AFFINITY DISCIPLINES AND THE USE OF PRINCIPLES OF GOOD PRACTICE FOR UNDERGRADUATE EDUCATION

Academic disciplines with soft paradigmaticdevelopment tend to have an affinity for more readilyenacting practices designed to improve undergraduateeducation than do hard paradigmatic developmentdisciplines. This study extends the affinity disciplinehypothesis to Chickering and Gamson's seven principlesof good practice. The affinity discipline hypothesisgarners empirical support for four of the sevenprinciples of good practice: encouragement offaculty-student contact, encouragement of activelearning, communication of high expectations, andrespect for diverse talents and ways of knowing.Implications for theory and practice are suggested by the findings ofthis study.     

The Relation Between Callous-Unemotional Traits,Psychosocial Maturity,and Delinquent Behavior Among Justice-Involved Youth

Callous-unemotional (CU) traits are a risk factor for severe and persistent patterns of juvenile delinquency. Given the influence of CU trait assessments in justice-system settings, it is important to determine whether the predictive utility of CU traits is conditional on the absence of protective psychosocial factors. Employing a sample of justice-involved male youth (N = 1,216, M_age = 15.29), this study examined whether psychosocial maturity (PSM) outweighs or attenuates the effect of CU traits on delinquency. Results indicated that youth with high CU traits or low PSM offended more during the year following their first arrest. Additionally, PSM moderated the relation between CU traits and offending, such that higher PSM was associated with less offending but only among low CU youth.     

Cultural discourses of privacy: Interrogating globalized workplace relationships in Japan

Using Carbaugh’s (2005. Cultures in conversation. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum; 2007. Cultural discourse analysis: Communication practices and intercultural encounters. Journal of Intercultural Communication Research, 36(3), 167–182) cultural discourse analysis and Petronio’s (2002. Boundaries of privacy: Dialectics of disclosure. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press) Communication Privacy Management (CPM) Theory, this study highlights four cultural premises that garner intercultural privacy management between foreign English language teachers (ELTs) and Japanese coworkers (JCWs) in Japan. The analysis revealed that ELTs: (a) expected not to be a “free space” for privacy inquisition by JCWs, and (b) expected voluntary reciprocity in (egalitarian) workplace relationships. JCWs viewed: (a) privacy inquisitions as acts of kindness/caring and (b) soliciting help from a supervisor as providing opportunities for better care. This study calls for attention to intercultural privacy management and enhances CPM’s cultural criteria.     

Education for Sustainability in Scottish Secondary Schools: boundary maintenance or professional reorientation?

This article reports on a study of education for sustainability in Scottish secondary schools. The study was based at the Institute of Education, University of Stirling, and was sponsored (between November 1997 and March 1998) by the Sustainable Schools Partnership, with funding from the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds Scotland, Scottish Natural Heritage and the Worldwide Fund for Nature Scotland and (between April 1998 and July 1998) by the University of Stirling. It comprised three research strands: a trawl of documentary evidence relating to policy and practice within the field of education for sustainability; interviews with key personnel in secondary schools identified as developing good practice in the field of education for sustainability; and a series of discussions with policy makers having a national and/or international perspective on education for sustainability and its development in schools. Although the prime focus was on Scottish schools, each of these strands also covered as a secondary concern relevant work in the other national regions of the UK. Having briefly clarified some issues of definition, the article offers an analysis of the central problem faced by schools (secondary schools in particular) involved in cross‐curriculum developments of this kind. That analysis focuses upon the aspiration of these schools to bring about whole‐school change within an institutional context characterised by strong boundary maintenance. The article then outlines the first of two findings: where education for sustainability is being developed within a secondary school setting, whole‐school change is likely to be conceived as modest modifications to existing structures. The article goes on, however, to outline some of the changing practices within these schools and, in doing so, introduces the second finding: where education for sustainability is being developed within a secondary school setting, whole‐school change is likely to be conceived in terms of a reorientation of professional interest and practice towards the local community and wider community concerns. These two findings, we argue, should be seen neither as complementary nor as existing in creative tension. They point to a school system seriously at odds with itself: pulled by one set of professional and managerial priorities towards piecemeal change within fixed parameters and by a very different set of professional and educational responses towards the reconceptualisa‐tion of teaching and learning and the closer involvement of schools in the local communities. This increased interest in the outward‐looking school community extends to issues of global concern. The article concludes with some thoughts on how this tension might be resolved through a radical reordering of educational priorities in favour of boundary realignment and community participation.     

Home advantage and the debate about competitive balance in professional sports leagues

A recurrent theme in sports economics is the extent to which overall league attendances will be raised by measures, such as revenue sharing, which aim to improve competitive balance. This debate has ignored the phenomenon of home advantage, which may, however, be important to the extent that, if all teams had equal talent, all matches may then be weighted heavily in favour of the home team. We present an analysis of the relationship between attendance and match-level uncertainty in the English Football League. A simulation from our model indicates that equality of playing talent would in fact lower aggregate attendance. This result is explained by the loss of prospectively the most uncertain games, where weak teams have home advantage over strong teams.     

Filipino Arts Among Elders in Institutionalized Care Settings

The use of traditional art in recreational therapies is unexplored. This paper, thus, attempts to surface the unique power of traditional Filipino arts (TFA) as synergizing lens in capturing the individual and the collective experiences of a select group of Filipino elderly in an institutionalized care setting relative to their feelings of depression and self-esteem. Three Filipino elderly housed in an institutionalized care setting were chosen for this phenomenological study, a robotfoto and a series of semistructured interviews constitute the main data gathering tool. Field texts were subjected to phenomenological reduction via the repertory grid analysis. Emerged themes were subjected to a series of member checking procedures to ensure the trustworthiness of the reported data. Depression and self-esteem were interpreted via two emerged themes. The themes were Me, Myself, and Melancholy and Will Not Let My Worth Wither. Through recreational therapies in the form of traditional Filipino arts, participants found novel psychological crutches that overcame the challenges of depression and give them hope toward more positive views of themselves and life.