Policy Shifts in Language-Minority Education: A Mismatch between Politics and Pedagogy

Sustainable educational leadership—leadership which leaves a legacy that lasts beyond the leader's professional lifetime—is very much in fashion nowadays. A recent edition of this journal was devoted entirely to the topic (Hargreaves 2005a). However, it is important to ensure that, together with leadership itself, the impact of leadership is sustainable. The self-aggrandizement, silver bullets, short-term big-bang approaches, procedural illusions, witch hunts, failures to communicate, and lack of accountability evident in the story of the building of the Swedish 17th century warship, the Vasa, do not sit well with sustainable and effective leadership. In this article, lessons learned from the Vasa are compared and contrasted with those put forward by the contributors to the recent themed edition of this journal. The authors then identify what they believe, on the basis of North American and international research evidence, to be the emerging priorities for sustainable and effective educational leadership.     

Making the case for a material-dialogic approach to science education

ABSTRACT

Science is concerned with understanding the world. As such, engaging with the materiality of that world is integral to both empirical experimentation and theorising within science. However, it has been recognised for some time that the way scientists learn about the world and the way that young people learn about science cannot be simply equated. This difference has been pronounced in recent decades by the dominance of constructivist and social-constructivist theories of learning, which focus on the development of concepts in the minds of people. Whilst these theories have yielded insight into the complexity of learning, the role of the material remains undertheorised, not only within practical science inquiry, but also in relation to the broader materiality of classrooms. Through a detailed critical literature review, this paper demonstrates the need for a stronger theoretical frame through which to understand the role of the material in the learning and pedagogy of science. Building upon the gaps and possibilities that this review reveals, we outline a new material-dialogic theory via a synthesis of Barad’s Agential Realism and Bakhtinian dialogic theory. The significance of this paper lies in offering a theoretical basis for more effective practice.     

Glutaraldehyde enhanced dielectrophoretic yeast cell separation

We introduce a method for improved dielectrophoretic (DEP) discrimination and separation of viable and nonviable yeast cells. Due to the higher cell wall permeability of nonviable yeast cells compared with their viable counterpart, the cross-linking agent glutaraldehyde (GLT) is shown to selectively cross-link nonviable cells to a much greater extent than viable yeast. The DEP crossover frequency (cof) of both viable and nonviable yeast cells was measured over a large range of buffer conductivities (22 μS∕cm–400 μS∕cm) in order to study this effect. The results indicate that due to selective nonviable cell cross-linking, GLT modifies the DEP cof of nonviable cells, while viable cell cof remains relatively unaffected. To investigate this in more detail, a dual-shelled oblate spheroid model was evoked and fitted to the cof data to study cell electrical properties. GLT treatment is shown to minimize ion leakage out of the nonviable yeast cells by minimizing changes in cytoplasm conductivity over a large range of ionic concentrations. This effect is only observable in nonviable cells where GLT treatment serves to stabilize the cell cytoplasm conductivity over a large range of buffer conductivity and allow for much greater differences between viable and nonviable cell cofs. As such, by taking advantage of differences in cell wall permeability GLT magnifies the effect DEP has on the field induced separation of viable and nonviable yeasts.     

The development of a small-scale survey instrument of UK teachers to study professional use (and non-use) of and attitudes to social media

This paper documents the creation, implementation and analysis of a survey instrument designed to reveal patterns of use and attitudes towards the value of social media by UK teachers. The study was motivated to discover which teachers use social media professionally, how they use it (both personally and professionally) and attitudes to social media as a professional tool (for their students' and their own professional use). The instrument was created from verbal data from two focus group discussions regarding the use of social media in education. Attitude statements were included verbatim when practical. This instrument was placed online and practising teachers invited to complete it (n?=?216). Exploratory factor analysis and hierarchical clustering identified 9 factors from 54 attitude statements and 5 distinct teacher groups. The rich data allowed each group to be carefully defined, providing potentially invaluable information to school leaders when developing social media projects to recognize and accommodate the full range of teacher concerns and experience. The paper also addresses methodological concerns regarding instrument creation, dealing with missing data and the impact of missing data on subsequent analysis.     

The Skilled Counselor Training Model: Skills Acquisition,Self‐Assessment,and Cognitive Complexity

The authors evaluated the effectiveness of the Skilled Counselor Training Model (SCTM; M. H. Smaby, C. D. Maddux, E. Torres‐Rivera, & R. Zimmick, 1999) in teaching counseling skills and in fostering counselor cognitive complexity. Counselor trainees who completed the SCTM had better counseling skills and higher levels of cognitive complexity than did counselor trainees who did not receive the training. Before training, both experimental and control group participants overestimated their skills performance. The control group persisted in this overestimation after training, whereas students who completed the SCTM had a much more accurate self‐assessment. Results suggest that skills‐based training may improve counseling skills and cognitive complexity in counselor trainees.