Building Racial Justice Into a Master's Program

This chapter describes a five-year equity initiative to transform a language teacher education professional master's program into one that cultivates racial justice and equity-minded practices in graduates. This chapter will review program work over the last five years on two critical efforts involved in the ongoing five-year equity-minded initiatives. The program activities include data review and planning from 2017 to 2018 and equity curricular re-design from 2018 to 2020, where faculty revised program goals, curriculum, and syllabi. Critical race theory and equity-mindedness frameworks guided this equity initiative's process, goals, and content. The authors argue that building racial justice into a professional master's program requires applying a critical race analysis to the normative assumptions about academic program redesign. Individual and institutional challenges are discussed, and recommendations for building racial justice into the curriculum, instruction, and program policies are provided.

Exposing Mental Models to Accelerate Distance Learning Environments

This chapter forms one part in a series of chapters offering recommendations to design effective distance and blended learning. The COVID-19 pandemic has been an unintended catalyst for change in schools. Due to the closing of school buildings in the spring of 2020, school districts were forced to quickly transition to distance learning or blended learning. Even before COVID-19, many districts failed to successfully and systematically implement the new knowledge and skills acquired in these sessions. So, the question is, why has blended and distance learning practices continued to function in pockets throughout a school district and not systematically throughout the school organization? One can argue that full implementation was impeded by the lack of budgetary resources and infrastructure or unaligned curriculum, instruction, and assessments.

Education Quality of Best Public High Schools in South and Central Somalia

The purpose of this study was to explore what nine high school principals did to outperform other schools in the South and Central regions of Somalia. The study highlighted the high school principals’ perception of maintaining education quality concerning curriculum, instruction, and assessment. The study focused on the admission process, teaching, and learning performances of the top nine high schools in South and central Somalia. The methodology of this Qualitative study was descriptive phenomenology. The research design and approach were semi-structured open-ended interview protocol that comprised eight interview questions. Purposeful sampling was the sampling method. Nine principals participated in the study and provided the research data regarding the education quality of nine high schools in Somalia. All nine principals in this study maintained their high schools' education quality using a rigorous admission process. They utilized a government-developed official curriculum. Five principals reported that they employed specialist instructors, while six stated that their students actively participated in the learning process during class time. However, all the participants reported that smartphones hindered student learning. A slight majority of five principals (56%) stated that parental interventions were vital to schools' overall learning achievements. Somalia's public schools are far behind in utilizing effective educational technology. The technological literacy of the teachers is vital to effectively employ the accessible educational technology, which encouraged students to incorporate modern technologies in their learning activities successfully. Rigorous admission process, efficient curriculum, instruction, effective instructional materials, employing professional instructors, and active learning are all important components to maintain education quality.

Teacher collaboration and instructional program coherence across the transition to high school

This study explores to what extent principals perceive instructional program coherence (IPC) and vertical collaboration occur in high schools and their mid-level feeder schools. It also measures IPC and its five components' association with different measures of student achievement. The study took place in the state of Missouri, and 312 principals of high schools with separate feeder middle schools were invited to participate. Electronic and paper surveys as well as public data were collected and analyzed using descriptive statistics, bivariate correlations, and linear regression. The findings show that principals perceive their school's IPC to be fairly strong, but their vertical collaboration needs improvement. The findings also indicate that only particular IPC components such as curriculum, instruction positively influenced graduation rates, academic climate positively influenced the EOC Algebra 1 scores, and vertical collaboration positively associated with higher average freshman GPA's. A major limitation to this study was the low response rate.

Oral History Illustrated by the Case of Cyprus

Oral history offers unique meaning for curriculum studies by presenting, analyzing, and interpreting experiences and memories of participants in an educational situation. The situation and context of Cyprus, an island with protracted conflicts and ethnical division, provides sites of illustration for oral history in curriculum studies. Couched in an historical background of oral history and definitions, as well as characteristics that distinguish it from other forms of narrative inquiry, the essence and application of oral history can be conveyed through the case of Cyprus. Oral history projects undertaken in Cyprus are conveyed, with prominent reference to the Cyprus Oral History Project (COHP), which has delineated the nuances of language, performance, and creation of pedagogical spaces. For example, COHP established a link among oral history, curriculum, instruction, and education, which has been used in Cyprus to understand memory as curriculum and to rethink issues of language and curricular questions in light of the knowledge drawn from oral histories. Further, oral history projects in Cyprus have delineated refugee trauma through the description of loss, painful memories, and silence; how narratives worked as significant evidence and material in conflict and reconciliation workshops; and the importance of the gender lens of oral history in Cyprus. The themes of cultivating historical consciousness, shaping responses to conflict, discomforting pedagogy, memory and trauma, and their role in the reunification process have been explored extensively through such projects; yet, more extensive work needs to be done. The number of oral history projects is still limited, yet there is still so much to be uncovered through people’s narrations. In the case of Cyprus, oral history is considered as a source of information about ordinary people’s lives but also for the role it can play in understanding how being dispossessed and returning to the homeland can reconstruct and reorganize education and culture. The uses of oral history to understand curriculum in Cyprus is offered as an example for modified use for exploring a broader sphere of curriculum studies in other settings.