Anatomy as a Model Environment for Acquiring Professional Competencies in Medicine: Experiences at Harvard Medical School

Anatomy education provides students with opportunities to learn structure and function of the human body, to acquire professional competencies such as teamwork, interpersonal skills, self-awareness, and to reflect on and practice medical ethics. The fulfillment of this wide potential can present challenges in courses that are part of an integrated curriculum and shorter than traditional courses. This new reality, together with students' increasing concern about the stresses within medical education, led to efforts at Harvard Medical School to implement practical steps toward an optimal learning environment in anatomy. These were based on core elements of ethical anatomy education and principles of trauma-informed care. Anatomy is conceptualized here as the “first clinical discipline,” with relational interactions between anatomical educators, medical students, and body donors/patients. Essential prerequisites for the implementation of this work were support by the medical school leadership, open partnership between engaged students and faculty, faculty coordination, and peer-teaching. Specific interventions included pre-course faculty development on course philosophy and invitations to students to share their thoughts on anatomy. Student responses were integrated in course introductions, combined with a pre-dissection laboratory visit, an introductory guide, and a module on the history and ethics of anatomy. During the course, team-building activities were scheduled, and self-reflection encouraged, for example, through written exercises, and elective life-body drawing. Students' responses to the interventions were overall positive, but need further evaluation. This first attempt of a systematic implementation of an optimal learning environment in anatomy led to the identification of areas in need of adjustment.     

Integrating Northern Ireland: Cross‐group friendships in integrated and mixed schools

While Northern Ireland strives to build a shared society, the current reality is that everyday experiences are still shaped by division along ethno‐religious lines. This is particularly pronounced in the education system, where more than 92% of pupils attend separate schools. Within the predominantly separate education system, however, exists a small collection of schools which cater to a more heterogeneous pupil body and offer the opportunity for young people from both communities to meet and interact, and potentially develop cross‐group friendships. The present study compares the network‐based cross‐group friendships within two such school types; an integrated and a separate post‐primary school. These schools boast a distinct ethos yet they similarly enrol students from Catholic and Protestant backgrounds. Findings reveal that both schools show a high level of interconnection between pupils; however, the integrated school, with an ethos that openly supports social cohesion, shows a greater tendency towards cross‐group interactions and best friendships than those found within the separate school. In line with contact theory, these findings suggest that it may not be enough to simply create opportunities for intergroup contact but that optimal conditions, such as institutional support, may be a prerequisite for positive relationships to flourish. Implications for educational policies designed to promote greater cross‐community contact are discussed.     

Associations Between Classroom Language Composition,Teacher Social-Emotional Support,and Dual Language Learning Preschoolers’ Social Behavior

This secondary analysis explored longitudinal associations between the concentration of shared-language peers and the development of prosocial and problem behavior in dual language learning (DLL) preschoolers from low socioeconomic backgrounds. Mixed-effects regression models were used to analyze year-end outcomes of 212 Spanish-speaking students in 73 Head Start classrooms in which English was the only instructional language. Research Findings: Classroom concentration of Spanish speakers was not associated with Spanish-speaking DLLs’ year-end prosocial behavior. For problem behavior, there was a disordinal interaction between teacher social-emotional support and classroom concentration. In classrooms with higher teacher social-emotional support, the proportion of Spanish-speaking classmates was positively associated with Spanish-speaking children’s problem behaviors. In classrooms with lower teacher social-emotional support, the proportion of Spanish-speaking students per classroom was negatively associated with Spanish-speaking children’s problem behaviors. Practice or Policy: Findings highlight the value of shared-language peers in particular classroom contexts and have implications for DLL students’ preschool classroom placements.     

Designing for 21st century learning online: a heuristic method to enable educator learning support roles

With the growing emphasis on developing 21st century skills among today’s youth, there is continued optimism about the possibilities granted by increasing access to networked technologies, particularly for encouraging youth to pursue their interests and take ownership of their learning. Yet, research demonstrates the importance of adult support in realizing the promise of achieving these outcomes. Designers of such systems are thus faced with the need to create youth-centered spaces that also provide adult facilitation of learning. This paper presents an adaptation of the traditional heuristic evaluation method which provides designers of online learning systems with a holistic view of how adult learning support is enabled across the system. We describe how the heuristic evaluation method was adapted, and through a case example analyzing one online social learning system used in a middle school context, we demonstrate how it can be used to help identify areas for improvement and promising areas for further research. We also present a framework of heuristics which reflect specific educator learning support roles that have been found to be important for youth learning, particularly for supporting 21st century skills. This work contributes a novel heuristic evaluation method that can help designers of online learning platforms attend not only the experiences of learners, but also to how educators are enabled to support their learning.     

