Roads to Success in the Belgian French Community’s Higher Education System: Predictors of Dropout and Degree Completion at the Université Libre de Bruxelles

In this paper we study the factors that influence both dropout and (4-year) degree completion throughout university by applying the set of discrete-time methods for competing risks in event history analysis, as described in Scott and Kennedy (2005). In the French-speaking Belgian community, participation rates are very high given that higher education is largely financed through public funds, but at the same time, the system performs very poorly in terms of degree completion. In this particular context, we explore two main questions. First, to what extent is socioeconomic background still a determinant of success for academic careers in a system that, by construction, aims to eliminate economic barriers to higher education? Second, given the high proportion of students who fail their first year and are unable to move to their second year, can authorities promote degree completion and decrease dropout among students who have already experienced a failure? Using the competing risks model, we show that in spite of low entry barriers, students coming from lower socioeconomic background are more vulnerable to dropout along the whole academic path because of financial constraints that prevent them from re-enrolling. Also, our results reveal that, after a failed year, a significantly higher proportion of students who re-enroll in a different field obtain a degree compared to those that re-enroll in the same field, suggesting that universities should rethink the mechanisms available to manage failure and guide student choices.     

Music and Popular Culture

Gaye Tuchman, Arlene Kaplan Daniels, and James Benet, eds. Hearth and Home: Ima9es of llomen in the Mass Media (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978—no price given, but available in hardback and paperback)

Maurice Horn's Women in the Comics (New York: Chelsea House, 1977—$15.00)

Charles K. Wolfe's Tennessee Strings: The Story of Country Music in Tennessee (Knoxville, Yniversity of Tennessee Press, 1977—$3.50, paper)

Anthony Hopkins' Downbeat Music Guide (London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1977—$4.95)

Peter L. Skolnik's Fads: America's Crazes, Fevers & Fancies From the 1890s to the 1970s (New York: Crowell, 1978—$9.95)     

'No goats in the mother city': using Symbolic Objects to help students talk about diversity and change

This paper reports on a first year project in a South African engineering foundation programme which attempted to bring a cultural studies perspective to teaching academic literacy. Students identify and investigate everyday objects that have symbolic meanings in their communities. Objects are seen as catalysts for enabling student narratives to emerge, and are a way of exploring the tensions between convention and change in cultural practices. A project such as this breaks disciplinary frames, working across diverse contexts such as engineering and cultural studies. The aim is to begin to explore some of the complexities around ‘development’ in contexts of diversity and change, globalization and relocalization.     

Multimodal texts in Higher Education and the implications for writing pedagogy

Although studies on writing pedagogy and academic literacies have examined changing genres in tertiary education, there has not necessarily been an emphasis on how a range of modes and media have influenced texts in various disciplines. This paper explores the influence and incorporation of the visual into student texts in Higher Education, looking at the semiotic weighting of modes, conventions and functions of images, visual / verbal linkages and visual composition. These aspects of multimodal texts have implications for the ways in which we teach ‘academic literacies’ practices and writing as multimodal composition to students.     

Drama activities as ideational resources for primary‐grade children in urban science classrooms

In this study we explored how dramatic enactments of scientific phenomena and concepts mediate children's learning of scientific meanings along material, social, and representational dimensions. These drama activities were part of two integrated science‐literacy units, Matter and Forest, which we developed and implemented in six urban primary‐school (grades 1st–3rd) classrooms. We examine and discuss the possibilities and challenges that arise as children and teachers engaged in scientific knowing through such experiences. We use Halliday's (1978. Language as social semiotic: The social interpretation of language and meaning. Baltimore, MD: University Park Press) three metafunctions of communicative activity—ideational, interpersonal, and textual—to map out the place of the multimodal drama genre in elementary urban school science classrooms of young children. As the children talked, moved, gestured, and positioned themselves in space, they constructed and shared meanings with their peers and their teachers as they enacted their roles. Through their bodies they negotiated ambiguity and re‐articulated understandings, thus marking this embodied meaning making as a powerful way to engage with science. Furthermore, children's whole bodies became central, explicit tools used to accomplish the goal of representing this imaginary scientific world, as their teachers helped them differentiate it from the real world of the model they were enacting. Their bodies operated on multiple mediated levels: as material objects that moved through space, as social objects that negotiated classroom relationships and rules, and as metaphorical entities that stood for water molecules in different states of matter or for plants, animals, or non‐living entities in a forest food web. Children simultaneously negotiated meanings across all of these levels, and in doing so, acted out improvisational drama as they thought and talked science. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 47: 302–325, 2010     

