“It’s not them,it’s me”: competing discourses in one aspiring teacher’s talk

In this paper, we deploy M.M. Bakhtin’s notions about how language works to understand aspiring teachers’ struggles about the intersecting roles race, class, gender, language background, and sexual orientation play in students’ school lives and learning. Through life-history interviews and document analysis, we investigated the authoritative and internally persuasive discourses one aspiring teacher brought with her and took from a 15-week long course on a predominantly White Midwestern public university campus. Ideas she encountered in the course and its required tutoring component challenged her thinking about how various facets of people’s lives (such as those we list above) and the contexts in which they live, work and are schooled, affect how they are perceived, what they know, and can do.     

The “Batman Effect”: Improving Perseverance in Young Children

This study investigated the benefits of self‐distancing (i.e., taking an outsider's view of one's own situation) on young children's perseverance. Four‐ and 6‐year‐old children (N = 180) were asked to complete a repetitive task for 10 min while having the option to take breaks by playing an extremely attractive video game. Six‐year‐olds persevered longer than 4‐year‐olds. Nonetheless, across both ages, children who impersonated an exemplar other—in this case a character, such as Batman—spent the most time working, followed by children who took a third‐person perspective on the self, or finally, a first‐person perspective. Alternative explanations, implications, and future research directions are discussed.