The soaps: What's on and who cares?

This two‐pronged study analyzed soap opera content, centering on demographics, problems, conversations and sex behaviors, and surveyed soap viewers to determine viewing motives, involvement, and possible effects of soap viewing.     

Mentoring as an Induction Tool in Special Education Administration

Mentoring is a widely used method of induction into a variety of professional roles, including educational leadership. However, little scholarly literature has focused on the role of mentoring in the career development of special education administrators. In this examination of 14 such mentoring relationships, the existence of career and psychosocial functions as theorized by Kram is explored and the perceived value of the functions to mentors and protégés in the career development of beginning special education administrators is identified. Evidence of coaching, a career function, and counseling, a psychosocial function, was found in all relationships studied and these two functions were ranked as most important to the career development of beginning special education administrators by both mentors and protégés. Recommendations include incorporating mentoring functions into mentor and protégé training to increase the positive effect of mentoring on the career development of beginning special education administrators.     

Canadian school programs for students with emotional/behavioural disorders: A Decade of programs,policies, and practice

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this project was to examine programs and services for students with emotional/behavioural disorders (E/BD) across Canada. It is a replication of a survey undertaken a decade prior intended to examine similarities and differences in Canada’s provinces and territories, as well as exploring overall changes to policy and process in this period of time. Nine jurisdictions participated in this 2014 iteration of the cross-Canada electronic survey requesting information on services, policies, and practices for students with E/BD in the K-12 school systems from key stakeholders in jurisdictional ministries. Overall themes were captured, as well as unique highlights in each participating jurisdiction. Continued movement away from diagnosis, identification, and categorization is evident; however, little consistency has been attained across the country. Key issues are discussed along with recommendations moving forward.     

Teaching Peacemaking in Criminal Justice: Experiential Applications

As educators, we recognize that students often come to the classroom with preconceived notions about the criminal justice system that shape their subsequent learning. One such notion revolves around the effectiveness of the “war on crime” model of the criminal justice system. Many students feel that this model is the best way to achieve “justice.” Teaching peacemaking represents an opportunity to introduce the students to a new way of thinking about the criminal justice system. This paper explores how experiential learning strategies can facilitate students’ learning of peacemaking. Suggestions also are made about how peacemaking can be implemented into the pedagogy of criminal justice professors.     

Re-presenting Sport: How Instant Replay and Perceived Violence Impact Enjoyment of Mediated Sports

Several long-standing theories intersect in discussing the impact of community characteristics and of the mass media. The structural pluralism model popularized by Tichenor and his colleagues says that social structure influences how mass media operate in communities because they respond to how power is distributed in the social system, whereas the linear model says that the increasing size of a community's population leads to more social differentiation and diversity and corresponding increases in subcultures with their own beliefs, customs, and behaviors. Recently, there has been a concern about how changes in society have led to a decline in organizational activity and the network of relationships and trust that constitute “social capital.” This article examines the impact of population and diversity (using census data) on individuals’ media use, interpersonal discussion and civic engagement (measured in a national survey), and the relationship among these variables. Analysis of a structural model provides evidence that the “linear hypothesis” can be combined with structural pluralism, with size—measured by population—impacting diversity, which influences the relationships that people have with their community. Concurrently, social categories influence people's communication patterns and community relationships, and communication impacts civic engagement.     

The footprint and the stepping foot: archival records, evidence, and time

This paper provides an analysis of the archival concepts of “record” and “evidence” as socio-cultural constructs arising out of a particular view of time. Archival records are usually characterized as having certain relationships to evidence in its temporal aspects—specifically, the requirement for a temporal disconnect between creation and use. This disconnect also necessitates a break between knowledge and the knower in which the record must be externalized and set aside from its creator in order to have “recordness”. This paper explores how Western concepts of time impact concepts of records and archival evidences and proposes an alternative framing. Since records have such power in our lives and societies, practitioners must begin to work with an expanded concept of record and sensitivity to differing time frames and worldviews. The paper proposes a new definition of “record” as an intentional, stable, semantic structure, which is used to identify three broad categories of record types, based on event-orientation or object-orientation, that are flexible enough to account for differing cultural and spiritual understandings of time.     

Towards an activist approach to research and advocacy for girls and physical education

Background: Much research and practice in the field of physical activity and physical education for girls has been trapped in a reproductive cycle of telling the ‘same old story’ as if it is news over and over again, since at least the 1980s. A thread running through this narrative is that despite all of this research and related interventions, we have yet to find the ‘solution’ to the ‘problem’ of girls and physical education. As a result, little progress appears to have been made in terms of changing things for the better for the majority of girls.

Purpose: We offer an activist approach to work with girls in physical education as one possible means of breaking the reproductive cycle of research and media reporting that we suggest has worked against improving the situation for girls. We take a pragmatist stance to ask ‘can we make the situation for girls better than it is currently?’ and ‘how might we go about this task?’ We propose an activist approach not as ‘the solution’ to the ‘problem’ of girls in physical education, but as one worthy of testing in practice.

Process: We begin by outlining the broad features of an activist approach to working with girls in physical education. We then overview the findings of a growing body of activist studies in physical education and identify four critical elements that we believe need to be present in order to assist girls to identify, name and negotiate barriers to their engagements with physical education and their participation in physically active lifestyles. We highlight one example of an activist study that shows how the four critical elements interact in their work with girls.

Discussion: We argue for the need for a consensus around improving the current situation of girls in physical education, for a scaling up of this activist work as it is tested in practice, and for the coincidental development of a pedagogical model for working with girls in physical education.     

Early career teachers’ emotion and emerging teacher identities

The goal of our project was to develop an understanding of the connections among emotional episodes and emerging professional teacher identities of first year teachers. We interviewed eight first year mathematics and science teachers. We asked them to reflect on emotional episodes and talk about how those emotions informed their teaching identities. Our data yielded a model of ‘identity-work’ that reflected the teachers’ engagement in a reflective process of understanding themselves as it related to those emotional episodes. Our model includes four key processes: (1) Teacher incoming identity beliefs; (2) Teacher identity emotional episodes; (3) Teacher attributions and (4)Identity adjustment. All of our teachers exhibited a form of this process with some teachers elaborating on the ways in which pleasant emotional experiences confirmed their identities and others elaborating on the ways in which unpleasant emotional experiences caused them to confront and/or adjust their emergent identities. Implications for future research and teacher education are discussed.