Challenges to university autonomy in initial teacher education programmes: The cases of England,Manitoba and British Columbia

Since the middle of the twentieth century in England and Canada responsibility for the design and delivery of pre-service teacher programmes has been located primarily in universities and their Faculties/Schools of Education. Operating within a tradition of university autonomy, the governance of these programmes is nonetheless constrained by the accreditation and certification requirements of the state and the profession and the pragmatic demands of teachers’ work. Over the last two decades, a variety of provisions have been made to regulate the pre-service preparation of teachers in both countries that have afforded quite different roles and authority to the state, the university, and the teaching profession. It is the interplay of these pressures on the governance of initial teacher preparation in three different jurisdictions—England, Manitoba and British Columbia—and the characterisation of teacher preparation associated with each, that is the focus of this article.     

Getting Started in Academia: A Guide for Educational Psychologists

We identify the major tasks facing pre-tenure faculty members and outline advice, based on a review of the literature and our experiences, for succeeding in academia. The challenges encountered by new faculty include learning the culture of the new academic institution, understanding the processes and policies for academic performance review, establishing meaningful and constructive mentoring relationships, creating a sustainable research agenda as well as fostering the writing attitudes and strategies that promote turning research projects into publications. Also included are recommendations for developing expertise in teaching, cultivating healthy and productive relationships with advisees, and fulfilling service responsibilities. Finally, we suggest strategies for balancing the multiple, and sometimes competing, demands and expectations.     

Strategic alignment of participant motivations in e-government collaborations: The Internet Payment Platform pilot

Large-scale information technology implementations are risky projects, and the challenges and risks multiply when multiple organizations are involved, as is often the case in e-government initiatives. Some of the risk can be addressed by carefully aligning the partners' motivations, which are affected by each organization's internal and external operational and information technology strategies. In this paper, we propose a strategic alignment framework and use it to examine the motivations of a set of collaborating government agencies and businesses in the pilot implementation of the Internet Payment Platform, an interorganizational, third-party hosted, e-procurement system. As we predict, the partners in this study had varied technical, political, economic, and operational motivations for participating in the project. Even so, the participating agencies reported positive outcomes from the project, and look forward to further collaboration on the next iteration of this e-procurement system.     

African American College Students,the Black Church,and Counseling

African American undergraduate students face numerous challenges during college; however, they are less likely to seek help from college counseling services. Often, African Americans seek support from spiritual resources. In the current phenomenological study, participants shared in a focus group interview. Overall, participants seemed to value the Black Church as an integral part of their lives and as an influence on their perceptions of counseling and proclivity to seek counseling services.     

The role of post-visit action resources in facilitating meaningful free-choice learning after a zoo visit

Places like zoos, where free-choice learning is encouraged, are important for conveying climate change and sustainability issues to the public. Free-choice learning that targets environmentally focused sustainable behavior changes must be meaningful in order to encourage actual behavior change post-visit. However, visitors often fail to translate their learning into behavior change after a visit. This research explores the role of post-visit action resources (PVARs) in facilitating long-term learning for individual environmental sustainability after a visit to the Leatherdale International Polar Bear Conservation Centre in Winnipeg’s Assiniboine Park Zoo in Manitoba, Canada. An embedded mixed-methods research design used personal meaning maps and follow-up interviews to measure free-choice learning; data were analyzed both quantitatively and qualitatively. Findings revealed that the PVARs positively affected free-choice learning after an on-site visit to the zoo. Recommendations and implications are discussed in relation to practical applications and implications for future research in environmental education.     

We belong together: belonging to the principal’s in-group protects teachers from the negative effects of task conflict on psychological safety

Psychological safety is the shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking. Critical team events such as conflict and faultlines (hypothetical lines that split a team into subgroups) should impact psychological safety. Previous research has shown the benefits of task conflict on team outcomes under certain conditions and the consistently negative effects of demographic faultline strength on team outcomes. We propose that being close to the principal (what we call belonging to the principal’s in-group) should help attenuate the negative effects of task conflict and faultlines among teachers, because it is associated with a more effective working relationship. In a survey study with 244 teachers from 45 primary schools, we tested the moderating effect of belonging to the principal’s in-group vs. belonging to an out-group on the relationships of task conflict and faultlines on psychological safety. Results of multilevel model tests showed that relationship conflict (but not task conflict) and faultlines decreased psychological safety. However, when teachers belonged to the principal’s in-group as compared to an out-group, task conflict had no negative effect on psychological safety. We present implications to bridge the negative effects due to subgroup presence, so that psychological safety can become a resource for all.     

Caught up in the past? Social inclusion,skills, and vocational education and training policy in England

Since the mid-1990s, governments of different political persuasion have tried to reform VET policy to address problems in skills formation and social inclusion. Despite considerable policy activism, success has been somewhat limited, and England failed to overcome the problems associated with its liberal training regime. This article assesses the failure in vocational skills formation as a political economy and a public policy problem. It challenges the determinism in the political economy literature, points to poor public policy-making, and outlines possible policy levers.     

Die Messung von Global Competence im Rahmen von PISA 2018

This work deals with Global Competence as a suggested cross-curricular domain for the PISA study of 2018. Measuring Global Competence is related to a number of challenges, which are elaborated, described and discussed. As these challenges have not been sufficiently targeted up to now, Germany, among several other countries, decided not to assess Global Competence in the upcoming PISA assessment. Conclusively, propositions are made regarding viable options to capture Global Competence in international comparative studies so that established quality standards can be met.