Micronesian Educator #30 Micronesian Educator #30 FAÑOMNÅKAN 2021 A Journal of Research, Theory, and Practice in Guam and Micronesia Editors: Yukiko Inoue-Smith Christopher Schreiner Yukiko Inoue-Smith: Research papers, literature reviews, and student project papers Christopher Schreiner: Critical Essays and book reviews -------------------------------------- Editorial Board: David Gugin Mary Jane Miller Donald Rubenstein Michelle Santos Production Assistant: Matthew Raymundo Design and Layout: Pascual Olivares ------------------------------------------ Published by: School of Education, University of Guam 2 Micronesian Educator #30 Editors’ Introduction Welcome to the 30th volume of the Micronesian Educator, published through the School of Education at the University of Guam. We are delighted to provide you with many interesting and insightful articles. This volume consists of three sections: (i) feature articles; (ii) critical essays; and (iii) book reviews. Section One: Feature Articles Section One contains six articles. The first article, by Greg Burnett, Mereseini Tikoduadua, and Govinda Lingam, is “Fijian Teachers Working Across Pacific Borders: Identities, Pedagogies, and Sense of Differences.” According to the authors, there has been an increasing number of Fijian teachers employed to teach in various parts of the Pacific. This paper reviews research on the experiences of Fijian teachers working elsewhere in the Pacific and focuses on understanding sources of Fijian teachers’ identities; relevant differences among Pacific cultures; and the pedagogies Fijian teachers bring to their work. The findings contribute to wider debates concerning what constitutes quality teaching in the Pacific, and ways of optimizing cross-cultural teaching. The second article, by Ihmar Aldana, is “The Effects of Review Games Using Kahoot! on Students’ Quiz Scores.” Kahoot! is a free game-based learning platform increasingly used as educational technology in schools. This study examined the effects of using the game Kahoot! to review course material, as evidenced in students’ quiz scores, as well as in student engagement. The study was conducted in a high school geometry classroom in Guam, with a sample of 42 students in the 10th through 12th grades. The use of Kahoot! during review produced reliably higher quiz averages, and more observable student engagement, when compared to the outcomes of a traditional teacher- led review. The paper further discusses limitations, along with recommendations for future research. The third article, by John Arby G. Pacheco, is “SolarSPELL and Its Effects of Student Engagement and Test Scores.” SolarSPELL—a solar powered educational learning library—serves students and teachers in low-resource locations and supports student-centered learning environments. This study focuses on ways of promoting student engagement in a high school biology class. The author emphasizes the potential of SolarSPELL as a tool that applies contemporary students’ technological competencies and provides a safe environment that is structured and monitored by the teacher. Future studies should assess the effectiveness of SolarSPELL in increasing test scores and decreasing off-task behaviors, in other subjects. The fourth article, by Alyxandra Borja Reyes, is “The Effects of Choral Reading and Peer Discussion in Small Groups on Reading Fluency and Comprehension in a Third Grade Classroom.” The author emphasizes that in third grade, students are expected to make an important transition: from learning to read, to reading to learn. In this study, a choral reading intervention sought to increase reading fluency in the study, whereas peer discussions in small reading groups sought to increase reading comprehension through the strategy of thinking out loud. Based on the results of the study, encouraging students to read aloud in small groups of peers increased comprehension among students who were nearing proficiency in reading. The fifth article, by Deborah Ellen, is “Education for Sustainable Development: Education as If Our Islands Matter.” Environmentalists began sounding the alarm in the 1960s and early 1970s, with efforts that included the publishing of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and establishing Earth Day in 1970; followed by the founding of groups such as Greenpeace in 1971. The author emphasizes that, given that more than 50 years have passed, we can ask now, “Has our planet benefited from such efforts?” Focusing on systems thinking, living values education, and emergent teaching, this article explores Education for Sustainable Development as a way forward. The sixth article, by Yukiko Inoue-Smith, is “Formative Assessments as Feedback: The Case of Blended Assessment.” It is generally understood that formative