Discursive Struggles in Families Formed through Visible Adoption: An Exploration of Dialectical Unity

This study is the first to provide best practices exclusively for communication about crises that involve issues of culture, ethnicity, and/or race from expert crisis managers' perspectives. Using complexity theory as a framework, this study provides an in-depth, theoretically grounded understanding of managing issues and crises involving culture, ethnicity and/or race through the experiences of 34 senior crisis communicators. Complex insider perspectives suggest that responsibility for crisis management must move beyond any managerial bias to become more organic, normative, inclusive, and community spirited. First, issues and crises involving culture, ethnicity, and/or race are defined, laying a foundation for future theory development on ways these issues can become or exacerbate crises. Second, research participants’ stories coalesce to produce best practices and a useful decision-making framework for practical application in organizations.     

Deconstructing Plagiarism: International Students and Textual Borrowing Practices

This article reviews studies from various disciplines on plagiarism as a cross-cultural issue and examines cultural, educational, and linguistic factors that may influence the textual borrowing practices of international students. The reasons international students may employ inappropriate source use are complex and attempts to address and combat plagiarism in higher education must take into account multiple factors. Recommendations are made for ways in which academic libraries can assist international students with understanding plagiarism through orientations, instruction, reference service, and web-based guides and tutorials.     

Academic attitudes toward new media: An exploratory multidisciplinary study

This article looks at the attitudes of UK academics toward new media, utilizing organizational and sociocultural understandings of fields of scholarly enquiry. It focuses on four traditionally distinct disciplines—art and design, computer science, health science, and politics and international relations—representative of the range of approaches in higher education. Agreement was found among respondents across disciplinary communities about what new media represent and how they support their work. Analysis of semantic differential charts identified two dimensions underlying attitudes—“flexibility” and “fitness for scholarly purposes.” Rather than being anchored by epistemological divisions, new media are assessed by practical viewpoints relating to the activity types they allow, and by traditional measures of reliability. In response to questions about other characteristics of their disciplines (such as reputation and audience diversity), distinctions are in evidence, although in some cases these are not traditional ones.     

‘The power to squash people’: understanding girls’ relational aggression

While researchers and concerned adults alike draw attention to relational aggression among girls, how this aggression is associated with girls’ agency remains a matter of debate. In this paper we explore relational aggression among girls designated by their peers as ‘popular’ in order to understand how social power constructs girls’ agency as aggression. We locate this power, hence girls’ agency, in contradictory messages about girlhood that, although ever‐present ‘in girls heads,’ are typically absent in adult panic about girls’ aggression. Within peer culture, power comes from the ability to invoke the unspoken ‘rules’ that police the boundaries of acceptable femininity. We thus challenge the notion advanced by Pipher and others that girls’ empowerment entails (re)gaining an ‘authentic voice.’ In contrast, we suggest that such projects must be informed by an interrogation of how girls are positioned as speaking subjects.     

An effective mathematics and science curriculum option for secondary gifted education

Project Ga‐GEMS (Georgia's Project for Gifted Education in Math and Science) viewed the effect that placement in an integrated, hands‐on mathematics and science curriculum had on the achievement of academically talented high school students. For a two‐year period of time, students gifted in the areas of mathematics and science participated in a curriculum which incorporated higher‐level thinking skills and more real life laboratory experiences into mutually reinforcing mathematics and science lessons. After the conclusion of the two‐year program, Ga‐GEMS participants and a control group were given the mathematics and science sections of the ACT as they exited the tenth grade. The Ga‐GEMS students scored significantly higher on the Science Math Total, Pre‐Algebra/Elementary Algebra, Intermediate Algebra/Coordinate Geometry and Plane Geometry/Trigonometry sections of the ACT. To determine if the Ga‐GEMS students retained their higher scores throughout high school the SAT scores of both groups were compared as the students exited high school. Significant differences in the areas of total score and mathematics were noted. This study lends support for the use of a differentiated curriculum for educating gifted students in science and mathematics.     

Collaborative teaching in a linguistically and culturally diverse higher education setting: a case study of a postgraduate accounting program

The Language for Professional Communication in Accounting project has changed teaching practice in a linguistically and culturally diverse postgraduate accounting program at Macquarie University in Australia. This paper reflects on the project’s interdisciplinary and collaborative approach to diversity in the classroom by tracing its growth and development and describing the way in which it is supporting the integration of professional communication skills and discipline‐specific content within the Master of Accounting program. In particular, the paper demonstrates that discipline specialists working in a continuous and collaborative relationship with English language specialists, to integrate and assess communication skills and enrich the curriculum, leads to better outcomes for students and staff. The paper contributes to a growing literature on approaches that integrate particular graduate attributes into programs with diverse student populations, rather than bolt‐on interventions by language specialists that have limited outcomes.     

Navigating nature,culture and education in contemporary botanic gardens

Increasingly, humans are an urban species prone to ‘plant blindness’. This demographic shift and situation has implications for both individual and collective perceptions of nature, as well as for addressing ‘ecophobia’ and encouraging ‘biophilia’ through education. Contemporary humanity occupies a world in which extensive physical change, both in the landscape and its related organisms, is occurring . Education-related debates on these issues links to the noted phenomenon of a ‘bubble wrap generation’ growing up within ‘nature-deficit’ childhoods in ‘megalopolitan cities’. Indeed, some commentators consider that 'nature has already disappeared' and exists only in protected spaces. Such perceptions have consequences for education in ‘presented world’ settings such as zoos, botanic gardens and natural history museums. This editorial, and its associated collection of papers, considers the critical relationships between nature, culture and education in contemporary botanic gardens and the ways in which visitors navigate their journeys, as demonstrated by research.