Join CAST to showcase two of this semesters Scholarship Talks:

Nina Kasniunas The Remaking of Politics Through Voter Registration & Mobilization

Third party voter registration and mobilization organizations are proliferating and increasingly using organizing techniques to engage their communities.  The research presentation will demonstrate how they are shifting individuals’ relationships with democracy.

Mary Adkins  Supporting Conditionally Certified Teachers in Maryland

Teachers are critical to educational systems and play a significant role in the cognitive, emotional, and social development of students. Due to the high number of teacher vacancies, there are increasingly greater numbers of inexperienced, underprepared, conditionally certified teachers leading K-12 classrooms. To support these conditional hires, districts in Maryland have partnered with local 2-year and 4-year institutions to provide a pathway to certification. While these partnerships provide teachers with the course work needed to earn certification, there is not as much known about the resources and supports available at the school and district level to support these teachers. Additionally, little is known about the relative impact of these resources on developing teacher effectiveness. To address these concerns, I conducted semi-structured interviews with teachers currently working under a conditional certificate. The teachers in the sample were career changers, classroom paraprofessionals, and instructional assistants transitioning into the role as the teacher of record. Teachers came from elementary, secondary, and self-contained special education classrooms, as well as from suburban and urban Maryland school districts. This talk will convey teachers’ perceptions of the availability and usefulness of support and the extent to which these resources could be translated into a positive change in their classrooms. Additionally, preliminary findings about the extent to which teachers attributed their level of effectiveness to the supports available to them will be shared.