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Amy M Hewett-Olatunde
TRSL A: Prospectus
GED 8516 Leadership
Spring 2014
Hamline University














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Dissertation Prospectus
Amy Hewett-Olatunde, EdD7
Introduction to Research Topic and Question
My interest in constructivism, community building, and engaged pedagogy has
become more evident in my classroom practice as I have grown both professionally and
personally. As an English Language (EL) teacher, I have been charged with a very
special task; I serve as a steward, a parent, an educator, and a role model. Every morning
when I wake up, I feel blessed, and that is not a light statement to make after working in
the same school for the past fifteen years. I know my day will be one of growth, bonding,
and learning for both my students and myself. As an EL teacher, I need to ask myself the
following questions: How can my students learn academically while growing emotionally
every single day in my class? What do I bring to these students to make their day
productive, while feeling that they truly belong to a community?
My interest in engaged pedagogy stems from a deep-seeded love for youth and
empowering them through a holistic education. Engaged pedagogys central focus is on
the well-being of an individual. The teacher must be committed to a process of self-
actualization that promotes their own well-being if they are able to teach students in a
manner that empowers students (hooks, 1994, p. 15). I am highly intrigued in how
engaged pedagogy lends itself to building community in an EL high school setting. The
building I work in has driven and passionate teachers who truly love their jobs because of
the students they teach, and as a result, there is not a high turn over rate in our school for
teachers. The relationships that have been formed with students is evident as we see our
former students come back year after year post graduation to volunteer, to visit, and to
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attend events at our school. There are definitely some teachers in our building who stand
out as being closer to students because of the relationships they have built with the
students in their classes.
Our students require an educational foundation that varies for each individual, and
with that being said, it sometimes feels like there is less time to cater to their emotional
needs. Our learners come from an average of over 26 countries, and even more cultures
and languages. Many of the students are Students with Limited or Interrupted Formal
Education (SLIFE), and their needs are different from students who have been afforded
the opportunity to an education throughout their childhood and adolescence. With this
variable, the teachers and staff at LEAP are among the most passionate people I have
ever come across in regard to serving the students individual academic and personal
needs. I believe this is a characteristic possessed by EL teachers in general. Because of
the strain placed on teachers to meet timely objectives and adhere to the Common Core
Standards set out by the state of Minnesota, how can an EL teacher foster relationships
and develop the most optimal environment for students?
With an optimal environment, English Learners are able to develop multiple areas
of their person. One area that I am particularly interested in is advocacy, and more so
self-advocacy. So, this brings me to the question: How does engaged pedagogy, through
the means of community building, help to form a conceptual framework for self-
advocacy in a high school English Language Learner classroom? In my view, engaged
pedagogy walks hand in hand with community building. A constructivist lens is the
framework for which I am going to pursue this topic. Community building is defined as
any activity, individually or collaboratively, in which the teacher and students build
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relationships, form bonds, build on each others strengths, and build up each others
weaknesses. Creativity, discomfort, open-mindedness, and equality are all components of
engaged pedagogy.
Philosophical and Theoretical Foundations
There is a thread that weaves humankind together; therefore, we all have the right
to equality. This is equality in every facet, not excluding education. It is not until we view
life through this lens that power struggles will cease to exist. Because we are nowhere
near this point, I face the dilemma of trying to educate my students on how to self-
advocate for themselves. This seems like such a simple concept and one that should be
engrained in us from the time of infancy as we begin to develop our personalities;
nevertheless, this is a foreign concept to some who have inherited an existence of
oppression. When you teach students who were born and grew up in oppressive
circumstances, it seems insurmountable to teach them how to stand up and claim what is
rightfully theirs: self-dignity, self-appreciation, and the power to advocate for themselves.
I vividly remember a young, Karen male who was writing a poem in my class who stated,
I am from being born to run and as the poem continued, the depth of this young
mans resiliency through struggle was profound. It helps me, as an educator, to never
forget for a single moment that these children need so much more than content and
language objectives; they need us, as educators, to feed their souls.
