(Re)storying Horizons: White Kindergarten Teachers’ Enactment Of The Language And Literacy Curriculum In A Predominantly-white Working-class North Carolina Mountain Community Public School

The early childhood curriculum is too-often based on narrowed/ing conceptualizations of “literacy” and “language,” which negatively position nonacademic (read: nondominant) literacy and language practices and result in schools failing and further marginalizing working-class children and families across racial identifications. It is therefore pertinent to (re)conceptualize language and literacy by interrogating dominantly-positioned academic practices. Exploring early childhood teachers’ sense- making and enactment of the curriculum elucidates how nonacademic practices are (under)valued in and through the mandated curriculum. With this aim, through a critical ethnographic case study, I engaged in observations of classroom interactions and teacher team meetings, artifact collection, and interviews with four White female public kindergarten teachers in a predominantly-White working-class North Carolina mountain community. I found that the four teachers’ language ideologies had been constructed, understood, and developed from early childhood, through schooling experiences, and in teacher learning. These ideologies, while not always recognized, influenced how they were making sense of and enacting the curriculum. Their own childhood literacy experiences impacted approaches to teaching literacy; these White female teachers talked about what they had needed as students and how this influenced their approaches to teaching young children. Talk around students’ language and literacy practices illustrated a desire to prepare children for school and to support student success; although, this talk was underpinned with some deficit perspectives (pervasive in the mandated curriculum) concerning nonacademic language and literacy practices. The teachers were negotiating the mandated curriculum on a daily basis, as they strived to do what they deemed best for students, most of whom were being introduced to formal schooling in kindergarten. They were confident about what their students needed and sought greater trust in their own knowledge and capabilities as teachers, and they often discussed validating children’s language and literacy practices. Concurrently, teachers often talked about moving from or fixing children’s home practices, or modeling correct (academic) practices. Informed by the findings of this study, early childhood teachers can work to reconstruct definitions of language and literacy as we engage working-class children’s multiple, purposeful, and sophisticated ways of making and assigning meaning and of communicating (i.e., their literacy and language practices)

Enabling collective creativity in schools using Minecraft: serious play

Situated in complexity theory this thesis covers the broad area of creativity re-conceptualise creativity within Australian mainstream education, as being something that continually emerges from collective process. In doing so, many of the key characteristics of the Australian education system, were analysed for the role they played in enabling or hindering creativity within a school. M inecraft was a key pedagogical tool used to filter this aspects through to reimagine them. The findings of this study included: 1. Situating pedagogies framed in complexity have limited scope in the current discourse around mainstream Australian education. 2. There is a role for pedagogies that arise out of new and conflicting discourses (e.g., complexity theory). Its place and role are one of continual ‘deterritorialization and reterritorialization’ (Deleuze & Guattari 1987; Roy 2003). Despite existing only on the edge of the discourse, their mere existence is evidence of the potential for change. 3. Digital games based on complexity, such as the MMO game Minecraft, have a place in education and are enablers of systemic creativity. 4. The students in the study were developing new and previously unnamed multithreaded identities through their complex game design and play. I have labelled this new form of identity Vellooming

Undergraduate Catalog - The School Year 2008-2010

https://digitalcommons.pvamu.edu/pv-undergraduate-catalog/1015/thumbnail.jp

The Rock, Summer 2014 (vol. 83, no. 2)

https://poetcommons.whittier.edu/rock/1002/thumbnail.jp

Images of Service: Reflections from the Campus Compact Midwest Collaboration Community Service Directors Fellowship Program 2000-2001

We Americans are people of the journey. From boats across the Atlantic by way of Pilgrim quest, to the holocaust of the middle passage, to classic travelogues such as On the Road or Travels with Charley (in Search of America}, the stamp of the mythic journey seems to be indelibly planted on our national psyche. And as we all know, journeys have several staple elements: anticipation, consumption of a variety of foods at exorbitant prices, wrestling with a roadmap, and children in the back crying, Are we there yet? A quintessentially American component to the journey, however, is the postcard

Rethinking the law school

Law, by its very nature, tends to think locally, not globally. This book has a broader scope in terms of the range of nations and offers a succinct journey through law schools on different continents and subject matters. It covers education, research, impact and societal outreach, and governance. It illustrates that law schools throughout the world have much in common in terms of values, duties, challenges, ambitions and hopes. It provides insights into these aspirations, whilst presenting a thought provoking discussion for a more global agenda on the future of law schools. Written from the perspective of a former dean, the book offers a unique understanding of the challenges facing legal education and research

Wellbeing impacts of sustainably designed community gardens: A capability approach

In early 2011 there were over 1782 community garden sites officially registered with the Federation of City Farms and Community Gardens. In addition to promoting healthy food and healthy eating, many of these sites contain a number of sustainable design features and associated activities. They also claim to deal with value-laden ethical and social issues relating to human wellbeing. In this way they aim to be ecologically sustainable. Using a normative framework for evaluating wellbeing - the Capability Approach - this research reports on the multiple impacts that the design of such spaces may have on the subjective wellbeing of site users. Qualitative research methods of data collection and analysis in five community garden sites in the UK and Ireland were carried out for adult, youth and child users. Results show that although producing a food yield was found to have most impact on wellbeing for all user groups, the overall wellbeing impacts of site activities go beyond physical health and healthy eating, impacting most on capabilities of stimulation, psychological wellbeing and purpose. Two key aspects of site design and associated valued activities - agency and dynamic balance - were found to enhance both the sustainability of the community garden sites and the wellbeing of site users. These are the essence of enhancing wellbeing in the sustainably designed community garden sites. The thesis concludes that not only is there a requirement for new conceptualizations of sustainable design and wellbeing for the urban environment but we also require new methodological approaches to better capture the multi-layered and multidimensional complexities of such spaces within our everyday lives