scholarly journals #GhanaTaughtMe: How Graduate Study Abroad Shifted Two Black American Educators’ Perceptions of Teaching, Learning, and Achievement

10.28945/4424 ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 4 ◽  
pp. 227-244
Author(s):  
Brittany M Williams ◽  
Raven K Cokley

Aim/Purpose: The purpose of this collaborative autoethnographic research study was to explore how a shared Ghanaian study abroad experience would (re)shape how two U.S. first-generation Black women doctoral students understood teaching, learning, and academic achievement. Through our experiences, we reflected on what a reimagining U.S. higher education could look like to facilitate a cultural shift in educational norms. Background: The centrality of whiteness in U.S. education contributes to the learning and unlearning of people of Black students. The promise of Ghana, then, represents a space for revisioning who we are and could be as student affairs and counselor educators through more African ways of knowing. Methodology: Collaborative Autoethnography (CAE) served as the methodology for this study. CAE can be described as a collaborative means of self-engagement (Chang, Ngunjiri, Hernandez, 2013; Chang, 2016) and is an interplay between collaboration, autobiography, and ethnography among researchers (Chang, Ngunjiri, Hernandez, 2013), where researchers’ experiences, memories, and autobiographical materials are gathered, analyzed, and interpreted to gain insight into a particular experience (Chang, Ngunjiri, Hernandez, 2013; Chang, 2016). Contribution: This study nuances ways of knowing and expectations around learning and accomplishment for Black students. This is done through following the journey of two Black women doctoral students in counselor education and student affairs who are deeply aware of the ways their classroom and educative practices contribute to the socialization and learning of Black children. This paper offers strategies for operationalizing more culturally responsive ways of engaging students and of enacting student affairs and counselor educator practices. Findings: The findings from this study have been synthesized into two major themes: (1) The reimagining of professional preparation; and (2) student and teacher socialization. Together, they reveal ways in which inherently Ghanaian practices and techniques of teaching and learning contribute to increased student engagement, educational attainment, and success. Recommendations for Practitioners: Higher education practitioners should consider how to apply Ghanaian principles of success and inclusion to ensure students can participate in campus programs and initiatives with minimal barriers (financial, social, and emotional) through collective commitment to inclusion, centering non-western constructs of time so that students have flexibility with institutional engagement, and design support systems for student leaders where collective rather than individual accomplishments are centered. Recommendation for Researchers: Researchers should consider shifting the centrality of positivist notions of scholarship in publication and research pipelines so that inherently African ways of knowing and being are included in the construction of knowledge. Impact on Society: This study has societal implications for the P-20 educational pipeline as it pertains to Black students and Black education. Specifically, there are implications for the many ways that we can affirm Black brilliance in U.S. public school settings, by acknowledging what and how they come to know things about the world around them (e.g., via singing, dancing, poetry, questioning). In terms of higher education in the U.S., this study calls into question how we, as educators and practitioners, position Black students’ ancestral knowledges as being both valid and valuable in the classroom. Future Research: Future researchers may wish to examine: (1) the direct suggestions for what inclusive education can look like from Ghanaians themselves as outsiders looking into U.S. education; (2) exploration of Black American and Ghanaian student perspectives and perceptions on teaching and learning in their respective countries, and (3) exploration of a broader range of Black people's voices including those of Black LGBT people, Black trans women, and non-millennial Black educators, for insight into making educational spaces more inclusive, transformative, and affirming.

10.28945/2679 ◽  
2003 ◽  
Author(s):  
ME Herselman ◽  
HR Hay

Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) are the major driving forces of globalised and knowledge-based societies of a new world era. They will have a profound impact on teaching and learning for two decades to come. The revolutionary change which is taking place in Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), has dramatic effects on the way universities carry out their functions of teaching, learning and research, particularly on the creation, dissemination and application of knowledge. These developments pose unprecedented challenges to higher education institutions (HEIs) in developing countries particular in South Africa as South Africa is viewed as the leading country on the continent.


