Teaching, Learning, Policy & Leadership Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2759
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Item More Than Thoughts and Prayers: Social Justice Leadership Preparation(2021) Burris, Jennifer; Scribner, Campbell F; Education Policy, and Leadership; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)School administrators often lack the preparation to recognize and act against educational injustices. This qualitative case study examines how a graduate-level educational leadership course at a private Christian university serving primarily white in-service teachers attempted to prepare administrators to be social justice leaders. Through interviews, course observations, and document analysis, this case study explores administrators' preparation for reflection and action across multiple dimensions of inequity, including personal, interpersonal, communal, systemic, and ecological. Findings indicate that participants consistently reflected across all dimensions, yet these reflections centered on surface-level inequities often without a systemic analysis of power and oppression. Deficit views on historically marginalized populations dominated participant discourse and reflection. Instead of educators being asked to consider their own role in creating and sustaining inequities in their classroom, school, and society, the course focused more on individuals being “good people” and loving students. Throughout the course discussions, assignments, and presentations, participants separated their personal actions from broader systems of power. Additionally, in both design and practice, the course provided only limited opportunities to develop skills to identify, respond to, and redress asymmetric systems of power. When considering the causes of continued educational inequities, participants either failed to consider their role in the upholding or dismantling of oppression, or they took on the role of white saviors. Throughout the course, participants made tenuous assumptions about developing future administrators’ capacity for praxis, including participants’ prior knowledge level and the degree to which educational equity was covered in other classes in the program. These assumptions resulted in several deficit perspectives about marginalized communities and falsely implied that specific knowledge and skills are not required to be social justice leaders. Using a social justice leadership as praxis framework to more fully understand administrator preparation, this research has significant implications for preservice teacher and administrator courses that focus specifically on injustice in education, and for educational leadership programs more broadly.Item The place of race in past and present: Student and state narratives of race in U.S. History(2021) Lee, Justine Hwei Chi; Brown, Tara M; Education Policy, and Leadership; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This three-study dissertation addresses the broader question of identifying a collective memory of race in the Northern United States. The studies are conceptually linked by a critical race perspective and are distinct in research focus, methods, and findings. In the first study, I examined how 128 students from two New England states represented their understandings of the history of enslavement in the United States. I used inductive and deductive approaches to investigate how they connected this history to race and notions of national progress. In the second study, I used document analysis to investigate the representation of people of color in New York’s state standards for 11th grade U.S. history. I found that less than one-third of standards cited people of color, and the majority of such standards cited them alongside White people. This practice of exclusionary grouping reinforced Whiteness as normative by implying a essentialist view of race and ethnicity. In the third study, I employed discourse analysis to examine the representation of race in the New York U.S. history curricular framework and in the policy context of its intended use. I found that policy defining the purpose of social studies promoted nationalist and race-evasive discourses. Through strategic periodization, the curriculum segregated explicit references to race into an “alternate timeline,” whose narrative arc strongly implied racial progress. Moreover, I found that the selectively ahistorical use of the word “American” was used to mark groups as non-White. Ultimately, the state’s manipulation of time and language functioned to preserve discourses of national progress and U.S. moral exceptionalism and to suppress the study of race in history.Item The Initial Implementation Patterns of the C3 Framework in Maryland School Districts(2018) Pugh, Shannon Michelle; De La Paz, Susan; Curriculum and Instruction; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This qualitative study examined the initial implementation patterns of the C3 Framework in Maryland school districts. The National Council for the Social Studies published the C3 Framework as a guide for state departments of education to revise social studies standards. This study sought to determine how district social studies leaders viewed the C3 Framework, how the district social studies leaders translated the C3 Framework in their districts, and why they chose to implement the C3 Framework as they did. The primary data sources were interviews and documents; the data were analyzed using constant comparative analysis to identify overarching attitudes toward the C3 Framework and implementation patterns. Policy implementation research specifically related to cognitive theory and capacity was used to help explain the implementation process. This study found that beliefs, financial and human resources, and time were the main factors influencing implementation. The study also found that how districts approach and support reform implementation for social studies might be different from how districts previously approached and supported new standards and curriculum in other content areas. In this study, all district social studies leaders focused primarily on disciplinary literacy components of the C3 Framework, specifically those related to history. District social studies leaders focused on document-based activities, student projects, and writing to source but few addressed the Inquiry Arc in a way that challenged or altered expected approaches to teaching