LGBTQIA+ youth as multicultural educators

ABSTRACT

Multicultural education generally takes place as culturally competent adults prepare other adults to work with a variety of student youth. In this paper, we present an alternative that disrupts the pattern of adults teaching about youth. Our alternative has youth educating adults in ways that centre youth’s experiences and insights with schooling. We discuss the educative efforts of Chroma, a youth community for LGBTQIA+ and allied youth aged 12–20. First, we tell the story of Chroma’s educative efforts. Then, we discuss our methodology. Next, we discuss three key sets of insights about their educative efforts – anchoring expertise, meeting adult learners halfway, and barriers to learning. We raise questions inspired by these findings. At last, we conclude with a deconstruction of the adult–youth binary in multicultural education and ethnographic research.     

Effects of stimulus change in prepunishment alley segments on self-punitive behavior

Three experiments investigated the effects of stimulus change during extinction on self-punitive behavior. In Experiment 1, changing alley brightness cues in all three segments of the alley prior to extinction eliminated self-punitive behavior. That is, subjects given shock in the third alley segment during extinction did not differ from nonshocked subjects in alley speed or in the number of trials to extinction. In Experiment 2, with shock also administered in the third alley segment, self-punitive behavior was eliminated when the stimulus change was made in segment 1 or in segments 1 and 2 but was obtained when the change occurred in segment 2 or in the lower startbox. In Experiment 3, shock was administered in the second alley segment. Self-punitive behavior was not obtained when the lower startbox cues were changed but was obtained with stimulus change in the upper startbox or in segment 1. The results are consistent with an expanded version of the Mowrer-Brown conditioned-fear hypothesis.     

Enriching preservice teachers’ critical reflection through an international videoconference discussion

The concepts of reflection and reflective practice have become the core of many teacher education programmes, with critical reflection as the goal for many teacher educators. This study examined the use of a videoconference discussion in an instructional methodology course as a means to enrich the process of reflection and encourage critical reflection. Critical action research methodology was used by the researchers to evaluate the addition of videoconferencing to a model of scaffolded reflection which was already part of the course. The findings suggest that the introduction of a videoconference discussion to the scaffolded reflection model enriched critical reflection on four topics: technology use, multicultural curriculum and instruction, censorship of web-based resources, and accountability and assessment. The discussion of these topics allowed the preservice teachers to think about their own agency, and the affordances and constraints of their school context. Implications for using videoconferencing for critical reflection are provided for teacher educators.     

Predicting word-spelling difficulty in 7- to 11-year-olds

Some languages have simple grapheme-phoneme codes in which there is a one-to-one mapping, making them easy to teach and learn, while others have more complicated structures and are more difficult for teachers and students. There is now an increasing number of studies which demonstrate that readers in more transparent orthographies such as Italian, Spanish, Turkish, Greek and German have little difficulty in decoding written words, while English children have many more problems. Increasingly, lack of orthographic transparency in English is seen as having a powerful negative effect on the development of literacy skills in English-speaking children. In the present study, the word factors associated with poor spelling in 5 school year-groups (ages 7 to 11 years) are identified as: (a) frequency of the word in the English language, (b) length of the word and (c) a measure of the phoneticity of the word. The concept of word phoneticity is explored and data is presented illustrating the predictive model of spelling. The implications the model has for teaching and learning English are discussed, with particular reference to the beneficial effects that greater orthographic transparency would have for children.     

Individual differences in language performance after cochlear implantation at one to three years of age: child, family, and linguistic factors

Language skills were investigated in a multicultural sample of 13 prelingually deaf children (11 profoundly deaf from birth) who received cochlear implants between 14 and 38 months of age; average duration of implant use was 49 months. Individual postimplant language skills ranged from extremely delayed to age appropriate. On average, skills varied across domains: on vocabulary, several children functioned in the average range compared with hearing peers, but all were below that range on a test emphasizing syntax (CELF-P). Children with preimplant hearing experience had the highest scores on all language measures. Excluding these children, age of implantation (range 14 to 27 months) associated inversely and significantly with CELF-P scores, even when nonverbal IQ was controlled. Qualitative analyses indicated higher child language achievement associated with parents' reports of lengthy, in-depth processes to decide about cochlear implantation. Such reports may indicate high levels of ongoing parent involvement with child and programming.