Black Families and Schooling in Rural South Carolina: Families' and Educators' Disjunctive Interpretations of Parental Involvement

The positive impact on children's educational trajectories when effective home-school partnerships are established has been extensively documented. This article shares findings from a 13-month research study in a rural, southern community in South Carolina that sought to investigate the nature of the “partnerships” formed between educators and families, while challenging stereotypes and misperceptions that prevent such partnerships from unfolding. In doing so, the researcher makes visible the experiences of Black families, students, and schools in communities rarely studied—poor, rural Black communities in the southern United States. The researcher uses the actual words of the teachers and parents to make visible the disjunctive interpretations about one of the major themes from the study, parental involvement as relationships. Finally, the researcher offers implications for educators and parents as they do the work necessary to form relationships that really benefit students.     

Debating Affirmative Action: Politics,Media, and Equal Opportunity in a “Postracial” America

This article explores how race-conscious education policy is interpreted in the political landscape of a “postracial” America. Based on a qualitative media analysis of the press coverage surrounding Amendment 46, an antiaffirmative action initiative, we examine language, statistics, and messages leveraged by advocates and critics of the ballot measure. We argue that despite using some of the same data sources, terms, and concepts, proponents and opponents of Amendment 46 proposed divergent policies. We analyzed this phenomenon vis-à-vis the framework of conflicting racial projects (Omi &; Winant, 1994 Omi, M. and Winant, H. 1994. Racial formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s, New York, NY: Routledge.  [Google Scholar]), moral paradigms of race (Loury, 2002 Loury, G. 2002. The anatomy of racial inequality, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.  [Google Scholar]), and interpretations of equality of educational opportunity (Howe, 1997 Howe, K. 1997. Understanding equal educational opportunity: Social justice, democracy and schooling, New York, NY: Teachers College Press.  [Google Scholar]). Arguably, the public's understanding of race-conscious education policies relies in part on opportunities for researchers, journalists, and the public to deliberate about issues related to race. We conclude with some recommendations for fostering more communication and understanding based in deliberative democratic theory (Gutmann &; Thompson, 1996 Gutmann, A. and Thompson, D. 1996. Democracy and disagreement, Cambridge, MA: Belknap.  [Google Scholar], 2004).     

The Need for Critical Media Literacy In Teacher Education Core Curricula

The "information era" has brought up new literacies, although most of them are still not part of the K–12 curriculum or the teacher education curriculum. One of these new literacies is critical media literacy. The purpose of this article is to document the urgency for including this new literacy in school and teacher education curricula given the crucial role of media as they touch every issue impacting human life in society. Critical media literacy as understood here includes three dimensions: (1) develop a critical understanding of how corporate for-profit media work, driven by their political and economic vested interests; (2) search for and support alternative, nonprofit media; and (3) characterize the role of teachers in helping students and their parents to become media-literate users and supporters of alternative media. Critical media literacy is founded on the legitimate role of media to serve the public's right to be truly informed, and thereby serve democracy. However, currently we are witnessing an unprecedented concentration of for-profit media into conglomerates, in alliance with the government and especially with the federal regulating agency—Federal Communications Commission—and other powerful institutions and corporations. Starting with this big picture, we examine and document specific cases that illustrate how these conglomerates and their allies work to keep and to expand their power, by means of filtering information, manufacturing consent, and controlling what the public watch, listen to, read, think, believe, taste, dress, look like, speak, and how they perceive themselves. The propaganda behind the banning of bilingual education in California is a clear example in the educational arena of the role of media in helping powerful people to manufacture voters' consent through fabricated stories, misleading ballot question, biased polls, etc. The second dimension of critical media literacy refers to the active involvement of every person, including school children, to support and advocate for alternative, nonprofit, public service-driven media. Given the reasons and the evidence presented, the authors consider that there is an urgency for including critical media literacy in the K–12 school curricula, and therefore in the teacher education core curriculum.     

Timeless and timely issues in distance education planning

Abstract

Distance education planners make complex decisions that result in substantial investments and have long‐term implications. This article provides a framework to categorize planning issues into four distinct program stages and three decision areas. The framework brings to the surface and highlights numerous areas of uncertainty and potential disagreement among decision makers and provides an organizing backdrop to improve the distance education planning process.     

