Indigenous studies in all schools

Cherbourg State School is approximately 300 km northwest of Brisbane. It is situated in an Aboriginal community at Cherbourg with approximately 250 students. At the Cherbourg State School, the aim was to generate good academic outcomes for all students from kindergarten to Year 7 and to nurture a strong and positive sense of what it means to be Aboriginal in today’s society. In this paper, I will discuss modernism and postmodernism in indigenous studies and how this has impacted on the design and development of the Indigenous Studies Programme at the Cherbourg State School. The programme was designed to provide students with the opportunity to learn about the history of Indigenous people from Indigenous voices and provide an understanding of the impact of invasion and the consequences on the lives of Indigenous people, in the past and present. The stories from the elders and members of their own community provided knowledge that allowed students to challenge Aboriginal identity by taking on existing perceptions so that they could be better processed and understood.     

Is Social Media Too Social for Class? A Case Study of Twitter Use

This qualitative case study examined Twitter use by undergraduate and graduate students in three classes. Previous studies have shown that while some faculty use Twitter, few are incorporating it into classes despite many recommendations for such use. This study examined how students perceived Twitter as a classroom tool. As an optional activity, many started with Twitter but fewer continued through the semester. The study reports on content and counts of tweets as well as student self-reports on usage and interest. The researchers found students enjoyed being consumers of tweets but seldom retweeted or replied. Incorporating Twitter in courses will require careful consideration of scaffolding, modeling, privacy and course design. Questions remain as to whether the informal social focus of Twitter may overwhelm attempts to use it in more structured educational settings.     

Teaching Information Literacy to Faculty: An Experiment

Faculty at Southeastern University were required to take an information literacy course designed by the librarians. The author then interviewed faculty regarding their attitudes toward the course and information literacy. Librarians were especially interested in whether taking this course would change the faculty's approach to teaching information literacy in the classroom. Librarians evaluated the course and recommended future changes based on the results of these interviews.     

Fine-Tuning the Institutional Repository: Evaluating the Self-Archiving Behavior of Researchers in Music

While self-archiving gains more traction as a means for scholars to make their research freely available, a perception persists that certain disciplines in the humanities lag behind the sciences in this regard. This article investigates the rate of self-archiving by scholars contributing to the top journals in the field of music, a discipline that traditionally falls within the humanities, although research in the field is highly interdisciplinary and draws heavily on multiple scientific fields. The contributors to these journals come from a range of background and interests, and represent colleges and universities from six continents.     

Correlations of Media Habits Across Time,Generations, and Media Modalities

This study investigates media uses and preferences across two generations and across television and video games. Path analyses using data from 335 families show that the number of hours of television viewed by the first generation (parents at age 30) positively predicts the amount of television use by their offspring in the second generation 18 years later, as well as their own amount of television viewing at that time. The analyses also show that the amount of video game playing among offspring is significantly related to their own as well as their parents' concurrent TV use. While there is no similar longitudinal correlation between a preference for violent television by parents at age 30 and that of their offspring 18 years later, parents' violent television preferences at age 48 are positively correlated with their offspring's concurrent preference for violent television content. Additionally, the violent television preferences of offspring are positively correlated with their own preferences for violent video games. These effects were found while controlling for SES, intellectual achievement, and offspring gender. These results suggest that the amount of time devoted to media use and preferences for violent media generalize across media modalities and are transmitted across generations.     

“回收”爸爸

我成长于七十年代初,那时,离婚尚未对核心家庭产生严重的影响。整个小学阶段,我仅遇到过一个来自破裂家庭的小孩,而在我看来,她是让人好奇的异类。同学们似乎都害怕她,好像她会传染似的。我父亲已经去世,所以离婚似乎与我无关。我四岁时,父亲就去世了,虽然我偶尔会密谋想要让亨利·方达成为我的继父,但是我和母亲相依为命,     

Scaffolding cognitive and metacognitive strategy instruction in regular class lessons

The quality of teachers’ knowledge about how people learn influences students’ learning outcomes. Similarly, the quality of students’ knowledge about how they learn influences their engagement in self-regulated learning and consequently, their learning achievement. There is a gap between research findings that support these two premises and teaching–learning practices in classrooms. In this paper we describe attempts to reduce this gap. In Study 1 we surveyed early adolescent students’ cognitive and metacognitive strategy use and demonstrated that students’ cognitive and metacognitive strategy knowledge has substantial room for improvement. In Studies 2 and 3 we collaborated with teachers to embed explicit cognitive and metacognitive strategy instruction, using learning protocols, into regular class lessons. Studies 2 and 3 showed that the learning protocols slipped readily into teachers’ typical lesson designs, scaffolded teachers’ delivery of strategy instruction, and scaffolded some students’ acquisition of strategy knowledge, although progress was sometimes slow. Recommendations are presented for supporting teachers and students to engage with cognitive and metacognitive strategy instruction.     

Peer teaching as a strategy for conflict management and student re-engagement in schools

This article reports on a major action research program that experimented with the use of cross-age peer teaching in schools to assist teachers to manage conflict issues in their classrooms, and to re-engage disaffected students in learning. The research, which was conducted in a range of elementary and secondary schools in Australia, was part of a larger international project using conflict resolution concepts and techniques combined with drama strategies to address cultural conflict in schools. The use of formal cross-age peer teaching emerged as a highly effective strategy in teaching students to manage a range of conflicts in schools, and especially in learning to deal with bullying. Operating as peer teachers also enabled a number of students in the study, with serious behaviour problems, to re-engage with their learning. The article therefore evaluates the effectiveness of peer teaching in both conflict management and student re-engagement.