UNIVERSITY‐BASED INITIATIVES IN FAVOUR OF ECOSYSTEM REHABILITATION FOR THE NORTH AMERICAN GREAT LAKES

On‐going attempts by governments to implement measures intended to eliminate environmental degradation in the nearshore waters of the Great Lakes have revealed a critical need for integrative understanding that transcends disciplinary and professional specialisms. Academics from universities in the United States and Canada began, ten years ago, to meet with government officials and with people from nongovernmental organizations to find solutions to the problems in question. Groups of academics followed up these meetings with policy oriented studies using systems and transdisciplinary perspectives. Results have been readily disseminated into a wider constituency of interests because of the participation of nonacademics in the guiding of the studies. Similar collaborative approaches have been used to design role playing exercises for students in environmental studies courses at universities, using various Great Lakes situations as examples. An action learning/research mode lies at the core of environmental education at university level which also has considerable potential for addressing other global issues at universities.     

Phonological processing and emergent literacy in younger and older preschool children

Phonological awareness, phonological memory, and phonological access to lexical storage play important roles in acquiring literacy. We examined the convergent, discriminant, and predictive validity of these phonological processing abilities (PPA) in 389 3-, 4-, and 5-year-old children. Confirmatory factor analysis supported the validity of each PPA as separate from general cognitive ability and separate from each other. Multigroup structural equation modeling (SEM) with mean structure demonstrated that older preschoolers have better developed latent PPA than younger preschoolers but that the structure of PPA is equivalent. RAN was found uniquely associated with letter knowledge and text discrimination in younger preschoolers, and PA was found uniquely associated with word reading skills in older preschoolers. Finally, general cognitive ability was only indirectly associated with emergent literacy via PPA. These results highlight the importance of PPA in the early literacy development of English-speaking preschool children.     

‘Am I safe here and do you like me?’ Understanding complex trauma and attachment disruption in the classroom

Elementary and special education teachers and school counsellors currently provide support to children presenting learning disabilities and behavioural problems symptomatic of the more hidden diagnosis of complex trauma resulting from abuse or severe attachment disruption. Specific disorders such as attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (AD/HD) may be diagnosed in such children, but not the aetiology of complex trauma, resulting in missing information in the development of remedial and behavioural interventions. The evolving field of trauma counselling provides important information to special education teachers and school counsellors who work with children who have experienced trauma. In this review article authors Linda O'Neill of the University of Northern British Columbia (UNBC), Francis Guenette who is a doctoral student at the University of Victoria and Andrew Kitchenham of the University of Northern British Columbia summarise attachment, neurobiological, and complex trauma research that can be used in school settings to understand better the needs of these children. They conclude by suggesting that teachers and school counsellors would benefit from training on the consequences of childhood trauma and attachment disruption to develop interventions that will be effective and to identify what types of behaviours children can control and those they cannot.     

A voice in the wilderness: Meetings as ritual in a cross-cultural context

Drawing on a wider ethnographic study of cross-cultural interaction in a Papua New Guinean tertiary institution, this paper examines the interactions occurring in staff meetings. While the cross-cultural context is important, there are patterns here that are illuminating for all who have participated in meetings in any context. Meetings are framed as ritual: stereotypic, quasi dramatic, repetitive behaviors that persevere and are valued regardless of what is actually achieved. Having access to prestigious forms of knowledge, along with the prerogative to determine which knowledge and discourse types may be legitimately drawn upon in the meeting frame, allows those with power to determine the rules. Perhaps more importantly, it allows them to treat these rules, once normalized, in a more flexible way than less knowledgeable participants. Those who have communication competence, as defined within this frame, not only exercise influence but determine others' ability to do so. Non-participants collude with this in their silence. Collusion sustains existing perceptions of power, knowledge, and competence. If there is a genuine desire for more equitable decision making in meetings, participants might begin by probing the rituals of their meetings.     

Producing and practising social justice policy in education: A policy trajectory study from queensland,Australia

Recent philosophical debates have questioned the bases of identity politics in educational research and elsewhere, drawing attention to complexity and diversity of identity. These arguments will be briefly rehearsed, with reference to feminist theory. The criticism that one facet of identity (e.g. gender) cannot be analysed in isolation from others has sometimes been addressed via the study of the 'intersection' or 'interaction' of these various facets. However, others have attacked such approaches, maintaining that such aspects of identity are inseparably intermeshed, and beyond analysis. The poststructuralist account of the self and diversity appears to offer an analytical approach which can address such problems, yet poststructuralist theory also problematises many of the fundamental assumptions underlying emancipatory research in education and elsewhere. This article seeks to debate these various issues, with reference to research in schools. It argues the validity of research concerning specific aspects of identity. Drawing on concepts from feminist theory and reader response criticism, it outlines an approach to such work which rejects the dualisms of relativism/realism, similarity/diversity.     

RIM: A Random Item Mixture Model to Detect Differential Item Functioning

In this paper we present a new methodology for detecting differential item functioning (DIF). We introduce a DIF model, called the random item mixture (RIM), that is based on a Rasch model with random item difficulties (besides the common random person abilities). In addition, a mixture model is assumed for the item difficulties such that the items may belong to one of two classes: a DIF or a non-DIF class. The crucial difference between the DIF class and the non-DIF class is that the item difficulties in the DIF class may differ according to the observed person groups while they are equal across the person groups for the items from the non-DIF class. Statistical inference for the RIM is carried out in a Bayesian framework. The performance of the RIM is evaluated using a simulation study in which it is compared with traditional procedures, like the likelihood ratio test, the Mantel-Haenszel procedure and the standardized p -DIF procedure. In this comparison, the RIM performs better than the other methods. Finally, the usefulness of the model is also demonstrated on a real life data set.