Project team: First‐year analysis at a regional campus site

Abstract

The Project Transformative Educational Achievement Model (TEAM) is an instructional initiative designed to increase the number of students at university campuses from underrepresented minority and diverse urban backgrounds who enter teacher education programs. The goal is to support and encourage these students to complete a baccalaureate degree and to obtain a teaching license with the intent of eventually teaching in diverse urban environments. This project documents the recruitment and 1st‐year experiences of participants in the Project TEAM program on a regional campus in the Midwest region of the United States. A brief review of the literature is included, along with an exploration of issues of recruitment of the 1st‐year cohort group and the design of the initial Project TEAM seminars. Comments from the 1st‐year Project TEAM students are also included.     

Views From the Field: Conservation Educators’ and Practitioners’ Perceptions of Education as a Strategy for Achieving Conservation Outcomes

This article presents data from a mixed-methods study that collected data through surveys (n = 656), interviews (n = 15), and discussion groups (n = 75) to explore the use of social strategies such as education and outreach by non-governmental organizations and government agencies to reach outcomes related to biodiversity conservation and resource management. We examine and juxtapose perceptions of conservation practitioners with those of conservation educators regarding the efficacy of education to reach conservation or resource management goals. We explore how to facilitate integration among policy, science, and education efforts, and we suggest theoretical augmentations for conceptions of education and social strategies within conservation organizations.     

Making training more cognitively effective: Making videos interactive

The cost of health and safety (H&S) failures to the UK industry is currently estimated at up to £6.5 billion per annum, with the construction sector suffering unacceptably high levels of work-related incidents. Better H&S education across all skill levels in the industry is seen as an integral part of any solution. Traditional lecture-based courses often fail to recreate the dynamic realities of managing H&S on site and therefore do not sufficiently create deeper cognitive learning (which results in remembering and using what was learned). The use of videos is a move forward, but passively observing a video is not cognitively engaging and challenging, and therefore learning is not as effective as it can be. This paper describes the development of an interactive video in which learners take an active role. While observing the video, they are required to engage, participate, respond and be actively involved. The potential for this approach to be used in conjunction with more traditional approaches to H&S was explored using a group of 2nd-year undergraduate civil engineering students. The formative results suggested that the learning experience could be enhanced using interactive videos. Nevertheless, most of the learners believed that a blended approach would be most effective.     

Why Roger Federer is a GOAT: an account of sporting genius

Why is Roger Federer a GOAT (‘Greatest of All Time’) of tennis? I argue that the correct response goes beyond statistics and style of play; instead, it is due to the fact that Federer embodies the qualities that typify sporting genius. More than merely being a developed or refined form of expertise, sporting genius relies on the notion of performative fit; that is, the capacity to express viable ways of succeeding within a given sport in virtue of one’s cultivated history of biological and socio-cultural existence. In other words, a genius such as Federer perfectly fits the requirements of his sport and, moreover, is able to safeguard and shape this fit through his unique disposition to perform in certain ways. Performative fit provides the foundations for received traits of genius such as creativity, self-belief and risk-taking.     

提高账单和报表可持续性

想必大家都有收到银行账单或者电信局电话清单的经历。这些信件,有些我们会打开,有些很有可能未被拆开就被直接丢弃。这件事看起来很小,但是实际上对环境造成了巨大的影响。为避免纸质邮件所带来的环境问题,有人转向电子邮件,认为通过电子邮件不会有这样的环境问题。但是,事实真是如此吗？     

Revaluation of geometric cues reduces landmark discrimination via within-compound associations

Rats were trained in a triangular water maze in which a compound of geometric and landmark cues indicated the position of a submerged platform. Rats that then underwent revaluation of the geometric cues in the absence of the landmarks subsequently failed to discriminate between the landmarks. In contrast, those animals that received geometry training consistent with their previous experience of the geometry–landmark compound continued to discriminate the landmark cues. The experiment showed that within-compound associations had formed between the geometry and landmarks, and that representations of absent geometric cues could be evoked via presentation of the landmark cues alone. We argue that these evoked representations of the absent geometry cues can counteract any overshadowing of the landmark by geometry cues, and may sometimes result in potentiation. The results of this study do not support theories of cue-competition failure based on independent cue processing, but remain readily explicable by appeal to an account based on within-compound associations.     

The Rise of Storytelling as the New Marketing

More and more large and small brands are engaging in a marketing activity called content marketing: the idea that storytelling is key to attract and retain customers. Content marketing expert Joe Pulizzi details the history of content marketing, the opportunities, and six differences that separate good to great content marketers for publishers.     

The Cultural Politics of Horror Film Criticism

This article examines film criticism as a social practice. Specifically, it explores the institutional politics of horror film criticism and the various ways critics of the genre justify their own readings and interpretive discourse. It does so by way of positing a horror film “reading formation,” which serves a critical-institutional function within the film academy, namely, securing academic legitimacy for the genre while shoring up cultural and political distinctions specific to elite modes of analysis. Accordingly, the article argues that three intertextual mechanisms (canonical recycling, political auteurism, and symptomatic interpretation) both condition the appropriation of horror film texts as legitimate objects-to-be-read and work to sustain discursive power relations between scholastically credentialed and “nonexpert” reading subjects.