2021 ◽  
Vol 66 (1) ◽  
pp. 135-155
Author(s):  
Diana-Crina Marin ◽  
Mușata Bocoș

"In the context in which the teaching, learning, and assessment processes take place in the online environment, the question arises whether the currently organized learning situations are as effective as the learning situations carried out in the classroom, before the beginning of the pandemic. One of the disadvantages of online learning is related to the teacher’s low control over students’ activity. Factors such as initiative, creativity, efficient time management, intrinsic motivation, responsibility, and intellectual curiosity play an important role in students’ success in learning activities. Attendance at courses should not be formal and superficial and should be a process that involves the active and interactive participation of the students in the learning process. Providing high-quality educational opportunities to all students is a goal that is increasingly difficult to achieve in the context of the absence of face-to-face interactions. Also, applying a curriculum focused on the needs of the learner is becoming hard to achieve. Through this research, we aim to investigate issues related to how online learning takes place and to establish ways in which we can increase the efficiency of current teaching and learning processes. The study revealed that in the opinion of most of the students, the current epidemiological context has influenced in a negative way the quality of teaching and the student-teacher educational relationship. Keywords: Interactive learning, eLearning, independence in learning, higher education, efficient strategies "


Author(s):  
Mediha Sarı ◽  
Buket Turhan Türkkan ◽  
Ece Yolcu

Engaging in business life actively with industrialization, modernism movements and making a significant improvement in getting higher education degrees, the women’s getting postgraduate degrees –especially seen as a very challenging and demanding pathway by many people- has various effects on their social lives. The aim of this study was to analyze the interaction between doctoral process and women’s gender roles in daily life. The design of the study was qualitative interview-based and to collect the data semi-structured interviews were conducted. Participants were chosen among the volunteer women doctoral students in Cukurova University. The data collected was analyzed with content analysis. The findings revealed there are many advantages and disadvantages reflected on the women doctoral students’ lives through their doctorate regarding gender roles and they had a lot of difficulties through this process. They put forward recommendations related to various points such as providing equality of women and men and having support mechanisms in order to overcome these inequality related problems. Although they got both support and criticism regarding doing doctorate, women doctoral students have many reasons for doing doctorate which engage them into a devoted endeavor in a sense to get higher education and join more actively in business life.


Author(s):  
Michael Crock ◽  
Janet Baker ◽  
Skye Turner-Walker

This chapter analyses the history of, and future directions for, higher education studies undertaken through Open Universities Australia (OUA), Australia’s unique higher education conduit. Founded to provide open access to units that allow individuals to undertake individual units or achieve qualifications from leading Australian universities, and supported by a federal government student loans scheme, OUA’s experience and future plans provide significant insight into the potential and pitfalls of the technological innovation in both higher education distance, and increasingly, on-campus, teaching and learning. The need for an ongoing emphasis on innovation, adaptability, and cooperation in an extraordinarily rapidly changing environment is highlighted.


2015 ◽  
pp. 320-335
Author(s):  
Michael Crock ◽  
Janet Baker ◽  
Skye Turner-Walker

This chapter analyses the history of, and future directions for, higher education studies undertaken through Open Universities Australia (OUA), Australia's unique higher education conduit. Founded to provide open access to units that allow individuals to undertake individual units or achieve qualifications from leading Australian universities, and supported by a federal government student loans scheme, OUA's experience and future plans provide significant insight into the potential and pitfalls of the technological innovation in both higher education distance, and increasingly, on-campus, teaching and learning. The need for an ongoing emphasis on innovation, adaptability, and cooperation in an extraordinarily rapidly changing environment is highlighted.


Author(s):  
Pradeep Tomar ◽  
Shivani Verma

The future of higher education is intrinsically linked with developments on new technologies and computing capacities of the new intelligent machines. In this field, advances in artificial intelligence open to new possibilities and challenges for teaching and learning in higher education with the potential to fundamentally change governance and the internal architecture of institutions of higher education. The role of technology in higher learning is to enhance human thinking and to augment the educational process, not to reduce it to a set of procedures for content delivery, control, and assessment. With the rise of AI solutions, it is increasingly important for educational institutions to stay alert and see if the power of control over hidden algorithms that run them is not monopolized by tech-lords. This chapter will cover all the positive and negative aspects of AI technologies on teaching, learning, and research in higher education.


