Testing the effectiveness of the Developing Inclusive Youth program: A multisite randomized control trial

The Developing Inclusive Youth program is a classroom-based, individually administered video tool that depicts peer-based social and racial exclusion, combined with teacher-led discussions. A multisite randomized control trial was implemented with 983 participants (502 females; 58.5% White, 41.5% Ethnic/racial minority; M_age = 9.64 years) in 48 third-, fourth-, and fifth-grade classrooms across six schools. Children in the program were more likely to view interracial and same-race peer exclusion as wrong, associate positive traits with peers of different racial, ethnic, and gender backgrounds, and report play with peers from diverse backgrounds than were children in the control group. Many approaches are necessary to achieve antiracism in schools. This intervention is one component of this goal for developmental science.     

Re-viewing student teamwork: preparation for the ‘real world’ or bundles of situated social practices?

Research in Australian business education continues to emphasise the importance of students learning teamwork as an integral part of the undergraduate curriculum. However, entrenched conceptual and practical confusion as to what the term ‘teamwork’ means and how it ought to be enacted remains a vexed issue capable of distorting and diminishing teamwork, learning and related pedagogy. In this paper, we critically re-examine the view that developing teamwork in an undergraduate business degree equips students for work in the real world. By focusing on the ‘real world’ metaphor-in-use in a cross-disciplinary business capstone subject, we interrogate the spatio-temporal dimensions of teamwork and its realist conceptions and performance. The research draws upon the perceptions of interviewed academics conducting teamwork activities in undergraduate business courses and the lived experiences of the authors. The findings highlight how the use of multiple models of teamwork, constructed by competing discourses and linked to the dualities and invocations constructed by ‘the real world’ metaphor, further exacerbate confusion. We suggest re-viewing and re-valuing student teamwork as the performance of situated, social practices opening new spaces for student teamwork, learning and pedagogical practice.     

Investigating the mechanisms of written word production: insights from the written blocked cyclic naming paradigm

Reading and Writing - In three experiments, we examined whether similar principles apply to written and spoken production. Using a blocked cyclic written picture naming paradigm, we replicated the...     

How are Developmentally Appropriate or Traditional Teaching Practices Related to the Mathematics Achievement of General and Special Education Students?

Recently, developmentally appropriate practices have been distinguished from traditional practices and have been advocated as one way to reform primary general education classrooms. Relatively little research has examined the efficacy of developmentally appropriate versus traditional practices. In particular, concerns have been raised about the effectiveness of this approach for students with disabilities. This study examined the relationship between primary teachers' implementation of developmentally appropriate and traditional teaching methods and the mathematics achievement of general and special education students. Observations, interviews and questionnaires were used to measure the mathematics teaching practices used with general and special education students. Because developmentally appropriate and traditional teaching practices are often characterized in terms of a continuum, principal components methods were used to generate continuous composite variables that described teacher presentation, materials, grouping, and curriculum. The outcome measure was a curriculum- based measure of mathematics achievement. Principal components results showed that the composite variables most clearly associated with the developmentally appropriate v. traditional continuum were not related to mathematics achievement. Instead, consistent with previous research, achievement was associated with a reported measure of instruction that emphasized mathematical processing and strategy instruction. Further, a reported “laissez faire” method that emphasized individual student choice and treated special education students like general education students was negatively related to achievement, as was placement in special education class.     

Beyond a transmission model of communication

Elbers grapples with two persistent issues in psychology: (a) the role of the adult and the child in development, and (b) depictions of competence as context specific or generalized. Elbers' entrenchment in a transmission model of meaning undermines his portrayal of the child as an active participant in development. Furthermore, his characterization of competence as something in the head of the individual hinders his attempts to contextualize competence. We outline a framework informed by Vygotsky, Bakhtin, and others, which depicts both the formation and the functioning of mental processes (or competence) as fundamentally interactive. Mental functions arise in social interactions in which all participants accommodate each other, thus obviating the question of who is active or passive in the interaction. Furthermore, the social interactive origins of mental functioning impose a social context on all competencies. Such a framework facilitates movement away from the dilemmas which Elbers cogently raises.     

