Program of Study: Approved 4/10/08 / Modified 8/25/08 / Completed 3/24/09

The original program of study did not include the Independent Study: Technology and Teacher Education or the Doctoral Seminar in Educational Anthropology. My original plan was to complete EDIT 747: Technology and Teacher Education with Dr. Sprague during the summer 2008 and to do an Independent Study in Multilingual Multicultural Education with Dr. Osterling in the fall of 2008. I had to make a few changes as EDIT 747 was canceled and I learned that Dr. Osterling was offering his course in Educational Anthropology in the fall of 2008. I believe these changes have worked out for the best.

My work in Dr. Osterling's class allowed me to gain a historical perspective of educational anthropology and to explore more recent approaches to educational research that do more than report on issues of social inequalities by designing studies where the researcher and the participants collaborate to serve as agents of social change (Mehan, 2008). As my own ideas for becoming an agent of change in the field of world language education continued to develop during the fall 2008 semester, my desire to do a meaningful pilot study for my Independent Study with Dr. Sprague grew stronger. Dr. Sprague's guidance and flexibility greatly contributed to the development of a study that I believe will serve as a springboard to my dissertation research.

After taking Structural Equation Modeling in the summer of 2008 and Qualitative Methods in Educational Research in the fall of 2008, I found myself in a bit of an identity crisis. I wondered, what kind of researcher am I? Am I a qualitative or quantitative researcher? As I thought about becoming an agent of change, I believed that a mixed-method design would allow me to gain both "big picture" and "in depth" perspectives of the realities of world language education. But I was not sure how I would reconcile the philosophical and ideological differences that serve as the foundation for the distinct qualitative and quantitative research paradigms. To help me resolve my identity crisis, I made the decision to audit Dr. Maxwell's EDRS 797: Mixed Methods in Educational Research course in the spring 2009 semester. It was in this course that I found my identity as a researcher as I discovered a dialectical approach to an integrated mixed methods design (Greene, 2007).

General Culture			8
Semester	Course Number	Course Description	Credits
Fall 2006	EDUC 800	Ways of Knowing	3
Spring 2007	EDUC 802	Leadership Seminar	3
Fall 2006 / Spring 2007	EDUC 805	Doctoral Seminar in Education	2
Research Methods			12
Semester	Course Number	Course Description	Credits
Spring 2007	EDRS 810	Problems and Methods in Educational Research	3
Fall 2007	EDRS 811	Quantitative Methods in Educational Research	3
Fall 2008	EDRS 812	Qualitative Methods in Educational Research	3
Summer 2008	EDRS 797a	Structural Equation Modeling	3
Spring 2009	EDRS 797b	Mixed Methods in Educational Research	N/C audit
Professional Specialization			21
Semester	Course Number	Course Description	Credits
Spring 2008	EDUC 874	The Achievement Gap	3
Fall 2008	EDUC 853	World Language Perspectives in Teacher Education	3
Summer 2007	EDUC 797	Advanced Topics: Brain Based Teaching and Learning	3
Fall 2007	EDUC 882	Seminar in Bilingualism/SLA Theory and Research	3
Fall 2008	EDUC 893	Seminar in Educational Anthropology	3
Spring 2008	EDUC 890	Internship in Education	3
Spring 2008	EDUC 994	Advanced Internship in Education	3
Minor Field of Study			14
Semester	Course Number	Course Description	Credits
Summer 2007	EDIT 611	Innovations in Distance Learning	3
Summer 2007	EDIT 705	Instructional Design	3
Fall 2007	EDIT 725	Technology and Diversity	3
Fall 2008 / Spring 2009	EDUC 897	Independent Study: Technology and Teacher Education	3
Fall 2006	EDIT772	Electronic Portfolio	2
Dissertation			12
Semester	Course Number	Course Description	Credits
Summer 2009	EDUC 998	Doctoral Dissertation Proposal	3
Fall 2009	EDUC 999	Doctoral Dissertation Research	9

Return to top