Volunteers in the classroom: Guidelines for orientation

Fortunate child care directors have many volunteers in their centers. Parents, grandparents, student interns, and other community volunteers may work occasionally or regularly in the child care center. Directors should be prepared to host these volunteers by planning in advance for their orientation. This will make the director's task easier and the volunteers' work more meaningful to them and more useful to the children and staff. At the University of Tennessee's Child Development Laboratories we regularly host volunteers with little or no prior experience in child care. Volunteers from the Foster Grandparents Program, from other departments in the university, parents of the children enrolled in the program, as well as our own majors in the beginning stages of their field work, are frequent participants who require orientation and guidelines for working with young children in group care. Because it is not unusual for some volunteers to leave after a semester, training and orientation for new volunteers occurs regularly throughout the year. The information below is offered to directors to promote meaningful involvement of volunteers in their center.Jan Allen is Associate Professor in the Department of Child and Family Studies. Kathy Carlson is a Master Teacher in the Child Development Laboratories. They work together at The University of Tennessee in Knoxville, TN. The authors wish to thank Dr. Carol Catron and Anne Miller Farmer for helpful comments.     

Innovation in Publishing: This is not an Oxymoron!

While many pundits claim that publishers are not innovative, this paper cites dozens of recent examples of innovation in the publishing industry. The main models reviewed are: innovative projects/partnerships, investment, accelerators/incubators, public/private partnership, and grass-roots programs. Case studies are presented from HarperCollins, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Penguin Random House, and many others, based on research and the author’s own experience. By following the lead of these innovative accomplishments, publishers can foster innovation at their own companies.     

Work or Play in the Kindergarten?

All over the world there is searching discussion about how much structure is appropriate for children between the ages of 3 and 6. Many teachers still turn to the books of Susan Isaacs (1930, 1933) which give an exciting vision of how children's minds grow during play. Isaacs also describes the role of the nurturing adult who explores the world with children but never dominates or imposes her own view. Several decades later came the work of Marianne Parry (1975) whose contribution includes the distinction between two levels of play; ‘that which educates’, and ‘that which fills time’.     

Functional Assessment to Predict Capacity for Work in a Population of School‐leavers with Disabilities

This study reports on an assessment system for school‐leavers with disabilities to identify their capacity for work and the type of transition‐to‐work programme best suited to each person. Participants were 1,556 high school students in four cohorts who left school between 1999 and 2002. Each school‐leaver was assessed by rehabilitation counsellors for functional ability and capacity for work. In a supplementary study, the 2002 cohort was assessed by special transition teachers using a short screening tool. The results demonstrate that there is a predictable hierarchy of functional acquisition among school‐leavers with disabilities and that the single best predictor of future capacity for work and need for transition‐to‐work programmes among this group of young people is the capacity to manage activities of daily living. The results also demonstrate that a short screen used by teachers, together with a behavioural assessment, is sufficient to stream school‐leavers with a disability into a range of transition‐to‐work programmes.     

Spanish Language Children’s Books Focusing on Health Literacy: An Annotated Bibliography

An efficient and economical health care system requires that patients and providers understand each other. For Latino patients, the challenges to effective communication include limited Spanish language ability of providers, limited English language ability of patients, lack of knowledge of the health system, and a generally low educational attainment resulting in general low literacy and numeracy abilities. Both literacy and public health research suggests that focusing on family systems and children is a good path to helping the entire Latino community to navigate better healthcare. This poster provides a selection of titles of readily available Spanish and bilingual (Spanish/English) children’s books that focus on health literacy as well as a series that addresses children’s health issues written for low literacy Spanish-speaking parents. The bibliography is organized into the following categories: Exercise, Healthy Habits, The Human Body, Hygiene, Nutrition, Parenting, and Understanding Difference. It is incumbent upon those in public service, including public libraries, the educational system, and literacy experts, as well as those in the medical professions to try and remedy this situation. Ideally, the titles for children should be read with parents or teachers. This bibliography should be useful for public librarians, school librarians, academic librarians collecting for education departments, literacy experts, and medical and health sciences librarians.     

Writing Approaches of Graduate Students

The writing approach framework provides a comprehensive perspective on college‐level academic writing based on the relationship of writers’ beliefs and strategies to the quality of written outcomes. However, despite increased demands for more and better writing at the graduate level, little is known about graduate‐level writing processes or about the beliefs of graduate students regarding writing. The goals of this project were the preliminary development of a factor analytic model of graduate writing processes, and of an inventory to measure writing strategies. The results support seven independent factors: elaborative, low self‐efficacy, no revision, intuitive, scientist, task‐oriented, and sculptor, with the intuitive factor predictive of an academic writing outcome. Suggestions are advanced for classroom instruction and for further research.     

Erratum to: Urban High School Student Engagement through CincySTEM iTEST Projects

Journal of Science Education and Technology -     

The uncertainty and fragility of learning to teach: a Britzmanian lens on a student teacher story

This paper turns the kaleidoscopic lens of Professor Deborah Britzman’s writings on a student teacher story of learning to teach. It begins by briefly setting the context for the research. It then explains the study’s ontological and epistemological focus on experience and how student teacher and researchers create expressions of experience through an interpretative process. This leads to the design for interpretation in this study and to an explanation of why the work of Britzman became part of the interpretative layering for understanding student teacher Ciara’s texts. It continues by explicating Britzman’s concept of ‘struggle for voice’ as a metaphor for learning to teach and briefly makes comparison with the work of Bakhtin and his concept of the dialogical imagination. It then presents the layered interpretation in the form of indicative excerpts in a chronological story. Finally it focuses on the salient and pervading theme of affect and offers a brief commentary on its significance in initial teacher education and the need for developing an understanding for the feeling world of learning to teach.