School of Education

Extension is known for creating educational environments conducive to the transformative learning required for people to change their perspectives and make better decisions in their lives. However, creating such environments is not easy. The complex Extension context often produces barriers to including program components that support transformative learning. Extension partnerships with nonprofits, government units, and businesses can reduce these barriers and enhance the potential for transformative learning by fostering caring program environments. A partnership between Extension and United Way exemplifies one model for developing programs focused on creating caring educational environments that encourage and sustain transformative learning.

Implementing mathematically challenging tasks is difficult for teachers when working with emergent bilinguals because cognitively demanding tasks in mathematics commonly have high language demand. Currently, inadequate teacher preparation for teaching emergent bilinguals is becoming a significant concern in the United States as this population of students is rapidly growing. This study investigated how two mathematics preservice teachers (PSTs) support middle school emergent bilinguals to understand cognitively demanding mathematical problems through task modification. Fieldwork with a concurrent intervention was designed for the PSTs to work with emergent bilinguals in a one‐on‐one setting. The PSTs modified cognitively demanding mathematics tasks and designed a lesson for the emergent bilinguals based on the modified tasks. The results revealed that the task modification made by the PSTs tended to shift from reducing cognitive demands in mathematics and language to maintaining the demands through learning strategies of contextual support.

While much has been written about preparing educational leaders to lead for social justice, much less has been written about how to do so. This study is one of the first to analyze the reflections and written assignments of aspiring administrators to determine what they are currently thinking about poverty, race and ethnicity, and social justice leadership and how that thinking is shaped throughout one course. Results indicate that students were variable in their individual reflections, but that assignments which required them to analyze the inequities in their schools and develop an implementation plan led all of these aspiring administrators to seek to redress those inequities. The paper discusses implications for other programs which prepare educational leaders.

Teachers have to make many in-the-moment decisions when teaching. We investigated one teacher’s decisions in response to the difference between the intended meaning of a mathematical problem and her student’s understanding. The student—an English language learner—had a different interpretation of the mathematical scenario related to one particular clause in the problem that was, ironically, intended to be explanatory but ended up obscuring intended meaning and therefore impacted the student’s solution. In order to reflect on the teacher’s decisions, we include a vignette that illustrates the teacher’s tensions when making her instructional decisions. The vignette is followed by the teacher’s rationale for her decisions and an analysis of the episode. We invite readers to participate in her decision-making process and explore impacts of each decision.

The popularity of TV shows such as Crime Scene Investigation (CSI) has generated high school students’ interest in forensics. Yet, forensic science is not commonly accessible to students, and especially students of color who often attend under-resourced high schools. This article presents the design, development, and evaluation of an online forensics course created for high school students of color who were a part of an informal science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) educational development program. Two essential elements guided the course design: the target learners (high school students of color) and integrating online instruction and hands-on laboratory activities involving real-world forensic analyses. The design of the online course provided a STEM content-rich, self-directed, informal learning environment that effectively engaged high school students of color in meaningful forensics learning during the summer.

Extension professionals are increasingly encouraged to engage in practices that can advance the public value movement. It is unclear, however, whether recommended practices related to public value are being adopted. In 2014, 235 Extension professionals at Mississippi State University responded to an organizational capacity survey that included questions on public value practices. Research described here explored discrepancies between current and ideal public value practices among Extension professionals. Paired-samples t-tests revealed statistically significant discrepancies between current and ideal public value practices. The findings can inform efforts by Extension professionals seeking to increase awareness and practices related to public value.

Community college faculty members are essential to promoting student engagement and success, yet little research in this area has focused on the interactions of Latino men with their faculty members. The study utilized Harris and Wood’s (2013) Socio-Ecological Outcomes (SEO) model which focuses on the educational success of men of color in community colleges, to examine how Latino men made meaning of their interactions with faculty members and how these interactions influenced their community college success. Latino men made meaning of their faculty experiences based on (a) the accessibility and approachability of the faculty member, (b) their own hesitancy to seek help from faculty members, and (c) the level of investment or authentic care exhibited by the faculty member. These student-faculty interactions influenced the way in which Latino men engaged both inside and outside of the classroom as well as the way in which they sought support from faculty members.

There is a common belief that teachers do not need to differentiate their instruction for English Learners (ELs) and that helping ELs adjust in school culture is not a teacher’s responsbility (Walker, Shafer, & Liams, 2004). This belief is due to their lack of proper training to teach ELs, as statistics show only 13% of teachers are adequately prepared to teach ELs while more than 40% of teachers have ELs in their classrooms (NCES, 2002). Responding to the great need for an adequate teacher preparation for EL in mathematics education, this study was designed to investigate preservice teacher (PSTs) learning to help ELs understand mathematics.