Examing Culturally Responsive Teaching Practices In Elementary Classrooms

This qualitative study examines the enactment of culturally responsive teaching practices (Gay, 2010) within two African American elementary teachers' classrooms. Teacher interviews, classroom observations, and classroom documents were collected and analyzed to examine the supports and barriers these teachers encountered as they attempted to enact culturally responsive teaching practices. The descriptive case study reveals that both teachers engage culturally responsive teaching in similar ways. However, the difference in school context makes this effort more challenging for one teacher than another. Barriers included institutional requirements, classroom disruptions, student issues, and teacher isolation. Additionally, by implementing a collaborative coaching model as part of the study design, I briefly explored the role a teacher educator might play in supporting practicing teachers' engagement of culturally responsive teaching. Based on the findings, school structures are critiqued and suggestions for developing systems to support the enactment of culturally responsive teaching practices are introduced.Doctor of Philosoph

Clogging the machinery: the BBC's experiment in science coordination, 1949–1953

In 1949, physicist Mark Oliphant criticised the BBC’s handling of science in a letter to the Director General William Haley. It initiated a chain of events which led to the experimental appointment of a science adviser, Henry Dale, to improve the ‘coordination’ of science broadcasts. The experiment failed, but the episode revealed conflicting views of the BBC’s responsibility towards science held by scientists and BBC staff. For the scientists, science had a special status, both as knowledge and as an activity, which in their view obligated the BBC to make special arrangements for it. BBC staff, however, had their own professional procedures which they were unwilling to abandon. The events unfolded within a few years of the end of the Second World War, when social attitudes to science had been coloured by the recent conflict, and when the BBC itself was under scrutiny from the William Beveridge’s Committee. The BBC was also embarking on new initiatives, notably the revival of adult education. These contextual factors bear on the story, which is about the relationship between a public service broadcaster and the external constituencies it relies on, but must appear to remain independent from. The article therefore extends earlier studies showing how external bodies have attempted to manipulate the inner workings of the BBC to their own advantage (e.g. those by Doctor and Karpf) by looking at the little-researched area of science broadcasting. The article is largely based on unpublished archive documents

Examining culturally responsive teaching practices in elementary classrooms

This qualitative study examines the enactment of culturally responsive teaching practices (Gay, 2010) within two African American elementary teachers' classrooms. Teacher interviews, classroom observations, and classroom documents were collected and analyzed to examine the supports and barriers these teachers encountered as they attempted to enact culturally responsive teaching practices. The descriptive case study reveals that both teachers engage culturally responsive teaching in similar ways. However, the difference in school context makes this effort more challenging for one teacher than another. Barriers included institutional requirements, classroom disruptions, student issues, and teacher isolation. Additionally, by implementing a collaborative coaching model as part of the study design, I briefly explored the role a teacher educator might play in supporting practicing teachers' engagement of culturally responsive teaching. Based on the findings, school structures are critiqued and suggestions for developing systems to support the enactment of culturally responsive teaching practices are introduced

Examining the apprenticeship of observation with preservice teachers: The practice of blogging to facilitate autobiographical reflection and critique

One of the goals of successful teacher preparation is to develop professionals who are cognizant of their own backgrounds and who critically reflect on those experiences for future practice (Darling-Hammond, 2006). Overall, this study seeks to explore the ways in which blogging provides a space for reflection, interaction, and development of teacher practice within a teacher education program. Building upon the previous work with in-service teachers of Luehmann (2008), we examined preservice teacher (PST) participation in an online community of practice where teacher candidates, over the course of their elementary education program, reflect on their own educational backgrounds and mediate those ideas with course readings and exposure to a variety of pedagogical practices. Preservice teachers took these various components and spoke in terms of either mixing past experience and present exposure, retaining the qualities of each, or of deconstructing their prior experience as they assembled plans for the future. For this article, we focused on the autobiographical experiences of the PSTs to answer the following research questions: How does autobiographical reflection through blogging provide a space for students to recognize their apprenticeship of observation? And: In what ways do PSTs negotiate these apprenticeships of observation