Feminine sexual desire and shame in the classroom: an educator’s constructions of and investments in sexuality education

ABSTRACT

Within the growing body of literature on sexuality education in South Africa, researchers have highlighted how teachers may face, or themselves be, barriers to the implementation of rights-based comprehensive sexuality education. Important issues with regard to educators are: firstly, the social and discursive space within which educators are located; and secondly, the complex emotional and psychic investments that educators take up within particular discourses and practices. This paper explores, through a psychosocial reading of an interview extract with a particular educator based in the Eastern Cape of South Africa, how discursive and psychic concerns are sutured within the complex subjectivity of the educator as the medium for sexual education in schools. Specifically, it highlights the numerous ways in which feminine sexuality and desire may be avoided, denied and silenced. Even when feminine desire is specifically evoked as in this case, it is done so in a way that ensures social and cultural respectability, thereby reproducing shame narratives that form and maintain traditional gender discourses. Our analysis demonstrates how engaging with educators as subjects with their own sexual history and psychic dynamics, and as individuals with raced, gendered and classed identities, is a potentially transformative perspective for effective sexuality education.     

Logistic Discriminant Function Analysis for DIF Identification of Polytomously Scored Items

The purpose of this article is to present logistic discriminant function analysis as a means of differential item functioning (DIF) identification of items that are polytomously scored. The procedure is presented with examples of a DIF analysis using items from a 27-item mathematics test which includes six open-ended response items scored polytomously. The results show that the logistic discriminant function procedure is ideally suited for DIF identification on nondichotomously scored test items. It is simpler and more practical than polytomous extensions of the logistic regression DIF procedure and appears to fee more powerful than a generalized Mantel-Haenszelprocedure.     

Correlates of orthographic learning in third‐grade children's silent reading

This study examined word identification, phonological recoding efficiency, familiar word reading efficiency, orthographic choice for familiar words and serial naming speed as potential correlates of orthographic learning following silent reading in third‐grade children. Children silently read a series of short stories, each containing six repetitions of a different target non‐word. They subsequently read target non‐words faster than homophones and preferred target non‐words to homophones in an orthographic choice task, indicating that they had formed functional orthographic representations of the target non‐words through phonologically recoding them during silent story reading. Target non‐word orthographic choice was correlated with all measures bar non‐symbol naming speed. The association between phonological recoding efficiency and orthographic learning lends support to the hypothesis that self‐teaching occurs through phonological recoding even in silent reading. Our findings were not generally consistent with the view that serial naming speed assesses orthographic learning aptitude.     

Teachers' perceptions of the effects of a scientific literary course on subsequent learning in biology

Five teachers were interviewed as to their perceptions of the effect of an intervention to teach scientific literacy on learning in subsequent biology courses. The sample consisted of 450 students who had a literacy course in ninth grade and had completed tenth-grade biology. At the end of the academic year the biology teachers were interviewed and asked to compare the biology students who had the literacy course to students they had taught in earlier years. The biology teachers concluded that the literacy course did have an effect on students' subsequent ability to learn biology. The strength of the effect varied according to level of biology. Students had a better understanding of the nature of science and better laboratory and process skills. They were also better at analyzing data. The advanced and intermediate biology students were more creative, more likely to take risks, and engage in hypothetical thinking than other groups of students that the teachers had taught. Although the purpose of the literacy course was to teach literacy skills the advanced students retained a substantial amount of content material that was applicable to biology.     

The instructor self-evaluation form: Development and validation of an ipsative forced-choice measure of self-perceived faculty performance

An ipsative forced-choice college faculty self-evaluation questionnaire was developed. The instrument was validated by comparing self-evaluation scores to student rating scores and by comparing superior and nonsuperior instructors on the basis of student ratings. Both analyses yielded positive, but modest, indications of validity. Implications are discussed relative to the questionnaire's utility in faculty development activities.     

Overshadowing of explicitly unpaired conditioned inhibition is disrupted by preexposure to the overshadowed inhibitor

In two conditioned lick-suppression experiments with rats, the interaction of preexposure to a target stimulus and subsequent overshadowing of conditioned inhibition treatment was examined. Blaisdell, Bristol, Gunther, and Miller (1998) have demonstrated that stimulus preexposure and overshadowing counteract each other in their effects on Pavlovian excitation, producing strong excitatory responding to the target stimulus. In the present experiments, a conditioned inhibition analogue of this effect was examined. Overshadowing of conditioned inhibition (i.e., attenuation of inhibitory control of behavior by the target stimulus) was demonstrated when a more salient stimulus was compounded with the target inhibitor during conditioned inhibition training. However, the overshadowing deficit was attenuated by preexposing the target stimulus prior to overshadowing treatment. To account for this phenomenon, we contrast the comparator hypothesis (Miller & Matzel, 1988) with contemporary models that focus on associative acquisition.     

Developing Student Metacognition through Reflective Writing in an Upper Level Undergraduate Anatomy Course

Incorporating metacognitive strategies in the classroom helps students monitor and adjust their learning strategies throughout the semester, and helps students progress from novice to expert learners in a subject. Journaling (i.e., reflective writing) is one metacognitive task that allows students to contemplate and articulate their skill development as they learn a new subject. The research reported here examines the use of ‘blogs’ (i.e., online journals) in an upper level undergraduate human anatomy course. The blogs both facilitated development of students' metacognitive skills and provided researchers insight into student metacognitive process. Data were examined from 92 students from three successive semesters (spring 2010, 2012 and 2014). Each student reviewed 10 radiology online cases throughout the semester and then reflected on their understanding of anatomy and radiology in an online blog for each case. A total of 927 blogs were examined for this research. The researchers used a grounded theory approach to analyze the blog narratives and develop a codebook based on common themes. The 927 blogs yielded 11,082 statements that were coded with the codebook. As the semester progressed, the blog entries showed that students demonstrated greater self-confidence in their abilities to understand the subject matter, expressed greater enthusiasm for anatomy in general, and they improved their metacognitive skills. This research illustrates that reflective writing in an undergraduate anatomy course not only facilitates improvement in student metacognitive skills, but also provides the instructor with evidence how a student progresses from novice to more experienced learner in anatomy.