to explore their identity as readers and consider which books have been important in their reading life. I used four specific aspects of the readerography: the assignment, the list, the pivot, and the response. Analysis of student readerographies revealed that the participants are both informed by reading whitely and reinforce it. This dominance of whiteness and its normalization is a hidden force that must be disrupted through conscientization and praxis. Reading whitely, while influenced by several thought traditions, is my original theoretical concept. The term creates a platform to begin to dismantle the dominant reading experiences that circulate in the background of our normalized narratives around books and reading. Naming the phenomenon—using reading whitely as a heuristic for dominant reading experiences—is a first step toward articulating a new theory that helps understand the role of reading whitely in maintaining white supremacy. Building on these new understandings of what it means to read whitely, the study suggests the importance of developing critical knowledges to disrupt this phenomenon. The theory should inform efforts to promote equity-based literacy pedagogies that center anti-oppressive practices and disrupt white supremacy, to develop teacher education that is dedicated to social justice and extend understandings of why more inclusive children’s and adolescent literature is needed. It should also further conversations that guide the education of preservice teachers as they learn to read, use, and promote diverse and inclusive texts in their reading experiences.Item Student Teachers Learning Together to Enact Culturally Relevant Pedagogy for English Learners(2015-05) Benegas, MichelleAs Minnesota's schools currently educate 65,000 English learners (ELs), a 300% increase over the past two decades, teachers and school administrators are called to consider how best to meet the needs of this changing demographic. Given the firmly entrenched opportunity gap between ELs and their English-proficient peers, meeting the needs of this growing population of students is particularly urgent. Researchers assert that culturally relevant pedagogy (CRP) is essential in closing the opportunity gap, as it recognizes the central role of students’ cultures in all aspects of teaching and learning and it acknowledges and responds to the current schooling climate that places students from diverse cultural backgrounds in learning environments that do not mirror their home cultures and values. Unfortunately, CRP is a commonly misunderstood framework and little is known about how teachers can be prepared to enact it. This collective case study examined four student teachers as they participated in a community of practice focused on CRP for ELs in an urban elementary school. The researcher sought to understand how the participants’ understanding and enactment of CRP for ELs evolved and how they overcame perceived obstacles to CRP enactment. Prior to the onset of data collection, the elementary school adopted a new literacy curriculum that required teachers to deliver lessons by reading from scripts. The participants identified the standardized curriculum as the most significant obstacle to CRP enactment; however, findings from this study reveal that the participants developed a system (that the researcher and participants coined “weaving”) in which they attended to the “non-negotiables” of the curriculum while incorporating themes that reflected their diverse students’ lived experiences. Additional findings indicate that participant examination of their own evolving sociocultural identity was a critical aspect in their cultural competency development and that learning to enact CRP for ELs took place within and between community of practice meetings.Item Teachers' Beliefs and Their Manifestations: An Exploratory Mixed Methods Study of Cultural Intelligence in Pedagogical Practice(2016-09) Kennedy, DouglasThis study utilized mixed methods to investigate the beliefs and practices of 18 classroom teachers within a single school site and explored the applicability of Cultural Intelligence (CQ) to unpack the teachers’ navigation of cultural diversity within their classrooms. The study employed a demographic survey, CQ assessment instrument, semi-structured interviews, and classroom observations to address the four research questions: How do teachers at different levels of CQ development teach culturally diverse students? How do teachers at different levels of CQ development enact intercultural capabilities? To what extent does the construct of CQ align with the beliefs and practices of effective culturally relevant teachers? What is the nature of the relationship between CQ and culturally relevant pedagogy? The CQ assessment score data was utilized to differentiate and categorize participants into high-, medium-, and low-CQ groups. The groups interview and observation data were analyzed for differences, if any, between groups, convergence and divergence with the CQ construct, and applicability of CQ to understanding teachers’ beliefs and practices. The results present some convergence with the CQ construct and differences between teacher CQ groups in regards to teachers’ beliefs and practices with cultural diversity in their classrooms. Teachers within the high-CQ teacher group expressed more nuance understanding of culture and its role in teaching than their lower-CQ colleagues. Teachers in the high-CQ group also enacted more classroom practices that were closely aligned with culturally relevant pedagogy than their lower-CQ peers. The research may indicate a potential new direction for preparing teachers to understand the role of culture and navigate cultural diversity within their classrooms.Item "This Isn't a Sentence in a History Book": How Power-Relations Take Shape for Students with Historically Marginalized Identities in History Classrooms(2016-08) Oto, RyanThis post-intentional phenomenological study explores the problem of students with historically marginalized identities in terms of race, gender, and sexuality, being able to exist as they identify within the history classroom. The research question is as follows: How do power-relations take shape within history classrooms through the lived experiences of students with historically marginalized identities? Interviews with three students that self-identified with historically marginalized groups were conducted using post-intentional phenomenological methods. Applying theory from Foucault (1977, 1980, 1990a, 1990b), Omi and Winant (2015), and the author’s self-reflexive position, the interviews were analyzed and narratives constructed. The results suggest that the students live postcolonial lives that are challenged by normative forces from their relations to societal institutions of school and content. Students attempted to affirm and protect their identity projects by creating homeplaces. The author concludes by considering the importance that students’ identity projects play in the development of classroom safety.