544 research outputs found
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Intentional Touch in the Preschool Classroom: A Teacher’s Influence
No full textThis study examines the influence of a teacher’s intentional-positive physical touch on four children in a public preschool classroom in rural Maine. Children were not physically touched by the teacher for two weeks and then, following an intentional-positive touch script, the teacher engaged in intentional-positive touch with the children for four weeks. Data was collected broken into six categories: Intentional-Negative, Intentional-Neutral, Intentional-Positive, Unintentional-Negative, Unintentional-Neutral, and Unintentional-Positive. At the end of six weeks children were engaging in less Intentional-Negative touches. Unintentional-Neutral touches almost doubled and Intentional-Positive touches increased steadily in the female students
The Products of Intertextuality: The Value of Student Adaptations in a Literature Course
No full textThe essay explores a pedagogy of adaptation that focuses on examining intertextuality and engaging students in textual production through the creation of an adaptation. The paper discusses the success of assigning an adaptation project in an upper-level, third-year literature course taught at a small university. It examines student adaptations of writings by William Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, Mary Shelley, and Ben H. Winters and of existing film adaptations of Sense and Sensibility and Frankenstein. I link student projects to critical concepts such as re-vision and multimodality, and disciplines such as literary studies and the digital humanities. I also analyze how the projects reflect students\u27 interests in popular culture and fandom
The Impact of Curriculum and Coaching Supports in Supporting Quality Improvement in Classrooms
No full textThe purpose of this mixed methods study was to examine how a change in the preschool curriculum and the use of coaching supports to help teachers implement the new curriculum influences process quality as measured by the Classroom Assessment Scoring System (CLASS) Tool. CLASS scores for six classrooms were examined over a three year time period as classrooms moved from using the Creative Curriculum to the OWL Curriculum. Teacher surveys gathered information about how they thought the curriculum impacted their teaching practices. The results showed that overall the average CLASS scores in each domain, increased over three years
The Relationship Between Homework Completion, Perceptions of Homework Importance, and Technology
No full textThe purpose of this mixed-methods research was to examine homework completion rates and student perception of homework value in one middle school mathematics classroom. Twenty-four 7th grade students from Windham Middle School participated in two conditions, and completed a pre- and post-survey regarding homework perceptions. The study was designed to compare traditional homework to iPad-based homework. The first condition was four weeks of paper and pencil homework, and the second condition was three weeks of iPad homework using the online math program IXL. Homework completion rates indicated that paper and pencil homework was completed more often than IXL homework. Survey results showed a student preference for paper and pencil over IXL. This research encourages conversations with colleagues, administrators, and students about the use of homework and professional development around designing effective homework. Further research is needed in the area of IXL effectiveness and general homework effectiveness
Peer Mentoring As An Intervention For Ninth Grader Transition To High School
No full textThis study will gather data on the “Kick-Off” peer mentoring program used in two Maine schools and determine if the programs have improved school culture, attendance and decreased number of failures in the freshman class they seek to aid. This is a mixed methods study where qualitative data was acquired from administrator interviews regarding school culture and the quantitative portion uses survey data from staff regarding attendance and course failures. While the program solves many issues that hinder ninth graders, the program has little observable impact on attendance and grades. The greatest result is improving culture and student connections to the school
Impacts of the Implementation of Standards-Based Education on Teacher Practice
No full textIn schools where standards based teaching and assessing have been officially implemented, what effects has it had on teacher practice? The purpose of this study was to examine the effects a standards based educational curriculum has had on teacher practice. Data was collected using an anonymous survey. Five hundred and one teachers were sent the survey and there were twenty eight responses. The researcher found a very diverse reaction from teachers with some finding very dramatic changes to their practice, such as addition time needed for preparation, More professional development needed, and less content being taught, while others have not reported significant changes at all
Juan de Segovia and the Fight for Peace : Christians and Muslims in the Fifteenth Century
No full textJuan de Segovia (d. 1458), theologian, translator of the Qur\u27ān, and lifelong advocate for the forging of peaceful relations between Christians and Muslims, was one of Europe\u27s leading intellectuals. Today, however, few scholars are familiar with this important fifteenth-century figure. In this well-documented study, Anne Marie Wolf presents a clear, chronological narrative that follows the thought and career of Segovia, who taught at the University of Salamanca, represented the university at the Council of Basel (1431–1449), and spent his final years arguing vigorously that Europe should eschew war with the ascendant Ottoman Turks and instead strive to convert them peacefully to Christianity. What could make a prominent thinker, especially one who moved in circles of power, depart so markedly from the dominant views of his day and advance arguments that he knew would subject him to criticism and even ridicule? Although some historians have suggested that the multifaith heritage of his native Spain accounts for his unconventional belief that peaceful dialogue with Muslims was possible, Wolf argues that other aspects of his life and thought were equally important. For example, his experiences at the Council of Basel, where his defense of conciliarism in the face of opposition contributed to his ability to defend an unpopular position and where his insistence on conversion through peaceful means was bolstered by discussions about the proper way to deal with the Hussites, refined his arguments that peaceful conversion was prefereable to war. Ultimately Wolf demonstrates that Segovia\u27s thought on Islam and the proper Christian stance toward the Muslim world was consistent with his approach to other endeavors and with cultural and intellectual movements at play throughout his career.https://scholarworks.umf.maine.edu/publications/1074/thumbnail.jp
Using Transformative Experiences in a Science Class to Improve Students’ Conceptual Understanding of Biological Evolution and Promote Meaningful Classroom Experiences.