and learning social studies. Many used the C3 Framework as leverage to justify the continued work and focus on historical thinking and other disciplinary literacy work in their districts. Most district social studies leaders used inquiry and disciplinary literacy as synonyms; the pattern suggests that further work to help educators distinguish between these related approaches to learning is necessary to help support the use of inquiry in the social studies. As more states use the C3 Framework in state standards, this study might help states and districts guide how they approach its implementation.Item Learning to Elicit, Interpret, and Respond to Students’ Historical Thinking: A Case Study of Four Teacher Candidates(2015) Neel, Michael Alan; Imig, David G.; Valli, Linda R.; Curriculum and Instruction; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Teacher education researchers have argued that teacher candidates must learn to attend to students’ disciplinary thinking if they are to improve student learning. In history education, such attention must focus on student thinking about evidence because interpretation of evidence is at the heart of historical discourse. This study explores how four teacher candidates who had learned to attend to students’ historical thinking in a social studies methods course engaged in the practice of eliciting, interpreting, and responding to that thinking during their internships. Data collected over a nine-month period included observations of candidates in their methods courses, a pretest administered before the methods course, observation of at least four lessons per candidate in the internship, interviews with teachers after each observed lesson, and analysis of methods coursework. Case study analyses indicated that two of the candidates elicited, interpreted and responded to students’ historical thinking while another did not, and a fourth did so only under certain conditions. The cross-case analysis showed that although all of the candidates used methods course tools in the internship, some were unable to use these tools to elicit students’ historical thinking. While three of the four candidates noticed historical thinking and considered that thinking in determining an instructional response, what candidates noticed was limited to the scope of their instructional objectives. Only one candidate consistently responded to student thinking in evaluative ways, and all four struggled to deliver responses that maintained a focus on student reasoning. Instead, candidates preferred to demonstrate their own reasoning, either by building on a student idea or simply as a means to make a point not directly related to a student idea. This study highlights the interconnected nature of eliciting, interpreting, and responding to student thinking and offers insight into how teacher educators can facilitate attention to student historical thinking. It also points to factors that are important for the development of this ability including candidate disciplinary knowledge and the social contexts of learning. Furthermore, this study provides a framework and analytical tools that can enable future researchers to examine this phenomenon more deeply.Item Re-Positioning Latino Heritage Language Learners: The Case of one adolescent's experiences in two different pedagogical spaces.(2015) Merrills, Kayra Zurany; Martin-Beltran, Melinda; Curriculum and Instruction; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)To improve the education of heritage language learners, more research is necessary to understand alternative educational practices and learning contexts that tap into and further develop heritage language learners' bilingual competence. This inquiry investigates how one Latino heritage language learner (HLL), Yolanda, experienced distinct opportunities to use and develop her heritage language as she participated in a bilingual extra-curricular program and in a world language classroom. Drawing upon Positioning Theory (Davies & Harré, 1999; Harré & Moghaddam, 2003; Harré & van Langenhove, 1999), this study explored how her positioning promoted languaging and language use. Drawing from sociocultural theory, this study applied the concept of languaging to understand language learning (Swain, 2002, 2005, 2006; Swain et al, 2009). I use the term languaging to describe metalinguistic discourse in which students explain or discuss a linguistic problem to others or the moments when learners talk aloud to themselves to mediate understanding of language (Swain, 2006). This study provides an analysis of how the HLL's different positionings influenced the amount of languaging and the type of language (Spanish, English or both) she decided to use. This single-case study incorporated both qualitative and quantitative methodologies with exploratory purposes. Methods of data collection included observations, field notes, audio-recording, video-recording, and student interviews. Data analysis was guided by interactional ethnography, conversation analysis and grounded theory. I also used Dedoose software to code transcripts and identify the co-occurrence of languaging and positioning. This study found that a bilingual extra-curricular program afforded Yolanda positionings that promoted a higher quality and quantity of opportunities for languaging and use of linguistic multicompetence due to collaborative opportunities with linguistically diverse students. This study contributes to research on HLLs by focusing on classroom practices that promote languaging and use of linguistic multicompetence. This study has implications for teachers and teacher education by providing a rich description of an academic space that re-positions a heritage language learner as a multilingual expert and learner.Item Students as Investigators, Teachers as Researchers: Documenting a Critical History Pedagogy and its Impact on Diverse Learners in a Tenth-Grade World History Classroom(2014) Kelly, Timothy J.; Valli, Linda; Curriculum and Instruction; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This study documents a teacher's efforts to scaffold and support his students' investigations of modern world history and their interactions with the critical history pedagogy he implements in a diverse tenth-grade classroom. Using teacher research methods to generate descriptive quantitative and qualitative data, the study explores the role of the teacher, the students, and local contextual factors in the teaching