Integrating Religion and Spirituality Into Counselor Education: Barriers and Strategies

Despite a professionally recognized need for training in religion/spirituality, literature indicates that religious and spirituality issues continue to be inconsistently addressed in counselor education. Ten experts were asked to identify potential barriers to integrating religion and spirituality into counselor education and indicate strategies for overcoming these obstacles. Barriers included a lack of information and a lack of personal interest or relevance, and strategies included continuing education, heightened awareness of self and others, and curriculum‐specific recommendations. Implications for counselor training and recommendations for future research are discussed.     

Measuring Success in Outsourced Cataloging: A Data-Driven Investigation

This article investigates the error rates in shelf-ready cataloged monographs from Ingram Coutts Information Services that were received at The University of Western Ontario. Using quality control reports from a period of two years, over 500 cataloging errors were entered into a database organized by frequency, severity, and other factors. With this information, we analyzed the frequency of errors and their root causes. We found that overall error rates are low, and the quality of shelf-ready cataloging has improved since first implementing the outsourcing program.     

Managing Bibliographic Data Quality for Electronic Resources

This article presents a case study of quality management issues for electronic resource metadata to assess the support of user tasks (find, select, and obtain library resources) and potential for increased efficiencies in acquisitions and cataloging workflows. The authors evaluated the quality of existing bibliographic records (mostly vendor supplied) for e-resource collections as compared with records for the same collections in OCLC's WorldShare Collection Manager (WCM). Findings are that WCM records better support user tasks by containing more summaries and tables of contents; other checkpoints are largely comparable between the two source record groups. The transition to WCM records is discussed.     

Becoming connected,being caring

This paper highlights perspectives on action research in education, health and social care and was originally presented as a keynote at the International Practitioner Research Conference and Collaborative Action Research Conference in 2005. The paper links with the other conference keynote given by Stephen Kemmis, co‐author of Becoming Critical. It reflects on the importance of Being Caring in action research in the context of health and social care; particularly in relation to emotionally supporting practitioners to improve their practice in settings which do not always welcome more emancipatory or critical approaches often used in education. The paper begins by exploring the nature of practitioner research and action research in health and social care and its links with quality. It argues that health and social care professionals have often drawn their methodological understanding from the literature written by colleagues in education. This literature tends to support critical and emancipatory forms of action research, which health and social care professionals have tended to adopt in an uncritical manner. Reflecting on some of the contextual constraints in health and social care, it argues that many of these factors are beyond the control of individual practitioners and suggests a need to focus on the neglected area of emotions, in addition to, contextual issues. To illustrate the usefulness of this approach an example of psychodynamically informed action research is given. The paper concludes that in the quest to be critical, practitioner researchers/action researchers in education, health and social care may be ignoring the emotional contexts in which they work. It suggests that being caring may be the key to being critical.     

Characterizing the human experience of reform in an urban middle-school context

This narrative inquiry portrays the human experience of change by way of a situated account of a reform event. Three conceptualizations ground storied the analysis: the metaphor of the 'professional knowledge landscape' of schools; the 'narrative authority' of teacher knowledge; and the notion that teachers have knowledge communities with whom they make sense of their teaching experiences. The paper shows how past and present forces conspired together in perplexing ways to shape the contours of what the teachers--and the researcher--came to know of the reform event.     

Faculty Members' Perceptions of Teacher Preparation Programs

This research study examined faculty members' reaction to criticisms about the quality and design of teacher preparation programs at schools and colleges of education. The researchers found that there is confusion among teacher preparation professionals about their programs and research. The study also showed that, in general, teacher educators are resistant to change.     

Constructing videocases to help novices learn to facilitate discussions in science and English: how does subject matter matter?

Learning to conduct interactive classroom discussions is a high priority for becoming an effective teacher, and most teachers view conducting productive classroom discussions as a complex undertaking. Because the dynamics of facilitating classroom discussions are multifaceted and hard to analyze in real time, there is a growing interest in how video allows preservice teachers to examine records of their practice to promote further growth. What prospective teachers actually take away from analysis of video, however, needs further exploration. In this study, we explored five preservice student teachers’ beliefs about conducting discussions and probed the potential of videocase construction for supporting teacher learning by investigating the following question: ‘To what extent and how does making a videocase help preservice teachers investigate their facilitation of a subject‐specific discussion?’ Results revealed that by constructing and talking about their videocases, all five preservice teachers gained insights about how they lead discussions. Studying video excerpts and articulating what they saw in them provided a context for looking more closely at their own roles and student roles within their discussion. They also recognized the complexities of leading discussions and acknowledged particular areas that need improvement. The teachers used the metaphorical language of ‘guiding’ their students down a pathway when they talked about leading classroom discussions. There were similarities and differences among teachers’ conceptions of good discussions in English and science, and their notions of ‘guiding’ were related to their subject matter goals. The study suggests, however, several areas that may require further attention in preservice teachers’ preparation in leading discussions. Although the teachers expressed views of discussion that aligned broadly with disciplinary views in English or science, their language lacked specificity in what it means to develop varied interpretations of texts in English or consensus based on argument and evidence in science. More specific video analysis focused on subject matter goals and corresponding conversational elements may help preservice teachers develop more nuanced, sophisticated views of how particular types of social interaction have the potential to help their students reach specific subject matter goals. We conclude that investigation is needed on larger numbers of preservice teachers’ videocase construction processes, and further inquiry is needed into how working with video analysis affects their actual performance in future discussion facilitation.