College of Education - Language, Literacy & Sociocultural Studies

This reflective essay analyzes interactions where food was shared between a teacher and her
junior high school students. The author describes the official uses of food in junior high school
classrooms and in educational contexts in general. The author then theorizes these interactions,
suggesting other semiotic, dialogic, and culturally encoded possibilities for interpreting food
exchanges between teachers and students. These possibilities are contextualized using several
stories that demonstrate socially grounded interpretations of food use, which contrast with typical
notions of how food operates in educational contexts.

Junior high school teacher Mary Rice designed a consumer research unit that cultivates students’
critical reading and thinking skills. As students learn how to develop and revise criteria for
evaluating the reliability of online information, they read customer reviews, research products,
and present their findings orally.

In this work in progress piece, we outline our use of the Handbook of Reflection
and Reflective Inquiry as together we looked at the problem of determining the
viability of a multicultural student for special education services. We highlight
the ways in which the reflective processes in the Handbook assisted us as we
considered the cognitive, social and linguistic opportunities for a particular
child.

This self-study explores the range of stories I tell about coming to teach, my
perceptions of the various audiences as I engage in the telling of such stories, and the
competing and conflicting plotlines entailed in the set of stories. Using positioning
theory and narrative inquiry tools, I identify and unpack a canon of stories that have one
of two plotlines: “Of course I am a teacher” and “I never intended to become a teacher.”
I conclude by describing the effects of this self-study on my work both with students in
school and with teacher candidates preparing to teach.

Schwab (1978) argued that curriculum emerged in the
commonplaces of teacher, learner, subject matter and milieu. It was in these
four frames that I narratively explored my own development as an English
teacher and curriculum planner around Shakespeare’s work, particularly The
Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet. In this narrative, I relate four narrative
fragments that focus on my learning about Shakespeare as a secondary
student, a university student, a novice teacher, and a more experienced
educator. My major learning about English/language arts content and
standards is that I do not conceive of standards as top-down mandates only
but rather as part of a larger social and political context. My narrative
fragments reveal that standards about what to teach and how, come from a
variety of sources besides official curriculum documents and that negotiating
these various standards requires teachers to think and reflect in complex
ways.

This chapter reviews published, peer-reviewed research from the most recent decade at the nexus
or intersection of K12 online learning and students with disabilities. Previous reviews of research
on this topic are summarized. These reviews assert that there is not enough research on the topic.
The authors of this chapter employed a multifaceted coding process on articles that were located
for review. This process included reading for broad topics, multiple readings by each author, and a
negotiated process for final designations. Research in online learning for students with disabilities
in K12 settings in the last decade focuses on (1) curriculum evaluation, (2) student achievement
(as broadly defined) (3) stake holder perceptions and (4) policy structures presently in place
for online learning for this special population. Blended learning studies that fit the goals of this
review were practically non-existent. Several tables capture the major findings of these studies
from which implications are drawn about the ever-present need for more research in this area, but
also for research that is more rigorous, and is made available in published, peer-reviewed journals.
Implications are also offered for practitioners and policy makers.

This paper is an autobiographical account of one junior high teacher’s attempts to teach a Balanced Literacy curriculum with an emphasis on her experiences with English language learners (ELLs). The account is framed chronologically from her first days of teaching through her final semester and is organized by her attention to her state’s old English/language arts core, her state’s new English/language arts core, the World-class Instructional Design Association (WIDA) standards for ELLs and finally, the Common Core Curriculum Standards (CCSS). At the end of her autobiography, the author emphasizes the lessons she learned about trying to overlay Balanced Literacy with standards as they evolved during her teaching career. Those lessons focus on the opportunities and limitations of teacher agency and what is means to sustain oneself and sustain other teachers in their attempts to engage in Balanced Literacy practices.

Teachers are far more likely to use resources that they have immediate and easy access to (Grossman & Thompson, 2008). It is with that understanding that I approached the issue of locating and analyzing the content of lesson plans available to teachers on the subject of videogames. There were two research questions in this study. (1) Are lesson plans for teaching videogames on the Internet accessible to teachers and (2) what is the nature of any plans that exist?
This chapter overviews the online lesson plans accessible to teachers who might be interested in using videogames in their curriculum to build literacy skills.  This review study has implications for advocates of videogame use in classrooms as well as for scholars with research questions about the use of videogames in instructional contexts.

This inquiry explores the collaborative relationship between Mary, a teacher at a
junior high, and Stefinee, a teacher educator at a nearby university. Through the
use of emblematic narratives that emerged through the process of reliving and
retelling experiences from a shared professional knowledge landscape, we make
assertions about our collaboration through the use of the metaphor of an informal
roadside fruit stand while contrasting our work with larger collectives of school–
university partnerships. The sustaining quality of our collaboration emerges from
our shared experiences involving both children and teacher candidates in
educational experiences where their learning can be sustained. We also revel in the
opportunity to be part of a collaborative effort that is voluntary and therefore
driven by our own wonderings and hopes as teachers and teacher educators.

This outtake highlights several ethical dilemmas of studying curriculum in
online learning environments. These dilemmas emerge in the spaces of (a)
accessing the content of online or virtual curriculum products, (b) capturing
the content strategically, and (c) analyzing it using appropriate methods.
The author discusses some approaches to mitigating these dilemmas, but
also proposes that they will remain somewhat intractable without more
scholarly conversation about studying curriculum in virtual settings.

Purpose
This chapter attends to the fact that research has revealed
much about the importance of parents in this process, especially their
increased instructional roles when their children undertake online
courses. However, little is known about how online curriculum vendors
construct the parents of their potential enrollees in order to make online
learning an appealing option.
Approach
This research examined what these testimonials revealed
about how such companies conceptualize the beliefs parents of potential
students. Inductive narrative theme analysis was used to analyze the
testimonials.