The Communicator's Role in Resource Decision–Making

Abstract

The experience of 8 teenage participants of a 12-day adventure trip was investigated through participant observation and semistructured posttrip interviews. The teen participants conceptualized nature as a place out there—a reality fundamentally different and removed from their home reality of civilization. The teens understood nature as undisturbed, natural, unfamiliar, without people or human material development, relaxing, not busy, and with a sense of freedom. The teens strongly suggested nature does not exist at home. It appears that, with this construction of nature, the teens felt diminished motivation to take care of their home environment.     

Communication about science in a traditional museum: visitors’ and staff’s perceptions

This study investigated visitors’ and staff’s perceptions about the communication of science in a traditional natural history museum. The research examined the science-related outcomes for adult visitors and explored visitors’ and staff’s ideas of science and how it is portrayed at the museum. Data were collected by questionnaire and interview from 84 staff and 102 visitors. Both groups held positive views about science, its importance and the need for everyone to understand it. Comparison of visitors’ pretest and posttest scores on the questionnaire revealed some significant changes, several suggesting a change to views about science that were less “scientific.” Most visitors thought that their ideas about science had not changed as a result of their visit, but they were positive about the museum as a place for learning science. Staff held more “scientific” views about the nature of science than did visitors; they recognized the potential of the museum to educate people about science, but felt it needed to be presented as more relevant and accessible, particularly in terms of science as a cultural practice. Neither staff nor visitors perceived that the museum stimulated visitors to think critically about science. While acknowledging that interpreting complex scientific knowledge into exhibits readily understood by lay visitors and displaying controversy are difficult, these challenges must be addressed if visitors are to be encouraged to think about science and the social, cultural and political contexts which shape it. Léonie J. Rennie is professor of science and technology education and Dean, Graduate Studies at Curtin University of Technology in Australia. Her research interests include adults' and children's learning in science and technology and the communication of science in a range of out-of-school contexts. Currently, she is working on research projects relating to integrated curriculum in science, mathematics and technology, and a statewide program to enhance scientific literacy in the community. Gina F. Williams currently is a stay-at–home mother of two and pursuing a master’s degree in science communication from the Australian National University. At the time of the research, she was working as a Research Associate with Léonie J. Rennie at Curtin University of Technology in Australia. Gina was involved in a number of projects with a focus on the communication of science, in particular research into the learning experiences of adults in free- choice learning environments. With a background in science, Gina became interested in the issues involved in communicating science whilst working as an explainer at a science center. Her research interests include the wider community’s engagement with science in their everyday lives, and the development of community-based science projects.     

Drugs and the Brain: Learning the impact of methamphetamine abuse on the brain through a virtual brain exhibit in the museum

Drugs and the Brain: A Serious Game, a prototype museum exhibit, was designed to employ virtual models of the brain into a video game format. It was done to create a fun and engaging way of conveying knowledge and concepts about neuroscience, as well as the impact of methamphetamine abuse on the brain. The purpose of this study is to evaluate this prototype exhibit that promises to educate participants from various age, ethnicity, and gender backgrounds, and to establish a stronger concept of drug abuse prevention among children. A quantitative methodology using the pre‐ and post‐experimental designs was conducted on 175 museum visitors. A series of two‐sample paired t‐tests and subsequent ANOVAs were performed to examine the difference between pre‐ and post‐tests and to determine if there was a difference in the results in age, gender, ethnicity, and race. Results showed that both the understanding and attitudes of the participants toward the impact of methamphetamine abuse on the brain improved significantly (p < 0.01).     

Small fish in a small pond: the impact of collaborative learning on academic success for less-prepared students in a highly selective STEM environment

ABSTRACT

This study examines academic outcomes for university students engaged in a supplemental peer learning program in a selective institution. Using a matched sample of 1266 students, half enrolled in the supplemental program and half not enrolled, we find that participating students on average earned higher grades in linked courses. Using a subsample of students in a chemistry course sequence, we find program participants were more likely to remain in the sequence than non-participants, and that the impact was greater for students with lower levels of preparation.     

