Students in the Forest: The Role of Design-Build Pedagogies in Repairing Material Disconnections in Architecture Education

This article explores an intellectual disconnection in architectural education about the conception of wood as a building material. It explores initiatives to develop in future architects a deeper consciousness of the complex ecology of timber, promoting its sustainable use in the building industry. It explores six case studies drawn from architectural education to explore the ways in which the properties that make timber sustainable are explored through research and design, and how this deep understanding is transferred to students through hands-on applications.     

What Difference Does a Major Make? The Influence of College Major Field on Persistence by African American and White Students

The results from this study indicate similarities and differences in the factors related to the persistence of White and African American students in their freshman and sophomore years in college. Using random samples of data from students enrolled in public institutions of higher education in a Midwestern state, OLS regression analyses indicated that African American sophomores in the high-demand major fields (e.g., Business, Health, and Engineering/Computer Science) were more likely to persist than were those in other major fields, but there were no statistically significant differences in persistence for African American freshmen in other fields. While major fields were not statistically significant for White sophomores, White freshmen in social sciences or undecided about their majors were less likely to persist. The effects of financial aid packages on persistence varied across race.     

Petmanship: Understanding Elderly Filipinos' Self-Perceived Health and Self-Esteem Captured from their Lived Experiences with Pet Companions

Understanding of the lived experiences of geriatric clients with pets, particularly in the Western cultures, has been the subject of many studies. However, little is known about how Asian cultures, particularly the Filipino elderly, view their experiences with their pets in regard to their self-esteem and self-perceived health. This phenomenological study purports to capture the essence of the lived experiences of a select group of Filipino elderly with their pet companions in relation to their self-perceived health and self-esteem. A total of five Filipino elderly recruited from the Luzon area were involved in this study and were chosen through the snowballing technique. A three-part instrument was made by the researchers to gather data, namely robotfoto, semistructured interviews, and doodling activities. Field texts were analyzed via structural analysis through the aid of dendogram. Results of both cool and warm analysis have eidetically and interestingly described how the new coinage of petmanship, as introduced in the study, surfaced the functional and the instrumental views of pets relative to the elderly's self-esteem, vis-a-vis their Self-Efficacy Booster and Social Proactivity Builder roles in regard to self-perceived health. The metaphorical images drawn by the Filipino elderly surfaced the Roles Syndrome of Petmanship and the Rules Syndrome of Petmanship.     

Escape from the Skinner Box: The case for contemporary intelligent learning environments

Intelligent Tutoring systems (ITSs) and Intelligent Learning Environments (ILEs) have been developed and evaluated over the last 40 years. Recent meta-analyses show that they perform well enough to act as effective classroom assistants under the guidance of a human teacher. Despite this success, they have been criticised as embodying a retrograde behaviourist technology. They have also been caught up in broader controversies about the role of Artificial Intelligence in society and about the entry of big data companies into the education market and the harvesting of learner data. This paper concentrates on rebutting the criticisms of the pedagogy of ITSs and ILEs. It offers examples of how a much wider range of pedagogies are available than their critics claim. These wider pedagogies operate at both the screen level of individual systems, as well as at the classroom level within which the systems are orchestrated by the teacher. It argues that there are many ways that such systems can be integrated by the teacher into the overall experience of a class. Taken together, the screen-level and orchestration-level dramatically enlarge the range of pedagogies beyond what was possible with the “Skinner Box.”     

“Fully Equal to That of Any Children”: Experimental Creek Education in the Antebellum Era

During the 1840s and 1850s, members of the Creek Nation rejected schools as a colonial tool and instead experimented with various forms of education to fit their own local and national needs. Diverse individuals and communities articulated educational visions for their nation in conversation with fellow citizens, national leaders, and U.S. educators. Rather than embrace education to assimilate into the American republic, Creeks turned to schools and English literacy as one strategy to shape their own society and defend it from further Euro‐American colonial policies. By the end of the 1850s, they had established a fledgling national school system consisting of both neighborhood and mission schools. These institutions reflected and reinforced changes in race, class, gender, culture, and religion in the antebellum Creek Nation.     

‘Becoming your best’: student perspectives on community in the pursuit of aspirations

Achieving equitable schooling outcomes for young people living in communities of low socio-economic status is a prominent issue that assumes focus in educational policy, theory and practice both in Australia and internationally. This paper draws upon the narratives of five secondary school students living in the northern urban fringe of Adelaide in South Australia, a region that is characterised by socio-economic challenge (Prosser et al. in Connecting lives and learning: Renewing pedagogy in the middle years, 2010). Specifically, the participants’ understandings and perspectives about community are used to examine their aspirations through the analysis of qualitative data obtained from a focus group, visual methods, a storying activity and semi-structured interviews. Discussion on students’ construction and pursuit of aspirations is framed by Appadurai’s (Culture and public action: 59–84, 2004, p. 67) conceptualisation of aspiration as a cultural capacity influenced by one’s social, cultural and economic contexts. This paper demonstrates that students from low socio-economic backgrounds have aspirations for their future which are influenced by their schooling experiences and the positive trust relationships they develop with teachers in community. As such, connections between place and learning are highlighted as critical factors in achieving more equitable schooling outcomes. The research identifies factors in ‘community’ that shape young people’s aspirations and ways in which young people can be supported in navigating toward their aspirations.     

Functional Requirements Specification for Archival Asset Management: Identification and Integration of Essential Properties of Services-Oriented Architecture Products

The complexity and size of geospatial data can constrain the capabilities of service providers and create risks to the long-term preservation and archiving of valuable information assets. While services-oriented architectures such as the Earth Data Analysis Center's Geographic Storage, Transformation and Retrieval Engine (GSToRE) facilitate increased use and impact of geospatial data by mitigating these complexities by development of dynamic applications and interfaces, such services can often be primarily focused on the maintenance and delivery of only the most current versions of geospatial data that may nonetheless possess significant historical, cultural, or scientific value. Actions and documentation required to assure long-term preservation may not be supported by existing business models or may be otherwise compromised. However, general purpose archives offer a preservation capability that is complementary to the value created by dynamic service providers. We present an overview of the features of GSToRE, and the DSpace repository platform and describe the requirements of a methodology for the harvest, quality assurance, and ingest of geospatial data into an institutional repository as a complement to the dynamic data access and visualization services provided by GSToRE and systems like it.