This textbook will serve as a guide for practitioners whose goal is to enhance refugee students’ learning experiences. With millions of children globally in refugee or seeking asylum status, this volume is a must-read for every 21st century educator.
Often, refugee students have missed a substantial amount of schooling as a result of the disruptions in their home countries and transit through refugee camps. Others have never been to school at any time. Refugees enter school with the same hopes and aspirations as other students, but they also confront serious challenges.
This textbook helps educators to restore hope through the following topics:
empowering refugees in school
liberating structures in resettlement camps
increasing opportunity at university
designing compassionate pedagogies
leveraging technology
connecting the community
Each chapter includes points to ponder as educators work to apply the principles of restoring hope for refugee students and their families. This textbook also provides practical suggestions and case studies that will help educators to put theory into practice.
Teachers and professors who are passionate about honing their skills will find this book a comprehensive resource when displaced students enter their classrooms. This volume will also be of great interest to teacher-educators, pre-service teachers, educators serving in refugee camps and school administrators.
Illustrates concepts introduced throughout the book, many with case studies
Provides specific examples of pedagogies for displaced students and the children of displaced persons
Highlights how school and university leaders can support teachers to create a hopeful learning environment for displaced persons.
In 2019, I supervised a group of terrific scholars who were graduate assistants, and most were teachers. The bulk of the work was done by this terrific team. The idea was to create STEAM (Science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics) with literacy, then align all of that with Next Generation Science Standards, the Common Core State Standards, digital literacy standards, and Egyptian curricular standards.
The team worked together to produce the units, eventually four in all, and each of those was then reviewed by an independent expert who was not part of the team. While we were never able to spin those off to a website, as planned, I am adding them here with a Creative Commons license so that others can benefit from the great work the development team did. Because these were intended to be digitally available and designed for online access, technically, these are still drafts.
Theme
The world we live in!
Title
Securing access to clean water
Unit Essential Question
How could we secure better access to fresh/clean water sources?
Grade Level
6-8
The problem: Water scarcity and desertification are common challenges in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). The growing demands of securing more freshwater have impactful effects on demographics and economic development. Families living by the sea coast, and/ or remote places might spend many hours daily lining up to get a few liters of fresh water from the water delivery truck to maintain their day-to-day needs. Can you help them find a more sustainable and convenient alternative to access/ provide fresh water in their area?
How can we improve food production to meet the needs of the growing populations?
Grade Level
Grade (6-8)
The problem:
With the ever increasing population in Egypt and elsewhere, people need increasing amounts of food. In order to meet the increased food needs in Egypt, we have a lot of options such as importing food, which costs a lot of foreign currency, growing more food or rationalizing our food consumption. The government economic agenda gives priority to different agriculture projects with the aim to enlarge the cultivated area and to guarantee sufficient production of the main crops to satisfy the needs of the growing population. Can you help design a system that facilitates gardening for food production?
July 2019 was recorded as the warmest month in history. In general, it is anticipated that the period between 2015 to 2019 is turning out to be the hottest years in history (World Meteorological Organization, 2019). In Egypt, we continuously feel the summer heatwaves. As there is no hint for any environmental improvement, the climate change problem will continue bringing us more heatwaves and warmer weathers in the years to come. While using air conditioners might look like an immediate solution that helps us deal with the problem, the power used by air conditioners, like most other regular electricity-run devices, actually add to the problem causing climate change. Do you know why? Can you help us have a better solution that might have less negative impact on the environment?
The number of road traffic deaths continues to rise steadily, reaching 1.35 million in 2016 (WHO, 2016). Although automotive and mechanical engineers are innovating many safety procedures to help passengers, these innovations haven’t made their way into enough vehicles to reach their full potential in reducing fatal car crashes.
Do you remember those days that you spent hours outlining and drawing your dream car? What are the most important aspects in automotive design? How do automotive designers build cars that are speedy and safe at the same time?
Mechanical engineers, electrical engineers and industrial designers collaborate to develop and enhance motor vehicle structures, engines, and associated systems to ensure optimum wagon performance. In addition, they carry out a series of crash tests to modify their design in order to ensure optimum safety to all passengers in case of accidents.
Teaching the Language Arts: Forward Thinking in Today’s Classrooms is almost out in a new, 2nd edition by Denise Johnson, Beth Dobler, and Thomas DeVere Wolsey. New content, updated features, and now published by Routledge! The link below is an affiliate link; your price won’t change, though. https://amzn.to/3CDy8fg
Literacy Beat contributors are presenting several studies at The Federation of European Literacy Associations (FELA) in Dublin, Ireland, July 4 to 6, 2022. On this page, you can download resources and presentation slide decks.
