Here is the Place to Begin Your Explorations: An Autoethnographical Examination into Student Teaching Abroad

Participation in study abroad programs has increased steadily since the late 1980s and has tripled in the past two decades. Benefits of these experiences include positive academic performance, improved mental health, and better professional development—but for pre-service teachers who study abroad, these positive benefits can also transfer into culturally relevant pedagogy. As the need for teacher preparation programs to equip their students with global competence grows, cultivating undergraduates’ abilities to appreciate diverse perspectives not only empowers them to thrive in an interconnected world but also enables them to meet the academic and social needs of their culturally diverse students. In this paper, the authors use an assortment of methods (such as classroom observations, research journals, artifacts, and freewriting) to document and reflect on their international student teaching practicums. Autoethnography serves as a methodological vehicle to promote reflection on personal experiences embedded within larger cultural contexts. These narratives are then filtered through the theoretical framework of transformative learning theory to produce reflective analyses of our habits of mind and cultivate autonomous thinking

Blurring the Boundaries: Reflecting on PDS Roles and Responsibilities through Multiple Lenses

It is well documented that successful Professional Development School (PDS) initiatives are contingent on trusting relationships between the university and school districts

“I think I use them, but I’m not sure what each one is called”: integration of multiple literacies in secondary social studies and science classes

Doctor of PhilosophyCurriculum and InstructionF. Todd GoodsonIn the past, literacy was viewed solely as the basic, functional skills of reading and writing. However, with the New London Group’s (1996) proposal of multiliteracies and the more recent push for a plurality of literacies (NCTE, 2011), teachers have been urged to expand their definitions of literacy. This qualitative study explores how secondary-level social studies and science teachers perceive literacies and identifies their instructional literacies practices. Data were collected through a pre- and post-questionnaire, three focus group sessions, classroom observations, field notes, and artifacts. This study solicited nearly one hundred secondary social studies and science teachers from three Midwestern school districts. Eight educators (four social studies and four science) participated in the study that took place in the spring of 2015. Furthermore, a generous grant from a local chapter of Phi Delta Kappa partially funded this research. After applying initial and holistic codes to the data, nine themes emerged: conventional, progressive, hesitant/emerging, collaborate, calibrate, perform, practice, interdisciplinary, and intradisciplinary. The nine themes were further classified by how they appeared in the data: dispositional themes, behavioral themes, and bridge themes. Throughout the data analysis, contemporary genre theory guided the study (Devitt, 2004). Descriptive codes, derived from contemporary genre theory, further revealed that the situational, social, historical, and individual aspects of genre influence teachers’ pedagogical practices related to multiple literacies across disciplines. Therefore, the ways in which teachers perceived multiple literacies and implemented them into classroom instruction are multifaceted and vary depending on grade level, content area, and teaching location. However, teachers’ dispositions regarding literacy move beyond a traditional mindset of functional reading and writing as they engage in professional learning opportunities and collaborate within and across disciplines and grade levels. This study provides secondary educators insight into the prominence of multiple literacies present across content areas while also revealing the teaching methods and instructional strategies that foster multiple literacies

Synthetic Lethality of Retinoblastoma Mutant Cells in the Drosophila Eye by Mutation of a Novel Peptidyl Prolyl Isomerase Gene

Mutations that inactivate the retinoblastoma (Rb) pathway are common in human tumors. Such mutations promote tumor growth by deregulating the G1 cell cycle checkpoint. However, uncontrolled cell cycle progression can also produce new liabilities for cell survival. To uncover such liabilities in Rb mutant cells, we performed a clonal screen in the Drosophila eye to identify second-site mutations that eliminate Rbf(−) cells, but allow Rbf(+) cells to survive. Here we report the identification of a mutation in a novel highly conserved peptidyl prolyl isomerase (PPIase) that selectively eliminates Rbf(−) cells from the Drosophila eye