Supporting Students with Invisible Disabilities: A Scoping Review of Postsecondary Education for Students with Mental Illness or an Acquired Brain Injury

Students with invisible disabilities such as mental illness or acquired brain injury (ABI) experience multiple barriers that reduce their likelihood of postsecondary course completion. The present study conducted a systematic search of research reporting interventions for students experiencing mental illness or ABI to participate in postsecondary education. Nine databases were searched and a framework for categorising interventions and outcomes was developed. Forty-two studies revealed that most interventions were focused at the individual student level aiming to support students to build skills, grow confidence, or compensate for challenges through educational adjustments. There was wide diversity in research approaches used and a dearth of rigorous research designs. This review offers a more consistent way to define interventions and outcomes to guide future research and facilitate more meaningful comparisons between studies. The impacts of specific interventions on students’ attainment of qualifications and subsequent workforce participation need further investigation.     

Planning for student involvement in a program of supplemental instruction

Implementing a program of supplemental instruction (SI) in the present climate of transition in South Africa requires attention to involving students in planning and conducting the new program. Involved in this process are political opportunities and constraints. This paper recounts the steps (and missteps) taken in beginning an SI program in high risk courses in two academic departments at Border Technikon: Accounting and Management. It documents the steps taken to enlist support of the Student Representative Council (SRC) in setting policy, selecting tutors, and maintaining the program's funding base. We maintain that a successful SI program must draw upon the energies of tertiary level students, both in roles as learners in the high risk courses and as student leaders at an advanced level. Some students may experience both roles. For this process to be more than an imposition from the outside, the program must be a partnership with faculty and students sharing a stake in the outcomes. Both groups must see that they benefit from the smooth working of the SI system. Our results to date indicate that such a joint ownership is occurring. During 1996, he served as the Director of the Academic Development Centre at Border Technikon, East London, South Africa, under the Educators for Africa Program of the International Foundation of Education and Self-Help.     

Navigating the complexity of disability support in tertiary education: perspectives of students and disability service staff

Access to education is a right for all students. This right is typically realised through the provision of disability support and reasonable adjustments to enable tertiary students with disabilities to participate on an equal footing with their peers. This paper presents perspectives of disability service staff and students about implementing and using reasonable adjustments. Data were collected at 2 tertiary institutions in Australia through interviews with 25 students with disabilities and 7 disability service staff. Data were thematically analysed. The complexity of and variability in the processes of negotiating and implementing disability support were identified as an overarching theme in the data. These processes involved engaging multiple parties. The task of negotiating reasonable adjustments is used to illustrate some of the complexities inherent in supporting students with disabilities. These findings challenge existing assumptions that support is easily accessible and simply provided. They highlight the complexity of using reasonable adjustments, and the tendency for this to be seen as a student responsibility. Finally, the findings imply that disability services need to reorient from a focus on care and concern towards a rights orientation and foster students’ skills in self-advocacy to better enable them to negotiate without disadvantage.     

Career and Commitment in the Context of Comprehensive School Reform

The present article takes up a paradox: that teachers' involvement in ambitious innovation or large-scale reform may supply rich opportunities for professional growth while also introducing the seeds of longer-term career disappointment. Case study investigations of reforming high schools in the US from 1991 to 2001 illuminate the relationship of teachers' participation in secondary school reform to their teaching commitment and career trajectories. Two of the three successive studies produced a dominant pattern of initial enthusiasm followed by growing disappointment. We draw on the combined data to examine teachers' propensity to remain engaged with innovation or reform, and the ways in which sustained involvement strengthens or weakens teachers' career commitment and satisfaction.     

A History of the Community College Internship Program at North Carolina State University

Following World War II, North Carolina created public junior colleges and industrial education centers to meet the educational demands of veterans and expand the technical skills of the state's workforce. Despite the creation of these campuses, in the early 1960s North Carolina ranked 47th in the number of citizens in college, and 66 counties in state possessed no campus to serve the local area. A system of comprehensive community colleges created in 1963 to extend education in the state comprised 56 campuses that enrolled 387,000 students by 1972. Few of the leaders or upper administration of the rapidly expanding community college system possessed doctoral education. Created in 1966 Department of Community Colleges. ( 1966 , December ). Comprehensive community college system in North Carolina [Internal Report]. William Dallas Herring Papers, 1957–1980 (Carton 69, File Box 253, Folder 253:05). North Carolina State University Special Collections Research Center , Raleigh , NC.  [Google Scholar] to alleviate this problem, the Community College Internship Program was designed to provide an intensive two-year doctoral training for personnel from the community college system. The program played an instrumental role in the early development of the state's community colleges and the professionalization of its leadership.     

Advances in the application of information technology to sport performance

This paper overviews the diverse information technologies that are used to provide athletes with relevant feedback. Examples taken from various sports are used to illustrate selected applications of technology-based feedback. Several feedback systems are discussed, including vision, audition and proprioception. Each technology described here is based on the assumption that feedback would eventually enhance skill acquisition and sport performance and, as such, its usefulness to athletes and coaches in training is critically evaluated.     

Images of reflection: a look and a review

The idea of reflection linked with teaching has a wide semantic array in educational enquiry. In the preceding papers, it has been called reflective teaching [Russell] and reflectivity [Bullough & Gitlin]. While neither of these terms has received any great prominence in Australia, the term “reflection” itself has several images. This paper looks at these images of educational enquiry based on reflection and reviews significant issues that have emerged in Australian research, indicating how these are related to the papers in this issue of QSE.     

The influence of normative beliefs on students’ enrolment choices

Peers, family, mentors and the media may influence students’ attitudes towards chemistry and their intention to enrol in tertiary chemistry courses. In this paper we report on an investigation of the perceptions students hold about their associates’ attitudes towards chemistry and chemists. Data were gathered from interviews with 37 tertiary chemistry students, for whom chemistry had differing roles in their degree. The data suggest that although many of the students’ associates subscribe to stereotypical images of chemistry and chemists, students’ choices of enrolment are predominantly based on their own previous experiences.     

Expanding teacher work roles: a resource for retention or a recipe for overwork?

This paper illuminates the tensions between the rhetoric and presumed rewards of an expanded conception of teachers' work and the work demands and strains introduced by such a conception. Based on data collected in the United States, this paper draws on multi‐day, 24‐hour time and task diaries recorded by case‐study teachers, together with ethnographic interviews and observations, to illuminate the disjuncture between reform rhetoric and workplace demands. I use these data to assess the usefulness of existing theories of overwork as they may apply to teachers and teaching. This paper suggests that teacher overwork is, in part, a result of the expansion of teacher work roles. The argument unfolds in three parts. First, teachers' work roles have been expanded but structural supports for the expansion have been uneven. Second, the nature and extent of organizational support influences teacher experience of role expansion and, finally, teachers who embrace the expanded role conception strive to sustain it even in the absence of organizational supports. This results in overwork: here overwork is taken to mean working beyond the contractual day, week and year. Teachers' contracts specify their working day; when they work beyond this time without pay, then they are overworking. Current explanations of overwork do not adequately account for the case of teachers' overwork.