Minority Students’ Responses to Racism: The Case of Cyprus

While research has focused on the role of racism in (re)producing ethnic/racial inequalities in education, there is very little research that investigates how variability in minority students’ responses to racism can be explained. By using an ecological approach to integrate existing research on actors’ responses to racism, this study finds that researchers have generally neglected factors and processes situated at the micro- and meso-levels of analysis. Qualitative interview data with Turkish–Cypriot children enrolled in schools in the predominantly Greek-speaking part of the Republic of Cyprus are used to investigate their strategies in response to racism and the factors that explain the observed variability in their responses. The findings suggest the importance of and interactions between factors situated at different levels of analysis, including the level of organizations and social groups and face-to-face interactions in explaining variability in young people’s responses to racism.     

The Effect of Teacher Attitudes on Children’s Responses to Defective Articulation

Abstract

A group of 040 first-grade children reacted to four criterion attitude" "elected to reflect different way" teacher" may respond verbally toward a child with defective speech. They answered four questions indicating their acceptability of him. The purpose of the Investigation was to study the effect of the teacher attitudes on the children's responses. Results Indicate a significant relationship" and support the assumption that the social acceptability of speech-defective school children Is related to teacher attitudes. These children are chosen more often by their peers when the basis for selection Is friendship rather than speaking ability.     

Exploring Grade 7 Students’ Responses to Shaun Tan’s The Red Tree

As art objects, picturebooks have the potential to contribute to readers’ aesthetic development. Many scholars and practitioners have recognized how using picturebooks with older students can augment their reading motivation and extend their understanding of visual elements of art and design, as well as develop their literacy, language, and thinking skills. The Red Tree (Tan, 2001) was one of the picturebooks used during two multifaceted, classroom-based research projects with Grade 7 students. The studies explored how the students responded to and interpreted picturebooks and graphic novels with metafictive devices, and examined how the students transferred their knowledge and understanding of various literary and art elements when creating their own multimodal print texts. Overall, the content analysis of the students’ written responses to The Red Tree revealed an adoption of an “aesthetic attitude” (Doonan, Looking at Pictures in Picture Books, 1993, p. 11) towards the picturebook. The students’ responses reflected how they positioned themselves as active readers who looked closely at Tan’s sophisticated and metaphorical paintings, and who embraced a co-authoring role as they interpreted the emotional landscapes and textual fragments in the picturebook. The article concludes with a discussion of several pedagogical issues associated with using picturebooks in middle years’ classrooms.     

Children’s Use of Testimony to Determine Reality Status

Verbal testimony about reality status is critical but often contradictory. These studies address whom children consider reliable sources of information about reality and how they evaluate conflicting testimony. In Study 1, seventy 4- to 8-year-olds heard an adult or child provide testimony about how to cook food and use toys, and about the reality of unfamiliar entities. Children selected the adult for food and the child for toys. Six- and 8-year-olds also selected the adult regarding reality. In Study 2, ninety 4- to 8-year-olds heard conflicting reality information from children and adults. Six- to 8-year-olds endorsed adult and child claims differentially and stated that adults knew more. By age 6, children favor adult testimony about reality over that of children.     

African-American’s Awareness of Cultural Heritage: Alice Walker’s Everyday Use

Alice Walker’s famous short story Everyday Use reveals African American’s awareness of cultural heritage, which is deeply affected by thedouble consciousnessas well as their racial identification in the Civil Rights Movement. Through the exploration of the cultural conflict reflected in Everyday Use by relating to the influence on black people produced by the AfricanAmerican Civil Rights Movement, and the discussion of the different attitudes of the mother and her daughters towards their cultural heritage, the essay aims to reinforce Alice Walker’s claim that any attempt to lay too much emphasis on the ideas of utilitarian return to black people’s traditional culture is shallow and superficial.     