Through their personal narratives, there is a common thread that bonds these
beautiful young souls; they are persistent and resilient. This is the beauty of children in
my eyes. Children can be beaten down, shamed, chained, but they still find a way to hope
for something better. I work with these children, and this is why I find myself driven to
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be the teacher they can count on to prepare them, educate them, and show them how to
speak up for themselves. As a teacher, I feel it is my responsibility to respect and care for
the souls of my learners. This is a passion that courses through my veins. Over the
duration of many years, I have reflected on my craft, I have learned from educators,
poets, actors, writers, and my own students to design and/or implement curriculum that
engages, empowers, and transforms. This is an ever-evolving process for the students and
myself. This dissertation will attempt to articulate the process of how community
building through engaged pedagogy is crucial to the comprehensive education of an EL
student, and what the resulting effects may be in terms of self-advocacy.
My first theme will focus on the reason for self-advocacy. It will be based on an
historical context of whom my students are, where they are from, and the situations they
lived in before arriving in the United States. It will put into context the need for
community building and self-advocacy. It will help me to reflect on the necessity placed
on this issue. How do my self-identity and my students self-identity parallel one
another? How can people from vastly different life experiences and cultures come
together to form a symbiotic relationship? How can we grow together and individually?
How can the most fractured of students find their voice to feel empowered? Without
this foundation, it may not be fully understood why there is such a necessity for
community building in the classroom. In todays classrooms, you would be hard pressed
not to find an EL student sitting in a desk amongst their native peers. I am fortunate
enough to have 100% of my students be ELs, but for those EL students who find
themselves alone in an ocean of Americans who dont really understand them and dont
take the time to know them, this dissertation is also for you. For all of those EL teachers
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who spend their days and nights consumed with focusing on their students lives at the
expense of their personal needs, this dissertation is for you. This dissertation is also for
mainstream teachers who struggle to understand how to teach ELs and to understand the
complexities of their ELs lives in and out of the classroom. And last but not least, this
dissertation is for the guardians of these ELs, whose voices cant be heard, but who hope
desperately that their children will be loved, nurtured, and receive the best education. All
students should have a voice, and that voice should be heard.
The second theme will be identifying ways to build a constructivist classroom
where engaged pedagogy is the cornerstone. With each new semester comes a new group
of students who have trepidation of the days that lie ahead. I can only assume that they
hope to learn a lot, make friends in their classes, get good grades, to feel they belong, and
to have fun. As a teacher, what foundation will be built for the students in respect to
forming a community? This counters the notion of the banking system of education
(hooks, p. 14) where students are in your classroom to consume knowledge and store it.
My philosophy falls in line with Thich Nhat Hanhs philosophy of engaged Buddhism
and Paolo Frieres philosophy of praxis education. Paolo Freire and Hanhs
philosophies were similar in that there was action and reflection in Frieres view and a
focus on practice in conjunction with contemplation (hooks, p. 14). It is my charge to
transgress boundaries with my students. In order to do this, I need to figure out ways that
their individual needs can heard, developed, and satisfied in a manner that benefits them
and the class as a whole.
Another component of this philosophy that was mentioned is that the teacher must
be fully engaged and nourish their well being also. This is difficult on a daily basis. We
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all come into the classroom with baggage from our personal lives, and it is usually
expected we leave that baggage outside the door. Maybe this is expected for a couple
different reasons from the teachers perspective: the teacher does not have time for it,
does not feel comfortable with the contents of the baggage, and feels there is no place for
it in the classroom. From the students perspective: they dont know how to unload their
baggage without being exposed, they are scared, or they feel no one will understand
them, and in turn, judge them. There have been countless tears shed in my room, both
privately and publicly, by myself, and my students. A sentiment may have been
expressed and others felt empathy, a difficult situation was encountered and a student
needed a shoulder to cry on, I have read a journal at my desk and wept out of deep sorrow
and a mothers pain, or there was such uproarious laughter that it turned into tears.