Literacy Teachers Engage in Service-Learning via Community Organization Involvement

Service-learning provides community service as well as authentic, curriculum-driven learning experiences (Furco &; Root, 2010 Furco, A. and Root, S. 2010. Research demonstrates the value of service-learning. Kappan, 91(5): 16–23. [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) and has been an effective component of teacher education courses (García, Arias, Murri, &; Surna, 2010 García, E., Arias, M. B., Murri, N. J. H. and Serna, C. 2010. Developing responsive teachers: A challenge for a demographic reality. Journal of Teacher Education, 61: 132–142. doi:10.1177/002248710934787[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]; Mitton-Kukner, Nelson, &; Descrochers, 2010 Mitton-Kukner, J., Nelson, C. and Desrochers, C. 2010. Narrative inquiry in service-learning contexts: Possibilities for learning about diversity in teacher education. Teaching and Teacher Education, 26: 1162–1169. doi:10.1016/j.tate.2010.01.001[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]; Spencer, Cox-Petersen, &; Crawford, 2005 Spencer, B. H., Cox-Petersen, A. M. and Crawford, T. 2005. Assessing the impact of service-learning on preservice teachers in an after-school program. Teacher Education Quarterly, 32(4): 119–135.  [Google Scholar]). With these authentic experiences, teachers construct conceptions of literacy learning as broader than classroom teaching and learning. This study investigates how 54 preservice elementary teachers (hereafter called teachers) learned about literacy development and cultural responsivity by engaging in a service-learning experience.     

The Balaclava as Affect Generator: Free Pussy Riot Protests and Transnational Iconicity

August 17, 2012 was a “Global Day of Action” in support of Pussy Riot, a radical feminist performance group from Russia who had been incarcerated for their “Punk Prayer” at the altar of the Christ the Savior Cathedral in Moscow in February 2012. This paper reads the “Punk Prayer” as an image event with an extensive afterlife, mobilized through the transnational icon of the balaclava. By reading its production (socially and spatially) along with its circulation, evident in solidarity protest images, it argues that transnational iconicity enables transnational solidarity, an affective sense of connection and responsibility.     

Automatically Batch Loading Metadata from MARC into a Work-Based Metadata Model for Music

This article describes work done at Indiana University to “batch load” data from MARC bibliographic and authority records into the Work-based and FRBR-like Variations system. A series of experiments to iteratively refine our batch loading algorithm is described, along with details of how the algorithm identifies Works, creates relationships between entities, and maps a large amount of data from MARC into Variations records. The article closes with a discussion of the potential impact of this work on Variations project workflow and community FRBRization activities.     

INVESTIGATING IDEOLOGICAL CLARITY IN TEACHER EDUCATION

Set in a graduate-level multicultural literacy course, this qualitative study draws on Bakhtin's theories of ideological becoming and a hybrid of critical discourse analysis (CDA) methods (Gee, 1996 Gee, J. P. 1996. Social linguistics and literacies. Ideology in discourses, , 2nd ed. London: Falmer..  [Google Scholar]; Fairclough, 1995 Fairclough, N. 1995. Critical discourse analysis: The critical study of language. London: Longman..  [Google Scholar]; 2003 Fairclough, N. 2003. Analyzing discourse: Textual analysis for social research. London: Routledge. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]) to explore the complexities of learning to teach culturally and linguistically diverse students. We investigated how eight beginning teachers' ideologies were constructed and reconstructed by closely examining the struggles and tensions teachers expressed in one multicultural literacy course. This research adds to the literature about how beginning teachers might better address cultural and linguistic diversity in literacy instruction. The study also describes the types of activities that can facilitate the development of teachers who are interested and committed to working with culturally and linguistically diverse students.     

Teaching manuals and the blackboard: accessing historical classroom practices

The blackboard, a useful teaching tool in nineteenth-century England, was transformed into a teaching necessity in the decades follwing 1870, when the Education Acts made school free and mandatory for all children. The resulting huge population of schoolchildren inspired the development of teaching techniques appropriate for large-group learning. Many of these techniques relied on the blackboard as a reusable demonstration space visible to the entire class at once, unlike a book or slate. To share these new practices among teachers, particularly the novice teachers recruited to serve the increased school population, dozens of teaching manuals were published around the turn of the twentieth century. These manuals’ instructions for how to teach reading, writing, arithmetic and nature study to elementary school students offer historians a rare glimpse into teachers’ and students’ school experiences by suggesting how the blackboard shaped classroom practices in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century England.