Effects of Fishing Education Programs on Antecedents of Responsible Environmental Behavior

Abstract

The authors surveyed 619 participants in a national fishing education program (Hooked on Fishing-Not on Drugs) designed for youth in Grades 6-8. The survey of the youth assessed fishing and aquatic stewardship outcomes associated with different levels of program exposure (i.e., no program, programs without fishing, and programs with fishing). Youth who participated in programs that included experience-based fishing were more likely to report several desired fishing and stewardship outcomes. These data support the assumption that such programs are more likely to influence antecedents to environmentally responsible behavior than are programs without experience-based fishing.     

Sustainability education in a botanical garden promotes environmental knowledge,attitudes and willingness to act

Abstract

Creating behavior change to mobilize transitions toward sustainability is a significant challenge of our time. Inspired by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization’s Farmer Field School, we developed a novel community-based education program to engage people in local sustainability topics. In the Sustainable Communities Field School (Field School) program, advertised as team building tours, participants from local organizations are guided by instructors through University of British Columbia Botanical Garden, while receiving verbal and experiential education on topics of food systems and choices, biodiversity conservation, water conservation, and waste reduction. We found that after the Field School program, participants were significantly more knowledgeable about environmental issues, more connected to nature, showed greater intentions and willingness to engage in sustainability actions compared to garden visitors from the general public who did not go through the program. The results suggest that interactive sustainability education in a botanical garden setting can be a useful education model to mobilize public engagement on sustainability.     

Remembering Carole Adamsbaum (1939–2019)

Abstract

Carole Adamsbaum died on October 4, 2019. She worked for decades as a sexuality educator at the high school and college levels, along with providing training for other educators. Carole also worked as a psychiatric nurse and for many years opened her home to teens as a foster mother. This article includes tributes to her from family and friends and a reprint of her autobiographical essay from How I Got into Sex…Ed.     

Transgressive and negotiated White racial knowledge

Abstract

This critical case study investigated the experiences of six White preservice teachers as they learned about race and racism during the first semester of an urban-focused teacher preparation program. The author identified two broad themes of transgressive White racial knowledge and negotiated White racial knowledge to capture the participants’ engagement with the topic of race. By detailing the complexities of the racial knowledge of a group of race-conscious White teachers, the project helps to de-homogenize conceptualizations of White teachers’ racial identities. The transgressive knowledge displayed by the participants largely occurred in their intellectual understandings of issues related to urban education. When the participants discussed their antiracist practice and their own complicity in racism, their negotiations with critical understandings of race emerged. These findings suggest that educators working with race-conscious White teachers should emphasize the messiness inherent in enacting an antiracist practice and think differently about the subtle distancing strategies White teachers often deploy to release themselves from complicity in racism.     

‘Come in with an open mind’: changing attitudes towards mathematics in primary teacher education

Background: The relationship between attitudes and behaviour has led to a focus on the role played by attitudes in the teaching and learning of mathematics.

Purpose: This paper reports on an investigation into student teachers’ self-reported attitudes towards mathematics in the context of a mathematics education programme. The programme had been developed by the authors in response to a new, reformed four-year undergraduate initial teacher education (ITE) for primary teachers in Ireland. The authors aimed to use the feedback to evaluate and develop the course further.

Sample: We report on the attitudes of 345 pre-service primary teachers enrolled in a four-year undergraduate ITE programme. 281 of these participants had matched survey data before and after participating in the mathematics education programme.

Method and Design: Four evaluation criteria were used as a conceptual framework for the evaluation of the mathematics education programme. A multi-method approach was taken in investigating the students’ attitudes to mathematics by using a scale as a quantitative measure of attitude alongside open-ended survey items that provided qualitative insights into changes in attitudes.

Results and conclusions: Results from the survey data suggested overall that the participants’ attitudes towards mathematics were more positive after they had experienced the mathematics education programme. Overall, the written responses suggested that according to self-reportage, participants perceived that participation in the mathematics education programme had affected their attitudes towards mathematics positively. Comments indicated that the ‘small group’ tutorial structure was particularly well received and was associated with opportunities to actively engage, explore, interact and reflect. Suggestions offered by the participants will be used to inform planning and development of the mathematics programme.     