Engaged pedagogy means exposing yourself amongst fellow men and women who dont
judge your wears; they accept it, work with it, and help you to heal or to celebrate. There
are unspoken rules of non-judgment and encouragement that manifest in this classroom.
The third theme will be advocacy through action and active participation. What
will community building look like in the classroom? One can speak of this holistic
learning, but clarification needs to be provided with concrete examples. Through a
variety of activities, a community will start to form in three classrooms, which are of
varying English levels and focus on multiple language modalities: listening, speaking,
reading, and writing. In juxtaposition with these three classes, research on the
effectiveness of drama, journal writing, improvisation, public speaking and discourse,
and literature circles will be illustrated. This section will provide the framework for the
endless possibilities available to implement into a classroom, while helping the reader
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understand the importance from a philosophical and theoretical perspective. It is the
concept of forming an action plan and implementing it.
The fourth and final theme is leadership. How has leadership emerged from this
community? When I speak of leadership, I speak not only of the overt form of leadership
we have come to know as a society where the participants who speak the loudest and with
the most convincing argument prevail. I speak of all forms of leadership from servant to
transformational leadership (Northouse, 2013) that serves the community in a beneficial
way. The community includes the person exuding leadership in the most covert of ways.
Set with examples rich in variety, the story of these students comes to life with a
bountiful voice. How these students are able to take this empowerment out into their
worlds sets the tone for why a teachers individual classroom can alter mindsets on a
larger scale. This is the product of a journey fraught with pain, discomfort, worry, and
joy. This is the story of the EL student, who has a past similar to so many other
immigrants and refugees, but very much has a single story that needs to be heard.
Eluding to Adichie Chimamandas The Danger of a Single Story, educators should
recognize and appreciate the learners individual story.
Research Framework and Explanation of Research Methods
My dissertation will use a qualitative methodology. Qualitative research deals
with data collection and interpretation through an in-depth subjective lens. There is no set
starting point or a prescribed sequence of steps; interconnection and interaction are
among the different design components (Maxwell, 2013, p. 3). I will utilize a
constructivist paradigm to guide my research. In this paradigm, the researcher and the
participants in their studies come together in a co-construction. It is ill advised that the
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researcher be distant and objective (Hatch, 2002, p. 15). It is because of this close
relationship and mutual engagement that a subjective reality is constructed (Mischler,
1986).
The types of studies I will be implementing are case study and phenomenological
study. Case study, the first of the two types of studies being used, is an in-depth
exploration of a bounded system (e.g., an activity, event, process, or individuals) based
on extensive data collection (McMillan and Schumacher, p. 344). This case study will
be bound to the three components of participant characteristics, place, and time. It will be
an intrinsic case in that the participants are a unique set of individuals. Through extensive
and varied forms of data collection, this case study will allow me, the researcher, to form
an in-depth understanding of the participants and their narratives throughout the process.
Although the observation of the participants through varied activities will prove
fascinating, it is the ethnographical study that will pull these narratives together to seek
clarification on my research question. This then leads to the phenomenological aspect of
the research.
Through the use of phenomenological studies, there will be periods of time
interviewing participants and other times observing and examining the lived
experiences of the students I am studying. This can be thought of as capturing the
essence of the experience as perceived by the participant (McMillan and Schumacher,
p. 346). This type of study has a heavy emphasis on the consciousness of human
experiences (p. 346). There will be an initial open-ended survey to assess where the
participants feel they are at in terms of identity and self-confidence relating to the past
and present in various situations and with various groups. Thereafter, throughout the
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course of a high-school quarter, or nine weeks, personal, in-depth interviews through
unstructured means will be elicited. Through both written and oral responses, I will
attempt to interpret the similar experiences the participants will be involved in and how
they varied for each participant. What are their individual perspectives? It will examine
the experience of each participant and recognize that these experiences have a
relationship with the phenomenon (p. 346). Activities such as, but not limited to:
Writers Workshop with journals and poems, individual and group responses to group
discussions, and observations and involvement in drama and improvisation mini-
workshops led by myself and/or the aid of artists-in-residency from Park Square Theater
will be used. At the end of this nine-week period, the students will be given a post open-
ended survey similar, but not identical, to the initial open-ended survey given nine weeks
prior. All of the data collected needs to be analyzed.
