College of Education
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The collections in this community comprise faculty research works, as well as graduate theses and dissertations..
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Item PAST AS PROLOGUE TO PEACE IN POST-GENOCIDE CAMBODIA: A STUDY OF MEMORY CONSTRUCTION AND MEMORY EDUCATION BY THE EXTRAORDINARY CHAMBERS IN THE COURTS OF CAMBODIA AND CAMBODIAN CIVIL SOCIETY(2022) Rappeport, Annie; Lin, Jing; Education Policy, and Leadership; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Genocides demonstrate the worst of humanity manifest and created difficult pasts for future generations to contend with. What societies choose to remember is one of the most crucial choices made in the aftermath of mass atrocities. Looking to the Khmer Rouge regime and genocide from 1975-1979, the role of transitional justice and civil society is pioneering new ways to educate and remember the genocidal past. Recently, memory and education relation to memory have been an emphasized part of transitional justice processes including prioritization set by the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) which was established in 2003 after much negotiation. The hybrid tribunal allocated significant funding and staffing towards outreach, education and survivor participation opportunities as a means to address and contend with the Khmer Rouge genocide. The following study centers the experiences of those on the frontlines of the work being done at the intersections of transitional justice (ECCC), civil society and education. The research features 25 in-depth interviews with key informants combined with a complementary document analysis. The key informants represent leaders in Cambodian scholarship, the tribunal process, education, NGO and civil society memory and peace work. The findings show many relevant lessons learned in relation to outreach programs, victim-centered transitional justice, culturally competent modes of reconciliation and education, participant centered archiving, the benefits of using performing arts and the function of moral and symbolic reparations in the Cambodian context. Keywords: Cambodia, Reconciliation, Transitional Justice, Peace Studies, Memory Studies, Genocide, Peace Education, Civil SocietyItem An Exploration of Motivation, Transfer, and Implementation During Self-Regulated Instruction and Cognitive Apprenticeships in Secondary Science and Social Studies Classrooms(2021) Butler, Cameron; De La Paz, Susan; Special Education; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The Next Generation Science Standards and the Common Core State Standards for Social Studies emphasize the importance of disciplinary literacy in helping students to think and interact with texts like experts (NCSS, 2013; NRC, 2013). Developing these skills, however, is difficult and students do not naturally display disciplinary thinking and literacy skills (Hogan & Maglienti, 2001; Wineburg, 1991). Researchers have determined several effective practices for addressing these cognitively demanding skills including the cognitive apprenticeship model with embedded self-regulated instruction (SRI; see De La Paz et al., 2017; Levin et al., 2021). In this dissertation, I discuss a range of topics that focus broadly on supporting students and teachers while they learn and teach cognitively demanding disciplinary literacy skills. I begin by examining SRI and its effects on motivation for students with or at risk for learning disabilities (LD). Next, I analyze the impact of a cognitive apprenticeship model that incorporates SRI on students’ literacy skills in science. Finally, I analyze the implementation of a similar cognitive apprenticeship model in history by observing fidelity, chronicling teacher curricular adaptations, and documenting the important factors that influence teachers’ instructional decisions. The first study identified that SRI has a positive impact on student motivation in addition to its positive impact on academics (see Antononiou & Souvignier, 2007; Graham & Harris 1989a; Schunk & Cox, 1986). The second study corroborates research on the cognitive apprenticeship model in science (Lee et al., 2021a; Levin et al., 2021) by demonstrating that the model can support the development of literacy skills in science inquiry settings. This study also shows how the model helps students to transfer learning to functionally different scenarios. The final study details the implementation of a cognitive apprenticeship intervention that supported the use of historical literacy skills during historical inquiries. This study establishes that with online professional development (PD) and continued coaching, teachers showed high degrees of fidelity and made adaptations that adhered to the tenants of the model and supported their specific students. Additionally, this study demonstrated how important factors such as teachers’ beliefs and pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) affect teacher implementation.Item LGB TEACHER ORGANIZATIONS FROM 1970-1985(2019) Mayernick, Jason M; Hutt, Ethan; Education Policy, and Leadership; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation examines the activities and organization of six LGB teachers’ organizations which were active between 1970 and 1985. LGB teachers’ organizations located in California, New York City, the American Federation of Teachers, and the National Education Association are each examined in respective chapters. Each of these chapters focuses on a specific theme that is apparent throughout the histories of these groups. These themes include: professionalism, community, negotiation, and the portrayal of LGB teachers. This dissertation is an inquiry into the first time in