Critical Literacy,Disciplinary Literacy: Reading the Engineering-Designed World

Globally, many people spend most of their time interacting with the products of engineering design as they wear clothes, drink clean water, use transportation systems, and more. Given the omnipresence of engineering design, whose material results are felt daily in people’s lives, it seems especially important that students learn to recognize and question how certain designs promote the welfare and interests of some while remaining inaccessible to others. In this article, we outline a vision for critical literacy instruction in engineering that simultaneously incorporates and challenges professional standards. We—an associate professor of literacy, an engineer, and a teacher at an engineering-focused high school—illustrate how critical literacy instruction might be enacted in the context of engineering design instruction in high schools. We describe how critical literacy can complement disciplinary literacy instruction in engineering as students use critically-focused, disciplinary lenses to move toward social justice.     

Science identity development: how multimodal composition mediates student role-taking as scientist in a media-rich learning environment

Educational technology research and development - Science identity has been widely discussed in recent years; however, research on its development in multimodal composing environments, especially...     

Developing a Training Course for Undergraduate Teaching Assistants

An undergraduate teaching assistant (UTA) training course was developed using existing best practices and Bloom’s taxonomy of educational objectives as a framework. Course goals included developing assistants’ content knowledge, procedural knowledge, and metacognition regarding teaching. Across three semesters, UTAs’ (N?=?68) pre- and post-test responses showed significant increases in their teaching-related knowledge, confidence in their skills, consideration of a teaching-related career, and perceived benefits of being a UTA. The course provides an efficient method by which assistants learn to support students and faculty in a range of undergraduate courses, serving as a potential model for other teaching assistantship programs.     

Childhood Maltreatment and Early Developmental Vulnerabilities at Age 5 Years

This study examined associations between maltreatment and early developmental vulnerabilities in a population sample of 68,459 children (M_age = 5.62 years, SD = .37) drawn from the Australian state of New South Wales, using linked administrative data for the children and their parents (collected 2001–2009). Associations were estimated between (a) any maltreatment, (b) the number of maltreatment types, and (c) the timing of first reported maltreatment and vulnerability and risk status on multiple developmental domains (i.e., physical, social, emotional, cognitive, and communication). Pervasive associations were revealed between maltreatment and all developmental domains; children exposed to two or more maltreatment types, and with first maltreatment reported after 3 years of age, showed greater likelihood of vulnerability on multiple domains, relative to nonmaltreated children.     

Being a Learner Using Social Media in School: The Case of Space2cre8

The aim of this article is to gain knowledge about what it means to be a learner using social media in an educational setting. The article presents an ethnographic study of students in a multiethnic community in Oslo who participate in a social networking site called Space2cre8 (S28). In this article, we set out to explore the kind of space for learning that can be created in a lower secondary classroom by a social networking site. The article provides a detailed study of how two students made use of this social networking site as part of school activities, and it outlines two specific ways in which to be a learner using social media in school. The findings suggest that a social networking site such as S28 can provide different resources for different students with different learner identities, and might represent a space in which everyday knowledge and school knowledge merge to offer a hybrid space for learning.     

Responding to the Increased Needs of College Students: A Case Study of Case Management

The psychological needs of college students lead to overwhelming demand on college counseling centers’ resources. In this article, we review models of case management in Higher Education including the administrative, behavioral intervention, and counseling center models. We also present a case study of the 3-year development of a counseling center case management service. Initial data suggest that expanding the role of a counseling center case manager to allow for frequent appointments/follow-up and standardizing counseling center case management procedures led to improved appointment attendance and increased communication with students following referral. A vignette and suggestions for other centers are also presented.