Hermeneutic principles, by means of text interpretation, will help to co-construct
the participants perspectives (Bogdan & Biklen, 1992). The participants answers to
interview questions and journal topics, my observations and their observations
throughout the semester, and a final assessment of their overall change will form personal
narratives of their experiences. From these narratives, I will begin to interpret and
reconstruct by means of inductive analysis. Inductive data analysis is a search for
patterns of meaning in date so that general statements about phenomena under
investigation can be made (Hatch, 2002, p. 161). I will read the narratives and compare
them to see what themes surface. I will then code these themes to determine which ones
dominate and which ones do not. This evidence will determine if the community building
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activities they engaged in throughout the semester supported and elevated self-advocacy
of the participants or not.
Limitations and Ethical Considerations
There are some obvious limitations to this type of study. I will be working with
three of my own ELL writing classes, which leads to a great deal of subjectivity.
However, since my paradigm insists on the participants and the researcher being closely
connected, I had to maintain my original belief that it was better to work with my
students in my own classroom. I had originally thought of working with three different
teachers, but the validity would decrease as the activities would be vastly different from
one teacher to the next.
The ethical considerations are concerned with protecting the participants (Hatch,
2002). I see that there are a number of ethical issues to consider with my research:
reciprocity, exploitation, and preconceptions/bias. Hatch states that we ask a lot of
participants, namely that they need to reveal what goes on behind the scenes in their
everyday lives. We are asking that they trust us enough so that they are comfortable
sharing intimate details (Hatch, 2002). In many cases, we record their experiences and
then we leave to discern the data. We ask a lot, and, if were not careful, give very little
(Hatch, 2002, p. 66). Because of the students youth and positionality, the following set
of questions will help address the two aforementioned ethical concerns of reciprocity and
exploitation:
Why am I doing this study?
Why am I doing it at this site?
What is my relationship to the participants?
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What are the participants roles in the design, data collection, analysis, and
authorship of this study?
Who benefits from the study?
How do I benefit?
How do the participants benefit?
Who benefits most?
Who may be at risk in the contexts I am studying? (Hatch, 2002, p. 68)
In terms of preconceptions and/or bias, the researcher needs to bracket or hold
preconceived ideas about the phenomenon to elicit and better understand the meanings
given by the participants (McMillan and Schumacher, p. 346). Because I, the researcher,
have developed, revised, and implemented these activities into similar classes in the past,
I need to be critically aware that preconceptions will hinder the effects of the
investigation. I need to approach this study with new eyes, so as not to limit my
perspectives, but to allow the participants and their experiences to develop in the most
authentic of ways.
After determining that this research will benefit my students, myself, and other
educators who are interested in engaged pedagogy, I am convinced that there will be
more reciprocity for my students than myself and they will not be exploited in any way.
Because they are my students, it is my foremost concern to protect them and ensure that
their benefits always outweigh mine.


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To summarize, this study, including the experiences and its participants, are
intensely rich. It is my hope, as the researcher and teacher, that the students experiences
throughout this process will both equip them with tools for self-advocacy and help them
to identify their leadership strengths as they go forth on their journey in a new country.
There is not a lot of current research available in this area, so I believe my
findings will enhance the field of English as an Additional Language (EAL), the
mainstream public school system, ELL licensure programs and General Education
licensure programs. Moreover, I think it is time for all our EL children to have a voice
that is heard amongst peers, in schools, in their communities, and in our society as a
whole. In every child, there is potential and a gift that could lend itself to greatness in the
world. How are our EL children any different?












