Tyana Cullen - Social Inequality in the American Schooling System
After graduation Tyana moved back to San Diego and is completing a Master’s in Teaching at Point Loma Nazarene University, where she will also receive a Multi-Subject and Mild/Moderate Disability Credential. Additionally, Tyana also serves as an Academic Coach in the High Tech High schooling system, where she is responsible to ensure that students with disabilities and learning differences have full access to the general education curriculum by providing tutoring, small group instruction, and one-on-one support. After completing the Master’s, Tyana plans to teach elementary school and eventually pursue a doctoral degree.
Area of Concentration Courses
UGIS 120 - Introduction to Applied Language Studies
UGIS 110 - Introduction to Disability Studies
Education 188B - Native American Education: Critical Issues and Possibilitiesd Religious Thought
Education 183 - High School, The Movie
Education 190AC - Critical Studies in Education
Thesis
Visual Aid or Visual Distraction?: Multimodality and Classroom Theming as Methods of Immersion
Tyana’s honors thesis analyzes how classroom spaces have not developed at the same pace as teaching methodologies and how this disjunction is ruining the student’s ability to be immersed into the classroom curriculum. An ethnographic project that cross-referenced data from eight separate K-5 classrooms to showcase the teachers’ ability to provide multimodal lessons, Tyana’s research showed that all of the teachers successfully provided multimodal lessons, but have not altered their classroom spaces to play a part into the visuality of the lessons. Lastly, the thesis argued that the presence of unused items on the walls, with posters that were unrelated to actual curriculum, and teachers’ minimal collaboration with students disrupted the theme of their classrooms, creating more distraction than scaffolding to help students learn.
