Career quandaries of activist environmental engineering graduates in Indonesia

Abstract

This article reports on a study that aimed to investigate how young Indonesians might become environmentalists, and what happens when they do. It uses a Bourdieusian framework to analyse interviews with six Indonesian environmental engineering students who took an active role in environmental conservation campaigns while studying at the prestigious University of Technology Bandung (ITB) in Indonesia. In 2014, they were pondering the challenge of negotiating an environmentally defensible career after graduation from their degree. Four years later, in 2018 follow-up contact, it was evident that while they still operated a moral responsibility of conservation and care for the natural world, not all of them had found the dream jobs they imagined as earnest undergraduates keen to protect the natural environment. Yet most had maintained their ‘ecological habitus’ even as they sought to make good on the institutionalised cultural capital invested in their undergraduate degree in environmental engineering. This article examines that journey.     

Transgender Issues in Counselor Preparation

The emergent consciousness and political activism emanating from the transgender community have important implications for counselor education. Treatment issues are no longer exclusively centered on aiding “gender dysphoric” individuals to assume either a “male” or “female” gender but rather on exploring alternative gender identifications and options. Counselor educators and supervisors need to model for their students a “trans‐positive” approach to counseling that affirms and celebrates individuals with nontraditional gender identities.     

The meaning of out-of-field teaching for educational leadership

Assigning teachers to a position for which they are not suitably qualified influences effective educational leadership. The paper reveals assumptions and misconceptions about the lived experiences of teachers in out-of-field positions and what it means for effective educational leadership. The multilayered meaning of out-of-field teaching for quality education is an international concern which includes countries such as Australia, USA, UK, Korea, Europe, Turkey and South Africa. The paper reports on a transnational qualitative investigation conducted in Australia and South Africa at seven schools in different educational environments. The meaning of lived experiences in relation to out-of-field teaching and educational leadership is explored through the lenses of educational directors, principals, specialist and out-of-field teachers and parents. An in-depth discussion of the practical and social implications unveils taken-for-granted traditions and cultures in relation to out-of-field teaching. The paper concludes with an in-depth discussion of the meaning out-of-field teaching has for educational leadership, while it underlines specific complexities for decision-making and policy development. The need for further research in relation to educational leadership training and professional development in relation to the out-of-field situation is revealed.     

Gender differences when choosing school subjects: Parental push and career pull. Some tentative hypotheses

The literature has made us all aware of large gender differences in students' atttudes to science, in enrolment statistics in upper high school and tertiary level science courses, and in different spheres of employment. What have not been looked at in detail are the factors which are influential when students begin to make choices in early high school, choices which may well set them on a particular pathway from which it is difficult to turn. This preliminary study identifies factors which students in a Year 9 class believed were influential on the limited subject choices they had been able to make in Years 8 and 9, and the factors they believed would be most influential on choices to be made later in the school. In addition the students' views of science, of the separate sciences, and of their anticipated career patterns were sought. Several interesting findings were made which, if validated in further work, could lead to strategies which would support other approaches designed to reduce gender imbalances related to science. Specializations: non-scientific conceptions and conceptual change, problem solving, science teacher education. Specializations: Gender issues.     

What do Parents Mean when they Talk About ‘Discipline’ in Relation to their Children's Schools?

We interviewed 28 parents who had at least one child who had just finished compulsory schooling in the state sector. We asked them about their choice of school and their experience of compulsory schooling for their child. Discipline was a key element in their responses. We analysed the data to elucidate the different ways in which ‘discipline’ was of significance for these parents. We examined why they talked about discipline in this way. These included reference to employability, a concern for the ‘moral order’ and the maintenance of adult authority. We attempted to understand what was being said by seeing it as embedded in their way of life. Power relations between adult/child and resulting from social location were relevant to this understanding.     

Knowledge management support for teachers

Business organizations worldwide are implementing techniques and technologies to better manage their knowledge. Their objective is to improve the quality of the contributions people make to their organizations by helping them to make sense of the context within which the organization exists; to take responsibility, cooperate, and share what they know and learn; and to effectively challenge, negotiate, and learn from others. We consider how the concepts, tools, and techniques of organizational knowledge management can be applied to the professional practices and development of teachers. We describe a framework for knowledge management support for teachers where the sharing of concrete knowledge scaffolds the attainment of more abstract levels of knowledge sharing. We describe the development of a knowledge management support system emphasizing long-term participatory design relationships between technologists and teachers, regional cooperation among teachers in adjacent school divisions, the integration of communication and practice, synchronous and asynchronous interactions, and multiple metaphors for organizing knowledge resources and activities. This work was supported by the National Science Foundation, REC-0106552.     

Investigating epistemological beliefs in vocational education for child care workers: New ways of thinking about learning and training

Epistemological beliefs (beliefs about knowing and knowledge) have provided interesting insights into effective teaching and learning in higher education over the last 30 years. However, to date, little research has taken place in regard to teaching and learning in the technical and further education (TAFE) context in Australia. Seventeen 1^st and 2^nd year child care students studying for a Diploma in Children's Services were interviewed about the nature of their epistemological beliefs. The findings revealed new ways of thinking about evaluativistic beliefs, described as “practical evaluativism”. These beliefs may have implications for the way in which students evaluate theory and practice for implementation in their own child care practice.     

Continuity and change in levels of externalizing behavior in school of children from economically disadvantaged families

This study used a person-centered approach to understand continuity and change in the externalizing behavior of children from economically disadvantaged families (N = 134). Groups of children differed in showing high levels of externalizing behavior in first grade (7 years old) that persisted (persistent problem) or decreased (improver) in third grade (9 years old) and low levels in first grade that were stable (unproblematic) or increased (new problem) in third grade. The results showed that verbal ability, behavioral impulsivity, parent maladjustment, and harsh parenting distinguished the persistent problem and unproblematic groups. Family instability was associated with change for the improver and new problem groups. The results suggest the importance of examining changes in the early adjustment to school for children from economically disadvantaged families.     

Epistemic explanations for divergent evolution in discourses regarding students’ extended historical writing in England

In England, two concurrent but largely disconnected discourses have emerged whose representatives have promulgated initiatives relevant to students’ extended historical writing: genre theorists and the history teachers’ ‘extended writing movement’. Despite certain goals held in common, the two discourses have tended to talk past one another resulting in wastage, incoordination and replication in resourcing. One reason for these divergent discourses is that inter-discursive communication is difficult owing to epistemic differences regarding what the curricular goals regarding students’ extended historical writing should be. Using Bernstein’s model for the production of pedagogic knowledge as an interpretative framework, first I explain these discourses’ differing curricular conceptions by characterizing it as a tension between contrasting emphases on ‘recontextualization’ and ‘reproduction’ of academic knowledge. Second, as a representative of the extended writing movement, I offer a theoretical critique of genre theorists’ greater concentration on the field of reproduction. Third, I situate these developments in England in an international context by briefly comparing them to trends in the United States. Finally, I argue that these epistemic tensions regarding curricular goals matter and need to be resolved. Otherwise, the recommendations of the representatives of both discourses are destined to appeal to only limited audiences.