Stewarding the Discipline With Cross-Boundary Leadership

ABSTRACT

Proposals to prepare disciplinary stewards and optimize the conditions for collective stewardship can be framed in two ways. The dominant frame emphasizes disciplinary caretaking and lends comparatively less attention to reform and transformation. A second frame is grounded in the social ecology of particular disciplines, their fast-changing university homes, and society’s complex needs, problems, and opportunities, especially those that no longer fit inside the long-standing boundaries of particular disciplines and their specialties. Reformist and transformative stewardship in this second frame prioritizes the development of adaptive, connected disciplines characterized by new boundaries and bridging mechanisms for interdisciplinary research, teaching, and outreach/engagement. This frame also provides the opportunity to explore the difference between an academic discipline and a helping discipline. Questions remain about how leaders will persuade, support, and reward career-oriented, specialized faculty members to engage in all such acts of stewardship for Kinesiology alongside their customary concern for their respective sub-disciplines.     

Harambee: Working Together to Engender Change in Communities of Color

Working with communities of color to find solutions to the problems they face is a complex and challenging task. The “It Takes a Village” concept and the Transtheoretical Model of Change (Prochaska, Norcross, and DiClemente 1994) were used by the authors of this article in their work to empower clients of color to effect change in their communities. The narratives by these authors, European-American and African-American practitioners and educators, incorporate accounts of advocacy and social justice initiatives as they describe their interactions with grassroots organizations, such as educational and faith-based institutions, within communities of color.     

Student Teacher Attitudes to Sex Role Stereotyping: some Australian data

The sex role attitudes of 461 teacher education students were measured on a 32‐item questionnaire. Chi‐square analyses produced significant effects for gender on 22 of the items, showing that the females were more egalitarian than the males. However, most of the students adopted an egalitarian stance on many, though not all, of the items. Responses to some items (women getting drunk and swearing, corporal punishment, boys doing heavy chores, and boys dressing up and playing with dolls) suggest that some traditional stereotypes may be particularly resistant to change. The data also suggest that students may adopt egalitarian attitudes out of self‐interest rather than as a matter of principle, and are more accepting of general principles of gender equity than of specific practices designed to achieve it. Finally, although there is some evidence of ambivalence among the students, particularly the males, it is more accurate to characterise these students as definite in their gender attitudes.