Linguistic and Cultural Appropriations of an Immigrant Multilingual Literacy Teacher Educator

This autoethnographic self-study describes my interpretations of multicultural awareness, with special attention to multilingual awareness (MLA), based on my interactions with 52 students in the context of two literacy courses over a period of one year. An autoethnographic self-study provided an avenue to harness my reflections on practice and to study the ways in which my practice reflected awareness of my role as an educator. Findings from my teaching videos, written responses to students, and student evaluations suggested that my communication patterns with students reflected certain elements of multicultural awareness, as displayed by my attention to individual predispositions, cultural practices and personal stereotypes. The findings also appeared to indicate that multicultural and MLA interacted to reflect facilitation and symbiosis. Facilitation seemed apparent in my awareness of differences among students’ cultures and my own as I monitored my linguistic processing. Symbiosis appeared to emanate from the recognition of how my response to individual predispositions facilitated my application of conversational strategies based on feedback. This, in turn, heightened my attention to stereotypical attitudes and behaviors. Implications for multicultural teacher education include the benefits of using autoethnographic self-study to scrutinize educators’ awareness in practice as they determine the impact of this awareness on their instructional roles in multicultural teacher education. By extension, the study suggests that autoethnographic self-study research can provide additional lenses through which to interrogate monolithic perceptions of diversity in multicultural teacher education.     

Communicating Knowing Through Communities of Practice: Exploring Internal Communicative Processes and Differences Among CoPs

Knowing is an enacted, communicated process that is difficult to observe, let alone manage, in organizations. Communities of practice (CoPs) offer a productive solution for improving knowledge and knowledge management, but the communicative processes that enact CoPs have not been explored, leaving CoPs as an organizational black box. This research extends CoP theory as a means to determine the presence of a CoP and distinguish between various CoPs, and as a practical means to evaluate the communicative processes of organizational knowledge. CoPs enact the communicative nature of knowing through the elements of mutual engagement, negotiation of a joint enterprise, and shared repertoire. Specifically, two groups of volunteers are examined through a combination of participation, observation, and interviews in order to explore CoP theory as a dynamic system for examining and evaluating organizational knowledge.     

How open is open enough?: Melding proprietary and open source platform strategies

Computer platforms provide an integrated architecture of hardware and software standards as a basis for developing complementary assets. The most successful platforms were owned by proprietary sponsors that controlled platform evolution and appropriated associated rewards.Responding to the Internet and open source systems, three traditional vendors of proprietary platforms experimented with hybrid strategies which attempted to combine the advantages of open source software while retaining control and differentiation. Such hybrid standards strategies reflect the competing imperatives for adoption and appropriability, and suggest the conditions under which such strategies may be preferable to either the purely open or purely proprietary alternatives.     

From academia to media: staging the public career of critical literacy

This paper explores some of the processes through which an educational policy agenda can be generated in the media sphere. It casts light on the roles of journalists and various types of expert in these processes as they pertain to critical literacy. I argue for the usefulness of cross-field performance as a concept which helps to illuminate the special place of individuals who position themselves across journalistic, academic and political fields. The analysis is supported by examination of patterns in newspaper reporting and academic publication, which suggests that contestation of critical literacy serves as a staging device for a team of policy entrepreneurs, whose performances work to discredit and exclude other players.     

The Dominance Concept Inventory: A Tool for Assessing Undergraduate Student Alternative Conceptions about Dominance in Mendelian and Population Genetics

Despite the impact of genetics on daily life, biology undergraduates understand some key genetics concepts poorly. One concept requiring attention is dominance, which many students understand as a fixed property of an allele or trait and regularly conflate with frequency in a population or selective advantage. We present the Dominance Concept Inventory (DCI), an instrument to gather data on selected alternative conceptions about dominance. During development of the 16-item test, we used expert surveys (n = 12), student interviews (n = 42), and field tests (n = 1763) from introductory and advanced biology undergraduates at public and private, majority- and minority-serving, 2- and 4-yr institutions in the United States. In the final field test across all subject populations (n = 709), item difficulty ranged from 0.08 to 0.84 (0.51 ± 0.049 SEM), while item discrimination ranged from 0.11 to 0.82 (0.50 ± 0.048 SEM). Internal reliability (Cronbach''s alpha) was 0.77, while test–retest reliability values were 0.74 (product moment correlation) and 0.77 (intraclass correlation). The prevalence of alternative conceptions in the field tests shows that introductory and advanced students retain confusion about dominance after instruction. All measures support the DCI as a useful instrument for measuring undergraduate biology student understanding and alternative conceptions about dominance.     

Metatheoretical perspectives on sustainability journeys: Evolutionary, relational and durational

Journeys to a sustainable future have become important to industry, government and research. In this paper, we examine evolutionary, relational and durational perspectives on sustainability journeys. Each perspective emphasizes different facets of sustainability - shifts in selection environments, reconfigurations of emergent networks, and intertemporal comparisons and contrasts. Drawing on our analysis, we discuss implications for sustainability policy, strategy and research.     

On Going (Way) Beyond One’s Data: A Proposal to Restrict Recommendations for Practice in Primary Educational Research Journals

To counteract what we see as a growing research-reporting concern, we propose the following editorial-policy change regarding the content of primary research articles in educational research journals: Contributors should restrict their discussion and conclusions to their data and not offer recommendations for educational practice nor speculate about the educational policy implications of their research. We believe that this change will be beneficial for maintaining a separation between evidence and opinion concerning the legitimate warrants of empirical research. We suggest viable accompaniments and alternatives to authors offering practical recommendations and policy speculations in primary-research journal articles. Among these is to rely on all sources of evidence, including systematic research syntheses based on the aggregated contribution of multiple research studies from different sources, with recommendations for practice tailored to specific situations so that both their validity and utility will be increased. It is hoped that our proposed policy change will initiate a conversation among researchers, editors, reviewers, and educational-policy experts with respect to the scope and purpose of primary research journal articles.