From a young age, every child in Singapore is taught that the surest way to succeed in life is to have academic success. Education is seen as a way to secure your bread and butter as it leads to a well-paying job, which then allows you to afford a comfortable lifestyle. Of course, few would argue against education being one of the most important things in a person’s development. But when the stakes for being the smartest in your class are so high, the education system inevitably becomes a rat race for the highest numbers and the best scores. There is an “overbearing focus on grades and paper qualifications are elevated to unholy heights and worshipped,” and this pressure gives birth to a generation of Singaporeans who are risk-averse, lack the motivation to think critically, and don’t have the drive to innovate. The Singaporean education system is touted as a meritocratic one that allows students the freedom to climb the social ladder provided that they are hardworking enough to achieve the grades to advance. A meritocratic system seems fair as grades and paper qualifications don’t lie, but this encourages a tunnel-vision approach to education, ignoring the many aspects of education which cannot be measured by numbers. Is meritocracy at fault, then, for creating a generation of humanistic robots? I will examine and critique the current educational system in place by highlighting its faults and advantages, as well as by drawing contrasts with the systems in other countries. I hope to propose a way to reform Singapore’s education system for the better, to one that is more holistic, aiming to produce a generation of creative and motivated thinkers, which will help Singapore progress even further into the 21st Century.

In society, there are different types of intelligence that are valued. However, football intelligence is being overlooked. Previous research has addressed  the perception of student athletes in the classroom based upon stereotypes and the damaging effects of elite culture. Our methods included: Focus Group, Discourse Analysis, Social Media Analysis, Participant Observation, Interviews, Social Mapping, and Photoanalysis. We will use perception of chess players, which society accepts as intelligent, as a comparison to football players. These methods wil help us find out people's perceptions about football athletes and we hope that our research can be used in the future in Universities around the word to help change the dynamic of the classroom and possibly increase the graduation rates of football players. 

Despite increasing cultural and linguistic diversity in the United States, our public schools struggle to best serve students whose first language is not English. There is a disconnect between what educational research identifies as best practices for English learners and what gets implemented in our schools. In order to modify policy to meet the needs of these students, we need to first fully understand the policies that already exist; therefore, this research seeks to create a fuller picture of the state of bilingual education policy in Washington state. As Bernard Spolsky argues, language policy consists of three key parts: explicit language planning in the form of laws or school curricula, actual linguistic practices, and language beliefs & ideologies. I focus on the third - beliefs about bilingual education and the use of non-English languages in public schools - by surveying newspaper coverage of bilingual education in Washington state. Newspapers were chosen as a method for examining popular attitudes because they play a dual role in informing both the policy-making elites and the general public, two groups that rarely ever come in direct contact with bilingual education. Because of this, newspapers have a unique function in informing the public's opinion on matters they would otherwise not encounter. This presentation will focus specifically on preliminary results based on coverage of bilingual education in the Seattle Times, one of Washington state's major newspapers. Using discourse analysis methods, I will look at stylistic and rhetorical choices made by the paper to undermine the need for quality programming for bilingual students and to marginalize the voices of those who are most impacted by these programs - bilingual students and their families.

The purpose of my research is to examine the impact of an Afro-centric prototype (ACP) on target populations utilizing Community-Based Education (CBE). I define an Afro-Centric Prototype as a distinctively positive symbol that frames black people with an affirming perspective that promotes a constructive self-image. I characterize CBE as instruction occurring outside typical school facilities, and instead in community centers, bookstores, libraries, faith centers, etc., commonly accessible to the public. ACPs can exist as a person, object, or geographical region, and is communicated through language that results in black student confidence building and impacting non-black students in a similar manner. The ACP in my research is St. Maurice, a black General of the Holy Roman Empire that originated from the Nubian Kingdom of Africa. My non-profit organization, The Good Pharaoh Foundation was in the land of St. Maurice in 2011. My discoveries in Africa pointed to extensive evidence of this ACP’s impact on western civilization, culture, and society. Maurice is venerated amongst the early Kings of Europe and all Popes of the Church. Present-day leaders such as Colin Powell have been inducted into the order of St. Maurice. His influence on European and African culture are both fascinating, and world-impacting. I will hold a series of ACP lectures on St. Maurice and compare the resulting impact on black students occurring in CBEs to classical school classrooms. I will also investigate if the CBE sessions create a demand for additional research, activities, and publications that further promote the Afro-Centric prototype of St. Maurice. I hypothesize that positive learning experiences will occur in the CBEs indicating a need for allocation of further resources in CBE environments.

The work of tutors in the Odegaard Writing & Research Center requires continual adaptation of practices to accommodate and collaborate with writers who range from incoming freshmen to tenured faculty, come from more than 150 different departments and programs, speak more than 80 different home languages, and may visit at any stage of the writing process. Successful interactions require that undergraduate tutors thoughtfully enact writing center scholarship that itself tends to be quite abstract and axiomatic: for example “make better writers, not better papers”. As researchers, we asked: How might communication tools borrowed from other fields help tutors mediate the disconnect between writing center theory/pedagogy and writers’ (sometimes conflicting) expectations? We hypothesized that tutors’ ability to so mediate would be improved by acquisition of concrete active-listening and reflective-responding skills; such skills might enable them to more confidently navigate the endlessly shifting terrain of a tutoring session. To identify needed skills, we reviewed scholarship from legal mediation, nursing, psychology, composition, and social work. To assess the realities of tutor practices -- how practices do and do not align with the pedagogical mission of a writing center -- we surveyed tutors to assess their key concerns, observed tutoring sessions, and created transcripts. Our preliminary findings indicate a considerable gap between writing center theory and practice, despite tutors’ own articulated goals and best intentions. In response, we have undertaken additional research into non-defensive communication strategies and begun to develop and test new training and education materials for fellow tutors. We hope to offer better ways to practically enact ideals of collaborative learning. What we’ve learned through our research to date shows both considerable promise toward this end and value to myriad teaching and learning groups.