December 1 for the spring/summer edition

December 1 for the spring/summer edition

Manuscript Preparation and Submission

To submit a manuscript to be considered for review

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  Send an electronic file compatible with Microsoft Word as an e-mail attachment to the editor, Cynthia Lassonde, at lassonc@oneonta.edu.
  
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  Manuscripts must follow APA style as outlined in the most recent edition of the APA style manual.
  
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  Research and Perspectives manuscripts should not exceed 25 pages, including references. Nota Bene manuscripts should not exceed 5 pages, including references.
  
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  Include a 100-word abstract for Research and Perspectives manuscripts.
  
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  The cover page should consist of the title of the manuscript, a suggested running head, as well as the authors’ names, affiliations, addresses, e-mail addresses, and telephone numbers.
  
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  Omit headers and footers except for page numbers.
  
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  Omit all identifiers of the authors and affiliations from the manuscript. Be sure computer software does not reveal author’s identity as well.
  

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  Secure all permissions to quote copyrighted text or use graphics and/or figures of other non-original material. Include permissions with manuscript.
  

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  Data-based manuscripts involving human subjects should be submitted with a statement or verification from the author that an Institutional Review Board certificate or letter approving the research and guaranteeing protection of human subjects has been obtained from the researcher's institution.
  

Manuscripts will be subject to a blind review by peer reviewers and the editor. The review process will take approximately three months from time of submission.

All manuscripts will be judged on their scholarship, contribution to the knowledge base, timeliness of topic, creative/thoughtful approach, clarity and cohesiveness, appropriateness to category, and adherence to preparation guidelines. Selections may also be affected by editorial decisions regarding the overall content of a particular edition.

New York State Association of Teacher Education
and
New York Association of Colleges for Teacher Education
invite you to participate in our
2008-2009 joint state conferences.
NYSATE & NYACTE Annual Fall Conference

October 23-24, 2008

Holiday Inn

Wolf Road

Albany, NY

www.Holidayinnturf.com
NYSATE & NYACTE Annual Spring Conference

April 22-24, 2009

Gideon Putnam Resort and Spa

Saratoga Springs, NY

www.Gideonputnam.com
Visit www.NYACTE.org and www.NYS-ATE.org for more information.

Message from the Presidents

The Charles C. Mackey, Jr. Excellence in Service Leadership Award honors an educator in New York State who has demonstrated personal and professional qualities that exemplify the highest standards of service leadership in teacher education. An excellent servant leader is one who through personal knowledge, wisdom, ethical practice, and courage models effective practice and thus enables others to reach individual, institutional, and communal goals.

The Charles C. Mackey, Jr. Excellence in Service Leadership Award recognizes an individual who represents Teacher Education in his/her respective institution of higher education in New York State. The individual exemplifies service leadership within his/her institutional setting and within the broader New York professional community through engagement, initiative and personal qualities that reflect relevant High Standards for Teacher Education Accountability as defined by the American Association of Colleges of Teacher Education:

1. 
   Serve first and foremost as an advocate for P-12 students, especially for promoting the growth and development of all students;
   
2. 
   Promote diversity in teacher education faculty, candidates, curriculum, and programs;
   
3. 
   Be accountable to prospective teachers for their preparation to meet state licensure expectations (including knowledge of subject matter and of the students to whom those subjects are taught);
   
4. 
   Be informed by the best practice and most current research on teaching and learning theory and practice, including the commitment to active scholarship by teacher education faculty;
   
5. 
   Operate in collaboration with professional agencies responsible for quality assurance in the teaching profession.
   
6. 
   
   

Charles C. Mackey, Jr., Doris T. Garner,

James Shuman, Linda Beimer,

Jan McDonald, and Suzanne Miller

Welcome, everyone, to another packed issue of Excelsior. Before I begin to tell you about the informative, rigorous articles in this issue, I would like to take a moment to say thank you to our Editorial Review Board members, who volunteer their time and expertise to provide valuable feedback for the numerous manuscripts we receive each month; to the National Editorial Board members, who are very responsive when I frantically send out emails consulting their advice on making professional decisions about the journal; to the NYACTE Executive Board members, who provide funding and guidance; and to the many, many educators who support the journal by sending in manuscripts to be considered for publication, sharing the journal with colleagues, and suggesting colleagues submit their work to us. Word seems to be spreading about Excelsior. If you haven’t noticed in previous journals, we are reaching readers and authors in Canada, across the United States, and, in this issue, even in the United Arab Emirates. We are also reaching teacher educators with varied interests. Consider the variety in this issue: There is something for everyone.

