Jean C. McPhail

The Role of Interest in Fostering Sixth Grade Students' Identities As Competent Learners

Abstract The combined works of John Dewey and Jerome Bruner provide a framework spanning a century of educational thought which can inform curriculum decisions concerning students’ educational development, especially for middle school students whose waning of motivation toward school has been well documented by researchers and has long concerned parents and teachers. This framework, combined with recent contributions of motivation and interest researchers, can create broad understandings of how to collaboratively construct effective educational contexts. As early as 1913, Dewey specifically looked at the pivotal role of students’ genuine interests in Interest and Effort in Education. Our current research focus on how students’ interest can inform curricular contexts marks the recent shift showing an increased use of interest in education research since 1990. In this article, we discuss our study of a team-taught double classroom of sixth grade students whose interests were determined through a series of brainstorming sessions, and individual and focus group interviews. Students’ interests fell into six categories centering around subject areas such as Drama, Science, and Animal Studies. Learning contexts were constructed around four of these subject areas. Students participated in their first or second choice of subject area group. We found significantly higher scores on measures of Affect and Activation if students participated in their first choice group. We found intra-group unities of preferred and dispreferred ways of learning which distinguished each group from the class as a whole. Finally, our findings indicated that students reliably described their genuine interests over time. Students’ interests were found to be effective tools for informing curriculum decisions in the creation of sixth grade learning contexts.

Adolescents with Learning Disabilities A Comparative Life-Stream Interpretation

The subjective experiences of adolescents with learning disabilities (LD) were compared to those of their low-achieving and normally achieving peers. Three groups of juniors and seniors from one suburban high school district, 18 students with learning disabilities (15 males, 3 females), 17 low-achieving students (12 males, 5 females), and 20 average-achieving students (12 males, 8 females), were given electronic pagers and booklets for 1 week. They were signaled every 40 minutes during school hours, and every 2 hours after school. As soon as possible after receiving a signal, they responded to questions in their booklets. The questions provided subjective measures on levels of affect, activation, cognitive efficiency, self-esteem, motivation, and feedback from others. The students with learning disabilities reported feeling more positive and active than either of the other groups during school hours, while after school there were no differences on any of the subjective measures for the three groups. Specific LD school practices are highlighted for their probable impact on the heightened affect and activation of the students with learning disabilities.

Friendship and Literacy Through Literature

The exploratory research reported in this article was designed to determine the processes and outcomes of planning thematic literacy instruction in a holistic and contextualized manner. The work was conducted in an upper-elementary, self-contained setting for students identified as learning disabled. Specifically, the instructional activities included (a) interactive readings from literature on friendship, (b) personal written responses to the literature, (c) supported retellings of the literature, (d) performance related to the literature, and (e) journal writing on the topic of friendship. The outcomes are reported in terms of the use of intertextuality over the course of the 6-week unit, the emergence of theme as a salient feature in literature, and a change in the childrens conceptions of friendship. More specific literacy outcomes are captured in case studies of 3 children.

Democracy at work in and through experimental schooling

Through an exploration of two experimental schools, Oruaiti (1950s) and Discovery 1 (2000s), we aim to understand the socio-political contexts that create spaces for experimentation and examine their impact on mainstream schooling. Caught between competing, often contradictory, discourses such experiments struggle between the ‘regeneration’ and ‘reproduction’ functions of schooling. However, we argue that while they have limited impact on mainstream school reform, they contribute ideas of a democratic society and its citizenry. Consequently, they provide ‘windows’ into real-life laboratories in which social debates regarding the function and power of schooling, and specific visions of democracy are played out.