Let's Get Our Houses in Order: The Role of Transitional Rituals in Constructing Moral Kindergartners

This article stems from a participant-observation study I conducted in a full-day kindergarten classroom in a central North Carolina public school during the autumn of 1994. In attempting to understand how morality was constructed by the teacher and children there, I saw that the teacher utilized a series of rituals to help the children shed their external (home) roles, make the transition to their school roles, and reaggregate as students (as opposed to children). While she conceptualized these activities as merely organizing the children for the school day, I interpreted them as a manifestation of rites of passage (van Gennep, 1960; Turner, 1969). This paper is the second in a three-part examination of these rites of passage, in which I map out and explore the teacher's use of transitional or liminal rituals to construct the moral identity of the role of student and foster the children's attachment to that role.     

Irreconcilable Differences? The Business of Social Research and Users

Research in universities has undergone significant restructuring in the last decade and a half. Much of this restructuring stems from government policies aimed at harnessing research towards the goals of national wealth creation and improved quality of life. A key strategy in achieving these goals is making research relevant to 'users', typically defined in terms of business. Although many have commented on the tensions that arise from incorporating the notions of users and relevance in the natural and physical sciences, these have received little attention as they apply to the social sciences. As this paper argues, the application of the notion of users is far from unproblematic and reflects the wider ambiguities of UK science policy in general.     

Adopting and Implementing an Open Access Policy: The Library’s Role

With the support of the library, the faculty, and the administration, Allegheny College recently adopted the strongest type of Open Access policy, a mandate for all faculty scholarship to be placed in the college’s institutional repository. The library’s Head of Technical Services tells how the policy came to be approved and how it is being implemented by the library.     

Danger,danger! Evaluating the accessibility of Web-based emergency alert sign-ups in the northeastern United States

People with disabilities need access to emergency-related information at the same time that the general public receives that information. Many county and municipal-level governments suggest that citizens sign up on a Web page to receive emergency alert information. While the messages being sent out via e-mail or text message might be accessible, the sign-up processes are often inaccessible, preventing people with disabilities for signing up for these important information services. In this paper, all of the county-level emergency alert sign-ups in Massachusetts, New York, and Maryland, were evaluated for accessibility. A total of 156 evaluations took place (6 evaluations for each of the 26 counties evaluated). Of the 26 counties evaluated, 21 of them had accessibility violations. Legal, policy, and design-related implications are presented in the following discussion.     

Advocating for the Rights of the Child Through Family–School Collaboration

The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child celebrates its 25th anniversary in 2014 as the premier international human rights treaty focused on childhood rights and protections. In this article, we briefly review the 41 substantive principles embodied in the 54 Articles of the Convention and stress the need for educators, and specifically school psychologists, to work in concert with families to promote these premises through effective collaborative partnerships. Finally, we review examples of how the themes and positive ideology of the Convention can be enhanced through family–school collaboration infused into schooling practices within a multitiered service delivery framework to meet the learning and development best interests of the child.     

Responding to Students’ Learning Preferences in Chemistry

This paper reports on a teacher’s and his students’ responsiveness to a new tetrahedral-oriented (Mahaffy in J Chem Educ 83(1):49–55, 2006) curriculum requiring more discursive classroom practices in the teaching of chemistry. In this instrumental case study, we identify the intentions of this learner-centered curriculum and a teacher’s development in response to this curriculum. We also explore the tensions this teacher experiences as students subsequently respond to his adjusted teaching. We use a Chemistry Teacher Inventory (Lewthwaite and Wiebe in Res Sci Educ 40(11):667-689, 2011; Lewthwaite and Wiebe in Can J Math Sci Technol Educ 12(1):36–61, 2012; Lewthwaite in Chem Educ Res Pract. doi:10.1039/C3RP00122A, 2014) to assist the teacher in monitoring how he teaches and how he would like to improve his teaching. We also use a student form of the instrument, the Chemistry Classroom Inventory and Classroom Observation Protocol (Lewthwaite and Wiebe 2011) to verify the teacher’s teaching and perception of student preferences for his teaching especially in terms of the discursive processes the curriculum encourages. By so doing, the teacher is able to use both sets of data as a foundation for critical reflection and work towards resolution of the incongruence in data arising from students’ preferred learning orientations and his teaching aspirations. Implications of this study in regards to the authority of students’ voice in triggering teachers’ pedagogical change and the adjustments in ‘teachering’ and ‘studenting’ required by such curricula are considered.