An investigation of citizenship construction among students in higher education: a Foucauldian perspective

Higher Education - This study, adopting the Foucauldian lenses of citizenship, investigates how a group of students understand the prevailing social discourses and how such understanding and...     

Mask-making as identity project in a high school English class: a case study

This study reports on the composing process of one student, Peta (a pseudonym), as he reflects on a significant composition he produced during a unit on identity in a 12th‐grade English class in a U. S. high school. The unit was the first thematic exploration of the year for the students and was designed to help them think about themselves as readers, writers, and individuals. The teacher's goal was to have students' engagements with literary and artistic texts serve as vehicles for developing better understandings of themselves. The study demonstrates how students' engagement with more ‘traditional’ artefacts is essentially an example of multimodality and evidences why teachers and researchers should see such work as part of the long tradition of creativity within English. It also demonstrates how such an apparently ‘traditional’ artistic approach in fact covers the same territory as that of the digital revolution, that is that multimodal ‘tools’ engage all the cultural resources of students from their domestic, community and school settings, in contrast with much typical school activity that is perceived as pointless and tedious.     

Costing the library services. Cairns Library: a casestudy

In the presentclimate libraries have to adopt a business approach to funding submissions; detailed managementinformation must be produced in support of expenditure and to ensure that the services are cost-effective. In addition to the grant from its parent body (the Faculty of Clinical Medicine,University of Oxford), the Cairns Library obtains funding from five other bodies, includingNational Health Service Hospital Trusts. The Cairns Library has introdu ies anduser education. The costs for each package have been apportioned to the funding bodies on thebasis of the number of registered users from each body.     

The importance of environment for teacher professional learning in Malta and Scotland

Current reforms in the Maltese and Scottish educational contexts can only be fully implemented if teachers radically transform the way they teach. Teacher professional learning is an important mechanism that policy-makers, school leaders and administrators have to achieve this. Teacher professional learning is, above all, situated within the specific social workplace environment of teacher practice. Thus, schools need to be recognised as important sites of professional learning for teachers. In Malta and Scotland teachers were asked about their professional learning to identify how the learning environment within individual schools affects professional learning. In both countries, collaboration and school leadership were key components in determining a school’s learning environment. Data analysis led to the production of examples of expansive and restrictive features. Policy-makers, school leaders and administrators can use these features to examine how schools operate in terms of helping or hindering professional learning in the school environment.     

Childhood Adversity and Self-Care Education for Undergraduate Social Work and Human Services Students

Many students pursuing social work and human services courses have experienced adverse childhoods. This article focuses on their learning about self-care, an important skill for future practice. Interviews with 20 undergraduate students with a history of childhood adversity found unmet needs both for conceptualizing self-care and developing strategies to implement self-care in their day-to-day lives. Many cited limited role modeling and little importance placed on self-care during childhood. Teaching self-care is conceptualized as not only a core skill for practice but also an equity issue for students with a history of childhood adversity.     

Leveraging critical literacies for social change: questioning the culture of compliance at an ‘F’ school

This article traces the experiences of two veteran elementary school teachers in the urban Southwest, who are positioned by district and state policy ‘texts’ as insubordinate and failing, and who employ critical literacy practices to reconstruct and redesign these texts as they seek to create more equitable and humane conditions in schools. Stemming from a larger phenomenological study, this article explores how teachers in a ‘failing’ elementary school in the Southwestern US understand and negotiate district, state, and federal policies and examines how these policies shape and inform their identities as professionals. This research has important implications concerning the potential of critical literacy as a mode of resistance, the promise inherent in school/university partnerships for promoting change, and the ways in which the practice of deconstructing/reconstructing dehumanizing texts can foster a re-professionalization of teaching.