Mentoring: Immigrant teachers bridging professional practices

New teachers who enter Australian educational systems must acquire suitable knowledge that enables them to function effectively as a teacher in this country. For immigrant professionals new to the system mere transfer of knowledge does not suffice and does not satisfy their professional perception of self. Teachers who are born and trained overseas lack culturally specific educational knowledge. These shortfalls can initiate unforseen dilemmas for their professional development and shifts in their definition of self. Acquiring new knowledge requires teachers to understand the social elements of learning and teaching in local contexts and to apply them appropriately. Mentoring relationships can be a means of bridging the gap between the newcomers' former ways of knowing and current practice, thereby mobilizing their capacity to operate effectively as a teacher in their new contexts and develop a positive professional identity. In this paper we draw on interview data from a study that involved immigrant teachers.     

International trends in health science librarianship. Part 5 Latin America and the Caribbean

This is the 5th in a series of articles exploring international trends in health science librarianship in Latin America and the Caribbean in the first decade of the 21st century. The invited authors are from Argentina, Bermuda and Mexico. Future issues will track trends in Central Europe and the Middle East. JM     

Teacher‐Child Oral Reading Interactions: how do teachers typically tutor?

This paper reports the results of three studies which examine the behaviours of teachers when hearing children read. In the first study, we examine the tutoring behaviour of 55 teachers listening to 8‐14‐year‐old low progress readers. In the second study, we report results on 31 teachers listening to very low progress readers aged 9‐16 years and, in the third, we discuss the findings from 55 teachers listening to young average progress readers aged 4‐8 years. The results suggest that, for all three groups of readers, most teachers tend to respond immediately most of the time to reader errors, allowing little or no time for readers to self‐correct. Teachers tend to respond to errors with a prompt on most occasions but this is more likely with low and very low progress readers than with young, average progress readers. Relatively low rates of praise were apparent in all three groups. We also found that a large number of readers in all groups were inappropriately placed on book levels which were too easy or (less frequently) too difficult, as against an appropriate instructional level.     

Challenging Masculinity and Using Sexuality

Drawing from ethnographic research this paper focuses on how sexuality is deployed in regulative and tactical forms within Further Education. It examines how masculinity is institutionalised through the internal discourses of education. It demonstrates how, on the basis of the normalisation of masculinity, male teachers are able to regulate female students through the sexualising of situations. The resentment generated by being forced to confront their educational and feminine powerlessness leads the female students to develop a number of different coping tactics. One of these is a transformative attack on masculine hegemony whereby female students take up masculine subject positions and use strategies of masculinity to control male teachers. It argues that the refusal to give legitimacy and consent to masculine regulation, in education, on the basis of a cost‐benefit analysis, could engender challenges across the sites, thereby necessitating reconstructions of masculine power.     

Children's drawing and painting from a cognitive perspective: a longitudinal study

This paper describes a longitudinal study undertaken with 40 pre‐schoolers during their last six months in an early childhood centre and their first six months at school. The study presents an investigation of the pathways that child drawers and painters make towards representational depictions. As such its primary focus is on cognitive processes. Monthly samples of 40 children's drawings and paintings were collected over a 12‐month period that included the children's transition into formal schooling. CrossTabs analysis showed that the relevant cognitive abilities tended to present in clusters and that patterning may be a serious component both in its own right, as well as in facilitating representational depictions, as previously claimed by Booth.     

Gender Reproduction and Further Education: domestic apprenticeships

This paper explores how a group of 83 young, white, working class women became involved in the state's most recent attempt at restructuring social relations through vocational initiatives. Using ethnographic research conducted in a caring course department of a northern further education college, it examines how the students everyday practical experiences of the vocational caring curriculum involves them in the construction of subjectivity and gender and class reproduction. The central argument is that caring courses are little more than domestic apprenticeships which anticipate both the family household structure and the labour market. The students implicate themselves in this process, through their attempts to gain autonomy and self‐esteem, by constructing ‘ideal’ caring standards, which come to prioritise exclusive, familial forms of care over and above occupational roles. Thus, they socialise themselves out of the labour market and establish familial responsibilities, which can be drawn upon by the state to maintain unpaid welfare provision.     

The metacognitive reading strategies of five early readers

The purpose of this study was to examine the metacognitive reading strategies of five children, four to six years of age, who were reading fluently prior to formal instruction in grade one. Fluency was judged on whether the children could conduct meaningful reading (Smith, 1988) with relative smoothness (Duffy and Roehler, 1989). Methods of this case study included semi-structured interviews, role playing, observations and informal miscue analyses of oral reading. The children's personal characteristics and home environments provided a context for their reading strategies, and particular attention was given to the caregiver-child interactions which may have facilitated the development of metacognitive reading strategies. Findings suggest that each of the children utilized a variety of metacognitive reading strategies and showed individual preferences for certain strategies, as indicated by the number of times these strategies were used. The children also responded differently to particular research methods, a finding which supports the employment of a variety of methods when studying young children. Findings from this study also draw a relationship between caregiver-child interactions and the development of particular metacognitive reading strategies.