In Partnership with Industry: The Educational — Industrial Interface

The paper discusses the long-term strategic approach to collaboration between education and industry initiated by Glasgow School of Art's Department of Product Design, and examines the opportunities and benefits of the investment in the post of an Industrial Liaison Officer (ILO) over a four year period which furthered this partnership. The paper shows the need for a professionally and adequately resourced approach to provide mutual benefits to industry and education, and to the economy in general     

Serving Indiana's Emergent Bilingual Immigrant (EBI) Youth: A Collective Case Study of EBI Teacher Educators

ABSTRACT

Unlike states with established immigrant populations, Indiana is a new immigration gateway state that is developing its infrastructure to address immigrant needs. Indiana's English learner (EL) population between 1999 and 2018 has grown by 550% from 9,114 to 59,255 students. Of the current 59,255 ELs in K–12 schools, 24% are immigrants. Employing a collective case study, this article examines how Indiana university faculty prepare pre- and inservice teachers to address the needs of emergent bilingual immigrant (EBI) youth. While there are institutional constraints that impact how EBI youth needs are met, faculty in EL licensure programs are addressing these needs by explicitly facilitating activities that promote respect and develop empathy through perspective sharing. Despite underdeveloped social infrastructures for EBI youth and EBI teachers in Indiana schools, implications suggest that a methodical inclusion of immigration history, perspective-taking, and critical self-reflection can facilitate teacher identity development, and foster their stances of advocacy for EBIs.     

Empowering parents of pre-school children

This paper describes a project undertaken with parents from an inner city primary school in Hartlepool, England. The main objectives of the project were to increase the self esteem of the parents, to give them an understanding of the pre-school curriculum and to enable them to develop their skills, knowledge and confidence to become involved in school life and to take ownership of their own children's education. The project focused around the production of a video to show nursery life in the school and this production was used as a vehicle to encourage the fulfilment of the objectives described above. The paper concludes by describing the successful outcomes of the project. Some of the outcomes were planned for, but we were equally delighted with the unexpected ones.     

Small Group Work in Accounting Education: an evaluation of a programme for first‐year students

One important skill many students develop during their secondary schooling is the ability to work in groups, using the group both as a resource and a support system. At the tertiary level, where the traditional lecture/tutorial format is the main means for course delivery, these skills are not generally afforded formal recognition and often remain under‐utilised. Group work programmes in higher education that have been reported generally describe situations where group work is integrated into tutorials and lectures. This article explores the potential of group work schemes which operate outside the regular timetable. It describes a programme of small collaborative working groups which was offered to students in a first‐year accounting degree course and evaluates the programme's effectiveness in assisting students with their studies, and with their overall integration into university culture. The results, practical considerations for any academics wishing to duplicate the scheme, as well as areas for further research are discussed.     

Story writing skills of adults with a history language-impairment

The purpose of this study was to investigate the story writing skills of adults with a history of oral language impairment. It was hypothesized that writing text would pose difficulty for adults with a history of language impairment (LI), and that this difficulty would manifest itself as reduced grammatical complexity and increased errors in spelling, grammar and punctuation. The story writing of 10 adults with a history of LI was compared to a group of 51 unimpaired individuals. Participants were asked to write the story of Cinderella. Stories were analysed for length, grammatical complexity and accuracy of grammar, punctuation and spelling. Data were analysed to determine group trends as well as individual profiles. As a group, the adults with LI showed no difference from the comparison group in the length of their stories as measured by total number of words. The LI group did, however, show reduced grammatical complexity in their writing, as measured by mean length of t-unit. The LI group made more errors in grammar, spelling and punctuation than the comparison group. Individual analyses indicated substantial variability within the LI group. It is concluded that LI in childhood is associated with writing difficulties in adulthood.     

Learners＇ and teachers＇ conceptions and dispositions of mathematics from a Middle Eastern perspective

The paper discusses an on-going research project that studies students＇ and teachers＇ conceptions and dispositions of mathematics. Conceptions are the views that students hold on a subject, and what they believe is required in learning and doing the subject. Dispositions are the beliefs or tendencies to exhibit a frequent, conscious and voluntary behavior directed towards learning a subject. The participants are high school students, higher education students and mathematics teachers. The study utilizes self-reporting tools as well as focus groups and interviews in a three-stage research model. This is a work on progress. Results to date are briefly discussed.