American history when LGB people who were K-12 teachers came out in large numbers, the first time they were seen as being not heterosexual without being forced out of America’s schools, and the first time these teachers acted in groups to protect themselves and LGB students from an educational system that was openly hostile to anyone who did not appear to be heterosexual. LGB teachers were among the first LGB people to organize professional groups and they were among the first LGB people to secure commitments against discrimination from national level labor unions. Working first to protect their employment rights and later to ensure the educational rights of LGBT students, LGB teachers’ groups were at the forefront of shifting American schools toward greater inclusivity. By examining these groups through the perspectives of education, labor, and LGBT history this dissertation will argue that the relevance of these LGB teachers’ groups extends far beyond the individual experiences of LGB teachers and their schools and can be used to discuss broad expectations that Americans held, and continue to hold, for their schools and teachers.Item Beyond Diversity As Usual: Expanding Critical Cultural Approaches to Marginalization in Engineering Education(2017) Secules, Stephen; Elby, Andrew; Gupta, Ayush; Education Policy, and Leadership; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In general, what we think of as "diversity work" in undergraduate engineering education focuses in the following ways: more on the overlooked assets of minority groups than on the acts of overlooking, more on the experiences of marginalized groups than on the mechanisms of marginalization by dominant groups, more on supporting and increasing minority student retention than on critiquing and remediating the systems which lead minority students to leave engineering. This dissertation presents a series of arguments which push beyond a status quo understanding of diversity in engineering education. The first approach the dissertation takes up is to problematize educational facts around failure by interrogating their roots in interactions and cultural norms in an engineering classroom. In another argument, the dissertation places the engineering classroom cultural norms of competition, whiteness, and masculinity in a critical historical context of the discipline at large. Finally, I demonstrate how engaging students in a critique of marginalizing educational culture can be an important source of agency. In addition to applying and demonstrating the value of specific novel approaches in engineering education, the dissertation contributes to the research community by discussing the respective affordances between these and other possible scholarly approaches to culture and marginalization in education. I also suggest how a consideration of the taken-for-granted culture of engineering education can be an important tool for instructors seeking to gain insight into persistent educational problems. In addition, this dissertation makes implications for diversity support practice, envisioning new forms of support programming rooted in intersectionality and critical praxis.Item Prioritizing Purposes: Two American History Teachers' Choices Among Subject Matter and Classroom-Related Purposes(2016) Blum, Robyn M; Turner, Jennifer; Curriculum and Instruction; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This study explores how two American history teachers - one novice and one experienced – make in-the-moment choices among their history subject matter and classroom-related purposes during the teaching of an American history unit. Using classroom observations, lesson artifacts, student work products, and deep, retrospective interviews with the teachers as they watched videos of their teaching, this study maps out in detail the teachers’ purposes, both within and across different lesson activity structures. This study finds that the novice and the experienced teacher navigated among their purposes differently from each other, and that the characteristics of each teacher’s purposes navigation aligned with student outcomes in that teacher’s class. The novice teacher acted more like a juggler, with visible, reactive navigation among each purpose operational throughout his teaching; student outcomes in his class were similarly fragmented and discrete. The experienced teacher presented more like an orchestra conductor, interweaving his purposes and anticipating the navigation decisions that would create a more seamless whole; student outcomes in his class were aligned with his holistic navigation of purposes. Findings from this study have important implications for education research and teacher practice, including the relationship between teachers’ navigation among purposes and desired student outcomes, the integral role of classroom-related purposes interwoven with history subject matter purposes in teachers’ decision-making, and the differences in purposes navigation between a novice and an experienced history teacher.Item “PROSPERING BECAUSE THAT’S ITS HISTORY”: BLACK RESILIENCE AND HONORS DEVELOPMENT IN HIGHER EDUCATION: MORGAN STATE UNIVERSITY AND THE STATE OF MARYLAND, 1867-1988(2015) Dula, Traci Leigh Moody; MacDonald, Victoria-María; Curriculum and Instruction; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This study explores the origins and development of honors education at a Historically Black College and University (HBCU), Morgan State University, within the context of the Maryland higher education system. During the last decades, public and private institutions have invested in honors experiences for their high-ability students. These programs have become recruitment magnets while also raising institutional academic