Hmong American Parents’ Views on Promoting Adolescent Sexual Health

Parents play an important role in the promotion of adolescent sexual health, but little is known about parents’ attitudes and beliefs in immigrant families. We examine Hmong American parents’ attitudes about adolescent sexual health using survey data from 202 parents of adolescents with attention to parental gender differences. Breaking from traditional views, Hmong American parents most often viewed teen pregnancy as challenging, not beneficial, and advocated the involvement of parents and community leaders in its prevention. The parents also strongly endorsed addressing comprehensive sex education topics for adolescents. Findings encourage proactive efforts to involve Hmong American parents in the promotion of adolescent sexual health, both directly by enhancing parental knowledge and communication with youth and indirectly through parents’ support of comprehensive sex education.     

Knowing your students in large diverse classes: a phenomenographic case study

The problem which this paper addresses is the difficulty of knowing students in large diverse classes in pedagogically useful ways. The paper discusses how the phenomenographic methodology can be employed to address this problem. It describes how phenomenographic studies and their results can enable teachers to ‘know their students’ at a collective level in terms of a set of qualitatively distinct idealised types rather than at a personal level of individuals with their particular characteristics, and demonstrates the pedagogical utility of this kind of knowing. The means used to describe the approach and to demonstrate its utility when teaching large classes is to present, as a case study, a phenomenographic investigation into the learning practices among students in a large, diverse cohort of entrants to an engineering programme in South Africa. General principles are drawn from the case study and are discussed as they apply to the teaching of large classes.     

Explaining school‐based curriculum satisfaction: a case study

This paper examines the contradictory effects of teaching multicultural education in two American white women's university classrooms. The authors use discourse analysis to understand the confusing results of teaching about difference. In this analysis, course readings and a field trip to an urban school are examined in regard to the instructors' intentions and students' responses. The authors understand the puzzling results of their teaching by examining the positivist dimensions of their pedagogy, including the belief in rational approaches to overcoming racism, sexism and other systems of oppression, the belief in the possibility of replacing 'bad ideas' with 'good' ones, and the perpetuation of knowledge grounded in a binary system of meaning-making and language use. The authors conclude with ideas for a postpositivist approach to knowledge, experience and action, that emphasizes the production of interpretations.     

Hong Kong and Australian seniors: Views of aging and learning

ABSTRACT

This article reports on the findings of qualitative, semistructured interviews conducted with 40 older Australian participants and 39 participants in Hong Kong who either did or did not engage in organized learning in the last 6 months. Phenomenology was used to guide the interviews and analysis to explore the experiences and perspectives of these older people. The meaning older people attribute to aging and learning and their possible relationship in their lives in both societies is described and compared.     

Preservice teachers’ blogging: collaboration across universities for meaningful technology integration

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this study was to explore technology integration by preservice teachers (PSTs) through collaborative blogging between two universities. Researchers aimed to learn more about the ways PSTs apply and integrate technology into classrooms. As digital natives, many PSTs assume that because they already know how to use technology personally, they can also teach using technology. However, learning to integrate technology effectively in educational settings is a challenge. This two-phase qualitative study analyzed blogging between PSTs (n = 83) enrolled in elementary teacher education courses in two different regions of the United States. Data sources included anecdotal records, PST blog post and replies, PST and elementary student technology project artifacts, and questionnaires. The data revealed three themes related to technology integration by PSTs: (1) collaborating in an online community expanded professional learning, (2) PSTs demonstrated shifts in purposes, use of digital tools, and self-efficacy when learning to integrate technology, and (3) blogging served as a conduit for meaningful technology use. Findings show that collaboration through blogging with peers outside the walls of a university classroom was a catalyst for meaningful technology integration.     

Faculty Employment Trends in Criminology and Criminal Justice

The academic job search process is perhaps one of the most important and stressful events for scholars hoping to gain full‐time employment in academia. The stress that this process induces is due, at least in part, to the fact that candidates are forced to make important, life‐changing decisions with very little information. The goal of the present study is to provide an update on faculty employment trends in criminology and criminal justice by examining faculty position announcements posted in The Chronicle of Higher Education (CHE) from August 2004 to July 2009. Findings reveal that candidates seeking assistant professor positions will have the most choice, as positions posted at this rank make up the largest category of advertisements. Furthermore, when a specialization was included in the announcement, most departments sought those with a law enforcement focus, followed by generalists.