Master of Arts in Education
Michigan State University
East Lansing, Michigan, United States
CEP 866: Psychoeducational Interventions for Children and Youth
Professor Matthew Diemer (Summer 2011)
This course focused on the premise that children and youth face a variety of developmental challenges and a variety of external barriers that inhibit the successful resolution of developmental tasks. The coursework sought to help students understand the normative processes of human development in specific contexts in order to provide a conceptual base to help children and youth meet these challenges. A theoretical framework to understanding the best practices for developing child/youth intervention programs was used to address the effect of such challenges on school related success. At the end of the term, students were to develop an intervention program that could be used in an educational setting. The following project focused on youth problem solving.
Term Project Presentation and Brochure
TE 846: Accommodating Differences in Literacy Learners
Professor Paul Crutcher (Summer 2011)
This course sought to enlighten educators to the developmental processes, instructional practices, and assessment principles that contribute to effective learning of reading and writing. Teaching methods for accommodating the different needs of individual literacy learners were examined and then applied to each teacher's specific content area. In the area of music, the focus was on the acquisition of the ability to read music, treating notes and rhythms as parts of a musical sentence, with an end result being fluency in reading. The importance of decoding, word recognition, and prosodic features, such as stress, pitch, and phrasing, were examined and then applied to the process of music reading fluency acquisition in a project involving two sixth-grade choir students.
Term Project Paper and Lesson
ED 800: Concepts of Educational Inquiry
Professor Stephen Wieland (Fall 2011)
This course offered an opportunity to think and exchange ideas about student beliefs about education and the many forms of inquiry related to it. Students examined questions such as: What are education’s purposes, traditions, and characteristic activities? What is most worth knowing and how are individual, institutional, and social views of schooling reconciled? How do we learn, what do we want from teaching, and from education outside of schools? How do conditions of contemporary life influence education? What role does knowledge of human experience unlike our own play in inquiry? What resources are available for making inquiry part of teaching? The following paper examined the importance of self-reflection for the work of educators.
Term Project Paper
KIN 857: Promoting Positive Youth Development Through Sport
Professor Dan Gould (Fall 2011)
This course provided coaches and other individuals, with an understanding of ways to facilitate positive youth and student-athlete development through sport. Students explored the emerging youth development literature that focused on the role that sport and other extracurricular activities play in enhancing positive youth development including attachment to school and educational aspirations, the development of life skills such as initiative, teamwork, emotional control, health, and development. Choir is a team-based activity and the following program focused on building the life skills that are often acquired through sport, to the choir team environment, through a series of team-building, role-play, and problem-solving activities that promote unity.
Term Project Program Plan
CEP 832: Educating Students with Challenging Behavior
Professor Evelyn Oka (Spring 2012)
This course offered positive classroom management strategies that are useful with "tough to teach" students and examined types of behavioral problems that are especially challenging in the classroom: aggressiveness, oppositionality, hyperactivity, and social withdrawal, among others. For each type of problem, students explored research-based practices that have proven successful in the classroom and apply them to simulated cases using a positive behavior support approach. The course also addressed building cooperative working relationships with parents. The following project focused on one particular "tough to teach" student and the plan that was developed and implemented using course strategies and the results and discussion of said program.
Term Project Presentation and Paper
EAD 830: Issues in Urban Education-Racial Achievement Gap
Professor Christopher Dunbar (Spring 2012)
In this course, students examined factors that may contribute to the persistent racial achievement gap. Is it culture, economics, too much television, the culture of African American families, institutional or systemic racism, ill prepared teachers, peer pressure of particular groups of people, or any of a number of excuses/assessments that have been attributed to the racial gap? Those are just sample questions that students had to ponder as they examined their current educational setting in an attempt to better understand the obstacles facing their specific school contexts and diverse student bodies. The coursework below offers insight into what was investigated throughout the semester.
Term Project Paper and Conceptual Map
EAD 850: Issues and Strategies in Multicultural Education
Professor Riyad Shahajahan (Spring 2012)
This course provided an introduction to multicultural education. In the contemporary context, few communities remain untouched by the demographic shift that is transforming the globe into a multicultural society. These historical, transnational, and contemporary changes require us as educators to think differently and critically question our personal identities, assumptions, and values about diversity and whose/what knowledge counts in broader society. The work below represents the importance of gaining the critical self-reflection/critical lens necessary to be an educator that is knowledgeable of the unique social dynamics of ethnic, racial, gender, ability, sexuality, religious, and socioeconomic differences in education and society. .
Term Project Reflection and Visual and Critical Practice and Policy Analysis
EAD 822: Diverse Students and Families
Professor Muhammad Ahmad Khalifa (Summer 2012)
This course challenged students to investigate the relationships between schools, families, and communities by exploring the children who comprise today's school populations, the changes in family structures from yesterday and today, the schools as social institutions. The aspects of how schools engage diverse students and families by looking at the context of schools and the communities in which the schools exist were examined. Students were asked to consider how the contemporary social, cultural and linguistic contexts impact the process of education. The following project examines the implications of employing a primarily white teaching staff for a school and community population of primarily minority students and families.
Term Project Presentation and Paper
EAD 867: Case Studies in Educational Leadership
Professor Marilyn Amey (Summer 2012)
This course explored educational leadership from a variety of perspectives, providing students with an opportunity to develop a better understanding of leadership in complex educational settings, what it looks like throughout the organization, how it is enacted, and how it is relevant to addressing problems facing leaders and educators today. In this case-based course, students used leadership literature to address contemporary issues and see ways in which leaders can be instrumental in creating organizational change. Students also explored their own leadership philosophies and practices. The following presentation includes an embedded link that leads to a Prezi video representation that captures my personal leadership philosophy essay.
Term Project Presentation
ED 870: Capstone Seminar
Professor Matthew Koehler (Fall 2012)
The course was designed to engage students in discussion and reflection on learning in the Master of Arts in Education program. Students were asked to create a Web-based portfolio that presents a well-organized representation of their work and thinking in the program and participate in online discussion with other students in the seminar around their developing portfolios. Along with representing themselves, their coursework, resume, and educational/professional backgrounds, students were asked to reflect on past goals and develop new goals and examine how the program has helped them to realize stated goals. In addition, students were asked to envision their future as a learner. The fruit of this course is the development of this webpage and contents.
Additional Relevant Work: Thesis Proposal
"Does Unconscious Racial Bias Influence Repertoire Selection
in the Segregated Choral Classroom?"
in the Segregated Choral Classroom?"