Language, Literacy and Dewey: Experience in the Language Arts Context

Blending the Deweyan idea of “experience” with the work of contemporary literacy pedagogues and classroom examples, this paper explores the implications of Dewey’s principles upon today’s classroom contexts. If experience is a central component to education, how might Dewey’s ideas help to re-focus our scattered perceptions of what literacy learning “ought” to be in the 21st century? Furthermore, what possibilities are created therein for language arts teachers and students

Reading the Word, Not the World: A Critical Analysis of Close Reading

This article critically analyzes a Common Core-aligned English Language Arts curriculum with particular attention paid to the ways in which it constructs docile subjects in and through literate practices. Through a critical reading and content analysis of this textbook--one that the author was required to teach to her eighth grade students--this paper argues that under the guise of “college and career readiness,” the curriculum contained within the textbook represents a neoliberal approach to literary criticism, one whose ideology is evident through the material practices of “close reading” and in the disciplinary methods it employs in teaching students the “correct” way to read a text. In so doing, students become participants in a mass standardization effort that ultimately works to distort the myriad manifestations of power in K-12 public education today

Language, Literacy and Dewey: Experience in the Language Arts Context

Blending the Deweyan idea of “experience” with the work of contemporary literacy pedagogues and classroom examples, this paper explores the implications of Dewey’s principles upon today’s classroom contexts. If experience is a central component to education, how might Dewey’s ideas help to re-focus our scattered perceptions of what literacy learning “ought” to be in the 21st century? Furthermore, what possibilities are created therein for language arts teachers and students

Community across a continent: cultivating relationships in online education Distance Education versus Traditional Education: Management Methods and Systems

Online education has undoubtedly revolutionized the ways, means, and criteria for learning. With more systems for cyber communication and collaboration than ever before, online education is often touted as the second coming of Horace Mann's notion of “the great equalizer” in education. However, one critical piece of face-to-face education, the ability to build and cultivate interpersonal relationships and communities, is severely strained, and often nonexistent, in the realm of online learning. As more and more research suggests the importance of community to students' academic success at all levels of the educational system, what are the implications for our online students if this factor is missing? In this paper, the author draws upon her experience as a traditional public school educator and as an online instructor through the Johns Hopkins University Masters of Science in Education program to discuss the importance of nurturing personal connections with online students in ways that support students' intrinsic needs for community and increase participation, interaction, and academic outcomes

Reconstituting Teacher Education: Toward Wholeness in an Era of Monumental Challenges

Speaking to the political and social upheaval of our present moment, and drawing on discourses of democratic education, we argue that the U.S.’s racial reckoning propelled by recent events constitutes a sort of “founding” for our democracy and that this founding has important implications for reconfiguring citizenship within institutions and practices of teacher education. In building this argument, the authors articulate the aims of teacher education in a democracy and expand upon political scientist Danielle Allen’s theoretical concepts of sacrifice, reconstitution, and wholeness, demonstrating their urgent utility within our “thinning” democracy (Hess & McAvoy, 2015). We then draw on relevant literature to examine how teacher education fits into this larger political landscape, and we identify three monumental challenges within the field. Finally, we offer a way forward for teacher education, one grounded in democratic principles and centered on Allen’s conceptualization of wholeness

English education as democratic armor: Responding programmatically to our political work

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to illustrate the ways in which attention to programmatic vision and coherence – rather than foci on individual courses – might advance the work of justice-oriented, critical English education in important ways. The authors propose that consciously attending to the work of English education on the programmatic level can better enable English educators to cultivate democracy-sustaining dispositions in preservice teachers. Using Grossman et al.’s (2008) definition of “programmatic coherence”, the authors illustrate how one interdepartmental partnership is working to create a shared programmatic vision for English education. Design/methodology/approach – Drawing on Cornel West’s call for the development of a three-piece democratic armor – Socratic questioning, prophetic witness and tragicomic hope – the authors describe their programmatic vision for cultivating democracy-sustaining dispositions in preservice teachers. They show how this shared vision constitutes the foundation for the organization, purpose and sequence of the four-semester cohort program. Finally, the authors describe how this vision helps facilitate meaningful and purposeful symbiosis between field experiences and university coursework. Findings – In an effort to promote replicability regarding programmatic coherence, the authors share structural aspects of their program as well as pose generative questions for colleagues who are interested in approaching the work of critical, democratic English education from the programmatic level. Originality/value – Addressing the challenges of teacher preparation – especially in this polarized and pitched historical moment – requires shifting the focus from individual courses to a more expansive view that might enable English educators to consider how courses within a program might collectively advance a particular vision of critical and democratic English education

