Innovation Showcases
Asynchronous Session
Success for All and How We Get There View Digital Media
Innovation Showcase Samuel Mitchell
Those on the spectrum can be successful if given the correct opportunities and chances. Sam runs his own podcast called, Autism Rocks and Rolls. It has grown over the last three years and has become very, very successful. Podcasting was an outlet for Sam. It actually saved his life. All self-taught, Sam wants to share what worked for him while he built his podcast and nonprofit and to spread the message that the definition of success is in the eye of the beholder. Sam has a mission: To take the stigma off of autism and show people that he is not broken, therefore, embracing autism. Sam is not ashamed and wants to be the voice of those with autism or other disabilities. His podcast helped him be successful and is helping him change the world just a little bit at a time.
Storytelling Through Polaroid Photography View Digital Media
Innovation Showcase Brandon Gilbert
The significance of polaroid photography is attributed to the mediums ability to capture the world exactly as it appears to the child. A child who is given the freedom to orchestrate autonomously their own photo shoot has license to capture their vision in a single frame. Polaroid photography as a method for connecting with art and maybe some learning. I have recorded a preschool classroom during their free choice time, observing the images children will photograph, what language are they using, if any as the witness the instantaneous results of the camera, concept of retelling strategies through their instamatic photographs. These analyses are done through Qualtrics, an online pre and post survey that will be anonymous. This survey of college student’s offers perspective on the preschool activities done in our university classroom time. My hope is these future teachers will be able to manifest a qualitative appreciation for the process of young children classroom activities, thereby doing, develop a growing aesthetic for activity critique. It is my rationale that those who can access for themselves the visual beauty of something they have created, that they are better equipped to understand the work, precision, time, and effort utilized by others to create effective preschool lessons. Using surveys for future teachers to assess and critique their own creative activity capabilities will inspect their preschool classroom creative play hands on experiences.
Fostering Pedagogical Content Knowledge Through Co-teaching: A Multiliteracies Approach to Cultural Studies Curriculum Design View Digital Media
Innovation Showcase Trevor Aleo, Niki Kiviat
Recent scholarship in professional learning and curriculum inquiry suggests that educators’ understanding of pedagogical content knowledge leads to improved learning outcomes for students and professional growth for teachers. We hypothesize that a co-teaching model between a disciplinary expert and learning designer well-versed in multiliteracies theory and pedagogy offers unique affordances in the creation of cultural studies curriculum and construction of pedagogical content knowledge. Disciplinary experts, characterized by their mastery of the cognitive processes and social practices of their field, often struggle to recognize the very knowledge structures and schema that allow them to reason through complex problems in their domain. By engaging in a process of collaborative sensemaking with a learning designer, disciplinary experts can better recognize the patterns, structures, and threshold concepts of their field, and co-construct learning experiences that scaffold students’ disciplinary learning. Such approaches allow for meaningful disciplinary inquiry and the creation of points of entry into practitioners’ otherwise abstruse knowledge structures and discursive practices. The action-research undertaken during a three-week Italian Cultural Studies course provides insight into the respective strengths of the experts, as well as what is required of each co-teacher (and by extension, the student) to make sense of the content or learning experience in question. Moreover, it suggests such partnerships offer distinctive advantages in the fostering of the learning designer’s content knowledge, the disciplinary expert’s pedagogical knowledge, and the co-construction of pedagogical content knowledge that can inform future curriculum and instructional development within the discipline.
