The second‐year experience: Turning attention to the academy's middle children

Sophomores are the quiet ones, finishing avoided general education courses, changing their academic majors and residences, and worrying about finances. Jimmie Gahagan and Stuart Hunter describe new efforts to bring these students out of the shadows and help them succeed.     

IMPLEMENTATION AND EVALUATION OF PEER MARKING IN HIGHER EDUCATION

The implementation of peer marking within an existing tutorial system is examined. Peer marks were found to be in close agreement with the tutor's, lending credibility to the approach. The benefits of peer marking were discussed with the students, including their possible improvement in examination technique. This teaching approach has the added advantage in that the tutor can more easily act as a facilitator (rather than as an assessor) in the tutorial sessions. At the end of the year an evaluation of peer marking was carried out

Results from a questionnaire showed that five relative advantages of peer marking had been achieved. Further, the students believed that their work had been marked fairly, and that peer marks should count towards their end‐of‐year marks. Peer marking was found tobe most successful, fully complementing a tutorial system of teaching.     

“Acting White”: How the Past Implementation of School Desegregation Helped Create Today’s Attainment and Achievement Gaps

ABSTRACT

Summarizing my prior work, the only book length treatment of the “acting White” phenomenon (Buck, 2010), I argue that while desegregation was both a moral necessity and a social good, the manner in which desegregation was implemented by White authorities led indirectly to today’s achievement gaps. In the course of desegregation previously all-African-American schools were closed, with their faculty and administrators typically demoted or terminated, and their students sent to previously all-White schools, where they were not always welcomed. This massive social change established scholarly achievement as part of a White identity, not a Black identity. Unfortunately, this diagnoses may not lend itself to easy solutions.     

From preschool to home: processes of generalisation in language acquisition from an indigenous language recovery programme

Processes of generalising bilingual expertise from Te Kohanga Reo (an indigenous preschool for the revitalisation of Maori language) to home are analysed. Observations at the preschool and home settings revealed several features. The active and strategic role of the child in transferring expertise was evident. So too were the presence of complementary activities at home, sensitive responding to generalised language and shared cultural commitments. These processes were present in a range of activities. The results are discussed in terms of theoretical approaches to generalisation and the effectiveness of indigenous language intervention programmes.     

Urban inequality,social exclusion and schooling in Dhaka,Bangladesh

This paper asks whether education is a viable route to better livelihoods and social inclusion for children living in poor urban areas in Dhaka, Bangladesh. It uses qualitative interviews with 36 students aged 11–16, living in slum and middle-class areas, and also draws on data from a larger, mixed-methods study to provide context. Many children from slums are excluded altogether from education, while others are incorporated into the system but on unfavourable terms. The paper identifies three principal ways in which this adverse incorporation can happen: through differential access to different types and quality of school; through obstacles that prevent children from poorer households from progressing through the system and reaching higher levels; and through subordinate power relations in the school, embodied in systems of assessment, labelling of students and discipline. These are likely to limit the potential for education to be a socially transformative institution.     

Youth Voice,Civic Engagement and Failure in Participatory Action Research

In this article, we tell the story of a changing urban landscape through the eyes of the youth we work with in an ongoing after-school program and community-based research project rooted in Photovoice methodology. In particular, we focus on the work that, over the 6 years of our time with youth, has “ended up on the cutting room floor” (Paris and Winn (eds) Humanizing research: decolonizing qualitative inquiry with youth and communities. SAGE Publications, Thousand Oaks, 2014, p. xix). This attention to the work that has fallen through the cracks is a move to engage the central tenets of Humanizing Research, but it’s also a call to think critically with and through the failures that emerge in work with youth. We attend specifically to an ongoing failure in our work as a way to think about the kinds of promises that are often made and broken in participatory action research. In doing so, we tease out the implications of our work with youth and the steps community-based researchers can take to navigate the challenges that can impede the goals of fostering meaningful change.     

The effects of rime‐ and phoneme‐based teaching delivered by Learning Support Assistants

This paper evaluates three word‐level teaching programmes delivered by trained Learning Support Assistants (LSAs) for Year 1 children ‘at risk’ of reading difficulties. Rime‐based, phoneme‐based, and ‘mixed’ (rime and phoneme‐based) interventions were contrasted with controls receiving only the National Literacy Strategy. Phonological onset‐rime and phoneme manipulation, spelling, and word and non‐word reading were measured before and after the nine‐week intervention. High rime neighbourhood (HRn) non‐words (e.g. ‘dat’– with many real word rime neighbours) and low rime neighbourhood (LRn) non‐words (e.g. ‘tav’ with few real word neighbours) were used to evaluate onset‐rime‐ or grapheme‐phoneme‐based decoding strategies. Results showed greater phonological onset‐rime skills, letter‐sound knowledge and non‐word reading skills in all LSA‐taught intervention groups. There was no difference between the HRn and LRn non‐words. The only reliable difference between the intervention groups was an advantage in phoneme blending for the rime‐taught group. It was concluded that LSAs can enhance literacy development for 6‐year‐old poor readers. There appears to be no simple association between rime‐ or phoneme‐based teaching intervention and changes in the size of unit used by children following interventions.     

Places and Spaces: The Historical Interaction of Technology, Home, and Privacy

While recent developments in information and communication technologies have produced heightened concern over privacy issues, technology and privacy have a long history of interaction. The home has served as a key locus for this interaction. By distinguishing inside from outside, the home supports the allocation of particular behaviors and information to different areas, both physical and virtual. This article explores how different technologies, including structural elements, have affected and reflected over time the boundary represented by the home and how that boundary has helped shape the construction of privacy in the West. This illustrates how privacy might be conceptualized as a social condition arising from the interaction of various boundaries, including the principal one separating the public and the private.