Helping the One You Hurt: Toddlers’ Rudimentary Guilt,Shame, and Prosocial Behavior After Harming Another

This study explored the role of guilt and shame in early prosocial behavior by extending previous findings that guilt‐ and shame‐like responses can be distinguished in toddlers and, for the first time, examining their associations with helping. Toddlers (n = 32; M_age = 28.9 months) were led to believe they broke an adult's toy, after which they exhibited either a guilt‐like response that included frequently confessing their behavior and trying to repair the toy; or a shame‐like response that included frequently avoiding the adult and seldom confessing or attempting to repair the toy. In subsequent prosocial tasks, children showing a guilt‐like response helped an adult in emotional distress significantly faster and more frequently than did children showing a shame‐like response.     

When homelessness becomes a “luxury”: Neutrality as an obstacle to counterpublic rights claims

Rhetorical scholars have consistently demonstrated the value of engaging with difference in processes of public deliberation, yet publics still regularly make arguments on the basis of neutrality. Using a case study of advocacy for homeless bills of rights, I employ rhetorical field methods to assess vernacular responses to counterpublic rights claims. By attending to neutrality’s rhetorical force in practice, I examine how it enables publics to deny counterpublic assertions of inequality and obstruct counterpublic rights claims. I argue that neutrality allows publics to deny counterpublics’ needs, define counterpublics’ identities, and disguise their own self-interest. The theory of neutrality I offer here pushes rhetoricians beyond questions of its (un)desirability and (im)possibility to an understanding of how it operates.     

Problems in Classroom Engagement: Validation of an Assessment for District-Wide Use in the Early Primary Grades

Research Findings: The aim of this study was to provide an initial investigation into the psychometric properties of the Problems in Classroom Engagement Scale (PCES). The PCES was designed and tested for district-wide use as part of the report card system for a large urban school district. The PCES was administered to all 1st-, 2nd-, and 3rd-grade students in the district. Factor analytic examination revealed a bifactor structure as the best fit to the data. The bifactor structure reflected a general factor of Problems in Behavioral Engagement and two group factors: Problems in Social Engagement and Problems in Academic Engagement. These factors were found to be reliable within and across grades and demonstrated convergent and divergent relations with academic and behavioral outcomes. Practice or Policy: Findings provide initial evidence to support the routine use of the PCES in a large urban setting. The use of the PCES can help in fostering district-wide attention to students’ early difficulties with behavioral, social, and academic engagement.     

Re-bordering spaces of trauma: auto-ethnographic reflections on the immigrant and refugee experience in an inner-city high school in Toronto

The objective of this research study is to offer a glimpse into the lives of some newly-arrived students of different racial, linguistic and religious backgrounds as they confront the process of immigration and therefore personal and social displacement within the context of a Toronto inner-city high school. These students carry with them hidden but enduring scars that influence all aspects of their educational lives. In many cases their experience is steeped in trauma. Using auto-ethnographic methodology, this research is devoted to giving voice to these students who inhabit a space filled with suffering and loss but also resilience and cautious hope. If we really care about these vulnerable students in our classrooms, we must rethink and reshape our understanding of teaching and learning that is more fundamentally linked to the lived experiences of students coming from places of war and other oppressions. These issues are crucial for the future of nation-building and citizenship education in pluralistic Western societies such as Canada, both in and out of school.     

Introducing e-portfolios to pre-service teachers as tools for reflection and growth: lessons learnt

E-portfolios are being introduced into initial teacher education programmes internationally to help pre-service teachers build records of their learning journeys and develop into reflective practitioners; to allow them to assemble collections of evidence of their achievements against graduate standards, which can function as digital CVs; and to facilitate the seeding of personal learning networks that will support lifelong learning after graduation. Despite certain tensions between these aims, the potential benefits of e-portfolios make them an increasingly popular choice in teacher education. In this article, we discuss the introduction of Wi-Fi-based e-portfolios into a Master of Teaching programme at an Australian university. These served primarily as developmental e-portfolios, or personal learning environments (PLEs), and were designed to place particular emphasis on reflective practice. We describe how the e-portfolios were perceived and used by pre-service teachers in the first year of their implementation, and indicate the challenges and limitations encountered. Lessons learnt from the implementation are outlined and recommendations are proposed.     

Statewide Initiative to Embed Consumer Health Librarians in Public Libraries: A Case Study

In 2004 a collaborative, statewide outreach project in Delaware was undertaken where consumer health librarians were embedded in public libraries. In order to explore the effect of the embedded librarians on the quality of health information provision, unobtrusive reference visits were made to half of the public libraries in the state. The query “Do vaccines cause autism?” was posed to library staff; resources provided were recorded. In 67 percent of visits, public library staff provided authoritative health information resources. It appears the embedded librarians had a positive residual effect on the provision of authoritative health resources for addressing an ambiguous query.     

The UNESCO book production statistics

UNESCO’S Statistical Yearbook annually provides figures for the production of books in English, French, German, Spanish, and Russian. A detailed analysis of these data show that the lack of responses to questionnaires is the primary contributor to gaps in the statistics. If nonresponding countries had provided the requested information, the statistics would have shown increasing production of books in these languages. The 1987 questionnaire is reproduced in the Appendix. Gretchen Whitney is an assistant professor at the Graduate Library School of The University of Arizona and author ofLanguage Distribution in Databases. She teaches in the fields of information science and information policy.     

Initial-link duration and acquisition of preference in concurrent chains

Initial-link response allocation in concurrent chains becomes less extreme as the absolute duration of the initial links increases (Fantino, 1969). The present study asked whether initial-link duration affected how quickly response allocation reached asymptote (i.e., acquisition of preference). Six pigeons were trained on a concurrent-chains procedure in which the terminal links were fixed-interval (FI) 8 sec FI 16 sec or FI 16 sec FI 8 sec and were reversed every 20 sessions. Across conditions, all possible combinations of transitions between variable-interval (VI) 8-sec (short) and VI 24-sec (long) initial-link schedules were studied. Overall, the rate of acquisition was faster when the durations of the initial links preceding the reversal were short rather than long, and when the durations of the initial links following the reversal were long rather than short. By contrast, initial-link duration had no effect on acquisition or asymptotic measures of temporal control of terminal-link responding. These results support the core principle of delay-reduction theory (Fantino, 1969) that the impact of a conditioned reinforcer varies directly with initial-link duration, but also suggest that temporal learning during the terminal links proceeds independently of initial-link duration. nt]mis|These data were presented at the annual meeting of the Association for Behavior Analysis, Boston, May 2004.     

Using autobiographical queer life narratives of teachers to connect personal,political and pedagogical spaces

Autobiographical queer life narratives are communicative spaces where queer teachers take up personal issues of being, becoming, and belonging in contextual and relational analyses of their situated experiences. In this work w/e consider the challenges and risks involved in this research, which, when shared and probed in classroom spaces, is a dangerous exposition of the queer self. With these challenges and risks in mind, w/e examine how our narratives provide fugitive knowledge to inform a pedagogy of ‘resist-stance’ that recognizes, respects, and engages queer identity, difference, history and culture. W/e provide examples of this pedagogy, discussing teaching strategies currently being used to connect the personal, the political and the pedagogical in classroom spaces. W/e also speak of the difficulties of living out this pedagogy as transformative teaching to transgress queer erasure in hetero-normative educational practice.