The house that Hugh built: the Adelaide history department during the Stretton era, 1954–1966

In 1954, Hugh Stretton took charge of a threadbare history department at the University of Adelaide. By the end of his tenure as department chair in 1966, staff numbers had increased fivefold and the department was recognised as one of the best of its kind in Australia. Stretton wanted his department to ‘teach history interestingly’, which was his overriding criterion in making new appointments. He also ran a democratic department that went against prevailing notions of ‘God-Professor’ departmental governance. As well as highlighting the singular features of the Adelaide department, the present paper places the growth and the character of ‘The House that Hugh Built’ within wider Australian and global contexts. The ‘Stretton era’ straddled a period of rapid expansion of the university sector both locally and internationally, which entailed a move from a generalist to a more specialised curriculum, with a greater emphasis on research and publication, and a less male-dominated faculty.     

The Consortium and the Commissioner: A Grass Roots Tale of Fighting High Stakes Graduation Testing in New York

The following paper provides a case study of the resistance of the New York Performance Standards Consortium to the state’s unitary high stakes testing policy from 1998 to 2006. After detailing the history of the grass roots actions undertaken by the group of alternative high schools called ‘The Consortium’, the analysis seeks to apply sociological and philosophical theory of, among others, John Rawls and Charles Willie to explain: (1) the success of the subdominant people of power in fighting the implementation of the battery of high stakes graduation tests; and (2) the failures of the dominant state authority to uniformly enforce its policy, with particular regard to the decisions of New York’s Commissioner of Education. Implications of the case are then discussed to place this little known educational struggle in a broader social, political and historical context.

A rapid evidence‐based service by librarians provided information to answer primary care clinical questions

Background: A librarian consultation service was offered to 88 primary care clinicians during office hours. This included a streamlined evidence‐based process to answer questions in fewer than 20 min. This included a contact centre accessed through a Web‐based platform and using hand‐held devices and computers with Web access. Librarians were given technical training in evidence‐based medicine, including how to summarise evidence. Objectives: To describe the process and lessons learned from developing and operating a rapid response librarian consultation service for primary care clinicians. Methods: Evaluation included librarian interviews and a clinician exit satisfaction survey. Results: Clinicians were positive about its impact on their clinical practice and decision making. The project revealed some important ‘lessons learned’ in the clinical use of hand‐held devices, knowledge translation and training for clinicians and librarians. Conclusions: The Just‐in‐Time Librarian Consultation Service showed that it was possible to provide evidence‐based answers to clinical questions in 15 min or less. The project overcame a number of barriers using innovative solutions. There are many opportunities to build on this experience for future joint projects of librarians and healthcare providers.     

Survey Says…?: Assessing Interlibrary Loan/Document Delivery Use and Awareness for Responsive Service Delivery

Abstract

The object of this study is to assess Texas A&M University (TAMU) students/faculty/staff members’ use and awareness of the Libraries’ free document delivery and interlibrary loan service, branded as “Get It For Me.” Since 2010, we have continued to see a decline in new user registrations each year. Previous Get It For Me user surveys conducted in 2003 and 2011 indicated that the overall satisfaction of registered users was high and customer feedback gleaned from these surveys was used to initiate a number of service improvements. But what about the large percentage of the campus community who do not use the Get It For Me service? Are they aware of what this service has to offer? If so, why might they choose not to use it? If they are not aware of the service, might they use it if they knew more about how it can assist them in their scholarly endeavors? Instead of only surveying those customers who have used this service, we invited everyone on TAMU College Station campus to participate in the survey. Promoting the service is a vital component of service delivery.     

Coding Classroom Interactions for Collective and Individual Engagement

This article characterizes “engagement in science learning” from a sociocultural perspective and offers a mixed method approach to measuring engagement that combines critical discourse analysis (CDA) and social network analysis (SNA). Conceptualizing engagement from a sociocultural perspective, the article discusses the advantages of a mixed methodological approach, and specifically how mixed methods can expand and enrich our understanding of engagement in certain science learning situations. Through this sociocultural viewpoint, engagement is defined as meaningful changes in disciplinary discourse practice, which captures the dialectical relationship between the individual and collective. The combined use of CDA and SNA integrates an individual's relative position in a group with her situated language use.     

Do innovation measures actually measure innovation? Obliteration,symbolic adoption,and other finicky challenges in tracking innovation diffusion

Although innovation diffusion is a central topic in policy and strategy, its measurement remains difficult – particularly in cases where the innovation is a complex and possibly ambiguous practice. In this paper, we develop four theoretical mechanisms that may bias diffusion markers by leading to the understatement and/or overstatement of diffusion at different points in time. Employing the case of “green chemistry,” we then compare three different diffusion markers – keywords, database index terms, and domain expert assessments – and we demonstrate how they lead to differing conclusions about the magnitude and timing of diffusion, organizational demography, publication outlets, and collaboration. We also provide suggestive evidence of extensive “greenwashing” by particular organization types and in particular countries. Building on these findings, we point to potential challenges with existing diffusion studies, and we make a case for the incorporation of practitioners in construct measurement and for the integration of comparative metrics in diffusion studies.     

Emergent pedagogy: learning to enjoy the uncontrollable—and make it productive

This essay reflects the shared experiences of four college faculty members (a biologist, a psychologist, a computer scientist, and a feminist literary scholar) working together with K-12 teachers to explore a new perspective on educational practice. It offers a novel rationale for independent thinking and learning, one that derives from rapidly developing interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary inquiries in the sciences and social sciences into what are known as “complex” or “emergent” systems. Using emergent systems as a model of teaching and learning makes at least three significant contributions to our thinking bout teaching, in three very different dimensions. It invites us into an awareness that the brains of individual students and teachers operate as emergent systems that are neither possible nor desirable to control fully. It invites us to appreciate as well that the activities and benefits of a classroom are not all individual interactions between teacher and student. Interactions among students and teachers are collectively contributing to a somewhat unpredictable project with an insistently social dimension, which is in turn crucial to the individual achievements of all involved. Finally, emergent pedagogy encourages us to consider more carefully the relations between the individual classroom and the larger educational community of which it is a component, including a challenge to rethink the matter of assessment.