Student perspectives towards school responses to cyber-risk and safety: the presumption of the prudent digital citizen

ABSTRACT

While previous research identifies skepticism and some animosity among students towards school-based cyber-safety programs, drawing from focus group discussions with Canadian teens, this paper contributes to unpacking reasons for both support for ‘what works’ and antagonism for what is perceived to be lacking. Our findings reveal support for repeated messages, including those eliciting fear, especially for younger students. Criticisms most often centered on the questionable relatability of the messages, and the need for more practical information (e.g., privacy management). Criticisms are largely concentrated among female teens. Among our participants, the concentration of cyber-safety messages is being received in junior high school, with less emphasis by the time students reach high school. We argue that by high school students are expected to have successfully internalized the directives for online safety received in earlier grades, and have acquired, to a greater or lesser extent, a sense of prudentialism and self-control.     

Factors of success: building and sustaining teaching professional development opportunities for doctoral students and postdocs

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the key issues and elements to consider in developing and sustaining teaching development programs for doctoral students and postdoctoral scholars in connection to a large multi-institutional, higher education reform network. Based on interviews with 47 participants at eight member institutions and the central administration of the Center for the Integration of Research, Teaching, and Learning (CIRTL), we found five major components: campus culture, the program’s organizational placement, program leadership, program logistics, and the benefits acquired from adopting and adapting network ideas, knowledge, and resources.     

Memory and critical education: Approaches in the District Six Museum

Abstract

This article begins with the argument that education has become an important site of activity in museums around the world. This development has been of crucial significance for South Africa where many new museums have come into being and where old museums are now taking new courses. The challenge that these museums are having to confront is how to deal with the question of their public education responsibilities with respect to issues such as race, identity, nation and nation-building. How does the museum tell its story in ways that are inclusive and at the same time critical? How these challenges play themselves out in a museum such as the District Six Museum is important to talk about. What this discussion about the District Six Museum reveals is how little attention is paid to forms of public education in institutions outside of the school in South Africa. It is significant that the museum, which has come to play such a significant role in the reimagination of South Africa and is assuming in the intentions of the new government such a pivotal role in teaching South Africans about their pasts, is understood so poorly. The article uses the District Six Museum example to look critically at what a new museum educational practice might consist of.     

Comparative School Marks of September and January Junior High-School Entrants

ABSTRACT

The author used an explanatory mixed methods research design. The first phase involved the collection of quantitative data to examine the nature of preservice teachers’ (N = 192) culturally responsive teaching self-efficacy beliefs. Follow-up face-to-face interviews were carried out with a subsample selected from Phase 1 participants. These interviews were used to identify the types of culturally responsive teaching self-efficacy-forming experiences that preservice teachers encountered during their teacher education program and the perceived influence that these experiences had on the development of their self-efficacy beliefs. The face-to-face interviews uncovered disparities among preservice teachers regarding the aspects of culturally responsive teaching that were discussed, modeled, and practiced. The theoretical and practical implications of this study are discussed.     

The historical context of science and education at the American Museum of Natural History

In this article I critically examine the historical context of science education in a natural history museum and its relevance to using museum resources to teach science today. I begin with a discussion of the historical display of race and its relevance to my practice of using the Museum’s resources to teach science. I continue with a critical review of the history of the education department in a natural history museum to demonstrate the historical constitution of current practices of the education department. Using sociocultural constructs around identity formation and transformation, I move to the present with a case study of a teacher who transforms the structure of science education in her classroom and school as a result of her identity transformation and association with a museum-based professional education program.

Development of Adolescents’ Values and Jewish Identities via Experiential Philanthropy Education

ABSTRACT

The values that begin to solidify during adolescence can be steered by experiential education programs designed to inculcate a set of attitudes and behaviors in their participants. One such program, Jewish Youth Philanthropy, socializes adolescents into recognizing the importance of donating both to Jewish causes and within a Jewish framework. This paper examines the relationship between these programs and the development of Jewish and donor identities during adolescence. It suggests that surveyed Jewish youth philanthropy participants are more likely than non-participants to perceive themselves as donors, but that their Jewish identities are viewed as justifications for prosocial behavior, not drivers of it.     