assessments can monitor students’ progress and suggest ways of optimizing it. Following a brief overview of formative and summative assessments, this paper focuses on how formative 3 Micronesian Educator #30 assessments provide feedback on effectiveness in the teaching and learning process. The paper describes the case of blended formative and summative assessments in a two-stage core assignment. The paper highlights advantages of making formative assessments an essential part of teachers’ work with students, in joint fulfillment of learning objectives. Section Two: Critical Essays Section Two contains five critical essays. The first essay, by Stephen Fox, is “Optimal Class Size for Online Education in Pasifika Contexts.” This study reviews scholarship on optimal class size for online education in Pasifika contexts. It presupposes that “The Western system is particularly less effective for members of cultures that differ greatly from European norms, including Pasifika cultures.” The author concludes that “frequent student-student and student-teacher interaction, in a class of around 20 students, is most likely to result in sufficient social support to facilitate positive outcomes.” The second essay, by the UOG graduate student, Nikko Capati, is “Complicating the Mother(land) in Mia Alvar’s In the Country: A Critique of Power and Performance in the Filipino Household.” Capati finds that Alvar’s stories deconstruct many culturally normative notions and behaviors associated with Filipino women as represented in televisual media. Alvar’s stories depict personal characteristics and power relations that deviate from the feminine standards simplistically reified not just in popular melodramas and romances, but also in everyday cultural expectations. The third essay, by David Gugin, is “God’s Song: G.M. Hopkins and the Poem as Prayer.” Gugin’s close reading of a poem by G. M. Hopkins reveals aesthetic and non-linear associations that contrast with contemporary instrumental thinking common to data-driven business and the empirical sciences. Gugin welcomes the poetic diversification of thought and language as a sort of ecological ingression to a spiritual inscape at a time when thinking is urgently channeled into solving the pandemic, and language serves as fuel for antagonistic politicians. The fourth essay, by Joff P. N. Bradley, is “Woe Betide You the Truth Be Told: Linguistic Corruption as Pedagogical Tool.” In this essay, which was first presented as a lecture in South Korea, Bradley draws on resources from literature and philosophy to think about corruption as a pedagogical tool. He considers this issue in the sense of “undermining one's own position or right precisely through the undermining of one’s own language,” and asks: Is English the right language to reach truth and reconciliation? Bradley draws on Nobel Laureate and British playwright Harold Pinter to understand "the corruption and the rot of words,” and asks a range of questions: What does it mean to speak the master’s dominant narrative? What is the nature of the complicity with this tactic?" The fifth essay, by C. S. Schreiner, is “Underhill Academy: An Anecdotal History of the Future.” After holding social media and American education culpable for the reversion to barbarism that resulted in the 2016 presidential election and its toxic aftermath, the author conjures the imaginary Underhill Academy as one possible pharmakon or cure for what ails education. This mountainside attentional ecosphere develops student powers of critique and advanced literacy within the interdisciplinary framework of general ecology. It presupposes a philosophical concept of world as the horizon of all horizons which unites students as they distinguish the ecological grounds of their separate modes of scholarly endeavor. Section Three: Book Reviews Section Three contains five book reviews. The first book review, by Paulette Coulter, critiques two recent guides for the effective use of Zoom in an educational setting: Aaron Johnson’s Online Teaching with Zoom: A Guide for Teaching and Learning with Videoconference Platforms; and Doug Lemov’s Teach Like a Champion Team. Coulter, who shows in painstaking detail how the 4 Micronesian Educator #30 authors explain and clarify the many technical and pedagogical aspects of operating Zoom, finds both publications selectively useful for teachers suffering from Zoom fatigue during the pandemic. The second book review, by David Harrington, former Dean of Front Range Community College in Colorado, conducts a philosophical analysis of Charles Taylor’s The Malaise of Modernity. First presented as The Massy Lectures in Canada, Taylor’s study identifies three fundamental forms of malaise: contemporary individualism devoid of meaning and moral horizons;