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Item Placemaking Curricula in Teacher Preparation: Bridging State Standards and Local Expertise(Prescott College, 2022-05) Liu, Laura; IUPUC EducationThis study examined how placemaking curricula shaped teacher candidate (candidate) knowledge, dispositions, and skills to understand, appreciate, and sustain local diversity, as evidenced through candidate reflections and products created in an elementary teacher education course integrating civic science concepts and practices into elementary classrooms. This study explored how placemaking curricula engaged community stakeholders in meaningful shared inquiry on real-world challenges, while meeting state science education standards. Placemaking inquiry projects developed by candidates focused on soil and water conservation, and sustaining diversity in schoolyard spaces. Curricula engaged candidates in learning soil and water conservation techniques from local farmers and conservation leaders, then developing and sharing co-authored civic science children’s books on conservation topics aligned to grade-level standards. As further placemaking curricula, candidates partnered with elementary teachers and students to guide schoolyard observations, designs, and models constructed to sustain diverse abilities, cultures, and ecologies. Presentations to parents and peers celebrated shared insights.Item Examining the Relationships between Student Teacher Professional Identity Tensions and Motivation for Teaching: Mediating Role of Emotional Labor Strategies in China(MDPI, 2022-10) He, Wenjie; Tian, Guoxiu; Li, Qiong; Liu, Laura B.; Zhou, Jingtian; IUPUC EducationLearning to be a teacher through teaching practicum is viewed as a highly complex process in which multiple dilemmas and tensions emerge. These tensions may influence student teachers’ motivation for teaching. However, previous studies on teacher motivation have mainly focused on social status and welfare, seldom taking their emotion regulation into account. Sampling 752 student teachers from 15 teacher education institutes in China, this study examined the relationships between student teachers’ emotional labor strategies, professional identity tensions, and motivation for teaching during their practicum. The results indicated that emotional labor strategies were found to be important resources for student teachers to cope with the challenges brought by the tensions of professional identities in teaching practicum. In particular, deep acting and expression of naturally felt emotions enhanced student teachers’ intrinsic motivation to become a teacher. The results indicated that student teachers should perform emotional labor strategically, which may motivate them to be a teacher intrinsically.Item On the dole for the homeless soul: Religious and sex discrimination by sectarian adoption services(Peter Lang, 2022) Morris, Pamela L.; Sarapin, Susan H.Religious institutions have historically taken care of orphaned or unwanted children. Although the U.S. has provided public child services for nearly a century, the country still relies heavily on private, faith-based organizations to care for and place children with families. Some of these organizations receive public funds, yet their mission statements often prioritize placing young people with families that meet religious standards; they may reject parents who have religions or lifestyles that they disagree with. Such religious discrimination brings to the fore the Free Exercise and Establishment Clauses of the First Amendment and the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, as well as social considerations such as the Best Interests of the Child (BIC). This chapter will explore the legal, political, and social labyrinth that is closing doors to potential parents in favor of saving souls.Item Silos to symphonies? Hopes and challenges implementing multicultural programme infusion(Taylor and Francis, 2013-07-01) Liu, Laura B.; Milman, Natalie B.The need to infuse multicultural education (ME) across teacher preparation programmes is well documented by research, yet institutions are at very different stages in this endeavour. While most programmes demonstrate a segregated approach to ME, confining diversity to specialty courses, ME programme infusion places diversity, equity and social justice at a programme's centre. This study presents triumphs and challenges faculty faced in integrating ME across one teacher preparation programme. Via one academic year of observations, interviews and document analyses, this study was informed by Cochran-Smith, Davis and Fries’ 12 factors for multicultural teacher preparation, Gay's descriptors for ME programme infusion and Melnick and Zeichner's promising programme practices for preparing teacher candidates effectively to teach in diverse twenty-first century classrooms. Findings show that the faculty members approached ME infusion by establishing a vision in support of diversity and ME and creating professional learning communities offering a safe context for critical reflection on attitudes and pedagogies supporting diverse populations. However, a lack of connection between the ME and the core programme courses, and discrepancies among participant perspectives, demonstrated the need for more extensive ME programme infusion. Implications for practitioners, policymakers and researchers are given.Item Being There as a Support, a Guide, and to Intervene When You Have To: Mentors Reflect on Working with Teacher Candidates(International Council of Professors of Educational Leadership, 2020) Ruich, Lawrence J.; Browning, Thomas; Butera, Gretchen; Department of Education, IUPUCThis paper presents a study that investigated how mentors perceived their long-term relationships with teacher candidates in a secondary teacher preparation program. The study describes the process by which the teacher candidates and the mentors select each other and how the relationship develops, with findings that suggest that the length of time teacher candidates and mentor teachers work together as essential to building trust. Mentors identify themselves as quasi teacher educators who serve as an extension to the university preparation process. Findings explore the benefits of mentoring for the prospective and practicing teachers as well as to teacher preparation in general. To optimize the value of field experience, it is important to understand this