Technology: Servant or Master of the Online Teacher?

published or submitted for publicatio

NEXUS/Physics: An interdisciplinary repurposing of physics for biologists

In response to increasing calls for the reform of the undergraduate science curriculum for life science majors and pre-medical students (Bio2010, Scientific Foundations for Future Physicians, Vision & Change), an interdisciplinary team has created NEXUS/Physics: a repurposing of an introductory physics curriculum for the life sciences. The curriculum interacts strongly and supportively with introductory biology and chemistry courses taken by life sciences students, with the goal of helping students build general, multi-discipline scientific competencies. In order to do this, our two-semester NEXUS/Physics course sequence is positioned as a second year course so students will have had some exposure to basic concepts in biology and chemistry. NEXUS/Physics stresses interdisciplinary examples and the content differs markedly from traditional introductory physics to facilitate this. It extends the discussion of energy to include interatomic potentials and chemical reactions, the discussion of thermodynamics to include enthalpy and Gibbs free energy, and includes a serious discussion of random vs. coherent motion including diffusion. The development of instructional materials is coordinated with careful education research. Both the new content and the results of the research are described in a series of papers for which this paper serves as an overview and context.Comment: 12 page

From Conflict to Common Ground: Establishing Religious Cultural Competence in Evolution Education (ReCCEE)

abstract: Evolution is the foundation of biology, yet it remains controversial even among college biology students. Acceptance of evolution is important for students if we want them to incorporate evolution into their scientific thinking. However, students’ religious beliefs are a consistent barrier to their acceptance of evolution due to a perceived conflict between religion and evolution. Using pre-post instructional surveys of students in introductory college biology, Study 1 establishes instructional strategies that can be effective for reducing students' perceived conflict between religion and evolution. Through interviews and qualitative analyses, Study 2 documents how instructors teaching evolution at public universities may be resistant towards implementing strategies that can reduce students' perceived conflict, perhaps because of their own lack of religious beliefs and lack of training and awareness about students' conflict with evolution. Interviews with religious students in Study 3 reveals that religious college biology students can perceive their instructors as unfriendly towards religion which can negatively impact these students' perceived conflict between religion and evolution. Study 4 explores how instructors at Christian universities, who share the same Christian backgrounds as their students, do not struggle with implementing strategies that reduce students' perceived conflict between religion and evolution. Cumulatively, these studies reveal a need for a new instructional framework for evolution education that takes into account the religious cultural difference between instructors who are teaching evolution and students who are learning evolution. As such, a new instructional framework is then described, Religious Cultural Competence in Evolution Education (ReCCEE), that can help instructors teach evolution in a way that can reduce students' perceived conflict between religion and evolution, increase student acceptance of evolution, and create more inclusive college biology classrooms for religious students.Dissertation/ThesisDoctoral Dissertation Biology 201

Communities of practice in a community college music program: a case study examining various student expectations for music learning and participation

According to Cohen and Brawer (2008), there are four curricular functions of community colleges. Students who enroll at community colleges may seek academic transfer, vocational or technical education, developmental education, or continuing education, which includes community service. Community college faculty and administrators face a wide range of students enrolling in their courses and are challenged to stay relevant to each student. Using Wenger’s communities of practice (1998) and Lave and Wenger’s legitimate peripheral participation (1991) as a theoretical lens, I conducted a case study of a community college with similarities to my own place of employment to understand: (a) how do faculty members create and maintain appropriate communities of practice, (b) how and in what ways do the communities of practice available reflect the goals of students, and (c) what challenges do faculty members perceive in their attempt to align communities of practice with student needs. I interviewed all student music majors, all music faculty, the department chair, and the Vice-President of Academic Affairs, reviewed field notes, and analyzed pertinent documents available on the college website. I coded the data for the communities of practice concepts of mutual engagement, shared repertoire, and joint enterprise. My findings suggested that faculty members struggled to stay relevant to student expectations, a task that was exacerbated by many students who did not have expectations or who had unrealistic expectations. The diverse student body included many students that did not have career goals, academic expectations, or an understanding of the role of the community college. The case had such a small number of music majors that adding courses and programs was only possible within the structures of the current offerings and only if the cost to faculty members and the institution was minimal. Although idealistic about the potential of new programs that would attract more students, faculty members had to serve the diverse expectations of the student body inside the existing programs and courses. Implications from this research point to the importance of faculty members and administrations promoting open dialogue with one another, as well as with students, to align their goals and expectations

Basic Communication Course Annual Vol. 10

Full issue (174 pages, 6.4 MB

Indigenizing Intellectual Property: Tribally-Based Definition and Protections for Traditional Knowledge and Cultural Resources.

Ph.D. Thesis. University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa 2018

New genres and new challenges : five interdisciplinary case studies of master\u27s student writers.

In the area of graduate writing research, Rhetoric and Composition scholarship has focused mainly on students of English and their experiences as novice writing teachers, or on students who are nearing the end of their graduate experience and are in the writing stage of their culminating projects, like dissertations. Few case studies in Rhetoric and Composition have been conducted on graduate student writers, particularly graduate students from multiple disciplines. This dissertation sets out to address this gap in conducting five interdisciplinary case studies of new master’s student writers as they navigate their first semester of graduate school and learn how to adapt, transform or disregard their previous undergraduate writing practices to meet the demands of the new genres they encounter at the graduate level. Chapter one provides an overview of scholarship that has been conducted in Rhetoric and Composition and the sub-field of Applied Linguistics on graduate students as writers, teachers, and scholars, and argues that my study addresses the need for more interdisciplinary case studies of how new graduate students describe their experiences as writers in their first semester of graduate school. Chapter two describes the study’s methodology, which draws from case study theory and Julie Lindquist’s notion of slow research. Chapter three includes two analyses of graduate genres—the Physiology seminar Report and the Seminar Paper (from an English seminar), and how both faculty and students understand the conventions and goals of these genres. Chapter four describes the experiences of two students from English and Social work who attempt to transfer writing knowledge from their undergraduate writing experiences to their new graduate-level writing contexts. I interpret one student’s experience as reflecting what Rebecca Nowacek terms “frustrated transfer,” and the other student’s experience as “successful integration.” In Chapter five, I argue for writing instruction in disciplinary introductory graduate writing courses that thoroughly scaffolds classroom genres, incorporates discussions of how such genres compare to genres at work in the discipline, and makes room for students to reflect upon past writing experiences in comparison to present graduate-level writing tasks in order to provide new graduate students with the writing support they need in the first semester

Technology-Enhanced Formative Assessment: A Research-Based Pedagogy for Teaching Science with Classroom Response Technology

Classroom response systems (CRSs) are a promising instructional technology, but most literature on CRS use fails to distinguish between technology and pedagogy, to define and justify a pedagogical perspective, or to discriminate between pedagogies. Technology-enhanced formative assessment (TEFA) is our pedagogy for CRS-based science instruction, informed by experience and by several traditions of educational research. In TEFA, four principles enjoin the practice of question-driven instruction, dialogical discourse, formative assessment, and meta-level communication. These are enacted via the question cycle, an iterative pattern of CRS-based questioning that can serve multiple instructional needs. TEFA should improve CRS use and help teachers "bridge the gap" between educational research findings and practical, flexible classroom strategies for science instruction