Multicultural Organizational Development: A Resource for Health Equity

Discusses ways to develop the multicultural capacity of health organizations, based on theories from the behavioral sciences that have been applied to organizational management

Responsive Classroom Approach (RCA) in Music Classrooms to Acknowledge and Cultivate Diversity: A Curriculum

In present day America, there is a growing need for educators to acknowledge diversity and create a safe learning environment for all students. Students should feel safe, welcomed, and free to express themselves in any classroom. While there are many social emotional learning (SEL) strategies to support building this atmosphere, for over 40 years the Responsive Classroom Approach (RCA) has made a significant impact on the culture of classrooms across America. By fostering an environment to “build academic and social-emotional competencies every day,” RCA provides teachers a tool to promote relationship building within their school populations. However, with a rapidly growing diverse population, educators must ensure consistent implementation of such strategies as the Responsive Classroom approach (RCA). This project, Responsive Classroom Approach (RCA) in Music Classrooms to Acknowledge and Cultivate Diversity, is designed to determine in what ways the Responsive Classroom approach can be utilized to support the growing diversity in music classrooms. Through qualitative historical analysis of pre-existing literature on the Responsive Classroom Approach, this study will find the benefits of RCA and develop a curriculum around RCA that helps music teachers reach their students despite diverse populations and potential predisposed ideas of student behaviors

Comprehensive Positive School Discipline Resource Guide

This document provides a guide to assist schools and districts by providing information, resources, and tools to further the development of Positive School Discipline practices

Using Culturally Ambitious Teaching Practices to Support Urban Mathematics Teaching and Learning

Culturally relevant pedagogy is an ideology upon which strong urban classrooms can be built. However, culturally relevant pedagogy has not been operationalized in a way that allows consistent implementation in classrooms. This work focuses on the conceptualization of culturally ambitious teaching practices (CATP) in mathematics that exemplify the tenets of culturally relevant pedagogy – academic achievement, cultural competence, and critical consciousness – with those of ambitious mathematics teaching practices. This paper will describe the findings of the initial work of developing and operationalizing CATP in mathematics through a quantitative and qualitative analysis

Managing conflict in multicultural classes : examining the relationship between severity of conflict and the use of interventions by university instructors to manage and resolve conflict

Multicultural class professors are faced with the often difficult task of helping prepare pre-service counselors to meet the mental healthcare needs of an increasingly diverse and pluralistic society. A major factor that has stood in the way of effective training has been students’ resistance to challenging their entrenched patterns of bias and prejudice, which are undermining factors to the process of engendering multicultural awareness, sensitivity, and counseling competency. The purpose of this study was to examine how instructors deal with multicultural classroom conflict in view of the severity of the conflicts they encounter and the techniques and interventions that are used to mediate and resolve conflict arising out of the process of teaching multicultural courses. A total of 122 professors from CACREP affiliated counselor education programs in the U.S. were included in this study with 114 usable sets of participant data. Participants completed a researcher-developed online survey entitled the Multicultural Class Conflict Intervention Survey. A repeated-measures ANOVA and the Friedman Test were conducted to analyze the data. The analysis indicated that the level of challenge experienced by professors in dealing with and resolving multicultural classroom conflict was a statistically significant variable. Limited support was found for the Types of conflict as a predictor of specific patterns of conflict intervention usage when dealing with and resolving multicultural classroom conflict

School Leaders’ Conceptualizations of Teacher Care for African American Middle School Students

