Using a Social Work Professor's Autobiography as a Teaching Tool in Human Behavior and the Social Environment

Abstract

Social work, like other disciplines, has long used case studies as a (1) methodological approach to communicating a body of knowledge, and (2) as a tangible means to acquaint students with archetypical applications of realistic conditions. In social work, one required course sequence enhanced by case study assessments is Human Behavior and the Social Environment (HBSE). This paper describes the author's use of another social work professor's controversial and sensitive autobiography, To Ascend into the Shining World Againto instruct graduate students in HBSE courses. In his non-fictional account, the social work professor recalls the time when, during his own youth, he killed a teenager in 1967. The author recounts the way in which she incorporated the professor's story as a focus for analysis at The Ohio State University and how it was similarly examined in a course at the University of Louisville.     

Distributed Scaffolding in a Service-Learning Course

This article argues that the instructional scaffolding metaphor may be reconceived as distributed scaffolding when multiple means of influence are provided in a service-learning setting. In the service-learning course described here, the professor's role is largely as designer of activity settings for preservice teacher candidates, through which the students construct their own conceptions of teaching culturally diverse populations. The course involves a set of interrelated settings: a tutoring experience at the city's alternative high school; the reading of books from a menu of texts that cover a range of diversity topics; the discussion of these books in book club meetings independent of the professor's direct influence; and the whole-class discussion of these texts, led by each student book club. The distributed nature of the course scaffolding is illustrated with an excerpt from one book club's discussion.     

Teaching assistants from the People's Republic of China and US undergraduates: Perceptions of teaching and teachers

Abstract

The paper summarizes the results of a series of focus group interviews with Chinese teaching assistants and US undergraduates on their perceptions about teaching and teachers in their own and US cultures. Focus group interviews were held with Chinese math‐based science teaching assistants (CTAs) who were at three different stages of the teacher preparation process. Similarly, American undergraduates’ perceptions were elicited through focus group interviews and questionnnaires. CTAs viewed American college instructors as exciting, but unclear in their organization and presentation. Undergraduates thought ideal US professors should spend more time with their students, and have interpersonal skills in teaching. They did not value the professor's knowledge of the subject matter as much as CTAs did. Implications for future TA development programmes are also discussed.     

The road not taken: Frank Aydelotte and the thought approach to engineering writing

Frank Aydelotte's English and Engineering (1917) is one of the first anthologies in technical communication. Developed at MIT, this book attempted to broaden the education of undergraduate engineering students by using the tenets of the thought movement. This movement, which Aydelotte first articulated while directing Indiana University's first‐year English program, modified for universities in the United States the education that he had received at Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar. Rather than emphasizing matters of form and correctness, the thought approach required engineering students to think and write about issues important to their education and future careers.     

Hawthorne Elementary School: The University Perspective

This article reflects a faculty member's perspective of how Trinity University and Hawthome Elementary School planned and worked together to evolve into a successful partnership. Trinity's teacher education reform agenda focused on two goals: preparing future teachers for a full academic year in the real world of the elementary school and pursuing a teacher-selected school reform project. Both the Hawthorne culture and the inner-city professor's role as a teacher changed when we organized a shared vision and shared responsibility for teacher preparation and school reform.     

The influence of wait‐time on classroom learning

This study describes a lesson in which students engaged in inquiry in evolutionary biology in order to develop a better understanding of the concepts and reasoning skills necessary to support knowledge claims about changes in the genetic structure of populations, also known as microevolution. This paper describes how a software simulation called EVOLVE can be used to foster discussions about the conceptual knowledge used by advanced secondary or introductory college students when investigating the effects of natural selection on hypothetical populations over time. An experienced professor's use and rationale of a problem-based lesson using the simulation is examined. Examples of student misconceptions and naïve (incomplete) conceptions are described and an analysis of the procedural knowledge for experimenting with the computer model is provided. The results of this case study provide a model of how EVOLVE can be used to engage students in a complex problem-solving experience that encourages student meta-cognitive reflection about their understanding of evolution at the population level. Implications for teaching are provided and ways to improve student learning and problem solving in population genetics are suggested.     

Going Deeper than Deep and Surface Approaches: A study of students' perceptions of time

This paper supports Paul Ramsden's call to look beyond students' approaches to learning towards their perceptions of the educational context. However, we argue that Rams den's suggestions for an analysis of student perceptions are somewhat limited, and present an method which is more qualitatively and linguistically grounded. In the present study, this method was used to analyse students' perceptions of time in a second year chemical engineering course. Regardless of approach to learning, all students displayed two distinct ways of talking about time, one reflecting a perception of 'being in control' and the other a perception of 'being out of control' of time. Where students using a conceptual approach differed to the others was in the way they used perceptions of 'being in control', specifically in the way they chose to allocate time. For those not using a conceptual approach, the highly time-pressured environment seemed to militate against the adoption of a conceptual approach.     

