Guest Editorial: Educators Who Tell the Truth

In this guest editorial the Americans Who Tell the Truth painting exhibit by artist Robert Shetterly is related to the need for educators to tell the truth about children and social justice.     

Adult humans’ understanding of support relations: an up-linkage replication

In an up-linkage replication, three experiments examined adult humans’ folk physics, i.e., their naturally occurring and spontaneous understanding of the physical world, using a violation of expectation (VOE) task and stimuli similar to those used to study chimpanzees’, monkeys’, and rooks’ folk physics. Unlike what has been reported with nonhuman primates, adult humans did not look longer at physically impossible than possible events, though they did rate the physically impossible events as more interesting and novel than the possible events. These results underscore that behavior during a VOE experiment has many possible causes, only one of which may be a subject’s folk physics.     

The Journey from Telling to Being: Narrative Ways of Understanding Applied to South African Children’s Hero Stories

Children are raised hearing stories of local and mythic heroes in every society (Campbell, 1968). Parents and teachers have used tales surrounding the lives of heroes to teach children about courage, honor, and integrity for thousands of years. Yet, in spite of this rich history, there is astonishingly little research about the impact of hero stories on the lives of children. In this study, data were obtained from children in a South African primary school exploring the uses of hero stories in the social construction of the self as hero. Implications for counseling children are discussed.

An organisational perspective on the cluster paradox: Exploring how members of a cluster manage the tension between continuity and renewal

Clusters face what has been referred to as a ‘cluster paradox’; a situation in which a collective identity breeds cohesion and efficiency in inter-organisational collaboration, yet it hinders the variety needed to adapt to disruptive change and prevent lock-in situations. Accordingly, a recurring theme in the literature on cluster evolution and cluster life-cycles is the need for constant renewal to allow clusters to adapt to a changing environment. However, how individual firms enact a process of cluster renewal and consider possible response options is not well understood. Using a French energy cluster as empirical setting, this paper investigates individual members’ enactment of the renewal in terms of how it could affect their current position, both structurally and relationally, and to what extent members felt that they had agency to steer the process to safeguard their position. The findings show that members’ enactment of the proposed change does not only depend on the perceived impact of cluster renewal on the member itself but also on the impact the renewal might have on other members in the firm’s network. The analysis also suggests that cluster renewal leads to a leadership vacuum where it is not clear who, if anyone, will lead the renewal process.     

Conceptualizing minimalist footwear: an objective definition

Running has been plagued with an alarmingly high incidence of injury, which has resulted in the exploration of interventions aimed at reducing the risk of running-related injury. One such intervention is the introduction of footwear that mimics barefoot running. These have been termed minimalist shoes.

Minimalist footwear aims to reduce the risk of injury by promoting adaptations in running biomechanics that have been linked to a reduction in both impact and joint forces. However, some studies have found that minimalist footwear may be beneficial to the runner as they promote favourable biomechanical adaptations, whilst other studies have found the opposite to be true.

Reasons for these conflicting results could be attributed to the lack of a definition for minimalist footwear. The aim of this review article is to provide a structural definition for minimalist footwear based on studies that have examined the influence of footwear on biomechanical variables during running.

Based on current literature, we define minimalist footwear as a shoe with a highly flexible sole and upper that weighs 200g or less, has a heel stack height of 20mm or less and a heel-toe differential of 7mm or less.