Finding our way

LONG BEFORE I GOT PREGNANT, MY HUSBAND AND I BEGAN TO PREPARE FOR THE KIND OF BIRTH I HAD ALWAYS IMAGINED FOR MYSELF: peaceful, normal, and without medication or unnecessary medical intervention. In the fall of 2008, I got pregnant. At that same time, I started a new career as a labor and delivery nurse in a hospital that specializes in high-risk labor and birth. My daughter's journey into this world turned out to be the beautiful normal experience we had always imagined. This special experience also helped shape the kind of care I offer as a new labor and delivery nurse.     

Critical Literacy,Disciplinary Literacy: Reading the Engineering-Designed World

Globally, many people spend most of their time interacting with the products of engineering design as they wear clothes, drink clean water, use transportation systems, and more. Given the omnipresence of engineering design, whose material results are felt daily in people’s lives, it seems especially important that students learn to recognize and question how certain designs promote the welfare and interests of some while remaining inaccessible to others. In this article, we outline a vision for critical literacy instruction in engineering that simultaneously incorporates and challenges professional standards. We—an associate professor of literacy, an engineer, and a teacher at an engineering-focused high school—illustrate how critical literacy instruction might be enacted in the context of engineering design instruction in high schools. We describe how critical literacy can complement disciplinary literacy instruction in engineering as students use critically-focused, disciplinary lenses to move toward social justice.     

Maternal parenting and children's conscience: early security as moderator

Socialization research is shifting from direct links between parenting and children's outcomes toward models that consider parenting in the context of other factors. This study proposed that the effects of maternal responsive, gentle parenting on child conscience are moderated by the quality of their relationship, specifically, early security. A 2-process model of early conscience development was proposed and confirmed in this longitudinal study. The child's security and trust in the caregiver, assessed at 14 months in the Strange Situation, rendered him or her receptive and eager to accept the caregiver's socialization agenda. That early security then enhanced the effectiveness of parental adaptive parenting style, observed from 14 to 45 months, in terms of promoting conscience at 56 months, which encompassed moral conduct, moral cognition, and moral self.     

Preschool teachers’ self-efficacy,burnout, and stress in online professional development: a mixed methods approach to understand change

ABSTRACT

This mixed methods study examines the impact of online professional development on preschool teachers’ self-efficacy, burnout, and stress. Participating teachers (n = 89) were randomly assigned into four groups: one of three treatment conditions (course-only, conference, reflective writing) or a control group. All treatment conditions received a 14-week online course on teacher-child interactions, which included regular homework assignments and community discussion boards. The conference and reflective writing conditions received additional supports. Regression analyses revealed that teachers who were in the course-only treatment condition had decreased self-efficacy and increased emotional exhaustion, a component of burnout, relative to the control group. However, teachers in the conference and reflective writing conditions did not experience such negative effects. Qualitative analyses suggest that all teachers tended to focus on personal challenges within the course, but teachers who had access to conference and reflective writing supports benefited from the availability of emotional outlets and/or opportunities for feedback     

Preservice Teachers' Development and Implementation of Science Performance Assessment Tasks

Preservice teachers in a science methods course were provided instruction on performance assessment, then guided through a design and implementation process of performance assessment tasks. We assessed the effect of designing and implementing a performance assessment task on preservice teachers' understanding of standards-based assessment. The findings show that these preservice teachers improved in their understanding of assessment as a formative process as well as their science content understanding of the topic addressed in their designed task. We found that preservice teachers need to experiment with performance assessment tasks in an authentic context in order to understand the full potential and value of the task.     

The effectiveness of international development assistance from American organizations to deaf communities in Jamaica

American organizations bringing assistance to deaf people in developing countries unintentionally create relationships of dependency or oppression rather than relationships of support. Using qualitative methods, the author examined the effectiveness of development assistance provided to the Jamaican Deaf community by two American churches, one American nongovernmental organization, and one U.S. federal agency. Documents were reviewed and observations were made. Interviews were conducted with more than 60 deaf and hearing people involved with the American organizations, the Jamaican organizations, and deaf Jamaican beneficiaries. The author concludes that the Jamaican Deaf community was often excluded in planning, designing, or evaluating programs, and was unsatisfied with the American assistance it received. Results also indicate that the American organizations were poorly prepared to work with the Deaf community. Suggestions for American organizations wishing to strengthen and empower deaf people through development assistance in developing countries are proposed.     

Re-envisioning scientific literacy as relational,participatory thinking and doing

This review explores Michelle Hollingsworth Koomen’s “Inclusive science education: Learning from Wizard,” a case study of a middle school student with learning exceptionalities in a mainstream science classroom. The strength of Koomen’s work lies in her elucidation of the ways in which normative science instruction fails to adequately support Wizard’s learning. His classroom experiences position him, if unintentionally, as deficient and incapable, which in turn serves to undermine his ability to fully engage in science or to capitalize on his strengths as a learner in the service of developing disciplinary literacy. I extend this conversation by arguing for a broader view of scientific literacy and the need for a more relational pedagogy in classrooms that supports meaningful and productive engagement in science learning and fosters positive identification with science.     

Authoring Data Stories in a Media Makerspace: Adolescents Developing Critical Data Literacies

This article centers sociocultural and sociopolitical considerations of how young people understand, represent, and use data by presenting findings from a social design research study about how students in a public urban high school authored “data stories” using personal data they curated, collected, and visualized. The study contributes to theoretical understandings of critical data literacies by considering the experiences and practices of adolescents enrolled in a required media arts class as they produced data visualizations drawn from their everyday lives. Findings center on two aspects of critical data literacies youth developed—understanding themselves as people capable of using data for multiple purposes and understanding data as socially situated resources for meaning-making. This study foregrounds the importance of positioning youth as authors and architects of data, making central youth perspectives in understanding the role of data in young people’s digitally connected lives and highlighting the importance of expanding what “counts” as data. It also suggests the importance of creating infrastructure to support the development of culturally relevant data practices that highlight the social, cultural, and political uses of data and its racialized dimensions.     

Using videotapes to study the construction of mathematical knowledge by individual children working in groups

Videotaping small groups of students in a regular classroom environment makes it possible to study individual student cognitive growth in a social setting. The present report deals with student development of some new mathematical ideas over an extended period of time.