Victoria Fantozzi, Ph.D.

Article

Victoria B. Fantozzi, Katie Egan Cunningham

2018

In this article, the researchers share results from an action research project focused on supporting teacher education students' knowledge of children's literature and identities as readers. The researchers present analysis of teacher education students' blog posts about children's and young adult literature, class discussion, and survey data. Analysis reveals that the teacher education students not only gained knowledge about a wide range of texts but that their own reading identities seemed to change through the processes of text selection and text review using an online, participatory, and open platform for sharing.

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The Reading Teacher

Victoria B. Fantozzi, Christi Johnson, Anneliese Scherfen

2017

Every day, we are surrounded by stories in print, on social media, in blogs, on the radio, and in stories from our friends and family. The ways people make meaning and communicate are increasingly multimodal and digital; yet, the preschool classroom, for all its multimodal learning, is sometimes devoid of technology. In this action research project, the authors integrated an iPad into a play-based preschool classroom to support emergent literacy and playful storytelling. The students used multimodal and multi-actor storytelling to collaborate, navigate their places in the classroom, and connect their school experiences to their home lives.

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Article

Thomas D. Fallace, Victoria B. Fantozzi

2017

Background/Context: Over the last century, perhaps no school in American history has been studied more than John Dewey's Laboratory School at the University of Chicago (1896-1904). Scholars have published dozens of articles, books, essays, and assessments of a school that existed for only seven and a half years. Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study: This article reviews the extensive firsthand accounts and historiography of the famed school. In the first section, the authors trace the published accounts of those who experienced the Dewey School firsthand between 1895 and 1904. In the second section, the authors review accounts of the school by contemporaries, reformers, and historians between 1904 and 2014, focusing on three historiographical areas: the events surrounding the closing of the school, the rationale underlying its curriculum, and the impact of the experiment on U.S. schools. In the third section, the authors argue that most accounts of the Dewey School convey one of three historiographical myths: the Dewey School as misunderstood; the Dewey School as triumph, and/or the Dewey School as tragedy. Research Design: A historiographical essay is a narrative and analytical account of what has been written on a particular historical topic. Following this methodology, the authors are less concerned with establishing what happened at the Dewey School, than they were with how the school was analyzed and interpreted by contemporaries and historians over the past 120 years. Conclusions/Recommendations: The authors analyze each myth to conclude that Dewey only subscribed to the myth of the Dewey School as misunderstood, while the other two were historiographical constructions created by Dewey's contemporaries and historians.

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Mentoring and Tutoring

Janine S. Davis, Victoria B. Fantozzi

2016

Research has shown that mentor teachers play varied roles. Using a conceptual framework grounded in these roles, the researchers explored what seven student teachers said during multiple interviews about the roles they wanted for their mentor teachers. Findings showed that while some participants preferred emotional support and others wanted instructional support, none wanted socialization. The researchers identified a new category–mentor as gatekeeper–to capture the preferences of one participant and concerns of others. This category reflected a focus on the credentialing aspect of student teaching as something that students must complete before licensure. Implications for teacher education included additional support for mentor teacher–preservice teacher pairs such as conversations about desired, expected, possible, and emerging roles during the mentoring process.

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Educational Studies: A Journal of the American Education Studies Association

Thomas D. Fallace, Victoria B. Fantozzi

2015

A century ago, John Dewey and his daughter Evelyn published Schools of To-morrow to nearly universal acclaim. However, over the course of the 20th century, critics of Dewey have drawn upon Schools of To-morrow to accuse him of being an uncritical disciple of French philosopher, Jean Rousseau, of being opposed to the transmission of content to students, and most recently of endorsing a curriculum that patronized Black students. As a result, the text has become John Dewey's most controversial and problematic. In this historical study, we seek to place Schools of To-morrow in its historical, intellectual, and social context. The first part of the study traces the writing and publication of the text, as well as its changing reception over the past century. The second part of the study directly responds to the three criticisms previously cited: that Dewey was a disciple of Rousseau, that Dewey was opposed to the transmission of content knowledge, and that Dewey endorsed the racially segregated school system of Indianapolis depicted in the text. Drawing upon Dewey's other writings, his course syllabi, his personal correspondence, and lecture notes, we argue that the first two accusations are unfounded, but the third is partially accurate, although incomplete. We conclude that Schools of To-morrow is an undervalued text in the Dewey cannon that warrants closer study.

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