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Descriptive Inquiry at Bank Street: Building Intellectual Community while Responding to Accreditation
Get PDFOver the 2016-17 academic year, Bank Street Graduate School faculty and staff participated in a school-wide Descriptive Inquiry process to examine their programs and pedagogy. As part of the process, faculty met regularly to share their practices and to strengthen their well-established programs in teacher and leader preparation, museum education, and child life. Dean Cecelia Traugh initiated this process, drawing on her extensive experience implementing Descriptive Inquiry in higher education settings, in order to help faculty reflect on their practice, improve program quality, and build organizational coherence.https://educate.bankstreet.edu/faculty-staff/1014/thumbnail.jp
Making Room for Bilingual Education: A Mexican-American Study
Get PDFThis Independent Study aims to explain, through the author\u27s new understandings, the political underpinnings and concrete effects of the English-only movement that practically eliminated bilingual education programs in the public school systems of California and Arizona in 1998 and 2000 respectively. Through a review of the pertinent literature, this review presents a broad history of bilingual education in the United Sates, and the negative effects English-only legislation has had on the linguistic, academic and social development of immigrant children in California and Arizona. As the United Sates\u27 social and racial composition has changed in the last decades, the battle against language diversity can be understood as a surrogate fight for racial discrimination. This work hopes to demonstrate how although masked as concern for immigrant children learning English, the dismantling of bilingual education programs is a purposeful attempt at disenfranchising and disempowering immigrant groups
Sharing our Stories: A Personal Narrative Literacy Curriculum for Grades 3-5
Get PDFThis thesis began out of my curiosity about the ways to set up a classroom to best support growing readers and writers. As my exploration into literacy continued, I decided to create a personal narrative unit with several foundational literacy skills, strategies, and practices for students to develop. With variety, authenticity, and modeling as the key pillars in planning, alignment to skills and standards will be embedded in genuine literacy experiences. The choice to engage in a genre study of personal narrative was due to its developmental appropriateness, potential for community building, and opportunity to share a range of stories. Using resources from The No-Nonsense Guide to Teaching Writing (Davis & Hill, 2003), Classrooms that Work: They Can All Read and Write (Cunningham & Allington, 2016), and The Continuum of Literacy Learning: Grades PreK-8 (Fountas & Pinnell, 2011) as foundations, an adaptable, six-week curriculum is suggested
L’dor vador: Storytelling for the holiday cycle in a Jewish early childhood setting
Get PDFStorytelling is an effective and appropriate method of engaging young children in complex concepts such as values and ethics. This paper provides rationale for using storytelling in an early childhood setting, background information on Jewish holidays, and highlights the values in the stories told during those holidays. It includes synopses of stories told through original storytelling, descriptions of activities incorporated in the experiences, as well as children’s responses and photographs of children’s work
Patriotism and Dual Citizenship
Get PDFI am a citizen of two countries—the United States and Mexico—and I have a deep love of both, for different reasons. I believe that being a citizen of two countries allows me to be a partial outsider in each, which perhaps gives me an uncommon perspective on both. I know that there are those who argue that it’s impossible to be truly loyal to one country if one is also a citizen of another, and there are those for whom any criticism of one’s country is tantamount to treason. I reject both of those positions.
First, I believe that a patriot is a person who loves his or her country and therefore wants it to be the best it is capable of being. The United States has been the leader of the free world for most of the time that the majority of us alive today have existed. This sets a unique standard. I believe this means that we should not only be the best we can be for ourselves, but that we should also set an example for those we would lead. Importantly, to be a good leader, it is essential to know something about those one is leading. In other words, it is helpful to know what makes other countries good, or even best, at some things in order to build on those strengths and perhaps adopt them whenever possible, as well as to lead in a way that acknowledges the strengths of others. This, in my mind, is precisely why promising to “Make America Great Again” is antithetical to true leadership. Making America “great” without helping those we hope to lead also be “great” is the very abandonment of leadership and therefore false patriotism
A Love-Hate Relationship: Personal Narratives of Pride and Shame as Patriotic Affects
Get PDFThe Office of Alumni Relations for George Mason University—in Fairfax, Virginia, where I teach—is located centrally on the campus. The exterior of the building faces a busy walkway, displaying in vinyl lettering the official slogan of the university’s alumni association: “once a Patriot, always a Patriot.” This motto refers to the university’s Patriot mascot and implies that once a person joins the university as a student, that person becomes a Patriot and will forever remain a Patriot, which, the alumni office presumably hopes, will result in feelings of goodwill that prompt generous financial contributions from alumni donors.
In considering the questions posed to authors for this issue of the Bank Street Occasional Paper Series, I think about the way the alumni association slogan performs its own assumptions of patriotism: because you are a (George Mason) Patriot, you must feel things for the university as a (George Mason) Patriot. Patriotism works as a kind of sociocultural cement to bond and hold members of pluralistic communities, nations, and states together (Soutphommasane, 2012; Taylor, 2002). Identifying the bonding agents that activate the properties of patriotism as a type of cement can help explain how patriotism works
A Case for the Inclusion of Graphic Novels in the Classroom
Get PDFThis paper will explore the use of graphic novels in the context of the classroom, ultimately arguing that graphic novels not only deserve a place in elementary through high school classrooms, but are an effective and successful learning tool. The paper is divided into four central arguments utilizing a review of relevant literature to support each section’s argument. It will begin with an examination of the motivation for the paper’s creation, detailing the circumstance unto which the author of this paper decided to write it. The paper will then move into the four central parts. Part one will examine research findings linking motivation with reading attainment. It will then relate this link to subsequent research conducted utilizing graphic novels as a motivator for students across grade levels. Then, the paper’s second section will draw upon the emerging importance of multimodal literacy within the context of the 21st century and will detail graphic novels’ role as a multimodal medium in preparing children to analyze and synthesize information delivered through multimodalities. Next, the paper’s third section will address a variety of literacy skills and strategies that students encounter and gain mastery of throughout their schooling. The section will subsequently utilize research that tracked student attainment and use of these skills and strategies through classroom use of graphic novels. Finally, the paper’s fourth section will detail content subjects, including math, science and social studies. It will explore research conducted to use graphic novels in these areas to support and extend student learning. Ultimately, the paper will conclude that graphic novels are a valuable learning tool for the classroom
Following the Money: Exploring Residency Funding through the Lens of Economics
Get PDFFollowing the Money digs into how the system for funding teacher preparation fuels a host of shortcomings: subpar routes to teaching, inadequate practice before entering the classroom, shortages in high need areas, underprepared teachers. Following the Money finds that financial barriers limit our ability to grow to a universally high-quality teacher preparation system, calling for a stronger knowledge base about the economics of teacher preparation to understand how we can realize the quality we need.https://educate.bankstreet.edu/faculty-staff/1016/thumbnail.jp
The Representation of Multiracial People in America with a Focus on Children’s Literature
Get PDFData continues to show that people who claim two or more races are amongst the fastest growing subset of the U.S. population. According to the 2010 Census, nearly half of the respondents identifying as multiracial are under the age of eighteen. This paper examines the representation of mixed race people in America through an historical examination of how they were racially classified, interviews, with a focus on racial identity development, and an analysis of picture books featuring multiracial main characters. While American society as whole is becoming more accepting of mixed race people, there are still considerable gaps in the accurate representation of mixed race people in popular culture and media. Being mixed race is nearly impossible to capture as a singular experience. Together, the multiple components of this paper offer a dynamic view of what it means to be multiracial in America