Joshua Kuntzman at the Gevirtz School's version of the 2016 Grad Slam
Joshua Kuntzman, a doctoral candidate in the Department of Education at the Gevirtz School graduate students will compete in the second semi-final round of the 2016 UC Santa Barbara’s Graduate Student Showcase Grad Slam on Tuesday, April 12, 3-4 pm in SRB Multipurpose Room. The event is free and open to the public. In these Grad Slam events, graduate students have the chance to tell the campus about their research or share their thoughts on big ideas that matter, in just a three-minute talk. If Kuntzman succeeds he can make it to the final round and have a chance at the grand prize of $5,000.
Kuntzman’s presentation is titled “Educational Dialogs: Uncovering the Foundation for School Reforms.” It explores how many practical “solutions” for improving education in the U.S. work actively against societal expectations that teachers be interactive, adaptive, and principled in communicating knowledge to learners. Last year, Kuntzman presented an educational theory, “analogous personalization,” developed to highlight the primacy of personalized teaching approaches in effective education. This year, his topic will be the concrete and practical, rather than the theoretical, results of the research: he demonstrates the socially complex nature of learning-centered interactions, overviews the findings of his university classroom research, and explains how this accurate and complex understanding of interpersonal learning dynamics – where relational and academic outcomes are intertwined – is fundamental to effectively improving education in the U.S.