July 4, 2022
Going Beyond the App: Online International Development to Reach Teachers on the Margins
Nance S. Wilson, State University of New York at Cortland
Thomas DeVere Wolsey, Consultant
Linda Smetana, California State University East Bay
Ibrahim M. Karkouti, The American University in Cairo
Ready for the premier literacy event in Africa? From August 23 to 25, 2023, the conference will be held in Nairobi, Kenya.
The Call for Abstracts is ready, and you can download it here or head to PALFA.org to see more about the upcoming conference and see photos from past conferences.
Thomas DeVere Wolsey with Freddy Hiebert and Ibrahim M. Karkouti
At AERA 2022 in San Diego, we presented
The authors conducted an analysis at the word level of four Arabic multidisciplinary textbooks in grades one and two in Egypt. The study sought to answer four questions: What are the most common words in standard Arabic? How many of the most common words in standard Arabic are used in the textbooks? How dense is the use of common words? How many rare words are used in the textbooks studied? Analysis found that the texts did not make use of any of the rare words found in the corpus, but many words in the texts did not appear in either the reference corpus inclusive of the common words list. Recommendations for policymakers and textbook publishers were included.
Recently, colleagues and I in Egypt tested a curriculum designed to improve letter-sound correspondence knowledge among first-grade students in four Egyptian community schools in an after-school program. The curriculum, called Iqra, intended that students would engage in whole-class, teacher-directed learning. We recorded the class sessions, but we needed to analyze interactions. We chose the time-honored Stallings (1977) instrument. However, to adjust for difference in the cultural context and modern data analysis tools, I created a modified Stallings Snapshot Observation System in Excel. Since there were two teachers in each classroom, the form was modified to accommodate that fact. Since the lessons varied in length, we also divided the video segments into 10 minute sequential chunks. This differs from the original but fit our needs.
I am sharing the Excel template because it may be helpful to others conducting classroom observations, but please share your thoughts and experiences in comments. In the meantime, as the research team completes analysis, I will provide additional observations here.
Engeström, Y. (1987). Learning by expanding: An activity-theoretical approach todevelopmental research. Helsinki, Finland: Orienta-Konsultit.
Scales, R. Q., Wolsey, T. D., Lenski, S., Smetana, L., Yoder, K. K., Dobler, E…Young J. R. (2018). Are we preparing or training teachers? Developing professional judgment in and beyond teacher preparation programs. Journal of Teacher Education, first published date: April-10-2017 doi: 10.1177/0022487117702584
Scales, R. Q., Wolsey, T. D., Young, J., Smetana, L., Grisham, D. L., Lenski, S., Dobler, E. Yoder, K. K., & Chambers, S. A. (2017). Mediating factors in literacy instruction: How novice elementary teachers navigate new teaching contexts. Reading Psychology, 38(6), 604-651. doi: 10.1080/02702711.2.17.1323056
Stallings, J. (1977). Learning to Look: A Handbook on Classroom Observation and Teaching Models. Wadsworth Publishing Company.
My work examines the potential interactions and opportunities to bring together traditional and digital literacies. Digital literacies are the skills needed to navigate digital tools (computer, smartphone, Kindle etc.) to evaluate, interact with, and create content. The way we engage with information from traditional literacies, such as books, is different from how we consume and create information found online. My work looks primarily at how we can help students to understand the information they are obtaining in digital spaces, analyze it critically, consider what is credible or not credible, and synthesize everything. Read the rest of the post here.
Nance Wilson and I talked with Mike Kranitz of EventSquid about #beyondtheapp #bta Beyond the App: Cause and Conference, which strives to support teachers’ professional development and coach literacy experts in one of the most creative ways possible in response to COVID, and their model may just change the game.
“We wanted them to know that they weren’t alone in the things that were causing them to struggle and we wanted them to know that people whose books they read… are also people they can talk and work together with.” – Dr. Thomas Wolsey
“It’s about leveraging the technology that’s out there to think about, ‘Well, what could this do for me that would be better and or different and would allow me to have similar quality practices that I had in the face to face?’” – Dr. Nance Wilson
Recently, the Center for Learning and Teaching (CLT) at The American University in Cairo sponsored a virtual symposium themed, Inspiration and Innovation: Conversations Around Emerging Pedagogy in Our Next Normal. The symposium featured faculty presentations called “Shift and Share.” Faculty presented the same presentation three times to ensure that participants were in small enough groups to interact. My presentation (March 10, 2021) was titled “Navigating the River: Teaching and Metacognition for Challenging Times” which you can view below.
A number of really good workshops, plenary sessions, and shift and share session recordings and resources are linked here. Check out the ideas!
Bridget Dalton
berdwyer
Blaine Smith
danagrisham
jillcastek
TDWolsey
Literacy Beat 