From Birth to Graduate School: Using technology to increase Hispanic student access to Education Department programs.
From Birth to Graduate School: Using technology to increase Hispanic student access to Education Department programs.
Eastern Connecticut State University’s (hereafter “Eastern”) Education Department programs start cultivating their applicant pools early. We operate our own pre-school and work with the local public school system to enhance the education of children who might one day become students in the Education department, then we work to ensure retention of our own students. Situated in the “quiet corner” of Connecticut, Eastern attracts many students from the surrounding communities. Most can drive to their parents’ home within an hour; many of those parents never went to college, and many speak Spanish as their first language. Around 35% of the residents of the town where Eastern resides (Willimantic, CT) speak Spanish. In a mutually-beneficial relationship, Eastern faculty, staff, and students work with parents, children, and school systems, using technology to enhance their reach. Faculty researchers study how children learn (using many of our pre-school students as subjects) and apply their research in multiple ways – teaching parents, teacher candidates, and teachers what they have learned.
Infants and Toddlers to Preschool: Apply research to help parents in dual-language households. Faculty scholars considered the research about ways to maintain proficiency in a first language while developing proficiency in a second language. They wrote a grant to obtain support for creating teaching videos for parents, showing them various techniques. They had two goals: 1) Promote reading to children in their native language as a method of ensuring first language proficiency. 2) Train women and girls who have caregiving responsibilities in dialogic reading strategies. As part of the project, they recruited local families to be trained in the techniques. Using video cameras, staff recorded adult/child reading sessions in English and Spanish, edited them, added narration, and made them available online on YouTube for easy access. For example, the video, Completing a Phrase, helps parents learn a technique to stimulate thinking and participation by the child. https://youtu.be/WbUtnCRLa_4 (Spanish) https://youtu.be/NFnuTf4Y0_Y (English). YouTube reports about for every 3 views of the video in English, there’s one view in Spanish, demonstrating that we are reaching the Hispanic community in proportion to its representation in our local population. (See http://www.easternct.edu/cece/family-reading-time/ for a more complete description of the project and links to the videos.)
In a similar vein, the Center is currently working under a US Department of Health and Human Services grant producing nine online modules for home visitors who work with pregnant women and families with children under 5. It has recruited a team of reviewers and translators from different countries to help ensure that the Spanish translations are both linguistically and culturally accurate. Those videos will be free to the public, allowing social workers and other professionals to take advantage of the best practices identified. In creating these videos, our faculty and staff bring national recognition to our work in early childhood education and much-needed financial resources to our programs.
K-12: Support K-12 teachers with online graduate education and online videos. To ensure that K-12 teachers in our area are well-qualified to teach the children who may one day become our students, we provide teachers with resources. Some of those resources are especially well-suited to reach Hispanic teachers and teachers of Hispanic students. For example, Connecticut has a chronic shortage of teachers qualified to teach dual language learners. This shortage deprives Hispanic students of access to educators who know how to identify and help them overcome dual-language-related educational challenges. To address this, we have recently introduced a concentration in dual language learning in our Master’s program, offering many of the required courses online. We use Blackboard Learn https://www.blackboard.com/learning-management-system/blackboard-learn.html, a robust online learning management system as a platform for instruction. This platform supports synchronous and a-synchronous instruction and provides a variety of tools to facilitate interaction among students and between students and teachers. It supports assessment of learning through portfolios, tests, and assignments and allows creation of rubrics and analysis of performance data. This use of online instructional technology helps us attract excellent instructors from a wider radius and allows working teachers to take the courses with some flexibility as to time and location, thus improving both the quality of instruction we can offer and the quality of attention our students can provide to the courses. We are working with the closest school district in providing cohort pricing and scholarships to make these courses more affordable to the teachers most likely to be preparing our future students. Certified teachers can take a set of 6 online courses and obtain cross-endorsement in dual language learning.
In addition to the more formal instruction provided in our courses, we also offer many free, online resources to help working teachers with a wide variety of teaching challenges, from setting up a classroom http://www.easternct.edu/cece/classroom-environment/ to using project-based learning http://www.easternct.edu/cece/project-based-learning/. These podcasts and videos offer searchable transcripts in English and Spanish, to help busy teachers discover topics of import to them. In developing these resources, our current faculty and staff enhance their own skills and research agenda and they advance knowledge among practicing teachers.
Undergraduate students. Mentor minority teacher candidates with advising and social media technology solutions. In order to address disparities in the program completion rates of minority teacher candidates as opposed to white, non-Hispanic teacher candidates, Eastern’s Graduate Division established Holmes Master’s scholarships for graduate students in the summer of 2016. http://www.easternct.edu/pressreleases/2016/11/08/eastern-holmes-program-diversifying-the-education-field/ The program continued in 2017-2018 and 2018-2019 with three Master’s students each year. http://www.easternct.edu/pressreleases/2018/02/14/holmes-program-at-eastern-develops-minority-teachers/ The Holmes Master’s program was created by a national organization for teacher education, American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education (AACTE), and aspires to ensure high-quality education for all students and to increase diversity among educators. (https://secure.aacte.org/apps/rl/res_get.php?fid=2142&ref=rl).
With the support and guidance of Education faculty and the Assistant Dean, these graduate students provide mentoring to minority undergraduates who aspire to be teachers. They use technology to connect with the undergraduates and to ensure follow-up. For example, they generate electronic lists of minority undergraduates who have expressed interest in education as a career and use e-mail and texting systems to invite those students to a variety of events. They use social media to create excitement about events. (See, for example, a Facebook post about a presentation given by the Holmes Master’s students: https://www.facebook.com/ECSUSEPS/posts/2163025227242803) They monitor performance of minority teacher candidates using advising technology (Grades First) and seek to provide one-on-one support and guidance for those at risk. Even if they eventually decide not to become teachers, the mentored undergraduate students develop more connections at Eastern and are more likely to complete their educations successfully. The Holmes Master’s program encourages recruitment and retention of undergraduate minority teacher candidates by exposing them to successful minority teachers as role models; the availability of scholarship money and faculty mentoring encourages recruitment and retention of graduate students as well. They use technology to conduct and report on graduate-level research regarding such topics as the effect of having minority teachers on student performance. The program has only been in existence for 3 years at Eastern, so success data is anecdotal at this point, but we are recognizing that the use of technology is improving our connections and our ability to assess the effectiveness of the program.
From Birth to Graduate School: Eastern’s Education programs use technology to reach parents of infants, toddlers, and pre-schoolers, parents and teachers of K-12 students, Eastern’s undergraduate teacher candidates, and Eastern’s graduate student mentors in an effort to ensure the best possible educational outcomes at each stage of a child’s and young adult’s development. To ensure maximum effectiveness in a city where 35% of the population speaks Spanish, the programs recognize and address language barriers, dual language learning shortages, and challenges faced by being among the minority in a profession.
Technologies
Included in general description above: video, YouTube, Course Management systems, advising systems, online courses, spreadsheets, word clouds, social media, texting systems.
Explain project results
Included in the general description above. Also, the Center for Early Childhood Education’s YouTube channel reached the 1-million viewer milestone in February 2018. http://www.easternct.edu/cece/one-million-views/ Six of the videos have received Telly Awards for technical excellence.
Why it should be considered best practice?
Universities should use their skills and resources to give back to the communities in which they reside.
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