Supporting English-medium pedagogy through an online corpus of science and engineering lectures

As English-medium instruction (EMI) spreads around the world, university teachers and students who are non-native speakers of English (NNS) need to put much effort into the delivery or reception of content. Construction of scientific meaning in the process of learning is already complex when instruction is delivered in the first language of the teachers and students, and may become even more challenging in a second language, because science education depends greatly on language. In order to identify important pedagogical functions that teachers use to deliver content and to present different ways to realise each function, a corpus of lectures related to science and engineering courses was created and analysed. NNS teachers and students in science and engineering involved in EMI higher education can obtain insights for delivering and listening to lectures from the Online Corpus of Academic Lectures (OnCAL).     

University-School Collaboration: Identifying faulty assumptions

The 1993 Teaching Accord in Australia (Commonwealth of Australia, Australia Education Union, and Independent Education Union) committed all funding for professional development to programmes promoting partnerships that involve teacher organisations, education authorities and universities. Since then there has been a proliferation of collaborative research and development projects involving universities and schools. The author has been a university participant in a number of these projects, including the Innovative Links Project (Innovative Links between Schools and Universities for Teacher Professional Development, 1994-96), the Australian National Middle Schooling Authentic Assessment Research Circle (1997) and the School-based Research and Reform Project (1998-2000). The first part of this article reports on research the author conducted into the experiences of the seven teacher educators who worked in the Innovative Links Project in South Australia. The research revealed that for these teacher educators, the Project expectations proved to be problematic because they were based on invalid assumptions about the personal, structural and cultural conditions that impacted on both school and university participants at that time. In the second part of the article, the author draws on experiences in later projects to look at what forms of collaboration are possible in the light of these conditions.     

The personal librarian program: an evaluation of a Cushing/Whitney Medical Library outreach initiative

The Cushing/Whitney Medical Library (CWML) at the Yale School of Medicine has offered a "Personal Librarian" (PL) program to medical center students since 1996. This outreach program matches students to a professional librarian as they matriculate, a relationship that is maintained until the student graduates. PLs offer individualized assistance for almost anything-from interpreting library policies and procedures to helping locate materials to assisting with thesis research. The program requires nominal effort on the part of the librarians, making it possible to expand the program to include other student groups. A recent survey revealed that students are extremely satisfied with the program and would generally welcome more contact from their PL.     

Experiential Engineering Through iGEM—An Undergraduate Summer Competition in Synthetic Biology

Unlike students in other engineering disciplines, undergraduates in biological engineering typically have limited opportunity to develop design competencies, and even fewer chances to implement their designed projects. The international Genetically Engineered Machines (iGEM) competition is a student Synthetic Biology competition that, in 2009, included 110 teams from across Asia, Europe, Latin America, and the US. Working at their own schools over the summer, the students use a kit of biological parts from the Registry of Standard Biological Parts, as well as new parts of their own design, to build biological systems that operate in living cells. Two years of survey data collected from undergraduates after their iGEM experiences in 2007 and 2008 suggest that both learning and identity as a biological engineer increase as a result of iGEM.     

Ten Years of LibQual: A Study of Qualitative and Quantitative Survey Results at the University of Mississippi 2001-2010

This article analyzes quantitative adequacy gap scores and coded qualitative comments from LibQual surveys at the University of Mississippi from 2001 to 2010, looking for relationships between library policy changes and LibQual results and any other trends that emerged. Analysis found no relationship between changes in policy and survey results but did identify a number of trends across the survey period.     

‘I could do with a pair of wings’: perspectives on physical activity,bodies and health from young Australian children

There is little research that reports children's perspectives on physical activity, bodies and health. This paper, drawn from a larger multi-method study on physical activity in the lives of seven- and eight-year-old Australian children, attempts to ‘give a voice’ to 13 children's views. Interviews focused on children's activity preferences and related decision making and motivations pertaining to these activities, as well as how they thought about the relationships between physical activity, health and their bodies. Data suggest some tensions surrounding the importance of fun for children alongside their awareness of ‘healthist’ discourses that require self-monitoring and improvement.     

Development and Testing of a Curriculum to Improve Decision-Making Skills in Middle and High School Students

Adolescence is a key developmental period for developing and strengthening brain circuits that underlie effective decision-making skills, which profoundly impact lifelong health and academic, professional, and economic achievement. But decision-making skills are learned rather than inherent. School presents an ideal environment for the direct instruction and frequent practice of decision-making skills, however, finding time in the school day is a challenge for contemporary educators. We have developed a learning curriculum that involves active student participation to strengthen decision-making skills that is sufficiently flexible and adaptable to be utilized in a wide variety of content-specific classwork. Using this curriculum, students show evidence of improved decision-making skills, including increased consideration of the number of factors that are relevant to their decision, the resources needed to make a particular decision, and both the short-term and long-term consequences of decisions.     

Transformative learning approaches for public relations pedagogy

Public relations educators are frequently challenged by students' flawed perceptions of public relations. Two contrasting case studies are presented in this paper to illustrate how socially-oriented paradigms may be applied to a real-client project to deliver a transformative learning experience. A discourse-analytic approach is applied within the case studies as a technique for identifying changes in students' understandings of the ideological structures, power relations and knowledge systems that underpin public relations and for determining whether transformative learning has taken place. The discourse engagement and normative/critical/ethical paradigmatic orientations examined in this paper provide conceptual foundations for developing civic responsibility that needs to be underpinned by salient social theory.