Using Content Analysis to Compare a U.S. Urban Teacher Residency to a Finnish Teacher Education Program

In the United States, how to provide a high-quality education to all students has been a focal discussion, especially in urban settings. One potential solution that has emerged to confront this issue involves urban teacher residency (UTR) programs that provide innovations concerning the recruitment, preparation, and retention of teachers in high-need urban schools. In this study, we conducted a content analysis and compared steering documents of a UTR program in California with materials from a teacher-training program in Finland. Despite differences in both the legislative and local contexts under which the two programs operate, we found many similarities in both the steering documents and course offerings of these two teacher-training programs. For example, both promote aspects of social justice and are research-based. Furthermore, both offer a variety of types of courses, such as those emphasizing the pedagogical bases of education and research studies in education.

     

Tertiary pedagogy encounters the technological imperative

In one of the most challenging periods to confront tertiary education, we examine the impact that technology is having on the experience of one open and distance education university: Deakin University in Victoria, Australia. This paper considers how the espoused pedagogical views that were expressed by the academics interviewed, individually and collectively impacted on their attitudes to information technologies and to their reactions to exposure to and experience with various technologies. The first part of the paper explicitly considers the interview as a research method and situates the interviews we undertook within current scholarship. The focus of the interviews was to seek perceptions of what constituted good teaching as well as the relevance of technology for teaching: as each academic defined it; the discipline concerned and the mode of delivery (i.e. on and/or off‐campus). The research did not provide definitive answers but suggested themes and implications which are considered in the Conclusion. Although restricted to the perceptions of five academics at one university, the extent to which each of the ‘case studies' resonates with the reader's experience takes it beyond the experience of the one tertiary institution.     

LEARNING TO BE IN PUBLIC SPACES: IN FROM THE MARGINS WITH DANCERS, SCULPTORS, PAINTERS AND MUSICIANS

ABSTRACT:  This article reports research in three Nottingham schools, concerned with (1) 'The school as fertile ground: how the ethos of a school enables everyone in it to benefit from the presence of artists in class'; (2) 'Children on the edge: how the arts reach those children who otherwise exclude themselves from class activities, for any reason' and (3) 'Children's voices and choices: how even very young children can learn to express their wishes, and then have them realised through arts projects'. The research methodology was rooted in two modes of inquiry, philosophical investigation and action research. The article draws on this research to argue that arts-based work in school has helped disadvantaged and/or disaffected children to engage in activities (both arts-based and others), and to be able to lay the groundwork for exercising voice and agency as they did so. If social justice is to flourish there is a need for particular kinds of public spaces and a need to create conditions such that children can learn to participate in those spaces, whether or not they are comfortable with the usual settings for 'rational argument' or 'deliberative democracy'. It is suggested that arts-based education, in some forms, is one good way of creating these conditions.     

Immersion,Reflection, Failure: Teaching Graduate Students to Teach Writing Online

ABSTRACT

A common challenge facing those who prepare graduate students to teach writing online is the need to help those students connect online writing instruction (OWI) theory with their classroom practice. The authors present how graduate students are prepared to teach writing online at three universities and then synthesize those approaches to highlight three principles that can guide effective OWI preparation for graduate students in any program: immersion, reflection, and failure.     

Possible selves of older adults entering a life plan community

This study examined the possible selves, goals, and perceptions of “time left” of older adults soon after they entered a life plan community as independent living residents. There has been little research regarding the effect of this life transition on older adults’ self-concept, hopes, and fears. Eighteen residents participated in one-hour personal interviews about their reasons for moving, their possible selves, goals, and perception of time left. Time left was measured in two ways: residents were asked to estimate the number of years they had left and were also asked to mark, on a novel visual analogue measure, how “limited” or “expanded” their time left felt to them. Residents were found to have an average of 6.18 possible selves in total, with more hoped-for possible selves (m = 4.39) than feared possible selves (m = 1.78). The majority of the goals were maintenance goals, followed by self-improvement goals and then avoidance goals. Residents estimated that they would live for 11.64 more years, and the majority reported that this felt like “a lot of time.” Based on their responses to the novel visual analogue measure of time left, two-thirds of the participants reported that their time left felt “expanded” rather than “limited.” Consistent with predictions based on socioemotional selectivity theory, participants with longer subjective life expectancies reported more self-improvement goals and more hoped-for selves. Participants identified more possible selves than documented in previous studies, including almost twice as many hoped-for possible selves.