Scholar Commons @ USF: Sharing Knowledge Worldwide

Librarians and faculty members are now working together through Open Access (OA) publishing to make faculty-produced scholarly content available to researchers worldwide. The University of South Florida Tampa Library has been working with the Berkeley Electronic Press (bepress) Digital Commons platform to create a substantial institutional repository (IR) that includes OA journals, conference proceedings, and data sets, among other materials. Library staff members are currently involved in a variety of activities, including negotiating memoranda of understanding, loading backfiles, registering Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) with CrossRef, designing layout, doing final publication steps, and assisting with technical issues. In 2011, the IR, Scholar Commons @ USF, went live, allowing the library to pull fragmented collections previously hosted on other platforms into a single system with improved discoverability. This article discusses how the repository was established, what is involved, lessons learned, and plans for future directions.     

Objects and Objectivity: The Evolution Controversy at the American Museum of Natural History, 1915–1928

For the purpose of this essay, I examine how evolutionary theory was treated and responded to in the American Museum of Natural History’s Hall of the Age of Man during the early 1900s. Specifically, I examine how the curatorial work of the museum’s president, Henry Fairfield Osborn, relied on the purported use of objectivity as a means by which to communicate the validity of evolutionary theory through the objects in his exhibit. But objectivity represented a resource for anti-evolution critics as well. To show this, I likewise examine how the Baptist pastor, John Roach Straton, responded to Osborn’s objects and purported use of objectivity in the Hall of the Age of Man and how he himself attempted to establish a different type of objectivity through pluralistic approaches to theories of origins. Established as a common value, objectivity ceased to be a simple discriminator between scientists and non-scientists within the debate over evolution. While issues over the teaching of evolutionary theory during this period are already well known, I show here that the controversy over evolutionary theory was not only an issue within public schools during the early 1900s, but also within the museum as an institute of public education and how the rhetorical role of objects and space were critical components of argument for both evolutionists and creationists.     

Maintaining teachers’ face in the context of change: results from a study of Vietnamese college lecturers’ perceptions of face

Gaining and saving face are very important in Vietnam as a mechanism of social control, including the professional behaviour of teachers. Interviews with 15 lecturers (aged 24–37) at a teacher training college in a Central Coast province of Vietnam illustrated the relationship between their concepts of face and their beliefs about good teaching. Most were still strongly influenced by traditional Confucian beliefs about the role and position of teachers, the nature of teachers’ knowledge and the relationship between teachers and students. On the other hand, some teachers also were aware of, and to a limited extent open to, more modern ideas that seemed to be related to broad social changes and reforms in approaches to teaching and learning in recent decades in Vietnam. The findings suggest that some teacher educators are uncertain about the value of traditional professional wisdom in the context of critical changes in society and in education. The research also suggests that the concepts of face and saving face are important for teachers’ sense of agency, and that Vietnamese educational authorities could increase the effectiveness of innovations in teacher education by paying attention to the influence of concepts of face on the teachers’ beliefs and behaviours.     

Is more child-initiated always better? Exploring relations between child-initiated instruction and preschoolers’ school readiness

Although research suggests that the use of child-initiated vs. teacher-directed instructional practices in early childhood education has implications for learning and development, the precise nature of these effects remains unclear. Using data from the Midwest Child-Parent Center (CPC) Expansion Project, the present study examined the possibility that a blend of child- and teacher-directed practices best promotes school readiness among preschoolers experiencing high levels of sociodemographic risk and explored whether the optimal blend varies based on child characteristics. Sixty-two CPC preschool teachers reported their instructional practices throughout the year, using a newly developed questionnaire—the Classroom Activity Report (CAR). The average reported proportion of child-initiated instruction was examined in relation to students’ end-of-year performance on a routine school readiness assessment (N = 1289). Although there was no main effect of child-initiated instruction on school readiness, there was a significant interaction between instruction and student age. Four-year-olds’ school readiness generally improved as the proportion of child-initiated time increased, while 3-year-olds showed a U-shaped pattern. The present findings add to the evidence that child-initiated instruction might support preschoolers’ school readiness, although they also suggest this relation may not always be linear. They also point to the importance of examining instructional strategies in relation to student characteristics, in order to tailor strategies to the student population. The CAR has potential as a brief, practical measurement tool that can support program monitoring and professional development.