Volume 18, Issue 2

The purpose of this study is to document the experiences, services, and programs provided to displaced university students from Puerto Rico and to offer recommendations to educational and community agencies regarding effective integration after a natural disaster. Through in-depth semi-structured interviews, this qualitative phenomenology study consisted of collecting oral histories of six displaced university students from Puerto Rico who relocated to Southwest Florida after Hurricane Maria. The analysis of the data indicated three themes, including (1) trauma after hurricane, (2) challenges and needs during relocation, and (3) conflicting feelings about the homeland and the United States. Although immediate, basic needs were met soon after relocation, in-depth, social-emotional needs, such as dealing with trauma and becoming acculturated in the new culture, remained unanswered. Recommendations are provided to higher education administration, professionals in education, and community agencies.

To teach English as a second foreign language at university levels provides the educator or professor an excellent occasion to compare the first and second languages by a series of analogical activities that not only highlight the similar forms and structures of them, but more important still, oblige students to comprehend these forms and structures without having either to rely on or depend upon their mother tongue or apprehend them through the prism of their own. In this article are compared Turkish, French and Chinese forms and structures with English through sets of analogical activities that I prepared and applied in classrooms with my Russian students studying the aforesaid languages at the University of Academgorodok near Novosibirsk in Siberia. It was my methodical experiment to bring together English/Turkish, English/French and English/Chinese as interrelated objects of study; to put into relief the interpenetrating analogical elements that these languages possess as a pedagogical approach to them in spite of their very different language families and distinctive structural and morphological features.

This study examines the relationship between student success measures on student achievement to inform our approach to mediating against potential barriers on persistence and retention for first generation and traditionally marginalized populations for students enrolled in a new Living Learning Community. Success measures examine those beyond the control of the university, including, but not limited to, High School GPA and ACT scores to determine where we should intervene and where we should build upon the strengths of our students. The theme of the PH LLC is Leadership Development and Career Exploration, a program that seeks to empower students by harnessing their individual strengths and capitalizing on them to be successful in college and beyond. The design of this program and its future prospects are also discussed.

Learners with special needs experience myriad problems in general and special education. These problems range from minor academic, social, emotional, and behavioral problems to major disenfranchisements, disadvantages, and disillusionments. In addition, these problems can be very intense. As a result, they call for innovative and creative techniques that include using the Church as a spiritual tool in educational activities. As educators and health professionals who are also Christians, we believe using the Church can assist in remediating the plights of these learners with special needs and in maximizing their fullest potential in school and in life. This is the focus of this article.

Both educators and students in the United States feel the continuous pressure to improve achievement scores as a form of validation for their work and success. However, emerging bilingual (EBs) learners encounter barriers within assessments that break the assumptions of validity, reliability, and fairness and prevent them from demonstrating their true knowledge. This is worsened when assumptions about EBs' academic capacity are extracted from those assessment results. This paper focuses on the use of assessment for and as learning for emerging bilingual (EB) students. Specific attention is given to the use of the students' home language as a resource in evaluating their knowledge and how teachers may address some of the inequitable practices to prepare EBs not only to be successful academically, but to demonstrate it in today's assessment world.

Prior research fails to support the future implementation of culturally responsive teaching. We argue that imparting culturally responsive teaching practices in the curriculum is insufficient and that preservice teacher education should instead look to support the implementation of these practices in subsequent teaching. The purpose of this literature synthesis was to characterize preservice teachers’ culturally responsive teaching self-efficacy. Thus, the researchers focused on estimating normative scores for preservice teachers by calculating and comparing mean point estimates and 95% confidence intervals for the culturally responsive teaching self-efficacy (CRTSE) scale strength indices across studies. A total of 14 independent studies representing N  = 1,026 preservice teachers and 21 independent measures of CRTSE were included in this literature synthesis. Preservice teacher mean scores on the CRTSE scale were characterized by visual interpretation of plots of the 95% confidence intervals. Based on the results, teacher educators can expect the average preservice teacher to be 70–83% certain of their ability to implement culturally responsive teaching. The data also indicate that CRTSE differs across preservice teacher specialization. Finally, the data also suggest that the representation of preservice teachers of color impacts the CRTSE score confidence intervals. Implications for teacher education, preservice teacher recruitment, and culturally responsive teaching are provided.

Nowadays, English has been considered as an International language or a Lingua Franca as a result of its widespread use among non-native speakers. English now is spoken by various people with different languages and diverse cultures. Thus, learners need to know the culture of different people of various countries. As stated by Cortazzi, M., & Jin, L. (1999). Cultural mirrors: Materials and methods in the EFL classroom. In E. Hinkel (Ed.), Culture in second language teaching (pp. 196–219). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, learners should have knowledge about source culture, target culture, and international culture. In this regard, teachers have a great responsibility in including cultural content in their English language classes. Therefore, the main purpose of this pilot study during Azimzadeh’s PhD journey (Azimzadeh, M. (Unpublished). Representation of cultural elements in EFL textbooks used in Iranian EFL high schools [PhD dissertation]. Adana, Turkey: Cukurova University) is to investigate Iranian and Turkish English language teachers’ views, perspectives, and experiences of teaching cultural content in their English language classes. This study was conducted as a mixed-method design. The data collection was done by using a questionnaire and an interview. The questionnaire which was used in this study adopted from CULTNET project (a network of researchers of inter-culture in foreign language education), Byram and Risager’s projects, and Cortazzi and Jin’s (1999) three cultural sources. Participants of this study were 16 teachers who were teaching English language in high schools in Iran and Turkey. The data collected from questionnaires and interviews were analysed by using a series of descriptive statistics and interviews were analysed by using thematic analysis (Creswell, J. W. (2003). Research design: Qualitative, quantitative, and mixed method approaches . London: Sage Publications, Inc). The findings of this study have indicated that both Iranian and Turkish teachers were aware of the importance of teaching culture in their English language classes. They generally claimed that culture was important in language classes and the cultural subjects should be taught in English language classes.

In this article, two instructional practices, Numbered Heads Together (NHT) and Carousel Brainstorming (CB), are discussed to guide instructors through the intentional practice of incorporating flexible groupings (CEC, HLP 17) in their daily instruction for the purpose of creating Culturally Relevant PK-12 Learning Communities for CLD Learners with Exceptionalities. Although NHT and CB are not the only approaches for implementing cooperative learning groups as an effective instructional tool, it is the authors’ premise that both practices successfully promote academic achievement and provide a positive, culturally relevant design for diverse learners, as well as a practitioner-friendly framework that is easily implemented. NHT and CB also serve as a means to provide students with a voice for their learning and to promote positive student behaviors. Regardless of the setting or identified disability, when facilitated with foresight and careful planning, evidence-based instructional best practices are supported, and inclusive course content is attained through the use of NHT and CB. Example lesson plans to intentionally incorporate both strategies are included within the article.