Theses and Dissertations from UMD
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New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a give thesis/dissertation in DRUM
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Item Reform-Oriented Collaborative Inquiry as a Pedagogy for Student Teaching in Middle School(2015) DeMink-Carthew, Jessica Jane; Valli, Linda; Curriculum and Instruction; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Specialized middle level teacher education programs are purported to be a potential lever for middle level education reform. Preparing teachers to enact reform-oriented visions of teaching, in the context of uneven, if not stalled, middle level education reform presents a formidable challenge as student teachers attempt to challenge the status quo. Yet, despite a growing body of literature on specialized middle level teacher education, the critical student teaching year remains under-researched. This dissertation thus proposes and investigates Reform-Oriented Collaborative Inquiry (ROCI) as a pedagogy for supporting reform-oriented student teaching in middle school. Employing a nested design, this dissertation uses two qualitative studies to explore ROCI from a variety of perspectives. The first study describes how four student teachers and one teacher educator used ROCI to create a student-driven social action project that was reform-oriented and responsive to their field placement school. An analysis of middle school student feedback regarding the social action project is also provided. The second study investigates the challenges and benefits experienced by the group as they attempted to innovate using ROCI as well as the insights they developed regarding what it takes to participate in middle level education reform. The challenges discussed include a disconnect between College of Education and field placement visions of teaching, being "just an intern," cultivating student engagement in "new" teaching approaches, time, and collaboration. The benefits of participation in ROCI include its successful support of reform-oriented innovation, increased understanding and confidence in reform-oriented teaching practices, relationships with students, and new insights for the teacher educator. Student teacher insights indicate that participating in middle level education reform requires collaboration with multiple stakeholders, strategic communication, flexibility and patience. Findings point to several implications for teacher education. These include the development of teacher education curricula that prepare preservice teachers for reform-oriented student teaching as well as the potential for ROCI to serve as a framework for building capacity in reform-oriented teaching in partnership schools as well as through induction. The challenges faced also underscore the need to address the multiple political, structural, and financial challenges that make investing in school-university partnership work difficult.Item THE DEVELOPMENT OF GLOBAL EDUCATION POLICY: A CASE STUDY OF THE ORIGINS AND EVOLUTION OF EL SALVADOR'S EDUCO PROGRAM(2013) Edwards, Donald Brent; Klees, Steve J.; Education Policy, and Leadership; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The Education with Community Participation (EDUCO) program began in El Salvador in early 1991, near the end of the twelve-year civil war. It not only represented an extreme form of decentralization in that it transferred the responsibility for hiring, firing and supervising teachers to rural communities, but it was also the first reform of its kind in Latin America. During the ensuing 20 years, the program has received tremendous attention. Indeed, within the country it became the central program through which the education sector was rebuilt and expanded in the post-war era of the 1990s and 2000s. Internationally, the program has been widely recognized as a successful and desirable example of community-level education management decentralization. In fact, the program has become a "global education policy" in that it has been and continues to be recognized, promoted and adapted around the world. To date, however, the majority of research on this program has been a-historical in nature and has focused narrowly on whether the program "worked" - statistically speaking and with regard to such outcomes as student achievement. In contrast, in this dissertation, I analyze the dynamics of how the policy was developed. I shed new light on the trajectory of the EDUCO program by focusing, from an international political economy framework, on how the program was developed, scaled up, and internationally promoted. In so doing, I am able to highlight relevant political economic structures that impinge on education reform, as well as the various mechanisms of transnational influence that contributed to its advancement within and beyond El Salvador. In a number of different ways, international organizations are central to the policy development process. Methodologically, I focus not only on the process of development itself, but also on the ways in which actors and forces from multiple levels (local, national, international) interact and intersect in that process. Theoretically, by choosing to analyze EDUCO's origins, I attempt to contribute to our understanding of how (i.e., through which mechanisms of transnational influence) and why certain policies come into existence and subsequently go global.