Narratives of agency: the experiences of Braille literacy practitioners in the Kha Ri Gude South African Mass Literacy Campaign

In this article, we locate the Kha Ri Gude South African Mass Literacy Campaign within the context of the problem of illiteracy and exclusion in South Africa, while concentrating on various post-apartheid initiatives designed to give visually challenged adults the opportunity to become literate. We shall provide a detailed account of focus group sessions organised in 2012; the aim of these sessions was to explore the experiences of blind literacy practitioners who were charged with the supervision and coordination of Braille literacy classes for blind, illiterate adults. We suggest that the way the practitioners expressed what being involved in the Campaign meant for them for an extended period (three years or more) gives us a glimpse of how, through their roles as literacy organisers, they were able to engender agency among blind adult literacy learners and themselves.     

ICT enabled Almajiri education in Nigeria: Challenges and prospects

Education and Information Technologies - The Almajiri children in Nigeria are deserving of special interventions to reduce the life-long divide in educational achievement, social status, and...     

The Necessity of Making Visible Concepts with Multiple Meanings in Science Education: The Use of the Gene Concept in a Biology Textbook

The purpose of this study is to analyze variations in how the gene concept is used and conceived in different sub-disciplines in biology. An examination of the development of subject matter and the use of the gene concept in a common college biology textbook shows that the gene concept is far from presented in a consistent way. The study describes and categorizes five different gene concepts used in the textbook; the gene as a trait, an information-structure, an actor, a regulator and a marker. These conceptual differences are not dealt with in an explicit manner. This constitutes one of the sources for confusion when learning about genes and genetics.

---

Bridging Education and Practice With a Competency-Based Learning Contract

ABSTRACT

Field work programs have a substantial responsibility for providing support and gatekeeping functions while ensuring an educational experience that allows students to master the nine holistic, multidimensional social work accreditation competencies. With additional emphasis on field as a “signature pedagogy,” field directors are tasked with finding placements that can support these explicit competencies. Through the utilization of a learning contract that combines the Council on Social Work Education Educational Policy and Accreditation Standards competencies (including component behaviors) students and supervisors can begin to discuss their joint progress on meeting each of these prior to the final evaluation. This process will ensure that students have demonstrated the necessary outcomes to become a generalist social work practitioner.     

A Further Perspective on Joint Partnerships: A Commentary on Creating and Capitalizing on the Town/Gown Relationship

This article discusses the benefits and challenges of the College Hill Library, a joint venture between Front Range Community College and the City of Westminster. It is a comparison to the Keene Library partnership described in the article by Halverson and Plotas.     

Jamaica's work-experience programme

Conclusion This article has sought to highlight a work-experience programme in a Third World country, pin-pointing the factors that militate against the achievement of its desired objectives. Among such factors are problems associated with curriculum organization at the secondary level, not least the negative attitudes that the society generally has towards a practical curriculum. Inadequate funding, largely due to governments aloofness, against a background of pressure on schools to become more selfreliant; wastage of human resources in relation to programme organization; and the lack of effective communication both within the school system and between the school and the community generally-all these are proving to be constraints on the achievement of objectives. Our discussion lends support to Sinclair's (1977) observation, referred to earlier, that Third World countries lack the institutional framework for conducting real-world assignments by pupils in factories and offices. Before curriculum innovations like the WEP can have the desired effects, Third World countries will not only have to deal constructively with negative attitudes and values in relation to practical and manual labour, but they will also have to find ways of initiating employment-generating strategies, so that students who have been prepared for the world of work will have the opportunity to enjoy the right to work. In Third World countries like Jamaica, which are caught in the grip of political and social strife exacerbated by a vicious economic squeeze, these are gulfs which seem too wide to breach at present.     

Findings From a Multiyear Scale-Up Effectiveness Trial of Open Court Reading

This multiyear scale-up effectiveness study of Open Court Reading (OCR) involved approximately 4,500 students and more than 1,000 teachers per year in Grades K–5 from 49 elementary schools in seven districts across the country. Using a school-level cluster randomized trial design, we assessed the implementation and effectiveness of Open Court Reading over two years. Implementation study results demonstrated adequate to high levels of fidelity across the treatment schools. Intent-to-treat analyses revealed no statistically significant main effects on students’ reading performance in Year 1 and a small negative effect (d = – .09) in Year 2. There were positive impacts for particular subgroups, including kindergarten (d = .12) and Hispanic (d = .10) students in the first year. However, there were negative impacts for first grade (d = –.13), females (d = –.11), students who were not eligible for free or reduced-price lunch (d = –.19), and non-English language learners (d = –.10) in the second year of the study. Thus, relative to the “business-as-usual” reading curricula, no positive overall impacts of OCR and mixed impacts for student subgroups were found.