Arts education partnerships: sources of harmony and dissonance with cultural institutions’ collaborative efforts

ABSTRACT

Due to budget constraints, schools in the United States have increasingly turned to community arts organizations for support. School-community arts partnership stakeholders collaborate because of shared missions to provide students with valuable arts learning experiences. Investigations of these initiatives indicate that these partnerships improve arts learning opportunities and increase public support and resources for arts education. However, not much is known about the experiences and perspectives of the arts organizations that participate in these partnerships. Coordinating collective efforts with a multitude of institutions and interests poses challenges. In this study, we examine survey data collected from arts organization administrators who participated in a large-scale school-community arts partnership initiative. We find that these organizations are generally positive about their impacts on students’ educational outcomes, but there is substantial variation in these views. We also find that organizations differ in their levels of support for these collective efforts. Sources of this variation appear to be attributable to organizations’ preexisting resources and extent to which they are established. While this difference in levels of support is potentially inevitable, we find evidence that the operations handled by the “backbone” organization, i.e. the initiative’s facilitators and overseers, can significantly influence organizations’ levels of support for these efforts. Organizations are more likely to support these collaborative efforts when they believe the backbone organization ensures transparency with initiative operations, provides regular, effective communication, and effectively resolves competing priorities.     

Mixed Reality Lab at Mississippi State University Libraries

Virtual and Augmented Realities are advancing technologies that are becoming more popular in gaming and programming communities. However, virtual reality has been in development for decades. As libraries are often at the forefront of offering new and advancing technologies to their communities, virtual and augmented reality programs have become new additions to library services. While gaming is the prominent use of these technologies, virtual and augmented reality affords many educational opportunities. Mississippi State University Libraries have recently added a virtual/augmented reality lab as part of its library program.     

Quality of Life of Children with Learning Disabilities: A Comparison of Self‐Reports and Proxy Reports

This study aimed to explore how children with learning disabilities (LD) perceive their quality of life (QoL) and to compare self‐reports and proxy reports regarding their QoL. Children with LD, their typically developing peers, their parents and teachers responded to the child, parent, and teacher forms of KINDL^R Questionnaire for Measuring Health‐Related Quality of Life (Ravens‐Sieberer & Bullinger, 1998). Findings showed that children with LD reported significantly lower QoL scores than those reported by typically developing peers. Intraclass correlation coefficients (ICCs) and t‐test results showed that agreement between child reports and parent‐proxy reports was either low or moderate on each QoL dimension. Findings of the study may be used to raise awareness regarding the social and educational needs of children with LD in Turkey.     

The entrepreneurial university and academic discourses: The meta‐synthesis of Higher Education articles

The innovative teaching, knowledge and technology production and societal service activities of academics are largely discussed within the entrepreneurial university discourse in Higher Education journals. Therefore, this research focuses on a meta‐synthesis of Higher Education articles to better understand the concepts of the entrepreneurial university and entrepreneurial academic. After the systematic elimination based on keywords and titles, 25 articles have been selected from the top 10 Higher Education journals in the SCImago Journal Rankings. Content analysis was performed on these articles to highlight the common operational areas in entrepreneurial universities and activities of entrepreneurial academics. The meta‐synthesis shows that, both for universities and academics, entrepreneurship is overwhelmingly characterised by the commercialisation of scholarly activities that enrich institutional income revenue as well as academics’ personal income. However, such an approach can distance universities from their mission of public good; so Higher Education administrators should create mechanisms that would allow both to take place in a balanced way.     

Exploring an intervention’s impact on everyday school activities

The focus of this paper is on a group of pupils with reading and writing difficulties who have been participating in an intervention study using assistive technology. That intervention study contained supervised training sessions with reading and writing tasks using an iPad with special supportive applications. The current study is a qualitative investigation of whether there has been any transfer from the intervention, to the pupils’ everyday school activities. Interviews with pupils and their teachers and observations during classroom lectures have been used to collect data. The results show that the pupils were positive to the assistive technology (the applications on the iPads), they found the apps easy to learn how to use and they appreciated the benefits they could give. Even so, only a few of the pupils had found use for and continued to use the tools after the intervention period finished. Possible reasons are that when the novelty wore off, students reverted to their usual study habits and that older students with many teachers and different classrooms were less able to adapt to using the apps. To improve transfer, it is suggested to introduce assistive technology earlier to students, in the younger grades, before study habits have been formed and to inform teachers about the use of AT in the classroom, including what is available and how it can benefit students.     

The Human Rights Approach to Education in International Organisations

In this article, the work of three international governmental organisations (IGOs) dealing with human rights will be discussed, namely the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF)¹ and the Council of Europe (CoE). In the first section, the main characteristics of the three IGOs in terms of similarities and differences will be elaborated. Then, their human rights approach to education will be described, dealing with the legal foundations. In the final section, the different strategies of implementation based on both their official mission statements and their present strategy papers will be evaluated under the heading ‘competition vs. cooperation’.     

Physics in upper secondary schools in Denmark

This article is the third in a series reporting on the changes in attitudes and interests‐‐mainly with respect to physics‐of several hundred students as they proceed through the Danish upper secondary school (Gymnasium). It concentrates on the results of the final investigation which took place shortly before the students leave the school.