relationship and its outcomes.Item Cultivating teacher professionalism in Chinese and U.S. settings: contexts, standards, and personhood(Taylor & Francis, 2021-07-12) Liu, Laura B.; Conner, J.M.; Li, Qiong; Education, IUPUCOur global era invites research on teacher reflection that is grounded in local contexts and enriched by cross-regional collaborations. Teacher professionalism is a shared global interest that is shaped by unique cultural factors in local settings. This study examines Chinese and U.S. undergraduate teacher education student views on the criteria for and standardised measures used to assess teacher professionalism. Data analyses of participant products, specifically group rubrics and individual reflections, involved constant comparative analyses to highlight convergent and divergent themes in student conceptions of teacher professionalism within and across the U.S. and Chinese university contexts. Findings demonstrate similarities and distinctions across participant views on the professional knowledge, skills, and dispositions involved in becoming a teacher, and reveals teacher professionalism as a dialectic among contexts, standards, and persons. Context distinguishes professional practice in ways that bring meaning and relevancy to local student needs. Standards provide a shared foundation for global discourse around key elements of a profession. Maintaining a person-centred view helps ensure assessment practices keep education’s broader civic goals central. Engaging in international dialogue on the meaning of teacher professionalism across regional cultures expanded understandings of professionalism, and how it may be fostered and evaluated more effectively in teacher education.Item Indifference-driven Discontent to Empathy-led Development: What Globally Minded Educators Can Learn from Stiglitz(FCT, 2016-06-27) Liu, Laura B.; Education, IUPUCGlobalization and Its Discontents is a must-read for those in higher education seeking greater understanding of global economic policy’s key role in shaping globalization’s unfolding. Candidly and insightfully composed by 2001 Nobel Prize winner in economics, Joseph Stiglitz, this personalized narrative presents a brief history of the complex dynamic among global economic institutions and key regions of the world these institutions have impacted, for better or for worse. This review highlights that cultivating a shared global value for reducing inequality is as vital as it is challenging. Organizing shared approaches for addressing inequality present even greater challenges, as international political and economic systems differ enormously. In accessible language, Stiglitz (2003) approaches this complexity with a perceptive eye for trends. This review draws upon neurological and sociological bases for empathy as an active healing agent not only for persons (micro-level), but also for nations and our emerging global society (macro-level).Item Funds of Knowledge in Storytelling and Recipes(NYS TESOL, 2021) Liu, Laura B.; Brodey, Sari; Education, IUPUCGlocalization, or the relationship between the global and the local, identifies cultural and linguistic inequities that may be addressed through bilingual, multilingual, and multicultural education programs, including the use of translanguaging as a resource for students (Joseph & Ramani, 2012). To support our glocal societies and classrooms, it is increasingly important for institutions of teacher education to prepare teacher candidates to recognize, value, and draw upon students’ funds of knowledge as resources for learning in the classroom. This article describes an autobiographical assignment inviting elementary ELL teacher candidates to reflect on and share funds of knowledge through a digital story and focuses on one candidate’s journey in connecting this process to valuing her ELL students’ funds of knowledge to meet TESOL standards for supporting ELLs in their sociocultural contexts.Item Poetry as Progress: Balancing Standards-Based Reforms with Aesthetic Inquiry(2011-10-30) Liu, Laura B.; Education, IUPUCThe meaning of "progress" in U.S. educational institutions has undergone much debate (Tyack & Cuban, 1995). Standards-driven practices have often promoted a search for "right" answers in place of critical and diverse thinking. Globalization and its impacts compel us to continue revising and articulating the meaning of progress for 21st century students, educators, and researchers (Ball & Tyson, 2011). This aesthetic empirical inquiry (Pinar, 2004; Ranciere, 2004) contributes to this process by creatively re-presenting teacher voice via bricolage (Denzin & Lincoln, 2003; Kincheloe, 2001), specifically poetic bricolage (Trueit, 2004). The pursuit of aesthetic approaches to research have the potential for re-shaping national notions of progress to emphasize the cultivation of creativity, understanding, and empathy across lines of difference, and thereby support 21st century global communities in collaborating to address inequity.Item Aesthetic Inquiry into Chinese University Student Fatherly Life Lessons: “Roots” and their Implications for Educational Contexts(2017-04-07) Liu, Laura B.; Education, IUPUCGlobally, teachers are trained to educate and assess children through matrices based on comparative competition, a practice that thrives on ranking. In an era of glocalization, how might educational systems cultivate classroom connections embracing diverse student gifts? This arts-based narrative inquiry explores fatherly life lessons of 17 undergraduate and six graduate students enrolled in an introductory qualitative research course at a large urban Chinese university. Building on the course instructor's model, students engaged in arts-based narrative inquiry to develop children's books on treasured fatherly life lessons that they then shared with second grade students at a local Chinese school. Drawing upon the "Confucian Analects" and Laozi's "Tao Te Ching," this study evidences empathy as rooted across cultures and ecologies, and that many fatherly life lessons take place in natural settings. This study encourages teacher education practice and research to engage arts-based autobiographical inquiry, and to explore empathy conceptualizations and expressions across cultures and ecologies. As "glocalization" brings together diverse groups, this work is important to create shared spaces for international connection and meaningful inter-institutional explorations.