Empowerment and ownership in effective internationalisation of the higher education curriculum

Internationalising the curriculum (IOC) in order to produce graduates with global citizenship skills is a common strategic goal in modern higher education. The extent to which this is achieved and the level of understanding amongst staff and students of what IOC involves and the benefits it imparts are varied. In this study, activities and attitudes across 15 subject disciplines delivered in a modern UK university were surveyed through an analysis of official course documentation, and semi-structured interviews with a range of academic staff. The outcomes are discussed in relation to the level of understanding and ownership that staff have of IOC. Through the modification of a process control model Barnett (European Journal of Education, 29(2), 165–179, 1994), suggestions are made as to how to move this top-down strategic imperative forward through empowerment of the academic staff involved in course delivery.     

Investigating the sets of values that community members hold toward local nature centers

While nature center’s missions often point to connecting people to nature in various ways, their potential to provide a broader array of services to their communities remains largely unexplored. To better understand the values local community members hold for nature centers, we conducted survey research around 16 centers in the United States. Exploratory factor analysis identified four underlying values: environmental connection, leisure provision, community resilience, and civic engagement. Our limited sample of community respondents felt these values to be important and well-provided by local centers, suggesting centers may play broader roles in communities than inferred from their mission statements. The identification of these distinct value sets provides centers with food for thought regarding not only the services they provide, but also how they might communicate their roles to various constituencies in their communities. The values also provide clear conceptual categories for future research on the values of diverse community institutions.     

Cangleska Wakan: The ecology of the sacred circle and the role of tribal colleges and universities

International Review of Education - Indigenous education and philosophy are rooted in the concept of relationality – the relatedness of all things – within the framework of place-based...     

Realizing the integrative capacity of educational mixed methods research teams: using a complexity-sensitive strategy to boost innovation

ABSTRACT

Educational research teams are increasingly recognized as an optimal configuration for addressing more complex mixed methods research problems; however, their development is often approached as a conventional research collaboration rather than an integrative one. An approach informed by complexity theory provides the practical guidance for studying mixed methods research teams as complex adaptive systems with the capacity for generating novel educational research outcomes greater than the sum of individual contributions alone. In this paper, I advance a complexity-sensitive strategy through which to realize the integrative capacity of educational mixed methods research teams comprising of four interrelated elements: membership, contributions, interactions, and performance. These elements embody amalgamations from a decade of my readings of the literature and real-life professional experience. Each element is examined in light of the three key concepts of complex adaptive systems to describe the necessary conditions for emergence, influential challenges illustrating interdependency, and desirable individual and team adaptations. The study’s theoretical and practical implications are discussed.     

Slipping through the cracks: teachers who miss out on early career support

This paper presents evidence from a nationally representative sample of early career teachers about those likely to miss out on formal support, and the employment conditions associated with this absence of support. It uses survey data from the Staff in Australia’s Schools Survey. Consistent with existing research, our results suggest a relationship between early career teachers with insecure employment and a lack of support. The findings suggest that, for early career teachers, being unsupported is associated with dissatisfaction with professional relationships and career opportunities; and that this dissatisfaction is associated with an intention to leave the profession.     

Social behavior of children in a classroom setting

Forty-two children (25 boys, 17 girls) in two traditional second-grade classrooms were videotaped during normal classroom activity until approximately 50 min of tape was accumulated for each child. A variety of behaviors was then coded on an event recorder, including child-child interactions, general behaviors, and child-teacher interactions. Teacher evaluations expressed as ratings between bipolar adjectives were also obtained. A principal components analysis revealed six distinct factors. The strongest factor was composed of teacher-child interactions. Analyses of variance indicated that sex and birth order differences were limited. Compared to boys, girls engaged in more verbalization with same-sex peers (p < .001) and more cooperation with same-sex peers (p < .05). Teacher's evaluations were not significantly influenced by the sex of the children. Favorable teacher evaluations were clearly associated with the extent to which a child approached and remained in proximity to the teacher.     

Dilemmas in crossing the boundaries: From K-12 to higher education and back again

For the purpose of reflective analysis, this article, which employs narrative inquiry as a research methodology, combines two “crossing the boundaries” dilemmas I experienced over the course of a decade. While the dilemmas relate to different issues that emerged in my career (standardized testing as a K-12 teacher and the formal evaluation of a reform program as a tenured, full professor), I trace the roots of the dilemmas to the same source: the hegemonic relationship between theory and practice which, despite the passage of time, continues to persist in the field of education and to shape the professional experiences of educators, some of which are miseducative. I argue that until the relationship between educational practices in schools and educational practices in universities are addressed, school reform that benefits children cannot be fully realized.     

The pension subsidy of educational inequality

Public school teachers receive on retirement a pension typically equaling 75% of the average salary earned during the three peak years. While the teachers pay part of the costs of their defined benefit pension through payroll deductions, most of the cost is subsidized by the state. The pension subsidy, a far from neglible component of the per pupil cost of instruction, is particularly high in those school districts that pay high salaries and enjoy low student/teacher ratios. It is a regressive subsidy highly correlated with school district income and wealth. Several alternative reform measures are considered.     

White Skin,Black Friend: A Fanonian application to theorize racial fetish in teacher education

In Black Skin, white masks (1967, Grove Press), Franz Fanon uses a psychoanalytic framework to theorize the inferiority-dependency complex of Black men in response to the colonial racism of white men. Applying his framework in reverse, this theoretical article psychoanalyzes the white psyche and emotionality with respect to the racialization process of whites and their racial attachment to Blackness. Positing that such a process is interconnected with narcissism, humanistic emptiness, and psychosis, this article presents how racial attachment becomes racial fetish. Such a fetish reifies whiteness by accumulating fictive kinships with friends of color; hence, the common parlance of ‘But I have a Black friend!’ The article, then, overlays this theoretical interpretation onto the subject of teacher education in the US, specifically urban teacher education programs that are predominantly comprised of white middle-class females who claim a desire to ‘save’ urban students of color. Ending with the dangers and hopes of a more humanistic friendship, this article offers emotional ways one can self-actualize the racialization process.