Rylie Ford
Author: Rylie Ford | Major: Social Studies Education and History | Semester: Fall 2023
My name is Rylie Ford and I am completing my honors thesis research for the College of Education and Health Professions, but I am also in the Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences. My majors are Social Studies Education and History and I graduate this upcoming spring! My wonderful mentor is Dr. Peggy Ward from the Education and Curriculum and instruction department. I have been researching this semester, Fall 2023, and will be continuing it in Spring 2024. Following graduation, I hope to begin my masters in History, and then eventually start teaching.
I chose to research Culturally Relevant Pedagogy after learning about it in my Classroom Learning Theory course with Dr. Ward. I knew that I loved her teaching style and philosophy, so after the course concluded I asked her if she would be interested in working on this with me. She has been my biggest supporter and advocate! We have worked together on every step of the research process, specifically creating my survey and analyzing the results. My research is focused on NWA secondary teachers and their perceptions of CRP, so I decided to send a survey out to teachers and see what I got back. I could not have done that without committee members, previous professors, faculty and local classroom teachers! I so appreciated their excitement about my research and willingness to help spread the word, I even had two teachers send it to all their school staff. I received 171 responses which is way more than I expected.
In creating my survey, I tried to find similar studies that have been done in order to get an idea of the questions I wanted to ask. Then, I came across a study that had created and validated a tool called “The Dispositions for Culturally Responsive Pedagogy Scale.” I used questions from their scale and edited them to be more relevant to my research questions. It is a likert based survey and I also asked for key demographic characteristics, two short answer questions, and a potential interview interest question.
One of my biggest challenges has been analysis of my results. I do not identify as a numbers person, so looking at frequencies and creating graphs has been very daunting. Luckily, my mentor has plenty of experience with that and has helped me organize the data and begin my analysis. My next steps are to continue organizing my data and have a draft of my paper written by the start of next semester. After that I will continue to revise and edit until its time to defend. I am also hoping to present my research at the Undergraduate Research Symposium. This research experience has been very beneficial to me, largely because this is a topic I am passionate about and genuinely want to continue educating myself on it! Additionally, it has enhanced the scope of my research abilities, which will definitely help me in graduate school. Further, it has pushed me out of my comfort zone to ask for help and make new connections. I had to send a lot of inquiries about various training programs, DEI initiatives in schools, and ask for help distributing my survey material.