Fostering eABCD: Asset-Based Community Development in Digital Service-Learning

The continuing expansion of digital service-learning is bringing emergent dynamics to the field of community engagement, including the challenge of fostering asset-based views of community partners in online spaces. “Online disinhibition” (Suler, 2004) can prompt harsh critique or insensitive language that would not have occurred during face-to-face relationships. Traditionally, the field of community engagement has drawn on asset-based community development (Kretzmann & McKnight, 1993), which calls for relationship-driven, asset-based, and internally focused partnerships, to encourage ethical and positive interactions with community members. However, this theory was not originally intended for digital, text-based interactions. This article explores how aspects of asset-based community development might be enacted in online partnerships, in electronic asset-based community development (eABCD). A case study of a digital writing partnership between college students and rural youth is used to illustrate how students can be supported in asset-based, relationship-driven, and internally focused interactions in online service-learning collaborations

Photon-rejection Power of the Light Dark Matter eXperiment in an 8 GeV Beam

The Light Dark Matter eXperiment (LDMX) is an electron-beam fixed-target experiment designed to achieve comprehensive model independent sensitivity to dark matter particles in the sub-GeV mass region. An upgrade to the LCLS-II accelerator will increase the beam energy available to LDMX from 4 to 8 GeV. Using detailed GEANT4-based simulations, we investigate the effect of the increased beam energy on the capabilities to separate signal and background, and demonstrate that the veto methodology developed for 4 GeV successfully rejects photon-induced backgrounds for at least $2\times10^{14}$ electrons on target at 8 GeV.Comment: 28 pages, 20 figures; corrected author lis

School Literacies, Youth Identities: Literacy and Ideology in a Remedial Reading Program

In tandem with the rise of popular, though problematic conceptions of the “achievement gap,” some have similarly surmised that this gap, which points to the disparate academic outcomes between students from minoritized communities and their normative peers, is really a “literacy gap.” This ethnographic study, which followed five high school remedial reading students and their teachers in Heartland, a Midwestern US city, over the course of a semester, interrogates the impact of the relatively narrow ways in which literacy education is taken up and enacted in school on students’ understanding of literacy and its relative value in their lives. The findings of the study suggest that while the student participants did engage in a variety of literate activities in their own lives, they did not consider these literate practices to count as “reading,” perhaps given the highly contextualized activities and assignments they had to complete in their reading classes. Teachers, meanwhile, were not aware of the rich literate lives of their students and envisioned their role as supplying students with basic reading skills they would need to keep up in their other classes. Thus, student-centered practices which affirm students’ diverse interests and ways of knowing, long called for in the annals of education reform, are still critically absent in classrooms where they are perhaps most needed

School Literacies, Youth Identities: Literacy and Ideology in a Remedial Reading Program

In tandem with the rise of popular, though problematic conceptions of the “achievement gap,” some have similarly surmised that this gap, which points to the disparate academic outcomes between students from minoritized communities and their normative peers, is really a “literacy gap.” This ethnographic study, which followed five high school remedial reading students and their teachers in Heartland, a Midwestern US city, over the course of a semester, interrogates the impact of the relatively narrow ways in which literacy education is taken up and enacted in school on students’ understanding of literacy and its relative value in their lives. The findings of the study suggest that while the student participants did engage in a variety of literate activities in their own lives, they did not consider these literate practices to count as “reading,” perhaps given the highly contextualized activities and assignments they had to complete in their reading classes. Teachers, meanwhile, were not aware of the rich literate lives of their students and envisioned their role as supplying students with basic reading skills they would need to keep up in their other classes. Thus, student-centered practices which affirm students’ diverse interests and ways of knowing, long called for in the annals of education reform, are still critically absent in classrooms where they are perhaps most needed