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  Dear Grown-ups... Sincerely, Gen Z - TEDxSpokane

  Kimber Lybbert

  Kimber Lybbert is National Board-certified teacher at Moses Lake High school, and her students keep telling her to write a book or give a TED talk. This year, her students argumentative research projects answer the question: What is it like to be a member of the class of 2020? Topics range from the lack of mental health counseling to the emerging mercantile nature of teen sexuality. Their stories reach down inside your core, draw the contents of your chest up through your sinus cavity, and lodge the debris somewhere behind your prefrontal cortex. They are beautiful and powerful and broken and patched together in ways that allow the best light of humanity to shine through them. In her talk she urges everyone to see the strength and potential in our young people. I am a National Board-certified teacher at Moses Lake High school, and my students keep telling me I need to write a book or give a TED talk. I don’t think this is because of who I am, but because of who they are. This year, their argumentative research projects answer the question: What is it like to be a member of the class of 2020? This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx

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  The Use of Critical Literacy Methods to Teach for Democratic Consciousness

  Tavia Quaid

  This action research study was initiated out of my concern that secondary education was heavily focused on career preparation rather than citizenship and student participation in the democratic process. An interest in how critical literacy teaching methods could increase student democratic consciousness prompted the three-cycle critical action research design. The foundation for the study was critical theory. Critical theorists, in particular seminal writer Paulo Freire (1970), have addressed goals for education that develop student inquiry and analysis of how different types of power are portrayed by writers, thus identifying the key components of critical literacy. Social constructivist Lev Vygotsky (1934/1997) addressed literacy methods that align with critical literacy teaching strategies. Vygotsky’s methods are included in the International Baccalaureate’s approaches to teaching and learning: the pedagogic framework for the instruction of IB’s curriculum. The study research question was to what extent does critical literacy, as implemented with the International Baccalaureate’s Approaches to Teaching and Learning, develop students’ democratic consciousness and their skills for participatory democracy. In three ninth grade pre-baccalaureate classes in the Pacific Northwest, this study used critical literacy instructional methods to address reading, speaking, writing, questioning, and creative discourse to develop students’ democratic consciousness. Critical discourse analysis, new historical criticism, reflective journals, research that identified the origin and purpose of the sources, Socratic seminars, informal and formal correspondence, and selfassessment were the key instructional strategies implemented. The cycles were based on three core texts: Cry, the Beloved Country (Paton 1948/2003), The Samurai’s Garden (Tsukiyama, 1994), Enrique’s Journey (Nazario, 2013). Socratic seminars and online discussions expressed student questioning and respect for others’ ideas and perspectives, while creative assessments iii demonstrated student insight and proved the impact of affective learning. Formal letters to elected officials proved students’ ability to present a logical argument for societal improvement. However, the results indicated that more authentic evidence of student democratic participation might have been observed if opportunities for service learning had been included among the instructional methods. The study results demonstrated that younger secondary students showed democratic consciousness in response to multi-skill critical literacy methods that promote student inquiry, reflection, and creativity.

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  The Lexical Approach: Collocation in High School English Language Learners

  Claire Smith

  Collocation skills were measured over time in a group of high School ELL students. Qualitative errors of Russian speakers versus Spanish speakers were analyzed.

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  Polymetric Performance by Musicians

  Kate Grieshaber

  This study measured musicians' ability to perform complex motor activities, seeking to provide empirical foundation for theories of neural timing behavior. In individual sessions, each of twenty-nine right-handed undergraduate or graduate percussionists or pianists performed three polymeters (2:3, 3:4, and 4:5) with two hand combinations (L:R, R:L) in six cuing contexts: (1) Uncued, without having heard the pattern, (2) Pulsewith the first pulse of each measure provided, (3) Imitate 1-in synchrony with a computer-generated pattern heard over a loudspeaker, (4) Continue/Pulseafter matching the pattern, continuing with the first pulse of each measure, (5) Imitate 2-again matching the pattern, and (6) Continue/Uncued-after matching the pattern, continuing on without cues. Tap evenness scores (standard deviation around each beat) served as the dependent variable. Factors found to be significant included hand (right more accurate than left), meter (fast more accurate than slow), hand combination (left hand performed slow meter least accurately), pattern (2:3 more accurate than 3:4, with both more accurate than 4:5), and cuing context (imitation contexts were more accurate than contexts in which first beats were provided). These effects, however, are affected by significant interactions of hand/meter and hand/meter/pattern. Very high and consistently accurate performance was observed, with many subjects performing with standard deviations under 10 milliseconds. Some musicians performed some contexts with near mathematical precision and others with systematic variation (non-random lags and anticipations). In post-experiment interviews, subjects were asked whether they had difficulties with certain aspects of performance (e.g., hand difficulty, changing hand combination, mathematically precise stimuli). Subjects also were asked about relative difficulty of polymetric pattern and performance strategy use. These reports corresponded closely with empirical performance data. Subjects reported using tactile, visual, and auditory cues and verbal mnemonics, and often reported switching between focusing on one meter or hand and focusing on the resultant rhythm of both hands together. Although high correspondence between subjects' reported cognitive activity and motor production was observed, more baseline data are needed before formulating models of rhythmic perception. Findings have implications for musicians (especially educators) and researchers in various fields examining neural aspects of motor behavior.