Matching Items (3)
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- All Subjects: Education, Secondary
- Creators: Durand, Sybil
Description
This dissertation investigates the impact reading Young Adult Literature (YAL) has on students' empathetic responses as well as their capacity to take action regarding a social justice issue chosen by the student. Drawing on data from a 10th grade honors classroom at a Title 1 school in the Southwest, this ethnographic case study investigates how students use YAL to formulate knowledge construction, empathetic responses, action plans and personal healing. Data for this research includes ethnographic fieldnotes, semi-structured participant interviews, daily journals and a focus group interview. Throughout this study, the teacher and researcher worked together to develop a flexible curriculum that implemented YAL and social activist ideas, such as investigation into action plans and discussion surrounding ways to make change. Results demonstrate that students who had some prior experience with an issue, coupled with identification with a helper character from the novel were more inclined to attempt to take tangible, victim-focused action, whereas students with no prior experience with an issue or those who identified overtly with the victim in the novel were likely to create action plans that spread awareness for others who were unaware of the complexities of the issue. Additionally, the students who had little exposure to the social justice issue they chose demonstrated a level of productive discomfort and a shift in the way they perceived the complexities of the issue. The importance of YAL in the students' social and emotional growth, coupled with an opportunity to create civically minded citizens signals the growing importance of this type of literature in a socially minded world.
ContributorsHays, Alice (Author) / Blasingame, James (Thesis advisor) / Durand, Sybil (Committee member) / Chin, Beverly (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2017
Description
High school students with high-incidence disabilities and struggling writers face considerable challenges when taking high-stakes writing assessments designed to examine their suitability for entrance to college. I examined the effectiveness of a writing intervention for improving these students’ performance on a popular college entrance exam, the writing assessment for the ACT. Students were taught a planning and composing strategy for successfully taking this test using the Self-Regulated Strategy Development (SRSD) model. A randomized control trial was conducted where 20 high school students were randomly assigned to a treatment (N = 10) or control (N = 10) condition. Control students received ACT math preparation. SRSD instruction statistically enhanced students’ planning, the quality of their written text (including ideas and analysis, development and support, organization, and language use), the inclusion of argumentative elements in their compositions, and the use of transition words in written text. Limitations of the study, future research, and implications for practice are discussed.
ContributorsRay, Amber Beth (Author) / Graham, Stephen (Thesis advisor) / Harris, Karen R. (Committee member) / Hart Barnett, Juliet (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2017
Description
While the literacy narrative genre has been studied in first-year composition and methods of teaching courses, investigations of the literacy narrative as a multimodal project for pre-service teachers (PSTs) of English Language Arts remain scarce. This research shares a qualitative classroom-based case study that focuses on a literacy narrative project, redesigned as a Multimodal Writing History Memoir (see Appendix 1), the first assignment in a required writing methods course in a teacher training program for English Language Arts (ELA) teachers at a large public university in the southwest. The study took place during the fall semester of 2019 with 15 ELA undergraduate pre-service English Education or Secondary Education majors. The study described here examined the implementation and outcomes of the multimodal writing history memoir with goals of better understanding how ELA PSTs design and compose multimodally, of understanding the topics and content they included in their memoirs, to discover how this project reflected PSTs’ ideas about teaching writing in their future classrooms. The memoir project invited pre-service teachers to infuse written, audio, and visual text while making use of at least four different mediums of their choice. Through combined theoretical frames, I explored semiotics, as well as pre-service teachers’ use of multiliteracies as they examined their conceptions of what it means to compose. In this qualitative analysis, I collected students’ memoirs and writing samples associated with the assignment, a demographics survey, and individual mid-semester interviews. The writing activities associated with the memoir included a series of quick writes (Kittle, 2009), responses to questions about writing and teachers’ responsibilities when it comes to teaching composition, and letters students wrote to one another during a peer review workshop. Additionally, my final data source included the handwritten notes I took during the presentations students gave to share their memoirs. Some discoveries I made center on the nuanced impact of acts of personal writing for PSTs, some of the specific teaching strategies and areas of teaching focus participants relayed, and specifically, how participants worked with and thought about teaching multimodal composition.
ContributorsHope, Kate (Author) / Early, Jessica (Thesis advisor) / Saidy, Christina (Committee member) / Durand, Sybil (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2020