profiles, justifying additional campus resources. The history of higher education reveals simultaneous narratives such as the tension of post-desegregated Black colleges facing uncertain futures; and the progress of the rise and popularity of collegiate honors programs. Both accounts contribute to tracing seemingly parallel histories in higher education that speaks to the development of honors education at HBCUs. While the extant literature on honors development at Historically White Institutions (HWIs) of higher education has gradually emerged, our understanding of activity at HBCUs is spotty at best. One connection of these two phenomena is the development of honors programs at HBCUs. Using Morgan State University, I examine the role and purpose of honors education at a public HBCU through archival materials and oral histories. Major unexpected findings that constructed this historical narrative beyond its original scope were the impact of the 1935/6 Murray v Pearson, the first higher education desegregation case. Other emerging themes were Morgan’s decades-long efforts to resist state control of its governance, Maryland’s misuse of Morrill Act funds, and the border state’s resistance to desegregation. Also, the broader histories of Black education, racism, and Black citizenship from Dred Scott and Plessy, the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation to Brown, inform this study. As themes are threaded together, Critical Race Theory provides the framework for understanding the emerging themes. In the immediate wake of the post-desegregation era, HBCUs had to address future challenges such as purpose and mission. Competing with HWIs for high-achieving Black students was one of the unanticipated consequences of the Brown decision. Often marginalized from higher education research literature, this study will broaden the research repository of honors education by documenting HBCU contributions despite a challenging landscape.Item The Life & Rhymes Of Jay-Z: An Historical Biography, 1969-2004(2015) Dibinga, Omekongo; Finkelstein, Barbara; Klees, Steve; Education Policy, and Leadership; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The purpose of this dissertation is to explore the life and ideas of Jay-Z, arguably the most powerful rapper in history. It is an effort to illuminate the ways in which he managed the vicissitudes of life as they were inscribed in the political, economic cultural, social contexts and message systems of the worlds which he inhabited: the social ideas of class struggle, the fact of black youth disempowerment, educational disenfranchisement, entrepreneurial possibility, and the struggle of families to buffer their children from the horrors of life on the streets.Item The Project of Memory: Life Writing the Holocaust(2014) Peterson, Margaret Polizos; Hultgren, Francine; Curriculum and Instruction; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This phenomenological study explores the lived experience of life writing the Holocaust. Life writing is the term used to describe personal biographical and autobiographical accounts in many genres (Jolly, 2001). As research concerned with how personal writing of the Holocaust is experienced by the writers themselves, this work explores the ways in which memory, narrative and history intersect in the writing processes of each writer. What insights might we gain about personal writing as a tool for helping to understand the past? What might we learn about historical events, such as the Holocaust, from crafted writing made by eyewitnesses? What does it mean for these writers to do this work? What may we learn about personal writing as a mode of learning? This research is done in the tradition of hermeneutic phenomenology and draws on the work of philosophers such as Heidegger, Gadamer, Merleau-Ponty, and particularly Levinas, as foundational grounding for this study. The work of David Carr, who describes our understanding of experience and history as narrative in nature helped to guide this research as well. Van Manen provides a systematic process by which research employing hermeneutic phenomenological philosophy can be done. Through engagement with the literature surrounding the existential phenomenon; research on writing after trauma; literature and research on survivor testimony; philosophical and psychological research concerning the nature of memory and critical analysis of historical consciousness and historiology, I formed questions that guided my conversations with participants. I recruited twelve participants, members of The Memory Project, a writing group of Holocaust survivors at The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum for this study. My phenomenological data suggests that life writing the Holocaust acts as a mode of seeking coherence for these writers. The narrative structure of memory, as pre-writing for life writing, is employed as a tool for greater self understanding and communication of a self by these writers. In addition, multiple communities are called upon by these writers as they craft and revise the texts they make. Conversations with historians of the Holocaust, dialogue with family members and the interactions within our group guide the remembering and writing of these writers and help add to a sense of their own "narrative coherence" described by Carr (1986). Drawing from insights gained from my participants, I suggest that the lived experience of life writing the Holocaust is a pedagogical process. This process is one in which narrative memory, expanding historical consciousness and writing as impetus and mode of questioning engage these survivors in ongoing discovery and communication of their own life stories. Additionally, I offer an understanding of life