From students to teachers: using surveys to build a culture of evidence and inquiry

In an effort to make decisions about teacher education policy and practice that were informed by research and evidence, participants in Boston College's ‘Teachers for a New Era’ Evidence Team (http://www.teachersforanewera.org) designed a portfolio of assessments and studies. This article describes one project in the portfolio – a series of surveys that trace teacher candidates' experiences over time and track shifts in these experiences as respondents progress from students during the pre‐service period to teachers in the first few years of work in the profession. The article illustrates how various constituencies in the teacher education programme and the larger university used survey data to guide practice, shape policies, and raise new questions about the curriculum, relationships with schools, and the performance of teachers and their pupils. The article argues that these surveys helped to create a new ‘culture of evidence and inquiry’ within which decisions about local policy and practice were made in the teacher preparation programme and the larger university.     

Globalisation,mergers and ‘inadvertent multi-campus universities’: reflections from Wales

Multi-site universities face the challenge of integrating campuses that may have different profiles and orientations arising from place-specific attachments. Multi-campus universities created via mergers seeking to ensure long-term financial sustainability, and increasing their attractiveness to students, create a tension in campuses’ purposes. We explore how mergers in Wales created ‘inadvertent’ multi-campus universities whilst attempting to increase their overall competitiveness. We highlight three tensions that mergers created for contributing to local places, firstly a tendency for internal concentration, investing for growth in metropolitan not peripheral campuses; secondly, to looking beyond traditional local campuses and creating external campuses (in this case in London); and thirdly, to specialise campuses on the basis of attracting external students not local needs. This creates a substantial challenge for managing multi-campus universities if they are to continue to be able to support the prosperity of more remote regions in an increasingly knowledge-based economy.     

Peer feedback mediates the impact of self-regulation procedures on strategy use and reading comprehension in reciprocal teaching groups

The goal of this research was to highlight the role social regulatory processes play in making students’ teamwork in reciprocal teaching (RT) groups (a classroom activity in which students take the teacher’s role in small group reading sessions) effective. In addition to teamwork quality, we expected peer feedback to be a key factor in enhancing students’ reading comprehension achievements. Because previous research (Schünemann et al. in Contemp Educ Psychol 38:289–305, 2013) has shown that procedures of self-regulated learning (SRL) augment the effects of RT methods, we further assumed that such procedures would promote the quality of students’ collaborative efforts. In a cluster-randomized trial, students in 12 fifth-grade classes practiced a strategic approach to reading either in a RT condition or in a RT + SRL condition. In one of the 14 sessions, students’ interactive behavior was videotaped. Strategy use and reading comprehension were assessed at pretest, posttest, and maintenance. Performance differences between conditions were reliable only at maintenance. A multilevel mediation analysis showed that relative to RT students, RT + SRL students were better able to provide their teammates with informative feedback and organize their group work in a task-focused manner. Only feedback quality mediated the sustainability of treatment effects on strategy use and reading comprehension. In essence, this research suggests that effective reading comprehension trainings should integrate explicit instruction and practice in reading strategies, SRL, and focus on supportive peer processes in small groups with extensive instruction and practice in peer feedback.     

Assessment matters: Considering the scholarship of teaching and learning in student affairs

Tony Ribera, Sarah Fernandez, and Matt Gray apply a scholarly approach to assessing student learning in the cocurriculum.     

Intimate partner violence in the family: Considerations for children's safety

Children's exposure to intimate partner violence (IPV) is increasingly recognized as a type of child maltreatment that has a level of impairment similar to other types of abuse and neglect. Despite advances in the area of IPV, the safety planning strategies recommended as part of the overall response to IPV need to be examined in terms of their implications for children. This article discusses these strategies within the context of child safety, comparing IPV safety planning with approaches aimed at reducing exposure to other types of violence such as child sexual abuse, as well as general child safety strategies. Despite the emphasis on safety planning in information available on responding to IPV, the actual effectiveness of such planning in improving safety and reducing violence is unknown. Safety planning provided to children by a parent experiencing IPV, especially when IPV is ongoing and not recognized by anyone outside the home, may lead to confusing messages for children, particularly if there is an emphasis on secrecy. While awaiting evidence about the effectiveness of specific safety planning strategies for children, we suggest basic principles and general strategies that emphasize universality in terms of education about any type of violence or abuse in the home being unacceptable, as well as the need to focus on safety in general.     

Between Asia and empire: infrastructures of encounter in the archive of war

ABSTRACT

In this essay, we stage a conversation about our experiences researching everyday histories of encounter between Asian and Asian diasporic subjects during the Pacific and Vietnam Wars. Through readings of materials from the archives of two empires, Britain and the United States, with bloody records of military intervention in east and south-east Asia, we show how wartime inter-Asian, Afro-Asian, and Asian diasporic geographies of relation overlapped with and animated one another, helping to (re)produce trans-local communities of affinity over space and time even as they also functioned as infrastructures for empire. Throughout, we reflect on the infrastructures – material, institutional, epistemological, affective – that make inter-referencing possible, both for our subjects and, importantly, for ourselves. If our archives resonate, what does this tell us about the trans-imperial durability of the intimate infrastructures we show taking shape in 1940s China and 1960s Vietnam respectively?     

The rise of the organisational society in Canadian and U.S. textbooks: 1836-2011

ABSTRACT

This paper examines how organisations have increasingly been portrayed in textbooks as solving social problems as well as contributing to national development. Findings from 527 Canadian and U.S. textbooks illustrate the rise of an organisational society during the time period between 1836 and 2011. Discussions of for-profit and non-profit forms of organisations rise early on in both countries, creating the foundation for an organisational society, which expands to incorporate global organisations in the post-World War II period. We argue that such portrayals in textbooks both reflect and legitimise the role of organisations in society, strengthening their taken-for-granted status as social actors.     

Charting a Course toward Embracing Evolving Technical Services Horizons

ABSTRACT

Technical Services departments have been navigating rough and uncertain waters while charting courses toward hazy horizons for years. Battling swelling expenses, blustering winds of reduced resources, and tumultuous tempests of electronic resources clashing with print resources, we steer toward an increasingly digital skyline with steadily leaner crews, needing support and new skills to sail these seas of continuous change and challenge. Now more than ever it is necessary to build a team empowered to maneuver efficiently and effectively. Leading and managing are central to positioning for and embracing these emerging horizons. The presenters have been studying and implementing various aspects of “servant leadership” with an eye toward growing people within our departments and communicating in multiple directions. During this session, we will focus particularly on the following processes: discernment, discovering purpose, and building capacity (relationships and communication). This presentation will explore the what, how, where, who, and when for leading and managing toward our Technical Services horizons.     

Luce Pathways Project: A Pilot Project for Heritage Language Speakers of Mandarin Chinese,Spanish, and Japanese

This article describes the development process of a project for heritage language speakers of Mandarin Chinese, Spanish, and Japanese at a high-enrollment community college in the northeast United States. This pilot project, funded by the Henry Luce Foundation, aimed to empower minority group students through active reinforcement of students’ heritage language and culture, crossdisciplinary faculty collaboration, and a cohort-based advisement model. The pilot project consisted of mentorship by faculty members who shared the same heritage language and culture, incorporation of heritage language and international business courses into students’ curricula, and weekly seminars that focused on developing students’ heritage culture and professional skills. A cohort of nine students demonstrated that such a model is effective for minority students by achieving a remarkably high completion rate (66.67%) compared with an average rate for public 2-year institutions in the United States (21.20%).