Curriculum design in the urban arts classroom; can the Common Core Standards be the great equalizer for arts education? : a research paper and studio art unit study

The purpose of this research is to present a case for developing Common Core Standards for the arts as an avenue to increase universal access to quality arts education regardless of a student\u27s geographic or socioeconomic background

Synthesizing Middle Grades Research on Cultural Responsiveness: The Importance of a Shared Conceptual Framework

In conducting a literature review of 133 articles on cultural responsiveness in middle level education, we identified a lack of shared definitions, theoretical frameworks, methodological approaches, and foci, which made it impossible to synthesize across articles. Using a conceptual framework that required: 1) clear definitions of terms; 2) a critically conscious stance; and 3) inclusion of the middle school concept, we identified 14 articles that met these criteria. We then mapped differences and convergences across these studies, which allowed us to identify the conceptual gaps that the field must address in order to have common definitions and understandings that enable synthesis across studies

Wait Time- Is True Science Understanding Worth the Wait?

Science can be defined as a way of knowing about the natural world. From the time they are born, humans have a natural curiosity about everything they observe. Teachers need to foster this desire in their students as well as provide them with a vehicle in which they can discover the natural world. For this reason, teachers should help students develop an understanding of the definition of inquiry as well as the skills necessary to use inquiry in the science classroom. One tool that can be used is Wait-time. Wait-time can be defined as the periods of silence that follow teacher questions and completed student responses. Research has shown a variety of benefits derived from wait time. Wait time helps to achieve the National Science Education Standards, and has positive impacts on both student learning and teaching techniques. The first purpose of this project will be to analyze previous research on wait time since its conception, and demonstrate the benefits and possible detriments of wait time use. These benefits will be compared and contrasted for teachers in the Monroe and Wayne county school districts. In addition, I have created a series of how and \u27\u27why questions relating to four thematic units that are part of the NYS Living Environment Regents curriculum These questions are specific to an activity that students will be engaged in as part of their learning. The activities, the objectives, how the NYS Standards are met, and a brief lesson plan will be included as part of my project. Teachers often overlook the importance of the questioning process in learning. I have found that there is a need for wait time in the classroom. Teachers should look for opportunities to implement wait time in every lesson and become aware of their role as a facilitator in the learning process. In my classroom, student inquiry did indeed improve. I found a more positive classroom environment, increased student participation, and in the end, enhanced student understanding. I will be asking these questions and incorporating wait time while completing each of these activities with my ninth grade living environment students. Two of the living environment classes contain many special education students. It is my hope that with a high quality questioning technique and sufficient wait time, there will be an increase in student questioning leading to inquiry and finally to content understanding. As a result of this project, I found I was no longer lecturing to the students. Instead I was facilitating class discussions. The students were in charge of their learning and I was simply guiding them. All students benefited from this change. They were all contributing and therefore all learning. Each student seemed to have a greater understanding of the material and higher expectations for their learning.Student test scores increased especially for the special education students. They not only achieved higher grades, but they seemed to expect more of themselves. On test and laboratory reports alike, students showed an increased interest in success

Manuscripts in the Hampton L. Carson Collection in the Free Library of Philadelphia

The Hampton L. Carson Collection of Anglo-American Common Law comprises one of the largest collections of English common law manuscripts in North America. The statute collections in the Carson Collection provide samples illustrating a range of topics of central importance to the study of English legal history, bibliography, and medieval English culture. LC 14 20.5 and LC 14.21 date to around 1300, and are among the earliest statute collections, copied as the nature of statutes as law was still developing. LC 14 09. 5 dates to the later fifteenth century, as legal manuscripts were beginning to compete with print. MS 14 09 5\u27s illuminations have been used to identify a group of manuscript artists who seem to have specialized in legal manuscripts. In Manuscripts in the Hampton L. Carson Collection I will introduce these manuscripts and others as I assess the usefulness of the collection for scholarly research

The Training Implications of a Social Care Approach to Working with Older People

While care of older people involves both medical and social care nursing homes are essentially an extension of the functions of the home rather than of a hospital. The largest group of employees in residential care settings are nurses and care attendants. A medical model could be said to dominate not a social care approach. However there has been a move away from large institutional settings with a hospital atmosphere to smaller more homely units where there is more emphasis on purposive activity and links with the community. Traditionally many of the day services for older people were provided by voluntary organisations and nuns from religious orders provided much of the expertise. With the decline in the number of religious these services are increasingly coming under the remit of the health board and staffed by people from a variety of nursing and social care backgrounds. This articlel is based on an exploratory study of the provision of care for older people in residential and day settings with particular focus on recreational, social and creative activities. The services and programmes examined were mainly in the Dublin area. The aims of the article are: To outline the structure of provision of residential and day services for older people who need additional support in daily living. To give an overview of policy development in relation to these services. To examine quality of life in relation to provision of recreational and social activities in these services and To put forward an argument for social care education in the provision of training courses for staff working with older people. The article outlines the main institutional services for dependent older people, discusses the principal policy reports that have shaped the services, and describes the historical evolution of services and the main policy developments to date. The article contrasts services based on older concepts of care with more recent practices. The quality of care is examined with reference to legislative requirements and quality indictors particularly related to purposive recreation. The characteristics of a medical model of care are contrasted with a social care approach and an argument is advanced for adopting a social care approach for meeting the needs of the dependent older person. Finally the training implications of adopting a social care approach are considered

Medieval Hackers

Medieval Hackers calls attention to the use of certain vocabulary terms in the Middle Ages and today: commonness, openness, and freedom. Today we associate this language with computer hackers, some of whom believe that information, from literature to the code that makes up computer programs, should be much more accessible to the general public than it is. In the medieval past these same terms were used by translators of censored texts, including the bible. Only at times in history when texts of enormous cultural importance were kept out of circulation, including our own time, does this vocabulary emerge. Using sources from Anonymous’s Fawkes mask to William Tyndale’s Bible prefaces, Medieval Hackers demonstrates why we should watch for this language when it turns up in our media today. This is important work in media archaeology, for as Kennedy writes in this book, the “effluorescence of intellectual piracy” in our current moment of political and technological revolutions “cannot help but draw us to look back and see that the enforcement of intellectual property in the face of traditional information culture has occurred before….We have seen that despite the radically different stakes involved, in the late Middle Ages, law texts traced the same trajectory as religious texts. In the end, perhaps religious texts serve as cultural bellwethers for the health of the information commons in all areas. As unlikely as it might seem, we might consider seriously the import of an animatronic [John] Wyclif, gesturing us to follow him on a (potentially doomed) quest to preserve the information commons