This issue offers an expanded number of articles in the Reports of Research and Self-Study section. We begin with Hui-Yin Hsu’s report of video blogging. Hsu uses engagement theory to frame a project that explored technology as a way to enhance curriculum articulation and creative expression. Parker and Cherubini follow with their collaborative self-study of their mission to better understand and improve their teaching, leadership, and scholarly practice within a learning faculty. Next, Wepner, Bettica, Gangi, Reilly, and Klemm describe how using storytelling and the arts in a school-college professional learning community program helped fifth graders further develop their literacy skills. If you are interested in action research, you’ll want to read Lang’s article to see how her study explored identity development in an alternative teacher education program. Sowa and Schmidt follow with their self-study of how scaffolding reflective practices helped their student teachers understand how they could integrate educational theory, practice, and ethics. Maheady, Jabot, and Rey describe how using Teaching Learning Projects, which seem to parallel Teacher Work Samples, reflected preservice teachers’ and their students’ learning. And finally, Garii and SooHoo take a critical look at homophobic harassment and girl-on-girl bullying in education. You’ll want to share this information with your preservice teachers.

This issue’s Sharing Perspectives and Practices section includes two unique kinds of articles. First, Dowdy shares how she uses drama in a critical literacy classroom. You’ll enjoy reading her students’ radio dramas. Jones, Jones, and Vermette close this section with a look at constructivism in the teacher education classroom and offer lists of key concepts with suggestions for how to help preservice teachers truly understand them.

Nota Bene offers three book reviews celebrating new and classic editions. Be sure to read what Avery, Hamlin, and Dean have to say about what they are reading.

Cynthia A. Lassonde, Editor


Excelsior:

Leadership in Teaching and Learning
A forum for research-based discourse to inform the preparation and professional development of educators
Yearly Subscription (2 issues)

$30

Contact Editor for Library Subscription Rate

Lassonc@oneonta.edu
Make checks payable to NYACTE. Mail check with information below to
Cindy Lassonde

Editor, Excelsior

SUNY College at Oneonta

501 Fitzelle Hall

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Your Name _____________________________________________________

New York Institute of Technology

This project explores technology use as a medium through which preservice teachers can enhance their curriculum articulation and their creative expression by engaging with content knowledge and content skills. The framework of this project rests on engagement theory. This theory states that, by undertaking certain meaningful tasks, preservice teachers can better incorporate technology into teaching and learning. In this study, preservice teachers created digital video production with video technology and shared their digital stories on a video blog with other educators. This paper discusses the project design, the project implementation, and the preservice teachers’ reflection on their content-integrated digital video creation. In this project, the video blog serves not only as a platform on which preservice teachers collect video clips but also as an important motivator that fosters preservice teachers’ active inquiry, active learning, collaboration, and interaction throughout the learning process.

Although many educators and policy analysts consider educational technology a tool that increases learners’ motivation and teaching effectiveness, a national report (National Center for Education Statistics, 1999) found that there is a lack of confidence and preparedness among teachers concerning their integration of educational technology into classroom instruction. This finding received support from several studies (i.e., Albee, 2003; McKenzie, 1999). The literature also supports the assertion that a lack of both training and experience is the primary reason underlying teachers’ infrequent use of technology in their classroom (Kumar & Kumar, 2003).

To foster preservice teachers’ technology skills, most teacher education programs require preservice teachers to complete one instructional technology course to develop their technology skills (Hargrave & Hsu, 2000). However, this add-on course focusing on the ability to use a computer does not lend itself to the adequate preparation of teachers in relation to classroom-based technology use. To enhance their comfort with technology, teachers should continuously immerse themselves in a context that requires them to contemplate effective strategies for the incorporation of new technologies into teaching and learning. Teacher educators have to ensure that preservice teachers acquire scaffolded experiences and meaningful related activities. The goal of this project is to encourage preservice teachers to adopt simple video production tools to improve their curriculum articulation, enhance confidence in using technology, and apply new technologies and techniques in their future teaching environments.
Literature Review

Video Use in Teacher Education: Digital Storytelling

Video production benefits learning in many ways. Wang and Hartley (2003) summarized three video technology approaches that could support teaching: (1) representing situations of teaching and learning in a comprehensive manner, (2) linking various data to a particular teaching event and issue, and (3) connecting preservice teachers to an established context of teaching and learning. Shewbridge and Berge (2007) pointed out that the greatest merit of having students produce video is that the experience motivates them to explore their topics and themselves. In addition, the video productions yield “personalized situations and circumstances once known only abstractly through discussions and texts” (Hall & Hudson, 2006, p. 335).