The “good professor” as perceived by university instructors

The purpose of this study is to answer the question: What is the Israeli instructor's conception of a “good university professor?” The study deals with the instructor's conception of the characteristics of the “good professor” with regard to the department in which he is teaching. A sample of 51 instructors from two departments were asked to select the three most important characteristics of a “good university professor” from a list of fifteen. It was shown that instructors attached primary importance to the professor's ability to spark intellectual growth. Of secondary importance was his method of instruction. The professor's traits connected to his academic status and his personality were of relatively little concern. There was unanimity among instructors from the two departments in their conception of what a “good professor” should be. They singled out characteristics that fall under the heading of delivery. A disparity exists between the instructor's conception of the “good professor” and the students' conception.     

Written feedback provided by first-year engineering students,undergraduate teaching assistants,and educators on design project work

ABSTRACT

Feedback is an important part of design education. To better understand how feedback is provided to students on their engineering design work, we characterised and compared first-year engineering students’, undergraduate teaching assistants’, and educators’ written feedback on sample student design work. We created a coding scheme including two domains: Substance and Focus of feedback. Educators made more and longer comments than undergraduate teaching assistants, and undergraduate teaching assistants made more and longer comments than first-year students. The first-year students focused on giving specific directions in their feedback while educators and undergraduate teaching assistants asked thought-provoking questions. Students tended to make more comments about the ways that their peers had communicated their design work while educators and undergraduate teaching assistants made more comments about the design ideas presented in the sample work. This study offers implications for practice for supporting educators, undergraduate teaching assistants, and first-year engineering students to be able to provide feedback on design work.     

A professor realizes the potential poison of Ivy

This clinical treatise discusses this author's concept of “professorial melancholia,” a progressive emotional process characterized by the negating of a university professor's professional motivation, positive attitudinal focus, and adequate personal self-esteem.     

Teaching elementary science methods to women: A male professor's experience from two perspectives

This is an action research study using an N of one (a case study) from the theoretical stance of symbolic interaction. This study of one male science education professor's experience teaching elementary science methods to females is told from two perspectives: the perspective of the professor and of a female coresearcher. In this study, the coresearchers present their perspectives of studying the gender difference between the male professor and his female elementary science method students and the attempts he makes to implement gender inclusive pedagogy. Discussion focuses on what each has learned through this study of examining the professor's practice as he takes action to improve the teaching and learning in his science method classes predominately populated by women. A key implication from this study is the assertion that male science methods professors have a special obligation to break the cycle of inequity in science teaching and learning for females by taking action to foster a female-friendly classroom climate and to encourage females to become engaged in class conversations and activities. However, professors should be aware that both female and male elementary teachers socialized in a system privileging men may not value efforts, or may even actively resist efforts to promote gender-inclusive science education during science methods. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 35: 919–949, 1998.     

Reframing hostility

This paper comments on the Annette Hemmings's paper entitled, 'Youth culture of hostility: Discourses of money, respect and difference.' The paper briefly looks at Hemmings's findings, in particular those related to identity development. However, the major focus is on reframing methodological aspects of Hemmings's study. In particular, the paper examines challenges facing cultural outsiders doing research; the dynamic and multiple roles of the researcher in discourse analysis (i.e., participant, observer, and subject); and a theoretical rationale for including the researcher as subject in research, which is based on Foucault's notion of how discourse systems impact the construction of people's sense of social, political and cultural realities.     

Living learning theory through My Fair Lady

In My Fair Lady ( Lerner & Lowe, 1956 ), the play, the renowned linguistics professor, Henry Higgins, attempts to instruct the common flower‐vendor, Eliza Doolittle, in proper English etiquette and speech. Revisit the colourful story from the perspective of a twenty‐first century instructional designer. Set in the 1910s, but written in the heyday of behaviourism, the play reflects the idea that behavioural change is the evidence of learning. As we analyse Professor Higgins's applied theory of learning and instruction, we find unique examples of behaviourism, cognitivism and constructivism at work in the instructional strategies and activities and in the good professor's interpretations of Ms Doolittle's actions and attitudes toward learning.     