“The Soldiers Came to the House”: Young Children’s Responses to <Emphasis Type="Italic">The Colour of Home</Emphasis>

This article begins by reflecting on the present refugee crisis and its relevance to children in the UK. It identifies the need for teaching about the refugee experience to young children and argues that literature can provide a conduit for this. Since the millennium there has been a rapid increase in the number of books published for children which take this as their theme, aimed at ever-younger readers. Taking as a case study The Colour of Home by Mary Hoffman, a picturebook commonly used in lower primary classrooms, the article considers how this text promotes understanding and validates the circumstances of refugees. It closely examines the motivations and aims of the writer, how the book was mediated by teachers in the primary classroom, and how refugee and non-refugee children read and responded to it. Findings are presented from an interview with Mary Hoffman herself, juxtaposed with data from three classrooms suggesting that pupils gained valuable insight into a complicated and controversial issue. However the research concludes that viewing children through a refugee/non-refugee binary was reductive in not recognising the multi-layered nuances of meaning which were constructed by young readers who brought to bear a wide variety of individual life and family experiences. Furthermore, teachers in the study played a powerful role in mediating the texts when sharing them in the classroom, and devised a selection of stimulating resources to provoke reader response in terms of empathy, “social action”, and some critical literacy.     

Preparing Teachers to Use GIS: The Impact of a Hybrid Professional Development Program on Teachers’ Use of GIS

This article reports the findings of a 3-year study of a hybrid professional development program designed to prepare science and mathematics teachers to implement GIS in their classrooms. The study was conducted as part of the CoastLines Innovative Technology Experiences for Students and Teachers project funded by the National Science Foundation. Three cohorts of teachers participated in the program, with each participant receiving 40 h of synchronous online instruction and 80 h of in-person instruction and support over an 8-month period. Data from surveys of participants both before and after the program were analyzed using correlation, ordinary least squares, and ordered logit regression analyses. The analyses revealed increases in the self-reported frequency of GIS use and enhanced feelings of preparation, competence, community, and comfort with respect to using GIS for instruction. A composite index of all impact variables was positively influenced as well. The statistical analyses found a strong relationship between self-reported feelings of preparation and use of GIS. Some support was found for the idea that feelings of competence, community, and comfort were related to the teachers’ sense of preparation. The findings suggest that a robust hybrid model of teacher professional development can prepare teachers to use GIS in their classrooms. More research is needed to understand how hybrid models influence the sociopsychological and other dimensions that support teachers’ feelings of preparation to implement GIS.

     

The Application of“Broken Window Theory”to College’s Daily Management

The daily management of college on the one hand is to constrain the action of students to achieve the maintenance of school’s order and on the other hand is to help students develop good habits and remold certain concepts of laws, morality and discipline to finally achieve the goal of education. This paper employed a famous theory of management, that is, the"broken window theory"in the research and finally concluded that the application of"broken window theory"in the daily management of colleges can immediately and effectively prevent some of students’bad behaviors and habits from being spread.     

The Inspiration of The Interpreter’s Roles to College English Teaching

Jef Verschueren is the representative of European Continental pragmatic thought.He puts forward a new theory that pragmatics is a perspective on language and he uses the theory of adaptation to analyze pragmatics."The general concern for the study of linguistic pragmatics is to understand the meaningful functioning of a language as a dynamic process operating on context-structure relationships at various levels of salience"(Verschuren 2000:69).The focal points in contexts are the utterer and the interpreter,for the physical,social and mental aspects of contexts are activated by language users’cognitive processes.Verschueren divided interpreter’s roles into five types:addressee,side participant,bystander,listener-in and eavesdropper,which can explain the adaptation of context and language choices.This is also applicable in college English classroom as the English class is also a context.At present students taught at the same time by the same teacher do not master the knowledge at the same level.One of the reason is that students are not engaged in the class at the same level.According to the Verschueren’s theory,the best English teaching class is one that each student in the addressee of teachers.Addressee is a metaphor which means everyone should follow the teachers’explanation carefully and take part in the teaching activities.It has something to do with interaction theory,which considers students as active individuals but not passive receivers.One of the common interaction patterns is questioning.In this thesis,the question how to make students addresses through adoption of questioning approach in college English class will be researched.     