One form for the video-based presentation of ideas is through digital storytelling. According to the Digital Storytelling Association (2002), “Digital stories derive their power through weaving images, music, narrative and voice together, thereby giving deep dimension and vivid color to characters, situations, and insights.” Several studies have investigated the effects that the use of digital storytelling has on teachers’ teaching. Banaszewski (2006) helped middle-school students develop digital storytelling projects and suggested that the projects provided students a channel, other than writing, to express themselves. Tendero (2006) examined the effects of digital storytelling on English education and concluded that digital storytelling provides student teachers two important assets: multiple ways to perceive other teachers’ teaching and help in shaping teaching practices. Hall and Hudson (2006) attempted to use digital storytelling as a medium through which preservice teachers could integrate content knowledge and could produce evidence of their learning. They learned that digital storytelling encourages students to “consider carefully how to portray others’ experiences fairly while connecting those experiences to larger issues of teaching and learning” (p. 335). In summary, digital storytelling can enrich preservice teachers’ experiences in teaching and learning, can motivate preservice teachers to incorporate technology into their teaching, and can improve their confidence in using technology.
Theoretical Framework: Engagement Theory

Derived from constructivist approaches, engagement theory posits that “students must be meaningfully engaged in learning activities through interaction with others and worthwhile tasks” (Kearsley & Shneiderman, 1999). Shneiderman (1992, 1993) implemented a series of technology-based activities that involved critical thinking and authentic purpose. He concluded that, in general, students’ intrinsic motivation to learn grows if they engage in activities that are project-based, authentic, and team-oriented. He suggested that educators should promote projects that have authentic purposes and should encourage students to use technologies in the construction of products, especially in relation to design activities that “involve active cognitive processes such as creating, problem-solving, reasoning, decision-making, and evaluation” (Kearsley & Shneiderman, 1999). Researchers have adopted engagement theory to promote learners’ motivation and to improve learners’ learning experiences (Carroll & Carney, 2005; Marshall, 2007; Miliszewska & Horwood, 2004). Therefore, engagement theory is a theoretical framework that helps explain how technology can support preservice teachers’ creative expression through a multimedia authoring process and can improve their motivation through their designing of authentic tasks. Engagement theory also provides preservice teachers opportunities to incorporate technology across the curriculum in a meaningful way.

The design of the current study’s digital-storytelling video blog project reflects the three chief principles of engagement theory: relate, create, and donate.

Relate. The relate principle stresses team efforts and collaboration. In this project, preservice teachers worked in groups to brainstorm ideas for stories, storyboard sequences, and script writing. They also watched sample digital storytelling projects and critiqued them in group efforts. Then, the preservice teachers brainstormed ideas to enhance teaching through digital-storytelling format in their disciplines and helped one another on digital video productions. Each teacher finished his or her own digital storytelling project and uploaded it to the class video blog for critiques. The teachers received rubrics for peer critiques on overall content, technical issues, and video presentation. Thus, the current study examines how the creation process of digital storytelling affected the sense of relatedness that the preservices teachers had in their collaborative efforts to achieve the same goal.

Create. The create principle stresses active learning through a series of creative and meaningful activities. In this case, preservice teachers had to define a learning domain, apply their content knowledge and skills to a learning context, and produce evidence of their learning. In this way, the teachers could use the story format to articulate curriculum in particular subject areas. By having the ability to use a video-editing tool, the teachers could creatively produce teaching and learning materials that, in turn, exhibited creativity.

Donate. The donate principle stresses the value of making meaningful contributions while learning. The purpose of these preservice teachers’ digital video productions was two-fold: use multimedia to present or to explain a concept of learning that aligned with curriculum standards, and share the resulting videos with other preservice teachers by contributing the videos to the blog. Regular teachers could adopt these videos in their teaching and could leave comments for the authors. In turn, the authors could improve their videos on the basis of the comments or could comment on the other teachers’ adoption of these videos.

Another merit of the engagement theory in relation to this project is that the theory increases preservice teachers’ confidence and comfort levels in technology adoption owing to the simplicity and the inexpensiveness of the digital video-production technology. This confidence and comfort can later surface when the preservice teachers are full-fledged teachers. In Roger’s diffusion of innovations theory (2003), he points out that expense and complexity are two key factors that people consider when deciding whether to adopt an innovation or not. The video-production tool chosen in this project is free and easy to use. Therefore, the expectation is that these characteristics will motivate preservice teachers both to use the technology to their advantage and to embrace student-centered orientations.