Author(s):  
Mark R. Schwehn

The argument of this book has been based upon one major assumption, namely that epistemologies have ethical implications, that ways of knowing are not morally neutral but morally directive. Accordingly, the major contrast developed thus far has been between the Weberian epistemology that connects knowledge fundamentally to power, to the prospect of technical mastery of the world, and communitarian epistemologies that connect knowledge fundamentally to understanding, to the pursuit of the truth of matters. This broadly articulated contrast has in turn informed two distinct conceptions of academic life and of the nature and purpose of the academic vocation. On one account, the soul of the university is Wissenschaft, on the other, edification. My discussion, in this epistemological and ethical context, of religious matters, especially the suggestion that certain spiritual virtues are indispensable to learning, has thus far been justified primarily on historical grounds. I have tried to show, first, that the Weberian conception of the academic calling derived in part from a transmutation of religious terms, and second, that for most of Western history religion and higher learning were interdependent in ways that have largely escaped the notice of many present-day analysts of the university. Then, in Chapter 3, I tried to demonstrate that, in spite of the triumph of Weberianism, practices that are central to the academy, such as teaching, learning, and scholarship, still depend for their success upon the exercise of spiritual virtues like charity. If these observations are correct, my analysis and criticism of the current understanding of the academic vocation are not yet complete. For the following questions arise: Why do so many contemporary academics believe that their sense of vocation ought to conform to the ideal type developed by Weber even as they at the same time resonate to the more spiritualized conception of teaching and learning articulated by Parker Palmer? Is there a peculiarly modern and secular spirituality that gives a deep measure of meaning to the academic vocation as Weber described it and at the same time blinds its practitioners to their own necessary reliance upon virtues that are distinctively religious?


2022 ◽  
pp. 76-94
Author(s):  
Nicoleta Duță

This chapter approaches the problematic of communication in teaching-learning activities in higher education during the crisis generated by the COVID-19 pandemic. The authors have proposed to present a theoretical and practical approach to the effective communication in teaching, with the objective of knowing which are the opinions of students on communication skills and motivation of them in the classroom. The study included a total of 261 students from different faculties at the University of Bucharest, who were a Likert-scale survey in the period May -July 2020. Results of the analysis of research data shows that students have seen their ability to concentrate and motivation to perform tasks affected, but they did not leave university. In this respect, most difficulties were in carrying out teamwork than individual. The adaptations made by the university during confinement have been positively appreciated. The research findings coming according to recent studies confirm that without communication the teaching and learning process will not take place.


2020 ◽  
Vol 19 (01) ◽  
pp. 2040023 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mamoun Masoud Abdulqader ◽  
Yousof Zohair Almunsour

This research aims to investigate the effects of social media use on higher education teaching and learning as well as the students’ academic performance. A total of 275 students and faculty members from the College of Computer Science and Information Technology at Imam Abdulrahman Bin Faisal University took part in the study. The participants answered survey questions to analyse information on their use of social media in education and how that has affected their teaching, learning and grades. A majority of the participants reported that they used social media in training. However, they also stated that social media platforms were beneficial in academic matters. The number of participants who stated that the use of social media in learning helped improve their grades was 43%. The other 57% thought that social media had no impact on their grades or had an adverse effect or were undecided.


Author(s):  
Mike Keppell ◽  
Eliza Au ◽  
Ada Ma ◽  
Christine Chan

As teacher-educators, we are acutely aware of our responsibilities in nurturing the knowledge, attitudes, and beliefs of pre-service teachers. As part of our interest in improving our teaching, learning, and assessment practices, we have been participating in an action-research project on technology-enhanced assessment over the last 12 months. Throughout this collaboration, we have become aware of our assessment practices and have been delighted that this has also resulted in a questioning of our current learning design for our modules and further clarity in our own thinking about why we teach the way that we do. The process of action-research has forced us to examine our educational beliefs and how these motivate our teaching and learning. This article focuses on why as teacher-educators it is our obligation to articulate our theories of teaching and learning. It is essential that we articulate these often-implicit theories not only as a means of engaging in dialogue with other teacher-educators, but also as a means of engaging in dialogue with our own students who are pre-service teachers. This cascading waterfall of dialogue and explicitness may allow pre-service teachers to gain insight into the decisions we make as teacher-educators and the rationale we use in our teaching. This obligation has important ramifications for the education of children in the Hong Kong setting, as pre-service teachers may see these explicit rationales as a guide to their own teaching within the early childhood, primary, and secondary settings.


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