bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Culturally Relevant Pedagogy 20 Years Later: Progress or Pontificating? What Have We Learned, and Where Do We Go?
Authors: Howard Tyrone C. , Rodriguez-Minkoff Andrea C. 
Published: November 2021

Background/Context In this paper, the authors discuss the concept of culturally relevant pedagogy 20 years after its introduction to the professional literature. Purpose/Focus The authors discuss key tenets of culturally relevant pedagogy, examine empirical examples of it, and make recommendations on how the concept may inform and influence the outcomes of culturally diverse students.
Supporting Teachers’ Equity-Oriented Learning and Identities: A Resource-Centered Perspective
Authors: Louie Nicole L. 
Published: November 2021

Background/Context Despite calls for equity in education, the dominant mode of schooling reproduces hierarchies, positioning some students as bright, gifted, or fast learners and others as lazy, in need of remediation, or slow. A number of studies have shown that teachers’ professional communities and networks can address this problem and enhance outcomes for all students. However, more research is needed not only to show the structure of supportive networks but also to explain the mechanisms through which they foster teacher learning. Research Questions This paper addresses three questions: (a) Where do teachers encounter resources that support their engagement with nondominant, equity-oriented teaching practice? (b) What kinds of resources support teachers’ engagement with nondominant teaching practice? and (c) How do different kinds of resources come together to support teachers’ patterns of engagement with communities of nondominant teaching practice? Research Design A multisite case study was conducted over the course of an academic year. The study involved extensive observations in routine teacher meetings and professional development settings, as well as classroom observations and teacher interviews. Participants Participants included 18 mathematics teachers from two diverse urban high schools. The mathematics departments at both schools expressed commitments to professional learning and collaboration in order to better serve their diverse student bodies, in particular, to support students who had previously been unsuccessful. Six teachers were selected as focal teachers for more in-depth observation and interviewing. This paper describes the contrasting cases of four teachers. Findings Two of the focal teachers maintained close engagement with nondominant, equity-oriented practice throughout the period of the study, while two did not. A comparison of teachers’ professional support networks showed that their patterns of engagement were related to their connections to sources outside their school-based communities and the access that these connections provided to four distinct types of resources. The two teachers who maintained their engagement with reforms were found to have abundant and personally significant identity resources, which were critical for their ongoing learning. Although the other two teachers had technical resources for engaging with reforms, they did not have such identity resources. Conclusions/Recommendations Research and practice have tended to focus on technical aspects of teacher learning in service of reform. This paper suggests that teachers need not only more resources, but also more kinds of resources in order to sustain the learning that student-centered, equity-oriented reforms require.
Teach for America Placement and Teacher Vacancies: Evidence from the Mississippi Delta
Authors: Curran F. Chris 
Published: November 2021

Background/Context Teach for America (TFA) represents an influential yet controversial preparation route for new teachers. In recent years, TFA has received criticism from traditionally trained teachers and schools of education on the basis that they are crowding out or taking positions away from non-TFA teachers. Despite this criticism, research on TFA has tended to focus on its impact on student outcomes rather than on its implications for teacher labor markets. Research Questions This study explores the relationship between TFA placement in school districts in the Mississippi Delta and district advertised vacancies to provide the first evidence on the impact of TFA on teacher labor market outcomes. The questions addressed include the following: What is the relationship between TFA presence in a Mississippi school district and the number of district vacancies advertised through the state board of education? Do these relationships vary by characteristics of the vacancy such as grade level or subject area? Setting This study uses data on school districts in the state of Mississippi for an 11-year period from 2001 through 2011. Research Design This study utilizes two primary analytic strategies. The first encompasses school district and year fixed effects with a series of time-varying control variables to identify the impact of TFA placement off changes in the use of TFA by districts over time. The second approach capitalizes on an abrupt increase in the presence of TFA in Mississippi starting in 2009 by using a difference-in-differences design. A series of robustness and sensitivity checks are also included. Findings/Results The results indicate that the presence of TFA in a district predicts approximately 11 fewer advertised vacancies per year per district and that each additional TFA teacher placed in a district predicts approximately one less advertised vacancy. Conclusions/Recommendations The results indicate that in the Mississippi Delta, TFA appears to be filling teacher vacancies. This suggests that the continued use of TFA by districts may be a viable solution to addressing teacher shortages.
Leveraging Big Data to Help Each Learner and Accelerate Learning Science
Authors: Winne Philip H. 
Published: November 2021

