Knowledge-Sharing and Potential Virtual Communities of Practice in the U.S. Coast Guard’s Afloat Community: a Qualitative Pilot Study

Virtual communities of Practice (VCoP) offer a flexible option for professional development that may be employed by geographically dispersed communities. Due to unique and dynamic operational demands and a reduced training budget, the United States Coast Guard’s (USCG) afloat community has limited opportunity for formal professional development, but alternative learning options have yet to be formally researched. This qualitative pilot study employed purposeful sampling to conduct 6 one-on-one interviews of afloat members with varying degrees of afloat experience and total time in service. The interviews were used to elucidate the knowledge-sharing culture of the afloat community, including the degree to which afloat members are willing to exchange knowledge and how trust, reciprocity, and disposition towards online learning influence this exchange. Interviews were digitally recorded and manually transcribed. Emergent themes included willingness and desire to share knowledge, concerns regarding service reputation, provisions for anonymity, and altruistic information exchange.     

Preparing teacher leaders: Perceptions of the impact of a cohort-based, job embedded, blended teacher leadership program

This qualitative study was designed to examine teachers’ and principals’ perceptions of the impact of a graduate program designed to prepare teacher leaders. Impact was investigated through interviews with 20 graduates and 6 principals. Using Mezirow’s concept of transformational learning, the study documents perceived transformation of teachers’ frames of reference: two related to teaching (adopt an inquiry stance; learn to view oneself as an autonomous professional), and two related to leadership (adopt a leadership stance; view student learning as a communal responsibility). The study includes implications for the design of graduate level teacher education programs to enhance their impact and effectiveness.     

Parents' Reports on the Child Adaptive Behavior Inventory Predict 4-Year-Olds' Playground Behavior

Although prior research indicates that parental reports of their young children's early social adaptation outside the home do not reconcile well with observations of social behavior in context, some of this inconsistency may be attributable to the “problem-oriented” biases inherent in many commonly used parent rating scales. Might greater concordance between parental reports and observational measures of social adaptation be found if parents described their children's peer behavior on an instrument balancing questions about behavior problems with questions about social strengths and competencies? Fifty-one children, representing two full preschool cohorts, were assessed over four months of a regular preschool year by trained observers using a scan-sampling procedure. Every behavior observed (M = 355 per child) was categorized as either Prosocial, Negative, or Withdrawn, with two sublevels per category. Midway through the school year, mothers and fathers independently completed the most recent version of the Child Adaptive Behavior Inventory (CABI), an instrument which assesses both competencies (social and academic) and difficulties with adaptation. Multiple, domain-specific correlations were found tying both maternal and paternal ratings of children's adaptation to observed social behavior on the preschool playground, with mothers's ratings only slightly better predictors of playground behavior than fathers'. Agreement between parents on the various CABI subscales (Social Competence, Externalizing-Aggressive, Externalizing-Hyperactive, Internalizing-Socially Isolative, and Internalizing-Psychological symptoms) was also good, ranging from .33 to .83. These results indicate that parents may be better attuned to preschool social behavior than has previously been assumed. Further research with the CABI is needed to establish the instrument's utility in predicting longitudinally the sequelae of early social adaptation.     

Single Service Point: It's All in the Design

ABSTRACT

“Design thinking” principles from a leading design firm, IDEO, were key elements in the planning process for a one-desk service model, the ASK Desk, at the John A. Prior Health Sciences Library. The library administration and staff employed the methodology to enhance customer experiences, meet technology challenges, and compete in a changing education environment. The most recent renovations demonstrate how the principles were applied. The concept of “continuous design thinking” is important in the library's daily operations to serve customers most effectively.     

Looking for the library: Using an undergraduate business syllabi analysis to inform an instruction program

This study analyzed 260 syllabi representing a year of the undergraduate curriculum from a business school. The syllabi were examined based on the mentions of the library from across three categories: spaces, resources, and services, as well as possible opportunities for engagement that librarians could target for collaboration. In this study, the library was mentioned 79 times, mostly in relation to library resources. There were also 479 opportunities for engagement coded. This study found that the majority of undergraduate syllabi do not mention the library, but that there are considerable opportunities that librarians can target for future engagement.     

“Do you see what I see?” Reading a different classroom scene

This paper examines the problem of representing a research site in poststructuralist terms, suggesting that “data” often taken for granted cannot be read to represent “reality” or “truth.” The representation of classroom life produced for analysis is both multifaceted and contradictory. The researcher's positioning within the major discourses governing educational practice may have as much influence on what is seen in the classroom as does the researcher's physical positioning within material reality. Rather than being seen as an impediment to ongoing educational research for change, the findings presented offer a challenge to researchers to make explicit their underlying interests and agendas.     

The digital reading path: researching modes and multidirectionality with iPads

This paper reports a study that examines the integration of tablet technologies such as iPads into literacy lessons to investigate how reading and meaning‐making occur within this digital medium. Specifically in this paper, we discuss the concept of reading paths as applied to physical and cognitive planes of meaning‐making. The paper reports on data collected as part of a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) funded project involving researchers from Canada, the United States and Australia. The study is currently under way in schools in the three different countries where the researchers are observing students in classrooms in primary and secondary schools. The research is designed with a mixed methods approach coding video footage of dyads to enable close study of their interaction during literacy tasks incorporating iPads. Our findings show that the affordances of touch technology allow for multimodal, multidirectional reading paths. By tracking students' interactions with the digital platform through touch, it is possible to see navigation as evidence of the relationship between material and cognitive processes, which fosters metatextual awareness. These aspects of modes and new literacies construct a dynamic materiality for students' reading and writing. As a result, we propose that current awareness of the mode of gesture needs to be expanded to take into account haptic ways of learning.     

Notes on reconstructing “the popular”

ABSTRACT

Drawing on Stuart Hall’s influential “Notes on deconstructing ‘the popular’” [Hall, S. (1981). In R. Samuel (Eds.), People’s history and socialist theory (pp. 227–240). London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.], this essay maps out some of the major shifts in cultural studies’ relationship to popular culture over the past several decades. It concludes with a call for cultural studies to find ways to work from the terrain of the popular, rather than merely studying that terrain, or trying to “translate” its scholarly analyses for popular audiences. This is a necessary path to fulfilling its mission as a political project.