Ebony in the Ivory Tower: Examining Trends in the Socioeconomic Status,Achievement, and Self-Concept of Black,Male Freshmen

Despite the educational challenges African American males face, there is a sizeable population successfully finishing high school and entering college. This study provides an overview of how a national sample of black male freshmen embodied the cognitive, social, and institutional factors related to college access between 1971 and 2004. Data reveal that black, male freshmen today have more affluent family backgrounds, better academic records, and greater confidence in their skills and abilities than their peers who entered college in earlier decades. Trends indicate that men with lower incomes, less confidence, and less ideal academic records are increasingly unlikely to be present on college campuses.     

Silenced Memories: An Examination of the Sociocultural Knowledge on Race and Racial Violence in Official School Curriculum

Drawing from the theoretical lenses of cultural memory and critical race theory, we examined how elementary level and middle school level social studies textbooks represent the history of racial violence directed toward African Americans and resistance to this violence in the U.S. Using a literary analysis method, we found that textbooks often presented vivid accounts; however, these narratives often presented these acts as detached from the larger structural and institutional ties that supported and subsequently benefited from these actions. We contend that this limited representation of racial violence has an adverse effect on the larger sociocultural memory and sociocultural knowledge available to students, thus limiting the extent to which students can fully understand the legacy of racism and racial inequity in the U.S.     

Personal and professional development programmes for women: Paradigm and paradox

During the 1990s a number of positive/affirmative action initiatives were taken in the United Kingdom, the United States, Australia and New Zealand, to support the career development of women working in higher education, and as part of the attempt to address the gender imbalance that exists among academic staff and professional administrators, particularly at senior levels. A model for a management development programme for women at different stages of the career life cycle is presented as one such initiative. Evaluation and feedback from delegates has been consistently positive, immediately following courses and over the longer term. However, although there has been a small increase in the number of women being promoted, the overall percentage of women at senior levels remains low, both in the institutions that have participated in the programmes and in higher education generally. The rationale for such initiatives is examined in the context of factors that have been found to affect women's progress, and questions are raised about the implications for human resource development professionals in higher education.     

Perspectiveuk

This paper is based on a Keynote presentation delivered at the AUA Annual Conference at the University of Nottingham in April 2007.     

The Mentoring Relationship as a Complex Adaptive System: Finding a Model for Our Experience

Mentoring theory and practice has evolved significantly during the past 40 years. Early mentoring models were characterized by the top-down flow of information and benefits to the protégé. This framework was reconceptualized as a reciprocal model when scholars realized mentoring was a mutually beneficial process. Recently, in response to rapidly changing organizational and social environments, scholars have explored other models of mentoring such as developmental networks. However, as we, the authors, reflect on our own experience of an informal mentoring process in an academic context we find existing models inadequately describe our experience. The model that best fits our story is a complex adaptive systems (CAS) perspective of the mentoring relationship, and we offer this lens to reconfigure current models.     

Developing “deliberate analysis” for learning mathematics and for mathematics teacher education: how the enactive approach to cognition frames reflection

We illustrate and exemplify how the idea of reflection is framed by the enactive concept of “deliberate analysis”. In keeping with this frame, we do not attempt to define reflection but rather work on the question of “how do we do reflecting?” within such a frame. We set out our enactivist theoretical stance, in particular pointing to implications for how we can learn from experience and showing the role of “deliberate analysis”. We then describe, drawing on education literature, what is generally seen as the purpose of reflection and review some existing conceptualizations in mathematics education, pointing out where we draw distinctions. To illustrate how we do reflecting, we offer excerpts from two lessons of an expert teacher and the writing of a prospective teacher. We exemplify how reflecting as deliberate analysis leads to a way of working with teachers supporting them in handling multiple views and ambiguity, their actions being contingent upon their students’ actions in learning mathematics.     

The Nature of Some of the Difficulties of Students Failing the First Two Years of College

The partial correlation coefficient is derived analytically under exemplary factor patterns. In these patterns, variables are described as an additive composition of a set of orthogonal factors, including general, common, and specific factors. Viewed in this framework, it is evident that the partial correlation may yield spurious results. Partialling out an infallible variable or a variable with no unique component does not necessarily yield an interpretable coefficient. Examples from the literature are given where an understanding of the underlying factor pattern facilitates interpretation of the computed partial correlation coefficient.