Background Today's gold standard for identifying what works, the randomized controlled trial, poorly serves each and any individual learner. Elements of my argument provide grounds for proposed remedies in cases where software can log extensive data about operations each learner applies to learn and each bit of information to which a learner applies those operations. Purpose of Study Analyses of such big data can produce learning analytics that provide raw material for self-regulating learners, for instructors to productively adapt instructional designs, and for learning scientists to advance learning science. I describe an example of such a software system, nStudy. Research Design I describe and analyze features of nStudy, including bookmarks, quotes, notes, and note artifacts that can be used to generate trace data. Results By using software like nStudy as they study, learners can partner with instructors and learning scientists in a symbiotic and progressive ecology of authentic experimentation. Conclusion I argue that software technologies like nStudy offer significant value in supporting learners and advancing learning science. A rationale and recommendations for this approach arise from my critique of pseudo-random controlled trials.
Maya Loves Tubby and you Should Too, If you Want to Understand and Evaluate Children's Math Learning in the Digital Age
Authors: Ginsburg Herbert P. 
Published: November 2021

Background This article describes a detailed, hypothetical, but quite plausible account of how one child, Maya, made use of math learning software on a touch screen device (Tubby). Focus of Study The author discusses the kind of research that is possible and necessary to understand children's learning in the digital age, and how that research can contribute to the development of even more effective educational software, and can also largely eliminate the need for high-stakes testing and standard achievement tests. Research Design Research of this type will require use of complex statistical techniques as well as qualitative methods, such as case studies. The tablet can provide detailed descriptions of children's engagement in the various activities. Tubby can also be used for summative research that provides a valuable portrait of the child's learning over the course of the year. Conclusion Computers can, in principle, engage children in meaningful learning and at the same time provide educators with the tools for understanding, improving, evaluating, and assessing children's learning.
Deciding about College: How Soon is Soon Enough?
Authors: Harding Jeffrey L. , Parker Maggie C. , Toutkoushian Robert K. 
Published: November 2021

Background/Context Prior research has stressed the importance of timing in the college choice process, especially as it relates to receiving early information and making plans and decisions. Little has been done, however, in terms of empirically demonstrating how soon students make their decisions about college and the ways in which the timing of student decisions are related to planning behaviors. Focus of Study This paper examines the relationships between the timing of decisions related to college attendance and outcomes such as aspirations, course-taking patterns in high school, and eventual college application. It also considers how the timing and various sources of information are related to when students make these decisions. Research Design This study provides secondary statistical analysis of data obtained from a statewide survey of high school seniors in New Hampshire during the spring of the 2004– 2005 school year. Conclusions/Recommendations Findings suggest that the dominant model of college choice involving predisposition, search, and choice should be updated to acknowledge that predisposition may begin much earlier than the literature has typically considered. To wit, many students begin gathering information and making decisions about postsecondary education as early as elementary school. Additional resources should be dispatched to address the needs of economically disadvantaged and first-generation students who often lack the types of human, social, and financial capital needed to make the most of their early educational opportunities.
“That's Where the Rubber Meets the Road”: The Intersection of Special Education and Dual Language Education
Authors: Kangas Sara E. N. 
Published: November 2021

Background English language learners (ELLs) with special needs remain an underresearched student population. Although providing services to these students proves to be a daunting task, bilingual schools are uniquely poised to meet the educational needs of ELLs with special needs. Yet, research has not explored service provision practices in bilingual contexts for ELLs with special needs. Purpose of Study This study examined the service provision practices of a bilingual school for ELLs with special needs and how these practices shaped the educational opportunities of these students. Research Design This study is an ethnographic case study of a charter bilingual elementary school. Data Collection and Analysis Fieldwork lasted for a majority of one academic year with the following data collected: classroom observations, interviews with staff, participation in meetings and informal conversations with staff, and school artifacts. The data were analyzed through an intersectionality framework, examining how disability and primary language resulted in multiple disadvantages for ELLs with special needs. Findings That data analysis revealed how providing services to ELLs with special needs is fraught with challenges and compromises. Specifically, despite the school's commitment to bilingualism, ideological and material conditions in the school worked in concert to restrict the access of ELLs with special needs to bilingual and academic support. The findings also illuminated how in an attempt to provide services, the school was enacting a de facto policy that both disregarded the bilingual development of ELLs with special needs and misappropriated effective models of bilingual and special education. Conclusions/Recommendations The study argues that when schools prioritize language and special education services in parity, educational opportunities for ELLs with special needs will improve. This study also asserts that the educational opportunities of ELLs with special needs are contingent upon the implementation of bilingual and special education programs with fidelity. Thus, to best prepare schools to serve ELLs with special needs, teacher education programs need to dedicate more attention to developing in-service and preservice teachers’ interdisciplinary knowledge about these students and their educational needs and rights.
Crafting Legitimacy in District–Community Partnerships
Authors: Lechasseur Kimberly 
Published: November 2021