An Aboriginal way towards curriculum reconciliation

ABSTRACT

This paper introduces the context and design of an institutional educational development grants program, Jindaola, which reflects an Aboriginal way towards reconciling Indigenous and non-Indigenous Knowledges in the Australian higher education curriculum. The program is unique in two ways: it foregrounds the voice of Aboriginal local Knowledge Holders in the design and implementation of the program; and, rather than focussing on embedding predefined ‘packages’ of Indigenous Knowledges and pedagogies into curricula, the approach adheres to Aboriginal methods for conducting business and maintaining knowledge integrity, by taking interdisciplinary teams of academics on a journey towards what we are calling ‘curriculum reconciliation’.     

Faculty women in the American university: Up the down staircase

This paper compares the status of academic women in the United States, particularly at the most prestigious institutions of higher education, to that of faculty men. Inequalities in rank, prestige, rewards, work environment, and social expectations are discovered. The paper next traces the organization of women within academia professional organizations in the late sixties and ties these developments to the larger women's movement nationally. Finally, the impact of these organizations on government policy and on university personnel practices is assessed. The future status of academic women in a country with a declining birthrate, a sluggish economy, and diminishing financial support for higher education is considered.     

The Typhoid Marys of the Left: Gender,Race, and the Broadcast Blacklist

Scholarly accounts of gender, race, and television in the 1950s have mainly focused on the ideological content of programming that ultimately made it onto the air. This research has played an important role in reckoning with the political and cultural legacies of 1950s television. But the focus on ideology and content has prevented us from fully understanding the repressive nature of anti-communist thought and action, both in terms of the powerful ways in which the broadcast blacklist made the production of progressive themes and images impossible, and in terms of how the fear that followed from the blacklist repressed the memory that such alternatives had ever existed. Counter to the images of white suburban women we have inherited from the 1950s, the first two casualties of the broadcast blacklist were professional women who were politically active—white actor Jean Muir and African American musician Hazel Scott—whose involvement in civil rights was deemed evidence of their communist sympathies. This essay builds on earlier research on gender and 1950s television not by analyzing the absence of strong women, people of color, immigrants, and working-class families from the televisual landscape, but by looking at the elimination of the very cultural workers writing, agitating, and fighting to broadcast these representations.     

Spectacle,spectatorship, and gender anxiety in television news coverage of the 1970 women's strike for equality

This essay examines television news coverage of the August 2 6, 19 70 Women's Strike for Equality, the first major media event of the second wave offeminism in the U.S. It explores three levels on which the news reports on the three broadcast networks (ABC, CBS, and NBC), rely on notions of women and visual pleasure: first, in their positioning of the Strike as sheer spectacle; second, in their verbal and visual framing of the Strike as absurdist entertainment rather than reasoned protest, and third, in their emphasis on the issue of femininity under attack, an emphasis in which femininity is largely represented by women's bodies. I conclude with a discussion of the ways in which the framing of the events functions both to assert and to assuage a profound sense of gender anxiety on the part of the assumed male spectator for the coverage.     

Students' “Write” to Their Own Language: Teaching the African American Verbal Tradition as a Rhetorically Effective Writing Skill

The 1974 Conference on College Composition and Communication's (CCCC) resolution declaring “Students' Right to Their Own Language” (SRTOL) defends the rights of students and all other writers to use different varieties of English (see Committee on CCCC Language Statement, 1974). In addition, the 1988 CCCC adoption of the National Language Policy (NLP), which was a response to the English-Only Movement, boldly asserts that English-Only is educationally unsound. However progressive these policies may be, there still remains a request from teachers on how to identify and develop effective pedagogies that advance language diversity in the classroom. The present research study responds to this problem by introducing a social justice approach to writing instruction that recognizes African and African American contributions to standardized American written communication structures. Using culturally relevant pedagogy and culturally sustaining pedagogy as theoretical frames, I explore the effects of a “comparative approach” to African American Language and Literacy instruction, which makes clear that African American Verbal Tradition (AVT) may be incorporated into expected conventions for academic writing. This case study takes place in two first-year writing courses at a major Midwestern university in which students are introduced to AVT. AVT is a broad linguistic tradition; therefore I have selected five features of AVT to investigate: (1) repetition, (2) signifyin[g] and indirection, (3) call response, (4) narrativizing, and (5) sounding. My project uses social justice as a framework that I developed through my own teaching practices, which highlights the linguistic abilities AAL speakers bring with them to the classroom and how these complex and intellectual writing skills can be expanded.