Negotiating Genre and New Media for STEM News

ABSTRACT

This article—co-authored by a transdisciplinary team of social scientists and journalists in the United States—traces changes to the news landscape in recent decades, and asks: How are legacy media producers grappling with these new realities? As part of a four-year collaboration on young adult news consumption, we take a participatory action research approach to this question, tacking back and forth between newsroom concepts and anthropological ones in pursuit of a synthesis that strengthens both. Starting from anthropological frameworks of participation, the authors argue that broadcast videos typically position their audiences as overhearers rather than interlocutors, while the reverse is true for social media, and that these tendencies shape audience expectations. We find that many audiences have what we call poetic motivations: they are drawn to stories that exemplify their genre. For example, the participatory nature of social media genres translates well to a more candid style that can incorporate live questions and other direct participation. The study reported here focuses on STEM news, but many of the findings apply to news production in general. Our reflective methods can also be applied more widely in the field of journalism to synthesize perspectives from theory and practice.     

Appraising the Community of Practice at a Hospital Library System Using a Critical Librarianship Lens

Abstract

The Kaiser Permanente health sciences librarians created inter-regional policies to standardize and guide the work of all librarians across regions. In response to the larger organization’s emphasis on promoting diversity and equity in healthcare and the workplace, the library policies have evolved over time to include aspects of critical librarianship in the information services that the Kaiser Permanente librarians provide to their organization. The article describes how the inter-regional group of hospital librarians provide information services through a critical librarianship lens and provides examples of how other health sciences librarians can incorporate these principles to expand their services.     

Community education and the concept of need

Whether we are lost to flagrant and groundless subjectivism or whether we can actually sustain and support our actions by appealing to discovered, transcendental truths is perhaps the chief angst of the modern and postmodern ages. In this paper it is argued that by seeking a middle ground through praxis, a ground neither lured by false foundationalism nor racked by relativism, we can sustain our social practices as educators only by critical encounters with the traditions and ideologies from which those practices emerge. To pursue this argument, it is suggested that because science does not well ground our practices we must therefore seek a sounder basis. To that end, a revitalized form of praxis is proposed, one that retrieves its central concerns with the moral dimensions of human action. Thus, in opposition to dominant interests in technical forms of educational practice based on empirically ‘discovered’ regularities, it is suggested that ‘practical’ reasoning provides a more useful understanding of how we conduct our practices as educators. In this respect we can understand our educational practice as requiring choice and deliberation in specific circumstances where courses of action are variable and debatable. Such a focus then allows us to consider the value‐laden and community bases of practice and encourages improvement of practice through encounters with its normative nature. It is in this context that our views of what we believe to be right and why become the reasons for our actions as educators. Consequently, praxis has to be focused on the ideology of our practice. It is here that the final discussion of the paper considers the ultimate project of praxis which is to distinguish bad practice based on false beliefs from that which is sustained by continuing critical dialogue.     

Seasonal Variation in Physical Activity Among Preschool Children in a Northern Canadian City

Little research has examined seasonal differences in physical activity (PA) levels among children. Proxy reports of PA were completed by 1,715 parents on their children in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. Total PA (TPA) minutes were calculated, and each participant was classified as active, somewhat active, or inactive. Logistic regression models were conducted to examine associations between PA status and seasons. Significant seasonal differences were observed for TPA, weekday PA, weekend PA, and active play. Children were significantly more likely to be physically active in the summer and spring and somewhat physically active in the summer and fall, relative to winter. Children living in cold climates are less likely to be physically active in the winter