Background/Context Partnering across districts, schools, and other community organizations has become ubiquitous as a policy for promoting change. Despite growing attention to and scholarship on district–community partnerships, there is little examination of the organizational mechanisms involved in sustaining them. Purpose/Objectives This study examines the ways in which district–community partnerships establish and sustain legitimacy with multiple constituencies over time. Drawing on institutional theory, these analyses extend current theories of legitimation by describing the legitimacy-building events of districts and their community partners as they craft partnerships over time. Research Design I used a qualitative multi-case-study design to build grounded theory based on three district–community partnerships. Interviews with partnership leaders, focus groups with governance team members, and observations were collected between 2012 and 2014. Thematic analysis was conducted within and across the three cases to identify legitimacy-building activities. Findings/Results Five mechanisms for building legitimacy emerged across the three district–community partnerships: funder endorsement, attention to reciprocity, service provision, dedicated formal staff roles, and a systems-building approach. Each mechanism was deployed across the stages of partnership (e.g., identity formation, recruitment, sustainability). These mechanisms were used to leverage legitimacy with one stakeholder group to build new legitimacy with other stakeholder groups, creating complex chains of legitimacy across partners over time. Conclusions/Recommendations The findings extend current research on both legitimacy frameworks and the use of community partnerships in education reform. Themes across cases highlight the recursive nature of legitimacy during the recruitment of new partners, how partnerships can build legitimacy across cultural divides, and the role of external funders in supporting legitimacy building across multiple sets of stakeholders.
Flows of Literacy across Corporate and User-Produced Virtual Worlds
Authors: Black Rebecca W. , Alexander Jonathan , Korobkova Ksenia A. 
Published: November 2021

Background/Context Sociocultural research on young people's literate practices with digital media has generally focused on literacy events and practices that are grounded in distinct online locations, such as affinity spaces, specific websites, particular videogames, or virtual worlds. Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study Contemporary media landscapes have become networked to such an extent that a transmedial approach is needed to understand the social, cultural, and literate contexts that young people inhabit. Research Design In this article, we use qualitative and literary analyses of products and artifacts from the Hunger Games media franchise to explore young people's literacy practices as embedded in corporate and fan-produced transmedia ecologies. Conclusions/Recommendations Our analysis looks beyond spatial and structural boundaries to understand how flows of corporate and user-produced artifacts can shape, constrain, and expand young people's literate repertoires.
Games as Distributed Teaching and Learning Systems
Authors: Gee Elisabeth , Gee James Paul 
Published: November 2021

Background Videogames and virtual worlds have frequently been studied as learning environments in isolation; that is, scholars have focused on understanding the features of games or virtual worlds as separate from or different than “real world” environments for learning. Although more recently, scholars have explored the teaching and learning that take place around games and virtual worlds, for example, in affinity spaces, these too have been treated as separate and often divorced from other learning experiences. Purpose Our goal in this article is to describe learning from experience, the nature of digital games, and distributed systems of teaching and learning in an integrated way that transcends dichotomies of online and offline activities or spaces. Research Design This article offers a theoretical framework in which to understand some aspects of teaching and learning outside of school today. Drawing on contemporary theories of how the mind works, we identify the central role of embodied experience in human thought and learning. We use videogames as examples of how real and virtual experiences are mediated in similar ways by good tools and social interactions. We argue that videogames and virtual worlds offer opportunities for new types of “conversations” with other people, with virtual worlds, and with the “real” world, conversations that extend humans’ abilities to learn from experiences. We then examine how experiences with games and virtual worlds are located and interpreted within broader, dynamic systems of social relations, technologies, practices, teaching, and learning. Conclusions Understanding our experiences with videogames and virtual worlds as distinctive forms of conversations with the world, situated within distributed teaching and learning systems, offers us a new means of understanding their potential significance in people's lives for learning, belonging, and problem solving.
How We Live Now: “I Don't Think There's Such a Thing as Being Offline”
Authors: Carrington Victoria 
Published: November 2021