and learning process. In particular, the teacher-researcher details his attempts to mediate the influences of curriculum and assessment measures in a high stakes accountability context, while equipping his students with powerful disciplinary tools aimed at deepening their understanding of the past and developing in them a capacity to shape those meanings. The data suggest that the teacher-researcher faced considerable challenges in implementing an inquiry-based approach to learning about the past. The breadth of the Virginia Standards of Learning (SOL's) meant that in-depth learning centered on the analysis of conflicting sources and the interpretation of competing perspectives necessarily contended with coverage demands associated with SOL test preparation. These external constraints became background concerns when the teacher-researcher focused more on the internal knowledge-based constraints that were impeding student learning. In addition to the cultural, linguistic, and academic diversity of the learners in his classroom, the teacher was challenged by his students' lack of experience analyzing historical sources, exploring multiple perspectives, and writing evidence-based arguments. Study findings indicate that two main factors contributed to the growth of historical thinking and writing among study participants. First, the history domain's cognitive practices were progressively introduced and learning supports were designed to meet the range of aptitudes and skill levels present in this diverse public school setting. Although some students experienced more in the way of skill development than conceptual growth, evidence demonstrates that a range of students experienced progression. Second, the teacher-researcher learned to utilize traditional classroom structures in the context of open-ended inquiries and directed these practices toward more meaningful encounters with historical knowledge. Although elements of his instructional pedagogy seemed to align with more conventional practices, a disciplinary thread was woven throughout the fabric of the world history course.Item CHALLENGING PRESERVICE TEACHER BELIEFS ABOUT THE PAST: THE INFLUENCE OF A COURSE DESIGNED TO SHIFT WAYS OF KNOWING ABOUT HISTORY TEACHING AND LEARNING(2013) Reddy, Kimberly; VanSledright, Bruce; Curriculum and Instruction; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)"School history" has long since been characterized by teacher-centered lectures and student passivity, which deviates substantially from the inquiry-based and rigorous methodology historians use to actively reconstruct the past. While recent efforts have been made to move toward a more investigative approach in classrooms, little if any progress has been made beyond the superficial reading of primary source documents. When trying to understand why the disconnect between disciplinary approaches to history and school history continues, researchers have speculated that the knowledge bases, from which prospective teachers develop beliefs about the meaning and processes of history, are foundationally weak. This study examines the influence of a college course designed to specifically address the teacher knowledge problem in history. Participant beliefs were targeted and intentionally challenged to elicit shifts toward more criterialist ways of knowing. It contributes to the literature on the teaching and learning of historical thinking as well as epistemic beliefs in history. Qualitative and quantitative data were collected from participants over the course of one college semester through questionnaires, interviews, and coursework artifacts. Analysis was completed on two subscales: beliefs about history and beliefs about history teaching and learning. Consistent with some previous studies, this research found that once surfaced, participant beliefs did begin to shift toward a more expert way of knowing following explicit instruction and practice with authentic disciplinary tasks. While beliefs about the knower, what can be known, and the procedural strategies necessary to create knowledge shifted at varying levels of consistency and stability, the shifts appeared to have an associative relationship often moving in concert rather than independently. Additionally, results indicate that participants whose initial beliefs were more stable made greater shifts toward criterialism suggesting that those who were able to spend less time understanding new ideas were able to spend more time thinking about how to take those ideas and put them into practice. Implications of this research raise questions about what teacher educators need to know in order to expertly prepare preservice history educators along with considerations for the content and instruction of teacher education programs.Item EXPLORING TWO SECONDARY SOCIAL STUDIES TEACHERS' PEDAGOGICAL DECISION MAKING IN CONSTRAINED AND FLEXIBLE CONTEXTS(2012) Meuwissen, Kevin William; VanSledright, Bruce; Curriculum and Instruction; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)With current trends in K-12 education toward curriculum centralization and high-stakes test-based accountability, teachers are in a position of increasingly adapting their practices to demands that originate beyond the classroom. A synthesis of literature on the relationship between these external influences and secondary social studies teaching suggests that indirect accountability echoes and direct school-institutional pressures reinforce pedagogical practices that are not well aligned with empirical evidence of how adolescents learn, particularly in the well-researched discipline of history. Not surprisingly, variations abound in how teachers filter external controls into the curricular and pedagogical decisions that manifest in the classroom. What follows is an examination of how an early-career and an experienced social studies teacher engage in pedagogical reasoning and activity under two concurrent yet distinct sets of curricular conditions: one in which the external controls of mandated curricula, instructional tools, and summative high-stakes tests are present, and another in which they are not. Two overarching questions are central to this study. First, what patterns of pedagogical reasoning and action manifest in each curricular context? Second, how do the teachers negotiate the various personal and external influences on their pedagogies as they work within and across the two markedly different contexts? I chose an instrumental