How speechreading contributes to reading in a transparent ortography: the case of Spanish deaf people

The aim of the study is to describe the performance of deaf and hearing people while speechreading Spanish, a language with transparent orthography, and to relate this skill to reading efficiency. Three groups of 27 participants each were recruited: a group of deaf participants, a chronological age‐matched hearing group and a reading age‐matched hearing group. All three were tested on vocabulary, phonological awareness, reading speed, speechreading and, only in the group of deaf people, speech intelligibility. The results indicate that deaf people are better speechreaders than younger hearing people, but they are no better than their age‐matched peers, and that speechreading is related to reading only in deaf people.     

Engaging students emotionally: the role of emotional intelligence in predicting cognitive and affective engagement in higher education

Student engagement is a key predictor of academic performance, persistence and retention in higher education. While many studies have identified how aspects of the college environment influence engagement, fewer have specifically focused on emotional intelligence (EI). In this study, we sought to explore whether EI could predict cognitive and/or affective engagement in a sample of undergraduate psychology students in Ireland. Ninety-one students completed two forms of the student engagement instrument, rating current engagement and retrospective secondary school engagement, along with the trait EI (TEI) questionnaire. After controlling for academic ability, gender and school engagement, multiple regression analyses found TEI to be a positive predictor of both cognitive and affective engagement. Previous academic performance acted as an additional predictor of cognitive engagement, while retrospective affective school engagement predicted current affective engagement. These results suggest that interventions aimed at increasing EI may have positive implications for many aspects of student engagement, and hence performance at third level.     

Facilitating Professional Development during International Practicum: Understanding our Work as Teacher Educators through Critical Incidents

This collaborative self-study details the experiences of an Australian teacher educator and a Canadian teacher educator, who led teacher candidates on international practicum placements to the Cook Islands and Kenya respectively. Focusing on critical incidents, they collaboratively analyzed dilemmas that occurred when providing professional development sessions for local teachers during these placements. These dilemmas required the teacher educators to think deeply about their beliefs and practices in these contexts. Findings from the study included the teacher educator’s tendency to make assumptions about good teaching and learning practices that were reflective of their personal pedagogical values and beliefs; their discomfort with their perceptions of some neo‐colonial practices within these international practicum sites and uncertainty about how to navigate the resultant tensions; and, the need to view the work of teacher educators though a new cultural lens when working in transnational contexts. Implications for teacher educators working with local hosting teachers during international placements include the need to understand and acknowledge the complexity of this dimension of teacher educators’ work, and for teacher educators to engage in parallel learning journeys with the teacher candidates they accompany. This involves critically reflecting on the experiences, assumptions, and beliefs that they bring to their new contexts, as well as adopting a global perspective and a deep consciousness of how one is perceived by others who are culturally, racially, or linguistically different.     

Evaluating Discipline-Based Education Research for Promotion and Tenure

Discipline-based education research (DBER) is an emergent, interdisciplinary field of scholarship aimed at understanding and improving discipline-specific teaching and learning. The number of DBER faculty members in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) departments has grown rapidly in recent years. Because the interdisciplinary nature of DBER involves social science, senior STEM faculty members may find it challenging to evaluate the quality or impact of DBER scholarship. This essay aims to address this issue by providing guidance on evaluating the scholarly accomplishments of DBER faculty members in a way that is useful to departmental colleagues and administrators during the tenure and promotion evaluation process.