Background/Context Distinctions, real and conceptual, in being “online” or “offline” have featured heavily in the ways educational researchers have understood and approached research into the lives and practices of young people. Even as we argued that bridges must be built between “on” and “off,” our research has reflected a set of deeply entrenched metaphors about the Internet. Focus of Study This article takes a qualitative approach, using semistructured interviews and object ethnographies within a postphenomenological theoretical frame to explore how contemporary young people understand and experience “the Internet” and “online–offline” alongside their engagement with ubiquitous smartphones. Here, the article positions itself in the emerging new materialism studies alongside speculative realism and posthumanism, but with a particular focus on where the philosophy of technology known as postphenomenology can lead us in our thinking. Research Design The interviews described here were conducted in English and form part of a larger ongoing research project focused on understanding the impacts of mobile digital technologies on young people, including tracking shifts in the metaphors used to explain their everyday lives with digital media. To date, the project includes 41 surveys and a dozen semistructured interviews conducted in person in the United Kingdom and Europe, or, where necessary, via Skype and/or email. The interviews described here were conducted in person in 2015 in England. Analysis was conducted via critical discourse analysis and metaphor analysis. Conclusions The article demonstrates that our dated metaphors of online/offline are no longer fit for purpose when speaking about the activities, practices, beliefs, and priorities of these young women. The views of these young women are illuminating and challenging, and they pave the way for how we might usefully theorize the practices with text and technologies that they carry across different presences.
Monster High as a Virtual Dollhouse: Tracking Play Practices across Converging Transmedia and Social Media
Authors: Wohlwend Karen E. 
Published: November 2021

Background Today, children play in transmedia franchises that bring together media characters, toys, and everyday consumer goods with games, apps, and websites in complex mergers of childhood cultures, digital literacies, consumer practices, and corporate agendas. Recent research on youth videogames and virtual worlds suggests the productive possibilities and tensions in children's imaginative engagements on these commercial playgrounds. Purpose Transmedia websites are conceptualized and analyzed as virtual dollhouses, or assemblages of toys, stories, and imagination that converge digital media, popular media, and social media. In this framing, transmedia websites are not texts to be read but contexts to inhabit. Are virtual dollhouses safe places where children can reimagine the worlds they know and play the worlds they imagine? Are girls doing more than playing simple repetitive games, dressing up avatars, caring for pets, and decorating rooms in virtual dollhouses? Research Design Nexus analysis tracks the histories and social functions of traditional doll-houses, then examines the monsterhigh.com website for these functions and converging practices. In nexus analysis, when practices repeat or support one another across imaginaries, shared normative expectations for ideal players and performances are thickened and amplified. Similarly, conflicting practices create ruptures that disrupt expected trajectories and usual ways of doing things. Nexus analysis of website and game designs and children's YouTube videos identifies repetitions of social practices with the dolls in the commercial website and in child-made films on YouTube social media, making visible the resonances across converging cultural imaginaries as well as ruptures that open opportunities for player agency and redesign. Conclusions As children engage the pretense of virtual dollhouses, they play out blended activities that are at once both simulated and real: dressing their avatars, creating imagined profiles, shopping, playing games, purchasing in-app goods, watching and “liking” videos, recruiting followers/friends, and affiliating with the brand and other fans. These lived-in practices align with particular visions of girlhood that circulate naturalized and normalizing expectations for girls that also converge in these concentrations of media. However, examination of the digital dress-up and online doll play that children produce and share on social media shows that players also make use of the complexity that convergence produces. Children remake imaginaries for their own purposes in ways that both reproduce and rupture these expectations. The analysis points up the need for (a) nuanced and expanded research on children's transmedia engagements, (b) productive play and digital literacies, and (c) critical media literacy in schools.