The Mother-in-Law Effect: Managing the Publicity of Personal Content Online

Audiences are what lend the “social” to social media. However, not all publics are equally welcomed by social media users, especially personal bloggers. Blog authors frequently exclude particular groups or types of people from their online content. As they negotiate the interplay of audience and blog, authors continuously create and destroy mediated publics, which are an important feature of the contemporary public/private distinction. The ways in which they manage those publics depend on the interplay of content and audiences. The creation and exclusion of numerous mediated blog publics illustrates a shift in the public/private distinction.     

Keeping our teachers! Investigating mentoring practices to support and retain novice educators

For this study the researchers used data from the 2006 North Carolina Teacher Working Conditions survey to investigate the possible relationship between mentoring and intentionality with respect to beginning teachers’ intentions to remain in the profession. The sample consists of 8838 teachers who were mentored during their first two years of teaching. To determine whether the quality of mentoring is related to teachers’ intentions to stay or leave the profession, mentor matching, degree of support, and frequency of interactions were variables examined. Beginning teachers who were matched by grade level, who received assistance with the supports investigated, and who met with mentors at least once monthly for the specified activities were more likely to commit to remaining in the profession than their peers who had received less support.     

Toward a critical rhetoric of risk communication: Producing citizens and the role of technical communicators

In this article, we build on arguments in risk communication that the predominant linear risk communication models are problematic for their failure to consider audience and additional contextual issues. The “failure”; of these risk communication models has led, some scholars argue, to a number of ethical and communicative problems. We seek to extend the critique, arguing that “risk”; is socially constructed. The claim for the social construction of risk has significant implications for both risk communication and the roles of technical communicators in risk situations. We frame these implications as a “critical rhetoric”; of risk communication that (1) dissolves the separation of risk assessment from risk communication to locate epistemology within communicative processes; (2) foregrounds power in risk communication as a way to frame ethical audience involvement; (3) argues for the technical communicator as one possessing the research and writing skills necessary for the complex processes of constructing and communicating risk.     

The Next Generation of Community College Leaders

Nearly a decade ago, Sullivan presented her interpretation of the four generations of community college leaders by describing them as “the founding fathers, the good managers, the collaborators, and the millennium generation” (Sullivan, 2001 Sullivan , L. G. ( 2001 ). Four generations of community college leadership . Community College Journal of Research and Practice , 25 , 559 – 571 .[Taylor & Francis Online] , [Google Scholar], p. 559). She predicted a shift to frames utilizing the Four-Frame Model of Leadership by Bolman and Deal (1991 Bolman , L. G. , & Deal , T. E. (1991). Leadership and management effectiveness: A multi-frame, multi-sector analysis. Human Resource Management , 30, 509–534.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]). This article provides a discussion of the research that has been published using the Bolman and Deal model and a synopsis of the current leadership challenges faced by community college leaders. And finally, a new prediction is made of the values, skills, and frames needed for these leaders.     

Policy making 2.0: From theory to practice

Government agencies are gradually moving from simpler towards more sophisticated and complex practices of social media use, which are characterized by important innovations at the technological, political and organizational level. This paper intends to provide two contributions to the current discourse about such advanced approaches to social media exploitation. The first is of practical nature and has to do with assessing the potential and the challenges of a centralized cross-platform approach to social media by government agencies in their policy making processes. The second contribution is of theoretical nature and consists in the development of a multi-dimensional framework for an integrated evaluation of such advanced practices of social media exploitation in public policy making from technological, political and organizational perspectives, drawing from theoretical constructs from different domains. The proposed framework is applied for the evaluation of a pilot consultation campaign conducted in Italy using multiple social media and concerning the large scale application of a telemedicine program.     

Do Off-Campus Students Still Use Document Delivery? Current Trends

ABSTRACT

The tremendous increase in the availability of full text electronic resources has been particularly beneficial to distance education students who do not have easy access to print collections. However, Western Michigan University (WMU) has been experiencing a decrease in requests for traditional document delivery of print based materials. This article presents a case study of WMU document delivery services for the distance education community. A survey was also conducted of libraries serving distance education programs to determine whether other institutions are also experiencing a decrease in usage of document delivery. Survey results show a more universal trend toward decreasing requests for delivery of print based articles; book requests are also decreasing but not at the same rate. The article concludes with some possible reasons for the decrease in usage of document delivery for distance education.