case study methodology as a means of vicariously representing the experiences of the two participants and generating small-scale theories about factors that impact teachers' mediation of different curricular structures within the current political-institutional context. Via this research, I posit two key arguments: 1) that teachers' epistemic stances and school-political positions are consequential to their ways of reasoning and acting pedagogically amidst the rising tide of test-based accountability; and 2) that teaching within flexible curricular contexts can provide a framework for critiquing the effects of, and tools for adapting to, tightly controlled contexts. Positing a link between the development of teaching expertise and an adaptive, pragmatic approach to pedagogical reasoning and action, this study's findings make a meaningful contribution to current conversations about the roles of social studies teachers as curriculum arbiters and how, why, and to what extent their decisional capital ought to be cultivated.Item A COMPARISON OF THE EXPERTISE OF UNIVERSITY FACULTY AND STUDENTS IN AMERICAN POLITICAL SCIENCE: IMPLICATIONS FOR FUTURE RESEARCH ON HIGH SCHOOL CIVICS AND GOVERNMENT(2012) Budano, Christopher; Monte-Sano, Chauncey; Curriculum and Instruction; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This study investigated the disciplinary knowledge and nature of expertise among political science experts studying American political science. A comparison group of students who had completed an introductory undergraduate course in American political science also participated in the study. Numerous research studies have found that civics and government courses often focus on the transmission of information from textbooks and teachers to students. The result of this type of teaching, at least according to the measures we currently utilize, has been the failure of the majority of students to learn about American government, become invested in our system of government, and indicate their desire to participate in the future. Civic and educational leaders have called for the development of curriculum to promote critical thinking and improve student learning and participation. Yet, there is no research base for understanding what critical thinking looks like in civics and government and its related discipline of political science or what activities and methods will lead to increased student achievement. With history education as a model, where defining the discipline has led to a better understanding of critical thinking in history and a more robust approach to teaching, the author investigated what expertise in this subfield of political science looks like, how experts conceptualize the discipline, and what cognitive processes they use in their work using a concept sorting and mapping task, two problem-solving tasks, and an open-ended interview. Experts defined political science as an empirical discipline focused on phenomena related to government, power, and the allocation of resources. Experts also recognized relationships and connections between concepts in the discipline and used a variety of conceptual knowledge and strategic processing when engaging in their work, including recognition of context, the identification of sub-problems and constraints, and an acknowledgement of what they did not know. A comparison to the students allowed for the description of different levels of expertise. Implications of the study include the need for additional research on the strategic processing of political science experts and the potential to define educational outcomes for teaching and learning in civics and government classes.Item Countering the Master Narrative: The Development of the Alternative Black Curriculum in Social Studies, 1890-1940(2012) Murray, Alana D.; MacDonald, Victoria M; Curriculum and Instruction; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)ABSTRACT Title of Document: COUNTERING THE MASTER NARRATIVE: THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE ALTERNATIVE BLACK CURRICULUM IN SOCIAL STUDIES, 1890-1940 Alana D. Murray, Ph.D., Curriculum And Instruction, specialization in Minority and Urban Education Directed By: Professor, Victoria-Marĩa MacDonald, and Department of Teaching and Learning, Policy and Leadership The purpose of this dissertation is to explore the development of the alternative black curriculum in social studies from 1890-1940. W.E.B. Du Bois and Carter G. Woodson worked in collaboration with women educators Nannie H. Burroughs and Anna Julia Cooper to create an alternative black curriculum that would support the intellectual growth of black children. There is a growing body of work, initially articulated by male scholars, that demonstrates the basic principles of the alternative black curriculum, a curriculum that reinterprets dominant narratives in US and world history about the African and African-American experience. My study illustrates how this curriculum was in many ways supplemented and even furthered by an ongoing dialogue with the pedagogical work of African-American women school founders, administrators, librarians, and teachers. Embracing both a critical race theory and integrated gender framework, an analysis of the alternative black curriculum will deepen and strengthen our understanding of the diverse contributors to social studies. Utilizing archival materials from the collection of Nannie Helen Burroughs in the Library of Congress, I document the ways in which women co-created an alternative black curriculum that challenged traditional narratives. I conducted a textual reading of the pageant, When Truth Gets A Hearing, authored by Nannie H. Burroughs, in order to establish how black women contributed to the development of the alternative black curriculum. I also compared When Truth Gets A Hearing to W.E.B. Du Bois's pageant, The Star of Ethiopia. In addition, I developed a case study of the social studies curriculum for National Training School for Women and Girls (NTS), a school Nannie H. Burroughs established with the explicit purpose of developing and nurturing African-American girls. The intent of my case study is to document how the alternative black curriculum in social studies was implemented in a school setting, with the hope that it might serve as a blueprint that teachers of social studies can use to restructure the current social studies curriculum to include a more comprehensive understanding of black history.