Parents’ Perceptions of and Responses to Children’s Emotions: Relations With Meta-Emotion Philosophy and Adult Attachment

Objective. This study investigated how parents’ perceptions of, feelings toward, and anticipated responses to children’s emotions relate to parents’ meta-emotion philosophy and attachment. Design. Parents (112 mothers and 95 fathers) completed an online research study where they viewed photographs of unfamiliar girls and boys (aged 10–14 years) displaying varying intensities of happiness, sadness, fear, anger, and neutral expressions. Parents labeled the emotion, identified the emotion’s intensity, and reported their mirrored emotion and responses. They also completed measures assessing their meta-emotion philosophy and attachment. Results. Meta-emotion philosophy predicted parents’ responses to children’s negative emotion, in that greater emotion-coaching predicted greater accuracy in labeling emotions (boys only), a greater likelihood to interact with children, and for mothers to be further from the mean in either direction in their mirrored emotion. Attachment also predicted parents’ responses to children’s negative emotions: Parents higher in anxiety reported more mirrored emotion, and those higher in avoidance reported less mirrored emotion, lower intensity, and less willingness to interact (boys only). In exploratory models for positive emotion, parents’ meta-emotion philosophy did not predict their responses, but parents higher in attachment avoidance rated girls’ positive emotions as less intense, reported less mirrored emotion, less willingness to interact, and less supportive responses, and those higher in anxiety showed the opposite pattern. Conclusion. Despite methodological limitations, results offer new evidence that parents’ ratings on a standardized emotion perception task as well as their anticipated responses toward children’s emotion displays are predicted by individual differences in their attachment and meta-emotion philosophy.     

Comparison between Ezra Pound’s “The River-Merchant’s Wife:A letter” and Li Bai’s “Journey to Chang Gan”

As an important imagist in American literary history,Ezra Pound's poems are famous for their originality both in style and language.The publication of Cathy,based on the adaptations of ancient Chinese poems,exerts a great influence on American poetry at the beginning of the 19th century.This paper is a comparison between the Ezra Pound's "The River-Merchant's Wife:A letter" and Li Bai's "Journey to Chang Gan".Through the comparison,it can be concluded that the translation of poetry is involved with not only the transfer in language,but also cultural image and thus a better understanding of the translation of poetry between different languages and cultures is achieved.     

Enid on Enid: Blyton’s Use of Arthurian Narratives in The Knights of the Round Table

The article begins by assessing Enid Blyton’s contribution to the Arthurian revival of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, setting this in the context of longstanding debates about the function of children’s literature. It goes on to argue that Blyton’s use of the story of Enid in The Knights of the Round Table (1930) has a personal significance which deserves attention. The article also suggests that other figures in the story—Enid’s father, her mother, and her husband Geraint—have parallels in Blyton’s life. In Alfred Tennyson’s “Idylls of the King,” the tale of Geraint and Enid concerns the early phase of married life—a phase which must meet certain criteria if children are to be forthcoming. But Blyton’s source might have prompted unease on her part, for it was in 1928—the year in which The Knights of the Round Table was serialized—that Blyton, who had not conceived after 4 years of marriage, consulted a gynaecologist.     

The Freedom to Birth—The Use of Cytotec to Induce Labor: A Non-Evidence-Based Intervention

The off-label use of Cytotec (misoprostol) to induce labor has increased over the past few decades. The increase in medical interventions in childbirth, many of which are not based on scientific evidence, and the rise in maternal and infant morbidity and in maternal and infant mortality cannot continue to go unrecognized. This column serves as a teaching tool for childbirth educators and provides an example of two unnecessary, potentially avoidable deaths that occurred during a birth with questionable medical interventions.     

The Application of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs to Educational Settings

Hierarchy of Needs,one of the most influential motivation theories,was developed by Abraham Maslow in 1940-50’s USA.Hi erarchy of Needs theory has great significance in understanding human motivation,management training and personal development.The purpose of this paper is to investigate briefly the application of the theory to educational settings so as to guide a more effective education.