Professionalization as an advocacy strategy: a content analysis of Canadian child care social movement organizations’ 2008 discursive resources

Do early childhood education and care (ECEC) professionals make good advocates? Canadian advocates have fought for better child care policies since the mid-1940s. What has happened to this advocacy with the recent increased professionalization of the ECEC sector? How does increased professionalization limit, innovate or expand advocacy strategies? This content analysis of seven Canadian child care social movement organizations’ discursive resources in 2008 examines how different types of child care social movement organizations communicated their positions to their members and the public to manage a changing economic and political climate. Preliminary findings indicate that both ECEC workforce sector associations and grassroots organizations shared common advocacy messages, played down problems associated with a market approach to child care, and framed child care as a business case in their messaging. The authors suggest this reflects a nascent discursive move towards the professionalization of Canadian child care movement advocacy messages.     

Reporting Risk: Perceptions of Fear and Risk from Health News Coverage

Using actual news coverage of an environmental risk, this experimental study examined whether providing unrelated risk comparisons and information about other sources of the same risk influenced readers' reactions to the coverage. The study suggests stories that provide information on other sources of a contaminant may do little to reduce risk perceptions; however, providing information about the magnitude of the risk at hand relative to other risks had several communication benefits. Both comparisons lead readers to feel more informed about the risk and, thus, better able to make decisions than those who did not see the comparisons. Media implications are discussed.     

Conducting Cross-Cultural Research: Controversy,Cautions, Concerns,and Considerations

In this article, the authors share concerns and considerations for researchers conducting cross-cultural research in gifted education. They contend that researchers should be mindful of the need to consider their own humanness—their beliefs, assumptions, attitudes, values, paradigms—and the limitations of their humanness when working with research participants from racially, culturally, and linguistically diverse backgrounds, especially those backgrounds that differ from their own. Furthermore, the authors assert that research is culture bound and that it is very difficult to conduct research where circumstances, demographics, and context can be ignored, minimized, negated, or in any way trivialized. Examples are presented of racially, culturally, and linguistically responsive researchers.     

Tracing spectres of whiteness: discourse and the construction of teaching subjects in urban Aboriginal education

The author traces how discourse functions in the context of a school-based, urban Aboriginal education initiative, with a focus on the construction and organization of teaching subjects. Critical discourse analysis that traces spectres reveals some of the ways that whiteness and Eurocentrism create the possibilities for, and the conditions in which teachers take up, the positions: victim of racism, arbiter of authenticity, and rescuer. Consideration of the multiple, complex, and shifting positions teachers occupy within whiteness in general, and in colonial systems of education in particular, offers unique possibilities when untangling and reconfiguring teachers' constructions of Aboriginality/Indigeneity and responses to Aboriginal/Indigenous education. This theory building also contributes to the larger field of curriculum studies by demonstrating how consideration of ‘unheroic tales’ can aid in theorizing teacher identity and difference, both within and beyond the markers Indigenous/non-Indigenous.