Educational Psychology

This study highlights ways in which educators can employ extant pedagogical knowledge and develop innovative instructional practices that leverage the shift from print-based literacy to digitally inflected multiliteracies. The explosion of information and communication technologies (ICTs) and digital media, especially the Internet in the 1990s, has changed the way students read, write, and learn. In an effort to expand knowledge about teaching and learning with digital media, this case study of curriculum and instruction at Tomol University’s Department of Digital Media (DDM) (a pseudonym) examined the changing nature of literacy in the Digital Age. To shed light on this phenomenon, students, faculty and administrators were purposefully selected from the DDM’s population. Data were collected from curriculum documents, interviews with faculty and administrators, a student survey, and artifacts of student work and instructor feedback. Qualitative analysis elucidated how the DDM’s instructional practices supported the advancement of students’ digital multiliteracies, media-rich project skills, and Digital Age communication fluency. The theoretical framework, grounded in pragmatic meliorism, critical realism and the education research literature, provided an analytic and interpretive approach that led to the study’s findings and recommendations for educational practice and future research.

Modern and postmodern civilization exhibits a variety o f pathological trends that have not only polluted the environment but have contributed to a spiritual crisis within humanity. Personal and social fragmentation has resulted from us losing touch with our spiritual roots. This paper explores aspects of archaic ontology as a remedy for the fragmented selfthrough an examination of the Native American Sun Dance ceremony. Through personal narrative and a review of the literature on the Sun Dance I explore ways for ethical intercultural exchange that can help us rediscover our spiritual connection with the Earth and how we might begin to embody the wisdom we encounter.