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Author: Publisher: ISBN: Category : Education, Rural Languages : en Pages : 150
Book Description
Environmental issues can be difficult for people to understand and for teachers to address in their classrooms. Issues such as climate change and ozone depletion are difficult to comprehend and present a challenge for most people to understand thoroughly the complexity of these environmental challenges. Professional development programs could provide the tools for teachers to improve their environmental literacy and a pathway for learning new methods for engaging their students. However, in rural Oregon, where professional development opportunities are scarce, teachers rely on a lean supply of organizations to provide these experiences. Alder Creek Community Forest, a nonprofit organization, provides opportunities for teachers to explore and to learn about the environment. Specifically, Alder Creek Community Forest collaborates with rural educators by facilitating workshops to help teachers integrate environmental education into a school's curriculum. My problem of practice was that teachers in rural areas have limited professional development opportunities related to environmental education. The purpose of the study was to describe the perceptions of teachers engaged in environmental education professional development workshops. I interviewed three teachers to capture their experience of participating in the environmental education curriculum with interviews before their participation, during their participation, and after they attended a minimum of two workshops. Results from my analysis offer insight into the lived experiences of three rural educators who participated in an environmental education curriculum. Their experiences contribute to this qualitative case study about how an environmental education professional development program can improve environmental literacy.
Author: Publisher: ISBN: Category : Education, Rural Languages : en Pages : 150
Book Description
Environmental issues can be difficult for people to understand and for teachers to address in their classrooms. Issues such as climate change and ozone depletion are difficult to comprehend and present a challenge for most people to understand thoroughly the complexity of these environmental challenges. Professional development programs could provide the tools for teachers to improve their environmental literacy and a pathway for learning new methods for engaging their students. However, in rural Oregon, where professional development opportunities are scarce, teachers rely on a lean supply of organizations to provide these experiences. Alder Creek Community Forest, a nonprofit organization, provides opportunities for teachers to explore and to learn about the environment. Specifically, Alder Creek Community Forest collaborates with rural educators by facilitating workshops to help teachers integrate environmental education into a school's curriculum. My problem of practice was that teachers in rural areas have limited professional development opportunities related to environmental education. The purpose of the study was to describe the perceptions of teachers engaged in environmental education professional development workshops. I interviewed three teachers to capture their experience of participating in the environmental education curriculum with interviews before their participation, during their participation, and after they attended a minimum of two workshops. Results from my analysis offer insight into the lived experiences of three rural educators who participated in an environmental education curriculum. Their experiences contribute to this qualitative case study about how an environmental education professional development program can improve environmental literacy.
Author: Publisher: ISBN: Category : Languages : en Pages : 132
Book Description
Teacher perceptions regarding their communities and their views of their relationships to the community are significant to this study. The literature acknowledges the influence of community opinion and mores on teacher practice. However, the voices are generally those of researchers and not of teachers, and this study will attempt to bridge that gap by acknowledging the voices of rural practitioners as primary sources. The literature review examines four main topics: community, schools and community, teachers and community, and teacher narrations regarding their understandings of the relationship of community to their practice. An examination of community includes considerations of communitarianism and community engagement as well as place-based education initiatives. A rationale for school-community interaction gestures to a community's perceptions of its schools and a school's perceptions of its community. Teacher engagement with the local community scrutinizes both the professional and personal advantages and challenges for such involvement. Finally, teacher narratives are examined as both means of personal expression and as constructivist instruments in the practice of teaching. The qualitative research design utilizes semi-structured interviews of ten rural educators. These teachers represent a variety of demographic and content area specialties, and live both in and outside of the communities in which they teach. Data from the interviews was open coded with attention given to common themes for categorization and analysis. Findings suggest that the teachers in this study do not purposefully engage with the local community, specifically regarding curriculum and pedagogical practice. While acknowledging the community's values and expectations, these teachers do not welcome its input and participation in the educational process, as would be evidenced in place-conscious educational efforts. Mutually beneficial partnerships are neither pursued nor encouraged by the culture of the school or the historical customs of the community. The teachers appear to have constructed a "community within the community", building a professional community around personal experiences and professional preferences which extends limited regard to the local community and to those associations which could be of benefit to both the school and the community.
Author: Gwendolen Susanne Jacobs Publisher: ISBN: Category : Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
Professional development provides opportunities for teachers to acquire the knowledge needed to become experts in their classroom content and to improve their instructional skills to meet the needs of today's student learners. While districts and curriculum leaders work to improve professional development design, teachers' dissatisfaction with current professional development practices are still problematic. Teachers continue to find it ineffective, irrelevant, making them feel undervalued as professionals. This is evident in the rural educational setting. Rural educators need on-going, flexible, and job-embedded effective professional development to meet the specific needs of rural educators and their students. While few studies have examined teacher perception on professional development, even fewer studies focused on the rural place. This study provides educational leaders with a teacher's perspective on what effective professional development looks and feels like for rural educators. Using narrative analysis of five rural educators' interviews and drawing on Gruenewald's Critical Pedagogy of Place, this study sought to understand the experiences of five rural educators as they explored their personal histories, perceptions, and experiences in receiving effective professional development. The study is driven by three research questions to determine if teachers' perceptions of effective professional development is influenced by their own sense of place and how they identify within that place. These questions included the following: 1. How do teachers in a rural setting perceive building and district level professional development? 2. In what ways does sense of place inform teachers' perceptions of effective professional development? 3. In what ways do these perceptions inform teachers' decisions to act on their new learning? The key themes revealed participants acknowledged the challenges districts face when providing effective professional development and that it is most beneficial when connected to their specific needs. Most participants acknowledged the complexity of rural relationships and recognized how their personal histories and experiences helped make and enrich these relationships. The findings relative to the five participants' experiences and their stories also suggest rural teachers do not fully recognize the extent by which their own sense of place and place identity influenced their perceptions on their learning. This can have several implications for district leaders, professional development directors and for current and future rural educators. If district leaders and professional development directors want to see implementation of teacher learning in the classroom, providing purposeful professional development must not only address the specific needs of rural educators and their students but also consider what teachers bring to the rural context in relationship to their professional learning.
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Author: Brian Sharpley
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Author: Gwendolen Susanne Jacobs
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Author: Robert Meadows
Author: Fariba Mostafa