Revised white paper

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Post here a short description of the changes you plan to make in your Second Year papers.

Sign your posting and separate it from those of others by putting a line with five dashes after your posting. jal

My Second Year paper thoughts are in the form of questions mainly:

  • Focus:
    • Intended audience to be “studied�?
    • Which adult education program? ESL, parent education, literacy, vocational, etc.
    • Could there be “transformative�? adult education without “formal�? education?
  • Critical pedagogy:
    • What outcomes do adult students seek when they participate in critical pedagogy-based classrooms?
    • What does “transformative�? education mean?
    • What does transformative education “liberate�? students from? And where does it liberate them to?
    • What kinds of arguments are made in opposition to critical pedagogy?
  • Adult education programs:
    • What are typical adult literacy/education programs created as a response to a growing workforce and a wave of new immigrants?
    • What is the political nature of adult education programs?
    • Is adult education a double-edged sword?
    • What do adult learners prefer? Functional, skills-based, “results-based�? programs vs. programs that spend time looking at context, and discussing social and political issues?
  • More research questions:
    • What levels of literacy/knowledge/ESL do different workplaces/communities require?
    • Do adults who obtain GEDs, ESL education, etc. find improved work opportunities and professional advancement?
    • What is the political, psychological, social, etc. meaning of “functional literacy�??
    • What are the critiques of “functional literacy?�?
    • What are some of the family literacy practices generated by adults involved in adult education programs?
    • What is the quantitative data that exists on adult education programs (e.g. CASAS: an English test for students in ESL programs.)

Luz

Year 2 paper rewrite outline I created a table to start thinking about this but I couldn't paste it here. So the items that are marked with a + are things I plan to add or expand. I also started this in the form of the dissertation proposal outline, so it overlaps with what I will enter in that section.

Topic: implications of teaching academic discourse to ELL/marginalized populations for teacher ed & professional development

  • Introduction. Set out benefits and constraints of explicit definition & teaching of “academic discourse�?, specially for English learners
    • +Examples might change to focus more specifically from outset on genre theory as mediating concept between teacher knowledge and student learning.
    • + Specify target age group(s)
  • Literature Review

In my paper I reviewed three lines of research/theory in this area as related to English learners:

    • • ESP (English for Special Purposes; comes out of TESOL, mostly college aged & adult learners)
    • • SFL (Systemic Functional Linguistics; Australian approach, mostly K-12)
    • • New Rhetoric (primarily N. American university composition programs)

Keep same three bodies of research and expand; emphasize studies that have looked at ELL and identify gaps in our knowledge, especially about actual impact on student learning.

    • + Language ideology: this I believe is one of the gaps. While there is a body of theory-building and some research in this field that incorporates a critical perspective on curriculum design (so that students may ultimately transform as well as reproduce the genres of power), I haven't found as much attention to the actual experiences and perspectives of marginalized students, to teacher language ideology, or to biliteracy. Joining genre theory and language ideology research might be productive.

I'll include my still-gelatinous ideas about a research proposal in the next section.

Cheryl

From both the verbal feedback and the written feedback I received on the second year white paper, as well as spending the summer considering the ideas I was tryiong to formulate in the white paper, I have a list of items that I want to expand or explore in the revision.

1. Questions I had a long laundry list of questions at the end of the paper. As I consider possible research I have begun to select, limit, and refine those research questions. Right now I have three main questions and one really tough question to consider. The main questions are:

  • I. How can the professional development of pre-service teachers be enhanced?
    • a. By using collaborative inquiry groups (teaching study groups, similar to Lesson Study groups).
    • b. Does participating in an online community support this development?
    • c. Does reflecting on video of their own practice within this collaborative community have an effect? Does there need to be a combination of face-to-face and online interaction?
  • II. Will engaging in collaborative inquiry (in a study group) around video of their own practice (and the practice of peers) increase pre-service teacher expertise in classroom practice?
    • a. As measured by a valid, reliable, authentic measurement instrument.
  • III. Does the capabilities of the technical application have an impact on the collaboration?


2. Metaphors I had several metaphors in the paper that I liked, but came back with some questions. I need to review these and decide if they need to be cleaned up, expanded or explained, or just left out.

3. Expand Ideas In several places I stated some ideas, either from my own thoughts or from the references. I had comments on these ideas asking for more information. So I think that I just need to write more around these thoughts to get the ideas more fully developed. I need to use these ideas to create an complete image in the reader’s mind.

4. Research I need to include more research about Lesson Study, collaborative inquiry of teacher groups. Also I need to explore the effects of technology on professional development, such as online communities and just technology ion general.

Chris


Feedback from the second year paper tells me that the two main criteria I need to address (or better address) are the following:

• Define (or better define) the term "urban". This was avoided by many of the researchers whose work I read, and also is avoided by most government and school agencies. However, if I am going to investigate the development of successful urban teachers, I need to find a way to define the term.

• What is the role of content? Much of the literature that I reviewed looked at the affective aspects of effective urban teachers, but little investigated their content and pedagogical knowledge. I know that there is fairly extensive research investigating the correlation between teacher content and/or pedagogical knowledge and student achievement... I need to find where the overlap is (assuming there is one) between the studies of teachers of general populations and teachers of urban populations.


As far as research design... I am most interested in investigating the long-term development process of effective urban teachers by studying a core group of effective urban teachers using a focus group approach similar to the focus group studies used by both Ladson-Billings and Nieto. Ladson-Billings's study of successful teachers of African-American students provides a strong model for identifying potential participants in the focus group-- Looking at the overlap between effective teachers as identified by high school students (Ladson-Billings used parents to identify effective teachers, but at the high school level, I feel that students might provide a more appropriate barometer) and those identified by administrators.

Clearly this is still in the development stages... Suggestions are welcome.

Heather

Revisions to be added to my second year paper


Additions to Lit. Review

Section One: Characteristics of successful learners

Confidence

Level of participation

Literacy

Academic achievement: scores, grades, teacher perception, self-perception, enrollment in college, completion of academic degree

Section Four: The effects of non-fluent language users on linguistic and cognitive development

Studies of the effects of child care givers as language models or non-fluent signers in deaf classrooms leads to the inference that if an interpreter’s ASL skills are limited = deaf/hard of hearing student’s learning of language and content is hindered.

Section Five: Academic discourse

Social nature of learning

What are typical discourse patterns in deaf classrooms when the teacher and students are native users of sign language? Are they comparable to those identified by Mehan, Cazden, Heath, etc.?

Melissa

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