Executing an Offender Reentry Simulation Event: Teaching the Reality of Reentry to University Students

This study discusses the implementation of an offender reentry simulation event hosted at a medium-sized university in the southeast for criminal justice students in Fall 2016. As the faculty member responsible for the event, it was my hope to provide students with a realistic experience of reentry that would help them to better understand the challenges associated with reentry. In other words, my desire was to challenge their preset notions that all offenders have the tools they need to successfully reenter society after incarceration and recidivism is simply a function of a rational choice to commit crime. The purpose was not to advocate for the removal of sanctions for criminal behavior, but to allow students to better understand the variety of experiences encountered by offenders so when they become practitioners, they can advocate for better resources to help reentering offenders with the long-term goal of recidivism reduction.     

Establishing empirical links between high school assessments and college outcomes: An essential requirement for college readiness interpretations

As states evaluate whether they should continue with their current assessment program or adopt next-generation college readiness assessments, it is important to ascertain the degree to which current high school assessments can be used for college readiness interpretations. In this study, we examined the ability of a state assessment to serve as an indicator of college readiness. Empirical evidence is presented summarizing relationships between performance on the standards-based high school assessment and performance in college. Benchmarks were set on the Reading, Mathematics, and Science tests by linking assessment scores directly to grades in college courses. The accuracy of the benchmarks was similar to that of a traditional college admission test. Students who met the college readiness benchmarks earned higher grades in general education college courses and had higher first-year college grade point averages. Implications for states and other stakeholders are discussed.     

Expanding the landscape: developing knowledgeability through communities of practice

Rapid changes in the Higher Education (HE) sector are increasing the pressure on teaching staff to introduce technology-enhanced learning experiences into the curriculum. Institutions therefore need to provide effective means of enabling academics to successfully transition to these new modes of curriculum delivery. This paper reports on an inquiry into the efficacy of a community of practice (CoP) approach trialled at a HE institution to contribute to the design of a renewed, blended curriculum. Analysis indicated that participation in the CoP had a positive impact on academics’ sense of community and their knowledgeability in relation to new teaching approaches.     

‘Exploring the “Construction” strand in the Irish Primary School Visual Arts Curriculum through the Forest School approach’

Forest School is a concept, or intervention to traditional educational settings, backed up by research and built upon long-standing theories that children engage with nature naturally and that learning becomes more relevant to the student when they can relate it to real life scenarios. This research documents the implementation of the Irish Primary School Visual Arts Curriculum through Forest School, specifically, the ‘Construction’ Strand. The research was a qualitative inquiry that was supported by an action research methodology. It was conducted over six weekly sessions. Key findings show the development of a sense of responsibility, resilience, independence, happiness in a sense of achievement and an awakened awareness of the child’s own surroundings. The findings advocate the benefits of implementing this approach to enhance the Primary School Visual Arts Curriculum, as well as promoting happiness and contentment in the remainder of the day at school in other curricular subjects. .     

Conducting research in sports engineering education

This aim of this paper is to provide recommendations for developing sports engineering education research (SEER) both at the individual and community levels. The emergence of this field can be positively informed by reflection on similar developments in other fields, particularly engineering education and health science education research. The large traditional engineering disciplines, including chemical, electrical and computer, and mechanical, have well-developed communities and publication venues for educational research. Health professions, including kinesiology, rehabilitation, nursing, and medicine, have allied with sports engineering to develop educational research that can inform methods and provide opportunities for dissemination. As an interdisciplinary field, it is also critical to draw on the growing body of interprofessional education research. The rich literature relating to discipline-based educational research (DBER) and the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) can support individuals moving into this field, and observations by communities in other disciplines can provide guideposts for sports engineering. There are well-established processes and methodologies that can be adapted from other discipline-based educational research fields. As stand-alone sports engineering education programs are relatively rare and young, there is an opportunity available to create a culture that values research on education in the field.     

