International and Foreign Communications

Benjamin D. Singer, ed. Communications in Canadian Society (Toronto: Copp Clark, 1975—price not given, paper)

Svennik Hoyer, Stig Hadenius, and Lennart Weibull's The Politics and Exonomics of the Press: A Developmental Perspective (Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage, 1975—$2.50, paper)     

Social scholarship: Reconsidering scholarly practices in the age of social media

This conceptual exploration inquires, what is scholarship reconsidered in the age of social media? How ought we to conceptualize social scholarship—a new set of practices being discussed in various disciplines? The paper offers a critical examination of the practical and policy implications of reconsidering scholarship in light of social media's affordances toward a conceptualization of social scholarship. For each dimension of Boyer's original framework, we explain its epistemologies and practices. Next, we take a critical approach to inquiring how each dimension, reconsidered through the lens of social scholarship values and social media affordances, might be envisioned today. This exploration provides concrete examples of how scholars might enact social scholarship with what benefits and challenges.     

A Cultural Perspective on Professional Beliefs of Childcare Teachers

Preschool is an institution for cultural preservation, which responds to social change. Guided by this assumption, this study used a recent video of Chinese preschool in conjunction with the questionnaire from Preschool in Three Cultures, a study by Joseph Tobin and his colleagues in the 1980s, to examine the cultural and professional beliefs of three groups of U.S. early childhood educators (preservice, inservice non-Head Start, and inservice Head Start). We examined participants’ cultural beliefs, critical comments on the preschool, and group differences in their comments. Results show that participants’ beliefs about necessary qualities for a teacher remained stable from the 1980s in the U.S. But a shift occurred in beliefs about why society needs preschools. More education and longer employment were linked significantly to more critical comments of Chinese practice. There was a marked difference in professional and cultural beliefs by educators’ group affiliations.