Art Animates: Ideas Inspired by a University-Sponsored Summer Arts Academy for Middle and High School Students

ABSTRACT

Art can provide a vehicle for animating learning. Teachers bring ideas to life through curriculum, while artists realize their ideas through images, often translating between forms, media and spaces. This paper describes the context, content and format of a residential Summer Arts Academy for gifted and talented middle and high school students, held on a university campus. In 2013, the theme of the visual art program at the Summer Arts Academy was animation, which linked to the summer exhibition at the local art museum. Collaborations among university faculty, public school teachers, community artists, and art museum and gallery staff have potential to animate learning for students, while stimulating additional forms of public engagement.     

Learning with immigrant children,families and communities: the imperative of early childhood teacher education

Abstract

This article reports on a longitudinal study spanning over 5 years, involving the design and implementation of an early childhood teacher education program model that engages a critical-ecological theoretical approach, a funds of knowledge perspective, and design-based methodology. This project aimed to promote equitable education for all children, and especially for young immigrant children encountering situations of oppression within the national and local educational contexts in Arizona. In this teacher education program, families, community members, researchers, pre-service teachers and teachers worked together to develop new modes of curricular activity, new spaces, new relationships, and new forms of movement among participants, as well as new circulations of literacy artefacts.     

Identifying and developing crosscutting environmental education outcomes for adolescents in the twenty-first century (EE21)

Abstract

While multiple valid measures exist for assessing outcomes of environmental education (EE) programs, the field lacks a comprehensive and logistically feasible common instrument that can apply across diverse programs. We describe a participatory effort for identifying and developing crosscutting outcomes for Environmental Education in the twenty-first Century (EE21). Following extensive input and debate from a wide range of EE providers and researchers, we developed, tested and statistically validated crosscutting scales for measuring consensus-based outcomes for individual participants in youth EE programs using confirmatory factor analysis across six unique sites, including two single-day field trip locations, four multiday residential programs and one science museum in the United States. The results suggest that the scales are valid and reliable for measuring outcomes that many EE programs in the United States can aspire to influence in adolescent participants, ages 10–14.     

Undergraduate research as a student engagement springboard: Exploring the longer-term reported benefits of participation in a research conference

ABSTRACT

Background: Undergraduate research is evident in many forms across higher education: in journals, at conferences and on research placements. It is widely reported that undergraduate research can encourage the development of discipline-specific and transferable communication skills and, in some cases, a more complex development of higher-order critical appraisal. Recent studies of extracurricular undergraduate research conferences have also found that participants report a development of self-authorship and an appreciation of the conference as liminal and transformative space. With many published studies measuring immediate feedback surrounding conference events, there is also a need to explore participants’ reflections over a longer term period of time.

Purpose: This small-scale project investigated participants’ self-report of whether and in what ways participation in a non-assessed, extracurricular undergraduate research conference had impacted their academic and professional practices, one year after their involvement in the conference.

Method: The qualitative study took place over two academic years with participants from an undergraduate conference which was held annually. The investigation adopted an action research methodology and completed two cycles of research. Data were collected firstly through an online survey with open questions, yielding feedback from 44 respondents. Focus groups were then conducted with nine of these students to explore this data further. A thematic approach was used to analyse the data.

Findings: The two cycles of data collection and analyses resulted in the identification of four central themes: (1) general positive impact on studies or career; (2) the development of presentation skills and personal confidence; (3) the development of research skills and perspectives; (4) an increased engagement with extracurricular opportunities.

Conclusions: Overall, our analysis identified that participants reported a development in communication skills and an enhanced relationship with the concept of ‘research’ and self-authorship. Students’ report that participation directly led to increased engagement with additional extracurricular activities is particularly noteworthy, as it contributes something new to the growing body of literature surrounding undergraduate research. More widely, the study suggests the potential for undergraduate conferences to act as springboards for increased extracurricular engagement.     

Student perceptions of learning environment: disciplinary program versus general education classrooms

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to examine student perceptions of the learning environment in their program major and general education classrooms. The participants were 870 undergraduate students majoring in engineering, fine arts, education, economics and nursing programs at a university in Thailand. We found significant differences in the perceptions of the classroom learning environment across various disciplines. Engineering and economics students perceived the learning environment in general education classrooms as more cooperative than the learning environment in program major classrooms. Fine arts and nursing students perceived greater involvement among students in the program major classrooms than in the general education classrooms. Our findings contribute to the body of research on inter-disciplinary differences in classroom learning environments in universities and the ways in which these differences may impact student learning outcomes.