Shelley Zion

Igniting the Fire Within Marginalized Youth: The Role of Critical Civic Inquiry in Fostering Ethnic Identity and Civic Self-Efficacy:

Critical Civic Inquiry (CCI) is a transformative student voice initiative that engages students in critical conversations about educational equity and inquiry-based learning to increase student voice and promote civic action. A quasi-experimental study was conducted to assess if participation in CCI increased the psychological empowerment (as measured through ethnic identity and civic self-efficacy) of high school students. Students who participated in CCI pedagogy reported increases in ethnic identity and civic self-efficacy. These findings indicate the importance of supportive adult relationships, inquiry-based learning, and critical conversations about social and educational inequities in promoting the psychological empowerment of marginalized students.

Deepening Culturally Responsive Understandings within a Teacher Preparation Program: It's a Process.

Given the crucial issues of disproportionality and the growing diversity of our K–12 student population it is imperative that today’s classroom teachers be prepared to critically examine, reflect on and respond to practices for learners with diverse needs and from diverse backgrounds. While effective teachers are the key to meeting the needs of diverse learners and critical in preparing these learners for the twenty-first century, teacher preparation programs must examine how equipped they are in modeling and teaching culturally responsive practices. For one teacher preparation program in the western United States, integrating culturally responsive content and learning experiences into course and field work meant that every aspect of the urban, elementary and secondary and special education programs warranted attention. Informed by an external evaluation of their program that highlighted: a near absence of community-based learning experiences for teacher candidates, a glaring concern regarding our limited conceptualization of social justice and diversity, and a need for enhanced efforts at recruitment of diverse teacher candidates, faculty first began by increasing their own knowledge about culturally responsive teaching. The authors describe how professional development was designed and implemented and ensuing programmatic changes.

Critical Friends’ Perspectives on Problems of Practice and Inquiry in an EdD Program

Conversations continue to evolve within the Carnegie Project on the Education Doctorate (CPED) regarding the nature of the dissertation in practice and the associated inquiry skills/coursework (Carnegie Project on the Education Doctorate, 2012). Questions abound, for example, regarding the nature, scope, impact, and format of the dissertation in practice. Because the approach to this culminating project diverges across institutions of higher education involved in the CPED consortium and because there is a commitment to allow flexibility to institutions to address their unique contexts, it is unclear what research/inquiry experiences and coursework are needed to support Doctor of Education (EdD) students to carry out the dissertation in practice with rigor and in a manner that truly develops scholarly practitioners who contribute to advancing problems of practice in contexts such as schools, districts, and community-based organizations.