The Difficulty of Teacher Dispositions: Considering Professional Dispositions for Preservice English Teachers

This article explores the place of teacher dispositions in English teacher preparation by contextualizing the issue of dispositions in English teacher preparation. This allows consideration for the importance of developing professional dispositions during English teacher preparation by recognizing that various stakeholders (teacher educators, university supervisors, mentor teachers, and preservice teachers) in teacher education often understand dispositions differently. The authors reflect and offer suggestions on how professional dispositions might be more effectively addressed in an English teacher education program through richer interactions among all stakeholders.     

Education and Leisure: a reappraisal

Early years education and special needs education have been the focus of UK government interest in recent years, with a strong emphasis on ‘joined up thinking’ across professional boundaries in order to plan and provide cohesive and increasingly inclusive programmes of education and care. This article considers the potential for joined up thinking and action across the early years and special needs education domains with the argument that there is often neglected common ground between the two, such as the shared need for a holistic perspective, partnership with parents, multidisciplinary collaboration and developmentally appropriate practice. Examples are provided from the UK context but the debates are relevant more widely. The article ends with an exploration of why this potential has often not been realised, arguing that separate histories and vulnerabilities and a desire to avoid parallel stigma are partly responsible.     

Learning from older citizens’ research groups

ABSTRACT

This article adds to an ongoing conversation in gerontology about the importance of training and involving older people in research. Currently, the literature rarely distinguishes between the one-off involvement of older citizens in research projects and the development of research groups led by older people that sustain over time as well as the nature of educational initiatives that support their development. This article presents a case-study based on evaluative data from the WhyNot! Older Citizens’ Research Group that has been running independently for nearly eight years. Members’ evaluations of, and reflections on, the impact of the training program explore from their perspective: Why older people want to get involved in research training and research groups, what they value most in the training, and the types of impact their involvement has had. Creating an educational environment where participants were able to contribute their knowledge in a new context as well learn new skills through group-work based experiential learning were key. Regular role-modeling provided by inputs from successful established citizen research groups was also important. Of the many benefits members gained from being part of a research group, emphasis was given to the relational aspects of the experience. Likewise the benefits members’ accorded to taking part in training and research transcended individual benefits encompassing benefits to the collective and the wider community. Linking health, social care and educational policies is important in providing coherence and opportunity for older people’s voices to shape research, policy, and practice.     

“I’m not running around with my pants sagging, so how am I not acting like a lady?”: Intersections of Race and Gender in the Experiences of Female Middle School Troublemakers

Careful examination of the discipline gap reveals growing disproportionality in the use of exclusionary discipline measures with female students of color, particularly African American females. Most often, adolescent girls of color are disciplined for subjectively defined behaviors, or behaviors considered inappropriate by educators. This study seeks to understand how seven middle school girls of color explain and justify their compliant and noncompliant behaviors and how their interactions with educators shape their beliefs about such behaviors. Using the theory of intersectionality, we examine how these girls both experience oppression and resist it within various domains of power. Findings show that a hostile school environment characterized by a lack of academic and social support, challenges to justice and fairness, presumptions of guilt, miscommunications and misunderstandings, and peer conflict alienates these young females of color from the learning process. Additionally, findings suggest participants strive to be heard and respected at school, using it as a site of resistance and reflecting their individual empowerment and self-advocacy.     

Characteristics of teaching and students’ emotions in the classroom: Investigating differences across domains

This study investigated the relations between eight characteristics of teaching and students’ academic emotions (enjoyment, pride, anxiety, anger, helplessness and boredom) across four academic domains (mathematics, physics, German, and English). 121 students (50% female; 8th and 11th graders) were asked about their perceptions of teaching characteristics and their academic emotions using the experience sampling method (real-time approach) for a period of 10 school days, with intraindividual analyses conducted using a multilevel approach. Multilevel exploratory factor analysis revealed that the eight teaching characteristics (understandability, illustration, enthusiasm, fostering attention, lack of clarity, difficulty, pace, level of expectation) represented two factors, labeled supportive presentation style (e.g., comprising understandability) and excessive lesson demands (e.g., comprising difficulty). In line with our hypothesis, we found clear relations on the intraindividual level between the two factors of teaching characteristics and students’ academic emotions in the classroom (e.g., supportive presentation style positively related to students’ enjoyment and negatively related to their boredom). Further, and supporting the universality assumption of teaching characteristics/academic emotions relations, the strength of relations between the two factors of teaching characteristics and academic emotions was very similar across the four academic domains. Implications for future research and educational practice are discussed.     

Comparison of Research Speed and Accuracy Using WestlawNext and Lexis Advance

ABSTRACT

In 2010, Thomson Reuters released a new search engine to the legal academy called WestlawNext. WestlawNext's single-search-box approach revolutionized the legal research process. LexisNexis followed with its own next-generation search engine, Lexis Advance. This study compares the speed and accuracy of WestlawNext and Lexis Advance for basic legal research questions. Fifty-five participants answered five legal questions in each system. We reviewed their results and research trails to determine how the systems compared on speed and accuracy. Our results indicate few significant differences between the two systems for basic legal research tasks utilizing keyword searches.     

Resilience in Families Caring for a Family Member Diagnosed with Dementia

The aim of this study was to identify and explore factors associated with family resilience in families caring for a demented family member. A mixed-methods approach was utilized to collect data from a convenience sample of spouses acting as primary caregivers of patients and living in the Cape Metropolitan area of the Western Cape, South Africa. The sample was comprised of families in which a spouse (n = 44) was caring for a partner with dementia. The quantitative data analysis was conducted using analyses of variance, Pearson's product-moment correlation coefficients, and a best-subsets multiple regression analysis. Qualitative data were analyzed using thematic content analysis. It was found that social support, positive communication patterns, acceptance, optimism, family hardiness, family connectedness, and the effective management of symptoms facilitated the resilience process in these families. In addition to expanding the current literature regarding family resilience, the findings of this study could be used to develop interventions tailored to the needs of these families caring for dementia patients to create a family environment that enhances adjustment and adaptation.     

Predicting Individual Variation in Language From Infant Speech Perception Measures

There are increasing reports that individual variation in behavioral and neurophysiological measures of infant speech processing predicts later language outcomes, and specifically concurrent or subsequent vocabulary size. If such findings are held up under scrutiny, they could both illuminate theoretical models of language development and contribute to the prediction of communicative disorders. A qualitative, systematic review of this emergent literature illustrated the variety of approaches that have been used and highlighted some conceptual problems regarding the measurements. A quantitative analysis of the same data established that the bivariate relation was significant, with correlations of similar strength to those found for well‐established nonlinguistic predictors of language. Further exploration of infant speech perception predictors, particularly from a methodological perspective, is recommended.