Matching Items (33)
Description
This study follows three secondary teachers as they facilitate a digital storytelling project with their students for the first time. All three teachers were not specifically trained in digital storytelling in order to investigate what happens when a digital storytelling novice tries to do a project like this with his or her students. The study follows two high school English teachers and one middle school math teacher. Each teacher's experience is shared in a case study, and all three case studies are compared and contrasted in a cross-case analysis. There is a discussion of the types of projects the teachers conducted and any challenges they faced. Strategies to overcome the challenges are also included. A variety of assessment rubrics are included in the appendix. In the review of literature, the history of digital storytelling is illuminated, as are historical concepts of literacy. There is also an exploration of twenty-first century skills including multiliteracies such as media and technology literacy. Both the teachers and their students offer suggestions to future teachers taking on digital storytelling projects. The dissertation ends with a discussion of future scholarship in educational uses of digital storytelling.
ContributorsGordon, Corrine (Author) / Blasingame, James (Thesis advisor) / Nilsen, Alleen P (Committee member) / Early, Jessica (Committee member) / Marsh, Josephine (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
Description
The purpose of this study is to explore the literacy practices members of an online fan community engage in to participate in the space and to question what learning happens through that participation. This dissertation is the product of a two-year virtual ethnographic study of The Sims Writers' Hangout (SWH), a discussion forum website established by fans of The Sims to support members' interests in creating and sharing Sims fan fiction. Affinity space theory informs an understanding of SWH's organization, and a definition of literacies as situated, social practices also frames the study. Data were collected following a discourse-centered online ethnographic approach, which guided systematic observation and interactions with eight key informants. The data corpus includes hundreds of pages of discussion forum posts, member profiles, moderator-created norming texts, numerous digital, multimodal Sims fan fiction texts, virtual interview responses from informants, field notes, and additional virtual artifacts, such as informants' websites and Flickr® photostreams. Study results are presented within three separate manuscripts prepared for publication and presentation, each exploring different lines of inquiry related to SWH. Chapter 3 focuses on tensions visible in the forum discussions to argue for an expansion of affinity space theory that accounts for the “hanging out” members do in the space. Chapter 4 analyzes one informant's literacy practices using a Design perspective. This analysis reveals the collaborative nature of Sims fan fiction literacies. The final manuscript (Chapter 5) offers an analysis of SWH pedagogy using Bernstein's pedagogic device concept. Data illustrate how pedagogic discourse in this online, informal learning space aligns with and challenges Bernstein's theory. Finally, Chapter 6 offers conclusions about how these three analyses expand our understanding of adolescent literacies and 21st century learning. This chapter also contains implications for theory and practice, recommendations for future research, and reflections on lessons learned.
ContributorsLammers, Jayne Catherine (Author) / Marsh, Josephine P (Thesis advisor) / Hayes, Elisabeth R. (Committee member) / Gee, James P (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
Description
The pace of technological development and the integral role technologies play in the lives of today's youth continue to transform perceptions and definitions of literacy. Just as the growth in completely online texts and the use of audio books and e-readers expands the definition of reading, digital platforms like blogs expand the notion of literary response and analysis. Responding to the complexities of literacy, this study examines the ways in which the literacy practice of blogging about young adult literature might elicit the active, intellectual orientation, or habits of mind, often sought in adolescent literacy development. Employing Gardner's Five Minds theory as an analysis tool and what Erickson calls "key linkages" as a framework, blog transcripts were read and coded. Those coded literacy acts were then linked to reveal any evidence of the creating, respectful, ethical, disciplined, and synthesizing habits of mind. From these overlays, empirical data tables emerged, accompanied by integrated case study narratives. Empirical data illustrate the aspects of the cases, and exposition provides a feature analysis of the habits of mind observed during blogging as a form of literary response to young adult literature. Results of this study suggest that bloggers writing about young adult books in a weblog environment reveal 1) some proficiency at synthesizing material, 2) a tendency to evaluate, 3) only moderate demonstration of the disciplined and respectful/ethical habits, 4) minimal evidence of the creating mind, and 5) moderate proficiency in basic transactional writing. Aligning with previous research, Talking with Our Fingertips illuminates possibilities for adopting pedagogical principles that provide student agency and potentially increase motivation and productivity.