No full textFor students within a high school science classroom content and understanding can become isolated within classroom walls, with little connection to everyday life. This 8-week mixed-methods study focused on using the Teaching for Transformative Experiences in Science (TTES) model in a 10th grade high school biology classroom in order to provide students with relevant experiences and enhance their understanding of biological evolution. The researcher found that through using the TTES model students’ conceptual understanding of the topic increased, they experienced positive emotions while studying the topic, and made connections to situations outside of the classroom. Further research needs to address how the TTES model could be applied to strengthen transformative experiences more often within all content areas taught at the high school level
Teaching Jane Austen and Her Contemporaries
No full textLITERARY PERIODS REVEAL AS MUCH about the present as the past. Certainly they affect the way we study Jane Austen. As Mary Favret puts it, “To say Austen has a period or belongs to a period, regardless of the exact period attributed to her, is to mark the act of periodizing as a function of the present” (373). Clifford Siskin suggests that the ways in which we “place Austen” in a period or literary context “has always to do with how we place ourselves in relation to the past” (125). While longstanding literary periods shape current reading practices, personal preferences, and professional agendas, scholars such as J. Hillis Miller have recognized the “problematics of periodization” (14).1 For one thing, periodization tends to level history, ideology, and authorship into an ostensible monolith. Particularly in regard to Austen, Favret argues that “periodization sets its objects in the halo of a singular, illuminating present . . . that filters out more complex relationships to time and history” (373). Periodization also separates authors who may have been writing within years of each other into distinct temporal and thematic camps; as a result, periods such as the “long” eighteenth century and Romanticism might not seem to share any characteristics in our students’ eyes. A single classification of Austen as either an author of late eighteenth-century or Romantic literature (or even as a nineteenth-century author) might preclude her from taking part in the overlapping socio-historical and literary contexts that influenced and defined her work. The very “act of periodizing” can pose problems for readers who “might begin to wonder about their explanatory power or their ability to situate someone like Jane Austen in a single moment,” as Favret concludes (373).
In teaching both eighteenth-century and Romantic literature, I have situated Austen in multiple moments. Although many literature courses at my current institution are organized according to periodization, I have considered the challenges that periodization holds for the instruction of authors, such as Austen, who wrote at the culmination of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century.2 In taking my cue from Miriam Wallace and the contributors to Enlightening Romanticism, Romancing the Enlightenment, I have embraced the overlap that occurs when we analyze a work topically and as a part of multiple historical and literary traditions.3 In my experience, Northanger Abbey affords an excellent case study of this strategy. The novel defies simple classification in a single literary period as its own history raises a number of questions about placement. Should we classify Northanger Abbey as a novel from the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century? Is the author a young Austen, or is the novel the product of revision and therefore representative of the more mature writer? Should we read the novel in the vein of an eighteenth-century-inspired moralistic tale, even if it at times makes a mockery of one? Should we study it as a Romantic Gothic novel, even if only in parody? In my estimation, we may read Northanger Abbey as all of the above and more, for these complicating factors enrich the study of the novel in regard to time, genre, and literary influences.
The remainder of this essay addresses how I have taught Northanger Abbey as a crossover text that simultaneously represents intersection and transition between time periods. In labeling Northanger Abbey a “crossover” text I am inspired by Miriam Wallace’s phrase “crossover audiences,” a term that she uses to describe readers who examine texts across two literary periods rather than in separate ones (1). I discuss the complicated nature of periodization as it applies to the teaching of Austen, as well as the benefits of assigning Northanger Abbey at the end of an eighteenth-century course, at the beginning of a Romanticism course, and in the context of a specialized seminar on Austen and her “contemporaries” (a term I negotiate to include her eighteenth-century predecessors and contemporary writers at the start of the nineteenth century).4 I show that assigning Northanger Abbey in multiple courses reinforces what Wallace calls “critical overlap”: a space in which scholar-teachers engage students in multivalent critical dialogue about literary influences and traditions, genres, and the development of authorship across periods (1). This critical overlap ultimately situates Austen’s writings in the context of a wider set of contemporaries and can help students from a variety of disciplines—including English, secondary education in English, and creative writing—see the diverse ways in which her writing responds to literary traditions across multiple time periods