Tradition Never Goes Out of Style: The Role of Tradition in Women’s Naming Practices

The goal of this project is to explore why, given United States women’s historical struggle to gain legal and social acceptance of nontraditional naming forms, the overwhelming majority of women continue to follow tradition and adopt their husbands’ names upon marriage. To begin to explain this phenomenon, this study focused on Catholic women, who changed their names between 1940 and 1998. This article illustrates the role tradition plays in participants’ worldview and how tradition influences their behavior and attitudes toward naming practices. The naming behaviors and attitudes of the women in this study are then analyzed within a larger sociocultural and political context.     

Book Reviews

Good teaching should be inclusive of all students. There are very strong arguments for making courses/units/modules as inclusive as possible, based on issues of equity and access. Inclusive teaching has been a catch cry in recent times and most universities have policies related to this issue. However, research into the effectiveness of measures taken to ensure that teaching caters to all students is rare. The scarcity of such information may be due to the difficulty in finding an appropriate method of evaluation. One of the means to evaluate teaching of a unit or course is to obtain feedback from students. Although information collected through this method may be subjected to biases, student perceptions can still provide useful data that can be incorporated into a broader evaluation system. This paper discusses an investigation into the inclusive nature of a large number of units offered at The University of Western Australia over 3 years. Student ratings in relation to the issue of inclusivity were also explored for possible influences of the year level of courses, broad discipline areas and student gender. The results of this study indicate that these three factors could affect how students view the inclusive nature of particular units.     

Gentle Riffs and Noises Off: Research Supervision Under the Spotlight

This article offers a critique of the manner in which doctoral supervision is conceptualised in a higher education system dominated by the market order. The authors consider the process of research supervision as an experience held in common, as a way of discovering the world together rather than as the fulfilment of discrete roles within a clearly defined timeframe. They propose an alternative ontology of research supervision, as a process of ‘unselfing’ informed by the enactment of agape (love) rather than as something that is characterised by conformity to a regulatory framework and informed by the dictates of institutionalised systems of monitoring and surveillance. This approach implies rejection of the relentless focus on choice and action that is characteristic of institutionalised higher education. The authors claim greater scope for consideration of the influence of the more elusive aspects of being human in the process of research supervision. This reappraisal of research supervision calls into question the pre-eminence of the Newtonian order of time as something that flows uniformly, independently of things and their relationships and calls for renewed emphasis on time as lived experience. The authors draw on a musical analogy, namely the differences between classical music and jazz, in order to explore these themes in relation to research supervision.     

European Schoolnet: enabling school networking

School networking is increasingly important in a globalised world, where schools themselves can be actors on an international stage. This article builds on the activities and experience of the longest established European initiative in this area, European Schoolnet (EUN), a network of 31 Ministries of Education. First, we offer an introduction covering school networks. We then describe the case of European Schoolnet, its history, role, and relationship with other school networks in the world. We then describe the underlying structure of EUN school networks and their basic characteristics. Using these basic characteristics as a framework, we consider a number of eTwinning, European Schoolnet networks: Network of Innovative Schools (ENIS) and myEUROPE. Last, we identify key features of network literacy, potential future trends in school networks, and areas where further research is needed in this field, and offer some recommendations.