ContributorsMiller, Donna L. (Donna Lynn) (Author) / Blasingame, James (Thesis advisor) / Chin, Beverly A (Committee member) / Marsh, Josephine P (Committee member) / Nilsen, Alleen P (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
Description
The purpose of this study was to analyze the impact of a context-based teaching approach (STS) versus a more traditional textbook approach on the attitudes and achievement of community college chemistry students. In studying attitudes toward chemistry within this study, I used a 30-item Likert scale in order to study the importance of chemistry in students' lives, the importance of chemistry, the difficulty of chemistry, interest in chemistry, and the usefulness of chemistry for their future career. Though the STS approach students had higher attitude post scores, there was no significant difference between the STS and textbook students' attitude post scores. It was noted that females had higher postattitude scores in the STS group, while males had higher postattitude scores in the textbook group. With regard to postachievement, I noted that males had higher scores in both groups. A correlation existed between postattitude and postachievement in the STS classroom. In summary, while an association between attitude and achievement was found in the STS classroom, teaching approach or sex was not found to influence attitudes, while sex was also not found to influence achievement. These results, overall, suggest that attitudes are not expected to change on the basis of either teaching approach or gender, and that techniques other than changing the teaching approach would need to be used in order to improve the attitudes of students. Qualitative analysis of an online discussion activity on Energy revealed that STS students were able to apply aspects of chemistry in decision making related to socioscientific issues. Additional analysis of interview and written responses provided insight regarding attitudes toward chemistry, with respect to topics of applicability of chemistry to life, difficulties with chemistry, teaching approach for chemistry, and the intent for enrolling in additional chemistry courses. In addition, the surveys of female students brought out subcategories with regard to emotional and professional characteristics of a good teacher, under the category of characteristics of teaching approach. With respect to the category of course experience, subcategories of useful knowledge to solve real-life problems and knowledge for future career were revealed. The differences between the control group females and STS group females with respect to these characteristics was striking and threw insight into how teacher behavior and teaching approach shape student attitudes to chemistry in case of female students.
ContributorsPerkins, Gita (Author) / Baker, Dale R. (Thesis advisor) / Sloane, Finbarr (Committee member) / Marsh, Josephine P (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
Description
This qualitative, action research study examines how teacher-writers' identities are constructed through the practice of revision in an extra-curriculum writing group. The writing group was designed to support the teacher-writers as they revised classroom research projects for submission for a scholarly journal. Using discourse analysis, the researcher explores how the teacher-writers' identities are constructed in the contested spaces of revision. This exploration focuses on contested issues that invariably emerge in a dynamic binary of reader/writer, issues of authority, ownership, and unstable reader and writer identities. By negotiating these contested spaces--these contact zones--the teacher-writers construct opportunities to flex their rhetorical agency. Through rhetorical agency, the teacher-writers shift their discoursal identities by discarding and acquiring a variety of discourses. As a result, the practice of revision constructs the teacher-writers identities as hybrid, as consisting of self and other.
ContributorsClark-Oates, Angela (Author) / Smith, Karen (Thesis advisor) / Roen, Duane (Thesis advisor) / Fischman, Gustavo (Committee member) / Early, Jessica (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
ABSTRACT Controversies surrounding multilingual language programs, disparities on educational achievement measures, and tracking represent some of the conflicts concerning race that continue to take place in school districts around the country. These debates are especially significant today as schools experience shifts in demographics. Racial and ethnic minorities now account for at least one-third of the nation's population (United States Census Bureau, 2010), and schools are more racially and ethnically diverse than ever before (National Center for Education Statistics, 2012). The continued importance of race in education serves as the impetus behind this dissertation's inquiries into race and language in the high school English classroom. This study explores how one group of students, attending a predominately White high school with growing racial and ethnic diversity, write and talk about race in the English classroom. I examine how explicitly or implicitly students engaged in everyday language, school talk, and school writing about racial and ethnic identity, as well as how students responded to an English language arts curriculum devoted to issues of race and equity. On a broader scale, this study seeks to understand the school, community, and larger social context of racial and ethnic division and unity, particularly the role language and literacy pedagogies can play in addressing these issues. Blending two qualitative methodologies, including ethnography and the design and implementation of a race-conscious English curriculum, I spent eight months in one high school classroom, resulting in an analysis of a series of field notes, student writing, and in-depth participant interview transcripts. Findings from this study may help complicate researchers' and teachers' notions of how racial and ethnic identity operates in classrooms with shifting demographics. This study also highlights the importance of bringing race-conscious literacy activities to the forefront of English classrooms where structured discussions and carefully crafted writing prompts can facilitate discourse on race that might otherwise be muted in the context of traditional English language arts curriculum. Finally, this dissertation calls for a greater focus on collaborative research and teaching teams comprised of classroom teachers and university researchers.
