‘Man sorting books’: historical research in an archive of university photographs

The impetus for this article was an encounter with thousands of photographs in an online archive of a public university in New Zealand, taken over the twentieth century. The size of the archive and the paucity of information about many images draws attention to challenges of commencing work in a large institutional visual archive. The first part of the article outlines initial forays into the archive and attempts to ‘sort’ the 22,000 plus images it contains into some form of order, utilising the categories of people, things, spaces, activities. The second part considers the history of the library as integral to an idea of the university and its role in the storing, organisation and dissemination of knowledge. It analyses archival images of the library to reflect on its place in the university, together with the limits and opportunities afforded by visual archives in histories of higher education.     

Preschool children’s early writing: repeated measures reveal growing but variable trajectories

Reading and Writing - Findings from education to neuroscience highlight the role of young children’s print-related skills, including early writing, in predicting and enhancing the development...     

Using the Inquiry Process to Motivate and Engage all (Including Struggling) Readers

With increasingly rigorous standards and mounting high stakes testing, it seems harder than ever to motivate and engage struggling readers. In this article the authors provide an overview of the inquiry learning process, which details how providing students with choice and opportunities to collaborate with peers can keep students invested in their own learning and progress. Within the framework of standards and/or a unit of study, students are coached toward choosing a personally meaningful research question in which they are given freedom to explore the answer through a variety of self-selected texts. Inquiry learning can be woven into already existing units of study or can be used to create an entirely new classroom project. The authors walk readers through the inquiry process with a teacher vignette that provides a step-by-step plan that can be implemented in any classroom.     

Stickers to Facts,Imposers, Democracy Advocators,and Committed Impartialists: Preservice Science Teachers’ Beliefs About Teacher’s Roles in Socioscientific Discourses

For science teachers using the discourse of socioscientific issues (SSI), it is important to make a decision as to whether when and how to disclose their own positions. The existing limited literature shows that science teachers prefer one of four roles during SSI discourse: sticker to facts, imposer, democracy advocator, and committed impartialist. The purpose of the present research is to understand the nature of preservice science teachers’ (PST) beliefs underlying such selection. Based on existing literature, we developed a teacher’s belief questionnaire including vignettes representing four teacher’s roles in discussion of genetically modified (GM) foods. Three hundred twenty-four (324) PSTs from a Turkish context experiencing SSI-based reforms completed these questionnaires, selected one of the teacher’s roles, and justified their selection by writing reasons. Content analysis procedures were used in data analysis of this qualitative study. The results show that most PSTs selected dialogical roles (democracy advocators and committed impartialists). Looking at their beliefs, epistemologies and teaching goals work together in PSTs’ selection of their preferred role. In addition, we argue that there is no desired alignment between teachers’ existing beliefs and expectations of SSI reforms. We conclude by indicating certain implications that may enhance such alignment.     

The interaction of syntactic competence and vocabulary during reading by deaf students

This research studied whether deaf students' component reading processes may interact with other in a competitive manner. Vocabulary and syntax, two processes known to directly and adversely affect the comprehension of many deaf readers, were studied to determine if they may influence each other, affecting the contribution that each one makes separately to reading comprehension. Multiple regression analyses were conducted on predictor variables that included measures of vocabulary and syntactic competence, as well as a variable summarizing the interaction of vocabulary and syntax. The criterion variable was a composite of comprehension performance on a cloze procedure and on a more traditional reading test. Results were cross-validated by separate regressions on data samples from three populations of profoundly deaf readers: 100 adolescents from oral school programs, 113 adolescents from total communication programs, and 211 students entering a postsecondary institution that used total communication. In each regression, the Vocabulary × Syntax interaction variable emerged as the most critical of the three predictors. Further analyses of the interaction revealed that among subjects in the highest quartile of syntactic competence, the correlation between vocabulary competence and reading was significantly greater than it was in the lower three syntax quartiles. In contrast, the relationship between syntax and comprehension remained stable across all four quartiles of vocabulary competence. This suggests that unless deaf readers have achieved a reasonable level of syntactic competence it may be difficult for them to capitalize fully on their vocabulary knowledge. The finding that limitations in one reading process can interfere with the application of another is consistent with the theory of Capacity Constrained Comprehension of M. Just and P. Carpenter (1992). Because syntax can exert both a direct and an indirect influence on comprehension, it should be an important focus in instructional programs.     

The Southern mind and the savage ideal: deconstructing identities of place in the Cracker State

ABSTRACT

This qualitative study discusses one Southern college of education and its engagement with White supremacy. This research stemmed from the Institution’s publication of an offensive catalog cover and the subsequent reactions to its inherent racism. Following this incident, our institution was dubbed ‘Cracker State’ in the media, informing our decision to analyze the historical connotations of this term for our pre-service educators. Utilizing Critical Whiteness Studies and Southern epistemology frameworks, we reconceptualize White Fragility while pulling from this experience and data collected to advance a strategy for confronting Southern White supremacy. Participants included 154 majority White and female students. Data stemmed from document analysis and two years of empirical data drawn from classroom discussions and student assignments. Due to the demographics and location of our college, we utilize the autobiographical demand of place and pay particular attention to understanding the influence of the South on the development of our students’ ideology. We explore this Southern place utilizing the following themes: (1) romantic fictions, (2) the specter of guilt, (3) God’s chosen people, and (4) the final great tragedy of the South. The goal is to begin a conversation regarding place-based pedagogy.     

Show me the money! An empirical analysis of mentoring outcomes for women in academia

This paper discusses and comprehensively evaluates a mentoring scheme for junior female academics. The program aimed to address the under‐representation of women in senior positions by increasing participation in networks and improving women’s research performance. A multifaceted, longitudinal design, including a control group, was used to evaluate the success of mentoring in terms of the benefits for the women and for the university. The results indicate mentoring was very beneficial, showing that mentees were more likely to stay in the university, received more grant income and higher level of promotion, and had better perceptions of themselves as academics compared with non‐mentored female academics. This indicates that not only do women themselves benefit from mentoring but that universities can confidently implement well‐designed initiatives, knowing that they will receive a significant return on investment.     

Governing individualized risk biographies: new class intellectuals and the problem of youth at‐risk

An apparent crisis of youth at‐risk is a key marker in contemporary debates about young people among a range of intellectuals, social commentators and experts in various domains and centres of expertise. Drawing on aspects of the reflexive modernization, governmentality and feminist literatures, this paper explores how risk discourses emerge as a means for rendering reality knowable—a technique that facilitates the management of individual biographies in institutionally structured risk environments. In this context there is intellectual work to be done in the social sciences that takes as its object the possibilities and limits of institutionalized intellectual abstraction for problematizing youth via rationalities of risk—and the limits of these rationalities for providing resources for governing our thoughts, actions and dispositions—our freedom.     

Statistical Learning and Spelling: Older Prephonological Spellers Produce More Wordlike Spellings Than Younger Prephonological Spellers

The authors analyzed the spellings of 179 U.S. children (age = 3 years, 2 months–5 years, 6 months) who were prephonological spellers, in that they wrote using letters that did not reflect the phonemes in the target items. Supporting the idea that children use their statistical learning skills to learn about the outer form of writing before they begin to spell phonologically, older prephonological spellers showed more knowledge about English letter patterns than did younger prephonological spellers. The written productions of older prephonological spellers were rated by adults as more similar to English words than were the productions of younger prephonological spellers. The older children s spellings were also more wordlike on several objective measures, including length, variability of letters within words, and digram frequency.