The force of the national rhetorical arena: Voices in tune against a disrespectful foreign sponsor

This article examines how a public relations crisis in the sport realm develops when national identity issues are at stake. Based on the media coverage of the All Blacks Rugby World Cup jersey crisis, and drawing on the concept of rhetorical arena, we explore Adidas's crisis communication strategies, identify and summarise the responses, actions, and interactions of various parties involved in the crisis. We consider how these parties influence the development of the crisis in what we call the ‘national rhetorical arena’. The article illustrates the power of the national rhetorical arena and its many voices to align over issues of national identity against a foreign sponsor making use of a national icon. When sponsoring national sport teams, foreign sponsors need to be aware they are only borrowing, not appropriating, important signifiers of national identity. They should make sure they do not impede the national public’s perceived entitlement to their national icons as any act of disrespect towards national identity is felt very strongly. In a crisis, they need to identify the potential voices in the national rhetorical arena, not underestimate the role of national media to shape and bring together these voices, not downplay the power of the national public, and not underestimate the strong undercurrent of nationalism especially during sport mega events.     

Embedded ethics: some technical and ethical challenges

This paper pertains to research works aiming at linking ethics and automated reasoning in autonomous machines. It focuses on a formal approach that is intended to be the basis of an artificial agent’s reasoning that could be considered by a human observer as an ethical reasoning. The approach includes some formal tools to describe a situation and models of ethical principles that are designed to automatically compute a judgement on possible decisions that can be made in a given situation and explain why a given decision is ethically acceptable or not. It is illustrated on three ethical frameworks—utilitarian ethics, deontological ethics and the Doctrine of Double effect whose formal models are tested on ethical dilemmas so as to examine how they respond to those dilemmas and to highlight the issues at stake when a formal approach to ethical concepts is considered. The whole approach is instantiated on the drone dilemma, a thought experiment we have designed; this allows the discrepancies that exist between the judgements of the various ethical frameworks to be shown. The final discussion allows us to highlight the different sources of subjectivity of the approach, despite the fact that concepts are expressed in a more rigorous way than in natural language: indeed, the formal approach enables subjectivity to be identified and located more precisely.     

Understanding the Work and Perceptions of Teaching Focused Faculty in a Changing Academic Landscape

Teaching Focused Faculty (TFF) roles are growing across Canada and around the world, raising questions about how to understand the nature of faculty work and how faculty in non-traditional work distributions feel about their work. Our study is the first attempt to survey TFF members’ work and job attitudes at large research intensive universities in Canada. Our data contribute to the literature on the nature of faculty work, by revealing that TFF engage in a wide variety of work, including teaching, service, curriculum leadership, and often research in pedagogy and/or disciplines. TFF report mixed messages about what their departments and institutions expect of them. Our data also contribute to the literature on how faculty feel about their work. Consistent with other research on faculty job attitudes, TFF report valuing their jobs highly. Our data also reveal that feeling integrated into mainstream institutional culture is a particularly important contributor to this sense of value. Taken together, our findings can be used to inform the research literature on faculty work, as well as by administrators seeing to implement or enhance TFF ranks at their institutions.     

Maternal literate mediation of writing and Korean children’s reading and writing across 1 year

The present study examined the relations of maternal literate support instructions during parent–child joint writing to children’s word reading and writing across 1 year among 95 4- and 5-year-old children from Korea. The whole episode of mothers individually teaching their children how to write words was videotaped, and a Korean scale of mothers’ literate mediation of their children’s writing was developed based on six cognitive strategies focusing on whole Gulja (Korean written syllable), visual strokes, letter, Gulja structure, and CV (consonant + vowel) and coda (final consonant of a syllable) subsyllabic units. Maternal literate support explained a significant amount of variance in children’s word reading and writing concurrently and longitudinally across 1 year after controlling for children’s age, nonverbal IQ, phonological and morphological awareness, rapid automatized naming and mother’s education. In addition, children’s coda phoneme awareness explained unique variance in word reading and writing concurrently and longitudinally. Results underscore the unique characteristics of Korean and the importance of Korean maternal literate support as a major factor in early literacy development.     

Research Supplement

When they were working in the Psychology Department of Meanwood Park Hospital the authors undertook a pilot study of attitudes towards mental retardation among secondary school pupils. The results indicate confusion about the nature and causes of mental retardation and highlight concerns about integration of children with special educational needs into mainstream education. As a result, a much larger investigation was conducted, which also attempted to promote positive attitudes. The results of the later study are being analysed. Catherine Kyle is now clinical psychologist at Ravenspark Hospital, Irvine, Ayrshire.