The purpose of this case study was to describe middle school leaders’ conceptualizations of caring teacher behaviors for African American middle school students. The qualitative case study focused on school leaders’ conceptualizations/identification of critical incidents (Flanagan, 1954) of care for African American middle school students. Noddings’ (1988) plan of action for implementing an ethic of care, including modeling, dialogue, practice, and confirmation, was used to inform the study. Data were collected through interviews, discussions of identified incidents of care, and observation documentation from the middle school leaders participating in the study. Themes identified from the study included: build relationships, identify and respond to students’ needs, create an emotionally safe classroom environment, and extend contact with students. Results indicated that middle school leaders’ conceptualizations of care were reflective of Noddings’ (1988) plan for implementing an ethic of care. One subtheme, communication with students, revealed the use of purposeful side conversations as an effective way to engage in dialogue with students regarding behavioral issues and other concerns. This is reflective of research on care for African American students, since these students want teachers who do not embarrass them or punish them unfairly (Casteel, 2000). Adding purposeful side conversations to Noddings’ (1984) dialogue component may be a way to reframe the narrative of dialogue to accommodate the care needs of African American middle school students

Exploring the Affective Loop

Research in psychology and neurology shows that both body and mind are involved when experiencing emotions (Damasio 1994, Davidson et al. 2003). People are also very physical when they try to communicate their emotions. Somewhere in between beings consciously and unconsciously aware of it ourselves, we produce both verbal and physical signs to make other people understand how we feel. Simultaneously, this production of signs involves us in a stronger personal experience of the emotions we express. Emotions are also communicated in the digital world, but there is little focus on users' personal as well as physical experience of emotions in the available digital media. In order to explore whether and how we can expand existing media, we have designed, implemented and evaluated /eMoto/, a mobile service for sending affective messages to others. With eMoto, we explicitly aim to address both cognitive and physical experiences of human emotions. Through combining affective gestures for input with affective expressions that make use of colors, shapes and animations for the background of messages, the interaction "pulls" the user into an /affective loop/. In this thesis we define what we mean by affective loop and present a user-centered design approach expressed through four design principles inspired by previous work within Human Computer Interaction (HCI) but adjusted to our purposes; /embodiment/ (Dourish 2001) as a means to address how people communicate emotions in real life, /flow/ (Csikszentmihalyi 1990) to reach a state of involvement that goes further than the current context, /ambiguity/ of the designed expressions (Gaver et al. 2003) to allow for open-ended interpretation by the end-users instead of simplistic, one-emotion one-expression pairs and /natural but designed expressions/ to address people's natural couplings between cognitively and physically experienced emotions. We also present results from an end-user study of eMoto that indicates that subjects got both physically and emotionally involved in the interaction and that the designed "openness" and ambiguity of the expressions, was appreciated and understood by our subjects. Through the user study, we identified four potential design problems that have to be tackled in order to achieve an affective loop effect; the extent to which users' /feel in control/ of the interaction, /harmony and coherence/ between cognitive and physical expressions/,/ /timing/ of expressions and feedback in a communicational setting, and effects of users' /personality/ on their emotional expressions and experiences of the interaction

A Causal-Comparative Study of the Effect of Cultural Identity and Gender on Emotional Intelligence Levels of Christian College Students

To date, very little research has joined the topics of Christian college students’ emotional intelligence (EI) levels, gender and cultural identity. This study was grounded in the Social Cognitive Theory which states that the environment, cognitive factors, and personal factors inform the learning process. The dependent variable was EI and the two independent variables were cultural identity and gender. The literature review identified varying results where EI, culture and gender are concerned, as well as a documented need for EI to be present both during and after college. Utilizing SurveyMonkey, this study was comprised of an instrument to measure participant EI (TEIQue-SF) and another (MEIM) to measure cultural identity and gender. This causal-comparative (ex post facto) study employed a two-way Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) design to analyze data from 168 volunteer participants located at 29 Christian higher learning institutions located around the USA. The results of the study showed participants with low cultural identity scored significantly higher EI levels than moderate cultural identity participants. Additionally, female participant EI levels were significantly higher than those of the male participants. There was no statistically significant relationship on the interaction effect of participant EI levels based on their cultural identity and gender. Among other aspects of cultural identity and Christian college students, future research should explore the effect of cultural identity of Christian college students who have emigrated to study abroad