Weblogs are chronological postings of news items and provide opportunities for readers to enter personal responses to articles (Williams & Jacobs, 2004). Because a person who posts on a blog does not have to understand HTML script, blogging has become a popular web-based publishing tool that can connect the author to a particularly broad audience. Educators have adopted weblogs as personal reflection tools (Brescia & Miller, 2006; Duffy & Bruns, 2006). Vygotsky’s social-constructivism theory (1978) is often considered a grounding theory in this regard because blogging provides a social panel on which participants can exchange their ideas (Dickey, 2004; Glogoff, 2005). It should be noted that participants can carry on meaningful conversations, as well as comment on the articles posted by another author. This comment-conversation process facilitates the social construction of knowledge and of meaning making (Ferdig & Trammell, 2004). The easy-to-use features that support a social-constructivist approach make blogging a potential facilitator of teaching and learning. Research studies have identified several benefits of blogging in education: (1) blogging helps students write better because they feel that they are writing to a real audience (Kennedy, 2003), (2) blogging greatly facilitates online collaboration (Godwin-Jones, 2003; Wang & Hsu, 2007), (3) blogging augments one’s personal voice, (4) blogging facilitates social connections (Dickey, 2004), and (5) blogging endows expression with a multimedia format.

Because it is feasible to import video clips into a blog, blogging is a vastly powerful publishing tool. Users can use a camcorder and video-editing software to produce a video clip and can then incorporate it into the blog. In addition to posting self-produced video clips, users can post links to a video clip. These links further disseminate content. In short, video blogs, or vlogs (Whelan, 2005), strengthen educators’ ability to carry multimedia materials into curriculum because this technology so conveniently supports the combining of text and image. The current study’s project used a blog to carry digital-storytelling video clips developed by preservice teachers. The blog’s ultimate purpose was to categorize digital-storytelling video clips by subject areas so that preservice teachers could use this video blog as an educational resource in their teaching and as a channel for the preservice teachers’ interaction with a greater audience.
Learning Goals

The current study’s project was implemented in a methods course offered in an education program for preservice teachers. The course was entitled Curriculum Articulation through Multimedia. In this course, preservice teachers were expected to use their knowledge of effective multimedia communication techniques to foster active inquiry, active learning, collaboration, and supportive interaction in elementary school classrooms. The learning focus was to prepare preservice teachers in the application of multimedia communication to both the articulation of curriculum and the fostering of collaboration. As multimedia-authoring tools continue to flourish and develop, preservice teachers must sharpen their skills. Using these skills wisely, the preservice teachers can, as full-fledged teachers, enhance and ultimately transform the curriculum to promote student learning. After screening out multimedia authoring tools among many, the instructor adopted Microsoft Movie Maker accompanied with blogger.com as the main tools that would assist in the curriculum articulation. Movie Maker is a free and easy to use video editing tool. Blogger is a free blogging service provided by Google.

To align the study with the learning focus of this course, the instructor identified six major objectives: (1) preservice teachers will use their knowledge of effective verbal, nonverbal, and media communication techniques to foster active engagement in learning, self motivation, and positive social interaction and to create supportive learning environments; (2) preservice teachers will be aware of and reflect on their practice in light of teaching and the resources available for professional learning; (3) preservice teachers will continually evaluate the effect that their professional decisions and actions have on students, parents, and other professionals in the learning community, and will actively seek out opportunities to grow professionally; (4) preservice teachers will know, understand, and use formal and informal assessment strategies to plan, evaluate, and strengthen instruction that will promote continuous intellectual, social, emotional, and physical development of each elementary school students; (5) preservice teachers will try to understand how elementary school students differ from one another in their learning development and their learning approaches, and will create instructional opportunities that are adapted to diverse students; and (6) preservice teachers will use technology resources to increase productivity and communication.

The instructor designed the keystone project, which would ensure that preservice teachers used multimedia communication techniques to make connections across the curriculum. The keystone project included the following components:

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  A unit plan that is three dimensional (written, auditory, and visual) through the use of a multimedia authoring tool
  
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  A digital-storytelling video clip that fosters curriculum articulation and creative expression in the unit plan learning
  
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  Mini-lesson teaching in a real classroom with cooperating teachers’ supervision
  
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  Blog critiques that concern the video clip in terms of its curriculum articulation and its creative expression
  
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  Blog reflection on the lesson taught