Connect,build, develop: Forming effective liaison strategies through peer mentoring and partnership

Many studies show that e-book awareness and usage is growing. Using vendor-supplied usage statistics for business and economics e-books, the authors sought to determine if a few titles accounted for a large percentage of usage. If proven, the authors hoped to be able to develop collections strategies to maximize e-book usage. Focusing on three providers, SpringerLink, NetLibrary, and eBrary, results showed that annually, a small number of titles accounted for a large percentage of usage. However, over the collection's lifetime, a higher percentage of titles were used. A small collection of Patron Driven Acquisition eAudio books were also examined.     

“All of Her Changes Have Made Me Think About My Changes”: Fan Readings of Phyllis Reynolds Naylor’s Alice Series

This essay follows the insights of reader response theory to examine how readers of Phyllis Reynolds Naylor’s Alice McKinley series negotiate textual meaning and construct particular identities in relation to the series’ controversial content. Ranking second on the American Library Association’s top one hundred list of banned and challenged books for 2000–2009, and criticized by conservative groups and feminist scholars alike, the Alice series may be understood as belonging to a widely-denigrated genre of relational reading material largely consumed by girls. The study analyzes over 2 years of reader posts to the Offical Alice Blog, the major fan website to the series, to argue that reading Alice is a means by which fans shape their social and cultural identities in sometimes contradictory ways. While Alice fans display an uncritical adoption of some traditional beliefs around gender and sexuality in their reading of the series, their discussion simultaneously reveals how their recognition of the series as transgressive and liberating in its presentation of matters related to female adolescent identity enables readers to construct particular identities for themselves as readers, teens, and young women that are formed in opposition to some conservative and traditional ideologies. Moreover, in their engagement with the series’ progressive sexual politics fans move closer to claiming agency as sexual subjects.     

Education research Australia: a changing ecology of knowledge and practice

Processes of national research assessment, such as Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) are a type of audit technology that confronts and steers established institutional identities and traditions. This nexus between policy and practice drives boundary work that diffracts prevailing policy logics, organisational practices, and habits of mind. We use this notion of ‘boundary work’ as an analytical lens for understanding the nature and effects of ERA in the Australian educational research space. This paper explains the methodology that informed the AARE–ACDE research reported in Strategic Capacity Building for Australian Educational Research. It documents the policy logic of ERA and the way it cuts across the established ecology of educational research, revealing social and symbolic work that is remaking the boundaries of educational research. We report on the historical trajectory of Australian educational research, the way ERA codes research outputs, and how educational researchers are repositioning in this shifting research space. We argue that there are specific loci of boundary work where capacity building in Australian educational research can make a difference to future educational knowledge building.     

Who is conducting educational research in Australia and how can their work be supported?

Educational research has long been the subject of lively and agitated debate, not least because of its diversity. Ranging in scope from academic development and broad-scale policy research through to student engagement and discipline-specific research, it includes methods of traditional academic inquiry and investigations and also less traditional modes of research. However, the topography of Australian educational research and the characteristics of the people who undertake this complex body of work are currently unclear. This paper explores some of the complexities of the Australian research community, drawing on the findings of a national online survey of academics who identified as researching in the field of education from within and outside education schools and faculties. The survey attracted 504 responses from 38 of Australia’s 39 universities, and just over two-thirds of respondents were located in a school or faculty of education. We draw on the results to answer the questions of who is undertaking educational research and who how they might be supported. We utilise a conceptual model that ‘segments’ the educational research workforce represented by the survey respondents, and we conclude by indicating strategies that might be utilised to address research barriers indicated by educational researchers.     

Critical Pedagogy in Process: A Collaborative Self‐Study

... the most important consideration in formulating purpose in education is the happiness of the students themselves. — T. Makiguchi     

Making the Rice: Latina Performance Testimonios of Hybridity,Assimilation, and Resistance

This performance testimonio is the result of collaboration between two U.S. Latina graduate students/ university instructors: a Latina of Puerto Rican descent and a white Chicana. It is a dialogue in which the authors “come together to engage our differences, face-to-face, and work to find common ground” (The Latina Feminist Group, 2001 The Latina Feminist Group. 2001. Telling to live: Latina feminist testimonios, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar], p. 1). We offer this performance testimonio to interrogate and be accountable for our performances of hybrid/assimilated identities, as we strive to recognize the ways we produce, maintain, and resist dominant and oppressive cultural paradigms. To do this, we draw on the models of resistance found in Latina/Chicana feminist discourse and performance autoethnography. The text was created to be performed before an audience.     

Short-Term Leadership Development: Meeting a Need for Emerging Community College Leaders

With retirements looming in the ranks of senior leadership, the need for short-term, intensive, focused leadership development targeting midlevel administrators has become acute. Through survey responses and in-depth interviews, this study examines leadership development needs of midlevel community college administrators who aspire to higher leadership positions. The plethora of short-term programs currently available through local colleges, states, and professional associations—while well-intentioned—are most often serendipitous and without clear focus or theoretical underpinning. This study suggests a framework for providing coherent, high impact, short-term leadership development opportunities to assist emerging leaders meet the challenges of today's increasingly complex colleges.     

Physiological Changes in Middle-Aged Men following a Ten-Week Jogging Program

Abstract

Twenty-one middle-aged males who participated in a jogging program performed a 6-minute submaximal exercise bout on a bicycle ergometer to determine if any differences existed between the results of heart rate and blood pressure tests taken before and after 10 weeks of training. Heart rates were obtained from electrocardiograph tracings and blood pressures were measured by a manual sphygmomanometer. The t test for differences between the means of related measures of heart rates and blood pressures was used with the .01 level selected for significance. Differences between the means of pre-and post tests of heart rate, under pre-exercise, submaximal exercise, and postexercise conditions, were all statistically significant. The jogging program did not produce any significant change in either systolic or disastolic blood pressure. It was concluded that 10 weeks of participation in a systematic jogging program will produce reductions in heart rates for middle-aged men at rest, during submaximal exercise, and during the recovery period following exercise.