What does electronic conferencing afford distance education?

Technology is potentially offering many opportunities to extend and expand distance learning in the higher education sector. Electronic conferencing, in particular, is seen as a technique which offers opportunities for course delivery and methods of interaction for distant learners. This paper examines the similarities and differences between face‐to‐face seminars and online discussions. Through the concept of affordance it is shown that both benefits and limitations for interaction exist for real and virtual meetings.

It is argued that until we fully understand what it is about face‐to‐face interactions that enhances learning, we cannot know what features are required within an electronic conferencing system.     

Disruptions and bridges in rural Australia: higher education aspiration to expectation of participation

ABSTRACT

Widening higher education participation can deliver benefits to individuals, societies and economies but rural populations experience factors which inhibit their aspiration for and participation in higher education. When designing outreach programs, universities need to consider this landscape of factors, many of which are socio-cultural. This article reports evaluation results from a project that trialled three university outreach programs designed to align with rural contexts with the aim of identifying aspects which were effective in addressing factors of rurality, revealing obscured future options and showing higher education pathways as attainable. Universities can work effectively with rural communities to inform people’s higher education aspirations through ‘disruptions’, interventions that inform educational aspiration, and ‘bridges’ which support higher education participation through facilitating access to information, physical, financial, academic and social resources. A model including both ‘disruptions’ and ‘bridges’, jointly resourced and drawing on social capital resources of communities and higher education institutions is presented.     

Using Performance Task Data to Improve Instruction

Two well-accepted ideas among educators are (a) performance assessment is an effective means of assessing higher-order thinking skills and (b) data-driven instruction planning is a valuable tool for optimizing student learning. This article describes a locally developed performance task (LDPT) designed to measure critical thinking, problem solving, and written communication skills of elementary and middle school students in a large school district. An investigation was conducted to determine how middle school teachers use LDPT responses to inform instruction and to ascertain how students are reflecting on their performance. Results from an analysis of documents indicated teachers were engaged in formal data-informed practices within professional learning communities. Moreover, educators examined student work samples and planned instruction based on student-specific needs. Strategies to reinforce proficiency in the skills assessed by the district's LDPT are reported.     

Re-envisioning the Role of Universities in Early Childhood Teacher Education: Community Partnerships for 21st-Century Learning

Despite contrasting views on the overlap of early childhood education and teacher education, opportunities abound for expanding the role of early childhood educators in broader teacher education discourse. University-based early childhood education and kindergarten-through-grade-12 teacher education share purposes, philosophies, and resources that should be explored to more effectively address the needs of diverse young children and their families. Community partnerships and a shift toward community-based teacher preparation present a context and opportunity for exploring the overlap of these two historically separate fields. In this article, we present a framework for collaborative, field-based early childhood teacher preparation, situating birth-though-grade-12 teacher education in diverse community contexts and involving school and community personnel to achieve universal 21^st-century goals for the teaching and learning of young children.     

Building a space to dream: Supporting indigenous children's survivance through community-engaged social and emotional learning

Indigenous communities practice survivance and challenge social and political systems to support their children's identity and well-being. Grounded in transformative social-emotional learning (SEL) and tribal critical race theory, this 3-year community-based participatory research study (2019–2021) examined how a SEL program co-created with an Indigenous community in Flathead Nation in Montana supports anti-racism and anti-colonialism among Indigenous children. Critical reflexivity and thematic analyses of Community Advisory Board meetings and journals written by 60 students (M_age = 10.3, SD = 1.45; 47% girls; 60% Native American) during the SEL program revealed themes on Indigenous identity, belonging, wellness, and colonialism. These results shed light on challenging the racist and colonial roots of education to support Indigenous children's survivance and social-emotional well-being.     

Collaboration: The Politics of Working Together

“Collaboration” is frequently urged on students, who are praised for being “good collaborators.” Yet collaboration has two senses: a positive sense of autonomously undertaken joint endeavor, but also a sinister implication of treacherous cooperation with enemies. In this article, Amy Shuffelton probes the uses and misuses of collaboration as an educational aim. She engages Josiah Royce's Philosophy of Loyalty and John Dewey's The Public and Its Problems, as well as contemporary critiques of neoliberal workplace structures, to explore the loyalties that shape what we do and who we are. Education for democratic citizenship, Shuffelton concludes, demands that children be provided opportunities to undertake conjoint activities that go beyond the limitations of conventional school collaborations.     

A Review of “Recommended Books in Spanish for Children and Young Adults, 2004–2008”

No abstract available for this article.     

Attitude toward Christianity among secondary school pupils in Northern Ireland: shifts in denominational differences

Background Northern Ireland is a province that remains deeply divided between Protestants and Catholics and maintains a segregated system of schools.

Purpose The research builds on a series of studies conducted in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s to monitor the attitude toward Christianity of males and females educated in Protestant and Catholic schools.

Sample A sample of 2359 16- to 18-year-old pupils attending Catholic and Protestant schools in Northern Ireland.

Design and methods A random sample of seven Protestant and nine Catholic schools invited all pupils attending their lower and upper sixth-form classes to participate in the survey and to complete the Francis scale of attitude toward Christianity.

Results The data demonstrate that, while males attending Catholic schools maintained a more positive attitude towards Christianity than males attending Protestant schools, females attending Catholic schools reported a less positive attitude toward Christianity than females attending Protestant schools. These findings are compared with studies conducted during the 1970s and 1980s when both males and females attending Catholic schools recorded a more positive attitude toward Christianity than their peers attending Protestant schools.

Conclusions Repeated cross-sectional studies of this nature help to profile the changing religious climate of Northern Ireland.