Humanism,modernism and designing education: exploring progressive relations between Australia,New Zealand and the West Riding of Yorkshire 1930s–1970s

Abstract

This article takes as a starting point the career of Sir Alec Clegg, Chief Education Officer for the West Riding of Yorkshire (1945–1974), and traces his professional connections with educationists in Australia and New Zealand. In exploring the nature of global exchanges between educators, artists, architects and designers in the decades immediately before and after the Second World War, the intertwining of modernism and progressivism is critically explored in the wider contextual frame of the Arts and Crafts Movement. The notion of increasing the humanity of the classroom occupied the efforts of a constellation of individuals caught up in the desire to redesign schooling in ways that would regenerate democratic relations of living in the post-war world. It is suggested that a common thread connected those concerned to strengthen democracy through combining progressive and modernist attitudes with the potent legacy of the Arts and Crafts Movement.     

Reverberating chords: implications of storied nostalgia for borderland discourses in pre-service teacher identity

The research that is the subject of this paper set out to interrogate pre-service teachers’ responses to issues of national identity, ideology, and representation in contemporary multicultural Canadian picture books. While the research focused on whether and how the literature could serve to inform and broaden pre-service teachers’ conceptualizations of diversity, we retrospectively decided to re-visit the focus group and interview data to know which of the 70 picture books had most engaged the teachers and why. We critically consider the implications of teachers’ attachments for social justice education and teachers’ cultivation of a critical, ‘borderlands’ discourse aware of self and open to others. The research suggests that a significant source of teacher knowledge and thinking is lodged in teachers’ personal memories of childhood texts, called touchstones. Touchstones were a place from which teachers implicitly began; certain stories struck particular chords, chords largely attributable to childhood memories. Most intertextual connections were personal, with some tangential to the text. While touchstones performed different functions depending on the subject position of the pre-service teachers, they pointed to the existence of an underlying position of teacher as nostalgic subject. Given the importance of this subject position for teachers’ responses to picture books, we explore critical reconceptualizations of nostalgia that can support the development of borderland discourses. We suggest that pre-service teachers need to be invited to individually and collectively examine their responses to both old and new touchstone stories. More nuanced research also needs to be conducted on the role of nostalgia in teacher formation, how it influences teacher practice, and how to best design teacher education courses to foster ‘borderland discourses’ related to the storying of teacher identity, especially with respect to popular ‘collectibles’ and core teaching texts like picture books.     

The OPAC is Dead: Managing the Virtual Library

Changing trends in library use and management of e-resources were discussed by Jane Burke from ProQuest/Serials Solutions. A paradigm shift in library collections has occurred in which e‐resources are now the major component of new library materials, requiring new ways to manage and display them. The use of e‐resource access and management services was discussed as a helpful tool, along with federated searching. Burke suggested that by spending less time processing print materials and ending bibliographic instruction, more time will be available for librarians to market and manage e-resources, which will be of greater benefit to today's library users.     

Bibliographic Management Software: A Focus Group Study of the Preferences and Practices of Undergraduate Students

With the growing population of undergraduate students on our campus and an increased focus on their success, librarians at a large midwestern university were interested in the citation management styles of this university cohort. Our university library spends considerable resources each year to maintain and promote access to the robust bibliographic management tool RefWorks. A team of librarians wondered whether RefWorks might be used by undergraduate students with the same perceived enthusiasm that we have sensed in graduate students and faculty. More generally, we explored how undergraduate students were managing their citations, if and what kinds of tools they were using to ease the process of creating bibliographies, and their general workflow in incorporating citations into their academic work.     

Name Authority Work in Public Libraries

Random samples of U.S. public libraries were surveyed in summer 2010 to ascertain their name authority cataloging practices. Comparisons of authority work processes and types of authority work done were made among public libraries of different sizes. Results were compared to previous studies of public and academic libraries.     

Closing the Loop on Nursing Library Instruction: Using Student Performance to Improve Outcomes

Two librarians analyzed nursing students’ performance on an information literacy assignment to determine how they could change their instruction to better assist the students in comprehending the material. After identifying major areas of difficulty, including the use of search techniques, they revised both the instruction and the assignment, closing the loop by utilizing their assessment data. Next, they analyzed those results to evaluate the effectiveness of their changes and to make further improvements, thus demonstrating the iterative nature of instruction and assessment. The evidence-based instruction cycle of teaching, assessing, and revising should be repeated frequently to keep the assignment fresh and relevant.