Mind‐Mindedness and Theory of Mind: Mediating Roles of Language and Perspectival Symbolic Play

Relations among indices of maternal mind‐mindedness (appropriate and nonattuned mind‐related comments) and children's: (a) internal state vocabulary and perspectival symbolic play at 26 months (N = 206), and (b) theory of mind (ToM) at 51 months (n = 161) were investigated. Appropriate comments were positively associated with ToM, but were unrelated to internal state language and perspectival symbolic play. Nonattuned comments were negatively correlated with internal state language and perspectival symbolic play, but were unrelated to ToM. Path analyses indicated that the best fit model assumed: (a) indirect links between nonattuned comments and ToM via children's perspectival symbolic play, (b) a direct link between appropriate comments and ToM, and (c) an indirect link between appropriate comments and ToM via children's concurrent receptive verbal ability.     

Winning and Losing: A case study of university tutor-student teacher interaction during a school-based practicum

Using a case study this paper analyses in some detail the ways in which both a university based subject tutor's and student teacher's implicit theories manifest themselves in the heat of the conversational moment. It illustrates how easy it is for tutor and student to 'get across each other' or to pick up messages that may or may not be intentionally communicated, and to adopt a stance that is in the last analysis self-preservative rather than developmental. The tutors' art, and their responsibility, is to present their enquiries and comments in such a way that the chances of this 'closing down' are minimised; and to be adept at repairing the relationship when it does go wrong. In defensive mode, both participants in the case study are convinced of their own rightness, take their judgements about each other as literal truth, and are quite unable to reflect on their contributions to the situation. The paper ends with some suggestions for avoiding such an impasse in similar situations.     

Integrating Case Studies in Engineering Mathematics: A response to SARTOR 3

Case studies have long been used to support the mathematics education of undergraduate engineers. Changes in the mathematical ability of entrants to engineering programmes and, indeed, the changing nature of many of the programmes themselves indicate the need to make the students' mathematical experiences more 'user friendly'. We describe here an approach which uses case studies, not as illustrations of applications of mathematics after a mathematical topic has been discussed, but in a fully integrated central role as vehicles for whole group discussion from which the students 'discover' the necessary mathematics which is taught subsequently. Not only is the 'carrot' of the application then central to their learning, but the need for the mathematics being taught is also clearly demonstrated. This approach has been tried with a group of 50 first year engineers. The effects on student motivation, ability and knowledge retention are discussed together with an indication of the Integrated Case Studies which were used.     

Public Sector Agricultural Extension System Reform and the Challenges Ahead

Abstract

This paper is organized into two main sections. The first section examines extension as an engine for innovation and reviews the numerous priorities confronting extension systems. Section two highlights the current knowledge imperative and the critical connection of extension to post-secondary higher education and training, organizational inservice training, and vocationally oriented self-directed learning. Final comments address ‘The Continuing Role of the Public Sector’, and the prospect of its role in balancing societal interests and promoting extension as an aspect of a knowledge economy. The conclusion proposes what may be agricultural extension's challenges ahead.     

Changes in science teachers' conceptions and connections of STEM concepts and earthquake engineering

ABSTRACT

The authors find justification for integrating science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) in the complex problems that today's students will face as tomorrow's STEM professionals. Teachers with individual subject-area specialties in the STEM content areas have limited experience in integrating STEM. In this study, the authors investigated the conceptual changes of secondary school teachers teaching domain-specific STEM courses after a week-long professional development experience integrating earthquake engineering and domain-specific concepts. They documented and then triangulated outcomes of the experience using participating teachers' concept maps and teacher-generated written materials, respectively. Statistical comparisons of participants' concept maps revealed significant increases in their overall understanding of earthquake engineering and more accurate linkages with and among science domain-specific concepts. Content analyses of teachers' learning products confirmed the concept map analysis and also provided evidence of transfer of workshop learning experiences into teacher-designed curriculum products accurately linking earthquake engineering and domain-specific STEM content knowledge.     

The Growth and Nature of Research Interest in Arithmetic and Reading

ABSTRACT

The author examined whether mathematics instruction provided by kindergarten teachers is related to children's mathematics learning during the kindergarten year based on the children's socioeconomic status and race. Hierarchical linear modeling was employed using a large sample of kindergarten students to estimate relationships between the teacher's instructional approach (e.g., concrete-spatial, interpersonal, linguistic) and children's mathematics skills. Results showed that the teacher's instructional approach was selectively related to children's mathematics learning. Students in classrooms where teachers frequently employed a concrete-spatial instructional approach learned more during the kindergarten year. Students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds benefitted more from teachers who often employed an interpersonal approach, and Black/African American students benefitted less from classrooms where teachers relied more on a linguistic approach. The findings suggest that kindergarten teachers’ instruction needs to employ varied methods that take into account students’ mathematics skills and background characteristics.