ContributorsDeCosta, Meredith (Author) / Roen, Duane (Thesis advisor) / Early, Jessica (Committee member) / Paris, Django (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
Description
This qualitative, classroom-based study investigates how 24 middle school students engaged with grammar in an instructional approach that bridged “grammar in context” practices with writing transfer practices. This “transfer-minded” approach invited students to monitor and reflect on their grammar choices in writing as a way to foster metacognition; it also guided students to consider other and future writing contexts where they could use the grammar they were learning as a way to foster transfer and long-term writing development. The dissertation findings detail the role of individual factors on student engagement with grammar in this study. The findings also share how students thought about and used grammar in their writing. Finally, the dissertation reveals how students engaged with the instructional practices, helping map successful and promising areas for effective grammar instruction.
ContributorsScholes, Justin (Author) / Early, Jessica (Thesis advisor) / Saidy, Christina (Committee member) / Graham, Steve (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2022
Description
This qualitative case study explores the experience of three first-year English language arts educators within a small community of practice designed to provide personal and professional support for beginning teachers. The participants engaged in a 12-week session where weekly meetings, which alternated between workshop and discussion, focused on participant experiences, sustainable teaching practices, and English language arts pedagogy. The study shares the curricular design of the community as well as the issues and ideas that were raised about teaching and the teaching life. Data were collected over the entire 12 weeks as well as in follow-up interviews conducted within four weeks of the last meeting. Data were drawn from the following sources: (1) pre-and-post-community questionnaires, (2) audio recorded meetings, (3) researcher notes and memos, (4) follow-up interviews. Using Wenger’s (1998, 2009) theory of communities of practice as well as sustainable teaching theory (Burns et al., 2018), this study documents the value of early career communities of practice and indicates that early career communities are necessary in light of the emotional dimensions of teaching English language arts, the many aspects of successful teaching that are not covered in teacher preparation programs, and the need for both personal and professional support, camaraderie, and continued learning for beginning teachers.
ContributorsGlerum, Michelle R (Author) / Early, Jessica (Thesis advisor) / Saidy, Christina (Committee member) / Warriner, Doris (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2022
Description
The notion of a teacher is an archaic, dynamic, and diverse concept that is embedded in and therefore revealed in the various complex and coexisting cultural and national contexts, ways of teaching and learning, and the entanglements with beings in multiple worlds. However, under the fundamental impacts of westernization, coloniality, and modernization in the Anthropocene, the concept of a teacher has been endowed with narrow colonial, human-centric, politicalized, as well as vocationalized and secularized connotations. It has been oversimplified to a profession, while other possible interpretations have been omitted and marginalized at the same time. My dissertation questions the implications of the gradual narrowing down of the concept over time and reexamines the concept of a teacher with the aim of ontologically broadening the scope of different connotations and embracing more diverse and inclusive forms as well as contexts of being a ‘teacher.’ In response, this dissertation traces the history, evolution, and cultural contexts of the notion of a teacher in ancient and modern China. It explores the concept of a teacher ontologically through multiple historical and theoretical frames, including decolonial theory in comparative education and several conceptual constructs in Taoism, Confucianism, and posthumanism. Guided by these frames, I introduce innovative (post)qualitative methodologies in data generation and collection, referring to collective re-membering activities, reanimating sense, and speculative fabulation experiences (Haraway, 2013) in terms of “teaching without words/actions,” “sitting and Wu,” and “Ge wu zhi zhi.” This dissertation is designed as a multi-scenario, multi-sense, and multispecies ethnography, and the fieldwork was conducted over three months of summertime in 2022 in a small town and a modern supercity in China. Using a diffractive analysis of memories, stories, and experiences with multiple participants, I attempt to broaden the concept of a teacher by presenting a variety of coexisting conceptualizations of the term and bringing into focus multiple ways of teaching, learning, and being a teacher.
ContributorsJiang, Jieyu (Author) / Silova, Iveta (Thesis advisor) / Goebel, Janna (Committee member) / Wu, Jinting (Committee member) / Anderson, Kate (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2023
Description
The purpose of this mixed-methods action research study was to understand how a knowledge-building intervention changes the perception of rural high school juniors on the perception of staying local for college after high school. This study also investigates the ways in which participants used their social capital to begin to change the stigma of staying local for college. The intervention in this study was conducted at a public high school over 5 weeks with 21 high school juniors. College choice models, Social Influence Theory, and social capital theory framed the intervention. After the intervention, the scores for participants’ knowledge of the local university doubled on average, and every participant reported an increase in perception of the local rural university as a college choice for themselves or their peers. Participants reported a willingness to recommend the university to their peers. For students to make informed decisions about college choice, they must have adequate and accurate information. Research-based, targeted sessions delivered by dynamic college representatives or student ambassadors may increase knowledge and perception.
ContributorsLowder, Jenna L (Author) / Marsh, Josephine P (Thesis advisor) / Ross, Lydia (Committee member) / Mann, Cristen (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2022