“You Can’t Bring Your Cat to Work”: Challenges Mothers Face Combining Breastfeeding and Working

Despite increasing emphasis in recent years on the importance of breastfeeding for public health, rates in the United States still fall short of goals set by health organizations. In particular, breastfeeding rates for working mothers are lower than for stay at home mothers, despite policy changes to facilitate breastfeeding and working. Based on interviews with 23 mothers who were participants in breastfeeding support groups, this study explores some of the factors contributing to women’s difficulty combining breastfeeding and working. Findings indicate that some women do not return to work because they believe working and breastfeeding are not compatible, while those who do work and breastfeed often lack support from coworkers and managers. In order to improve breastfeeding rates for working mothers, organizations should make their support for breastfeeding mothers explicit beyond formal policies such as lactation rooms.     

Analyzing Challenges to Library Materials: An Incomplete Picture

This research project used Freedom of Information requests to obtain public records from Alabama institutions about challenges to materials in public schools and public libraries. Challenges occur when a patron objects to certain content. In this analysis, we examine the records of challenges. The research questions were as follows: How many challenges occur in public schools and libraries? What is the nature of these challenges? Are there institutional or demographic factors that are correlated to the occurrence of challenges? In this exploratory study, the number of reported challenges was surprisingly low. We investigated whether reported challenges were related to certain institutional or demographic factors, but did not find any discernible relationships. The data suggest that most challenged material is retained, but that librarians may be self-censoring to reduce controversy in their collections.     

The Heroes and the Helpless: Conflicting Media Images of Refugees From Burma

After a protest against Burma's military government exploded into bloody violence on August 8, 1988, some political dissidents applied for refugee status through the United Nations. Since 1990, nearly 6,000 members of Myanmar's ethnic groups settled in Fort Wayne, Indiana. The project's overarching question asks: How have photojournalists covered the lives of the Burmese? An archive of photographs published from 1992 through 2012 by Fort Wayne's The Journal Gazette was used for this qualitative analysis. Three major themes emerged: refugees as “freedom fighters,” Aung San Suu Kyi as “superhero,” and Burmese as helpless victims lacking agency. With mounting tensions concerning refugees arriving into Europe, this examination is important because media images may play a role in welcoming and integrating refugees into new communities.     

The National Renewal Conference: A Forum for the Discussion of Issues of Faculty Vitality and Renewal

A series of national conferences focusing on faculty renewal is described in this paper. These conferences were attended by over 450 faculty members, faculty development professionals, and academic administrators representing 188 institutions and higher education organizations in 39 states, the District of Columbia, Canada, and the Virgin Islands. The programs of these conferences demonstrate that a wide range of activities promoting faculty renewal are ongoing in a variety of institutional settings throughout the country and examination of the conference programs and participants provides additional insight into the topic of faculty renewal in higher education.William K. Jackson is associate director of the Office of Instructional Development at the University of Georgia and a founding co-chair of the National Renewal Conferences. He holds graduate degrees in physics and educational administration (higher education) from the University of South Carolina and has served as an academic administrator at both a private liberal arts college and a public research university. He currently co-directs a FIPSE-funded Senior Teaching Fellows program at UGA.     

How changes in work structure influence employees’ perceptions of CSR: millionaire managers and locked-out laborers

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is widely understood as the various activities corporations engage in to meet stakeholder demands and demonstrate fit in society. Often employees are positioned as the beneficiaries of corporate largesse and worker recruitment and retention are offered as rationale for CSR activities. The voice of the employee, however, is noticeably missing from the CSR literature. This study uses a case study approach to explore how locked-out union workers define CSR. We conducted 51 semi-structured interviews and analyzed 27 secondary data sources. The results suggest that workers fuse together economic and ethical responsibilities to develop a portrait of their employer's CSR. Workers defined CSR as an economic/ethical responsibility that is intimately tied to a set of explicitly and implicitly communicated values. Our analysis exposed four additional dimensions that informed employees’ understanding of CSR: reciprocity, fair treatment, economic justice, and organizational structure. Propositions for future research and practical implications are offered based on the findings.     

Curation,conservation, and the artist in Silent Explosion: Ivor Davies and Destruction in Art

This paper examines the preservation and curatorial approaches explored for the exhibition Silent Explosion: Ivor Davies and Destruction in Art at Amgueddfa Cymru – National Museum Wales (November 2015–March 2016). The collaboration between the artist, curator/researcher, and conservators is considered and the evolving and flexible way in which transient pieces were presented/re-presented is described. The paper offers a case study in the context of this exhibition and argues that regardless of whether it is in traditional media (such as painting) or as time-based media (unstable and open to interpretation), Davies' work challenges a perception of artworks as finished, single-authored objects.     

Self[ie] reflective practice: revealing student engagement through the photographic performance of the self

ABSTRACT

This paper positions the photographic image of the self (the ‘selfie’) as the reflexive indicator on which students are prompted to reveal their learning behaviours, and uses this mode of reflexivity to construct a qualitative study of engagement in a higher education setting. The study leverages the intensified processes of self –reflection created by the novel forms of convergence across the social landscape in which the selfie is embedded, to reveal how oppositional and indexical selfie-reflective practices can operate to uniquely connect behaviours to learning in this sector.     

Scaling and Sustaining an Intervention: The Case of Reading Recovery

ABSTRACT

In every school district across the country, every year, initiatives are adopted with the goal of improving the literacy performance of young students, and, just as frequently, these initiatives fail or quickly become passing fads. In this article, Rodgers reviews literature related to scaling educational innovations and describes challenges and barriers to implementing and maintaining evidence-based reform. Using Reading Recovery as a case example, she describes features of the intervention that are thought to be linked to its longevity in terms of scalability and sustainability. She also shares lessons learned from the most recent period of its expansion with the 5-year grant to scale up Reading Recovery across the county. Implications from this article include the importance of adopting an initiative that has a well-articulated design, collecting data on the progress of the students served, and having a person in the district who acts as a redirecting agent, maintaining the design of the initiative and guarding it against tendencies to pare down the design.