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Annotated Bibliography
Bogdan, R., & Biklen, S. K. (1992). Qualitative research for education: an introduction
to theory and methods (2nd ed.). Boston: Allyn and Bacon.
Collay, M. (20112011). Everyday Teacher Leadership: Taking Action Where You Are.
San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
This book offers a wonderful foundation in what teacher leadership looks like. It
helps the reader to gain perspective on leadership as seen through teaching,
collaboration, inquiry, and partnerships. It is an advocacy text, which lends itself
to the pursuit of leadership and implementation of leadership in and out of the
classroom.
Freire, P. (2000). Pedagogy of the oppressed (30th anniversary ed.). New York:
Continuum.
One of the most renowned texts for critical pedagogy, Pedagogy of the
Oppressed, critiques the flaws in the banking model of education. The student
is a receptacle to collect knowledge, but there is no give-and-take relationship
with the teacher. Pedagogy involves the learner co-creating the knowledge in the
classroom.
Hanh, T. N. (2000). The Art of Mindful Living: How to Bring Love, Compassion, and
Inner Peace into Your Daily Life. Colorado: Sounds True.
This Audio CD shows how the powers of the sun can illuminate the areas of our
lives, which dwell in darkness. We should be mindful of our emotions of anger,
fear, and guilt, which will allow unnatural impatience to come into play. The
Beginners Mind is finding the passion for your purpose in life. Through
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breathing exercises, healing of past and current afflictions can be overcome. It
also focuses on how to live deeply in the moment.
Hatch, J. A. (2002). Doing qualitative research in education settings. Albany: State
University of New York Press.
hooks, b. (1994). Teaching to transgress: education as the practice of freedom. New
York: Routledge.
This book offers tremendous insight into the concepts of engaged pedagogy and
transformational teaching. It gives the reader a new perspective on why it is
crucial to create a neutral classroom where all learners feel welcomed, heard,
and a sense of ownership. It includes the notion of a teacher being truly involved
with her students, which focuses on well-being for both the learner and the
teacher.
Maxwell, J. A. (2013). Qualitative research design: An interactive design (3
rd
ed.).
Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.
Mischler, E. G. (1986). Research interviewing: context and narrative. Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press.
Northouse, P. G. (2013). Leadership: theory and practice (6th ed.). Thousand Oaks:
SAGE.
This book offers an insight into different forms of leadership that exist. It helps
to illustrate how leadership does not fit one mold. Northouse begins with a
definition of leadership in a broad sense to then slice the concept into all of its
many faces for the reader to gain a perspective of how leadership is can be seen
in both direct and indirect ways.
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Palmer, P. J., & Scribner, M. (2007). The courage to teach guide for reflection and
renewal (10th anniversary ed.). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
This book speaks to the disconnection between teachers, students, and the
subject. Palmer talks about the general vulnerability of teaching and how
teachers are losing heart. Good teaching requires self-knowledge, and how can
teachers get back to what matters most: the students. It focuses on the concept of
student-centered teaching.
Rogoff, B., Turkanis, C. G., & Bartlett, L. (2001). Learning together children and adults
in a school community. New York: Oxford University Press.
This book shows how children learn best when they are in an environment that
they co-create. When children can relate to the activities, contribute to the
activities, and accomplish meaningful and productive activities, they are
invested. How can children and adults learn together? There is a strong focus on
collaboration between all participants in the class.
Williams, R. B. (2006). 36 tools for building spirit in learning communities. Thousand
Oaks, Calif.: Corwin Press.
This book offers a plethora of examples of how to incorporate concrete
activities into the classroom and school as a whole. It serves as a guide,
complete with forms and steps for the teacher to implement community-
building tools into the classroom and school. This is beneficial to the teacher
who has never done this before, needs support, and clarification of how this
looks in a real setting. It is based on practice, not theory.


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