writing, memory and history conceived differently than in an objectivist tradition as transformative to a pedagogical sense of engaging in processes of memory, historical consciousness and writing.Item YOU HAVE TO CONSIDER THE SOURCE: AN INVESTIGATION OF 8TH GRADE STUDENTS USING HISTORY’S SOURCING HEURISTIC TO LEARN ABOUT AMERICA’S PAST(2013) Wooden, John Alan; VanSledright, Bruce A; Curriculum and Instruction; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Research in history education suggests disciplinary approaches to teaching and learning about the past lead to considerable growth in students' historical thinking capabilities. This study investigated how an historical inquiry approach to instruction influences the ways adolescents read, think and write about American history. The researcher created and taught a series of lessons centered on the sourcing heuristic and other aspects of the discipline of history to students in two sections of an 8th grade American history course in a major school district in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area. The lessons, exercises and pedagogical moves were based on a literature-based, theoretically-grounded framework for learning to think in history. In addition to exposure to curriculum and instruction based on historical investigation, students in one class received a structured intervention in historical thinking that gave them opportunities to critique and discuss each other's written historical arguments and engage in discourse about evidence and other history-specific concepts and strategic knowledge. It was assumed that these sessions of Peer Scrutiny and Discourse (PSD) would deepen students' knowledge of history (in a disciplinary sense) and lead them to outperform the students who did not engage in PSD on various measures of historical thinking and understanding. History-specific instruction took place over a five-month period. A range of data were collected to chart students' growth in historical thinking, including pre and post-study surveys of students' views and knowledge of history, journal entries they created after key lessons and exercises, six historical argumentation writing tasks, a think-aloud task on African Americans' experiences with Southern Reconstruction and exit interviews with primary informants, and the researcher's observations of the teaching and learning that took place. The data were also used to discern the influence of PSD. The researcher found that the majority of students in both classes made gains in historical thinking, especially in the area of written historical argumentation. There appeared to be changes in students' beliefs about history in both classes; and there was some indication that primary informants who experienced PSD developed slightly deeper ideas about evidence and interpretation. The quality of historical writing was higher among students who experienced PSD until the final historical argumentation task. This study suggests that learning about America's past through historical investigations informed and driven by a theoretical framework for learning to think in history causes forward movement along the novice-toward-expert continuum of historical thinking for most adolescents with little or no prior experience with disciplinary history.Item Using Argumentative Discussion to Enhance the Written Arguments of Middle School Students in Social Studies Classrooms(2012) Wissinger, Daniel R.; De La Paz, Susan; Special Education; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The purpose of this study was to explore the effects of Walton, Reed, and Macagno's (2008) dialectical framework on middle school students' historical discussions and written arguments. To do this,151 middle school students from six classrooms were randomly assigned to one of two conditions and asked to participate in a three-week intervention that featured: (a) examining three controversial topics in history, (b) primary source documents, (b) argumentative discussions, and (c) constructing argumentative essays. Because students were taught in small groups, the average performance of 12 groups of students who were assigned to the experimental condition was compared to the average performance of 12 groups of students who were assigned to the comparison conditions. Students in the experimental condition learned argumentative schemes and asked critical questions during discussions. Students in the comparison condition participated in the same historical investigations, received the same materials for instruction, engaged in discussions, and learned about text structure for writing argumentative essays in ways comparable to the experimental group, but used a traditional set of questions during discussions. The findings indicated a significant relationship between teaching students to use argumentative schemes and to ask critical questions during discussions and performance on students' resulting content knowledge. Main effects were also evident regarding students' historical thinking, a writing outcome that reflected use of evidence, ability to write from an author's perspective, use of contextual information, and the inclusion of rebuttals in their essays. While significant differences were not present between conditions on three outcome measures (i.e., reading comprehension, length of essays, or overall writing quality) students' in both sets of groups averaged moderate-to-high scores for reading comprehension and constructed essays that were considered proficient or advanced on the PSSA writing rubric. Taken together, the results of the study were encouraging and align with many of those in the existing literature, which emphasize the positive effects of integrating discussion in classroom activities.