‘A space for you to be who you are’: an ethnographic portrait of reterritorializing Indigenous student identities

ABSTRACT

This article explores the discourse practices of an Indigenous, community-based charter school and its efforts to create space for Indigenous both/and identities across rural–urban divides. The ethnographic portrait of Urban Native Middle School (UNMS) analyzes the discourse of making ‘a space for you’, which brings together rural and urban youth to braid binary constructs such as Indigenous and western knowledge, into a discourse of Indigenous persistence constraining contexts of schooling. We use the concept of ‘reterritorialization’ to discuss the significance of UNMS’s community effort to create a transformative space and place of educational opportunity with youth. The local efforts of this small community to reterritorialize schooling were ultimately weakened under the one-size-fits-all accountability metrics of No Child Left Behind policy. This ethnographic analysis ‘talks back’ to static definitions of identity, space and learning outcomes which fail to recognize the dynamic and diverse interests of Indigenous communities across rural – urban landscapes.     

Child abuse: A study of the child''s perspective

This study ascertained the child's response to various types of abuse and neglect. With interviews and questionnaires for the staff of a child psychiatric unit, the mothers and the children involved, we assessed the severity, frequency and duration of physical abuse, verbal abuse, physical neglect, emotional neglect or sexual abuse of children. The physically abused children accepted blame for mild but not severe mistreatment. Verbally and sexually abused children did not believe it was their fault if the mistreatment was moderately extensive but did if it was mild or severe. The relationship between extent of abuse and blame was less clear for neglect, but children usually though it was their fault. Verbal and sexual abuse appeared to have a greater impact on the children's perception of themselves and the world. Verbally abused children were more angry and more pessimistic about their future. Although physical abuse appeared to make some children feel they were unwanted at birth, how much the mother wanted her children was not related to the extent of any type of abuse. Both the type and extent of mistreatment appear to have different effects on the child's subjective experience. The use of the visual analogue scale in this study made it possible to differentiate a continuum of severity and frequency of five types of mistreatment without the need for definition.     

Progressive Development of Deep Learning Skills Through Undergraduate and Postgraduate Dissertations

A dissertation is an integral part of Higher National Diploma (HND), Bachelor of Science with Honours (BSc(Hons)) and taught Master of Science (MSc) programmes and should reflect differences in learning styles as appropriate to each level.

The dissertation requirements and assessment procedures within ten environment‐related undergraduate and postgraduate programmes were examined using the ‘framework’ approach. Two themes were examined in detail: a quantitative evaluation of characteristics which define the physical dimensions of the dissertation; and a qualitative analysis of the academic rationale, aims, objectives and learning outcomes, as well as the associated assessment criteria.

It is possible to differentiate between levels in terms of these two themes. There were greater similarities between the dissertations at HND and BSc(Hons) levels than between BSc(Hons) and MSc levels. Each dissertation occupies a separate, distinct place along a progressive development of a deep learning style.     

International student demand for higher education in the United States

Foreign students have been attending colleges and universities in the United States at rapidly increasing rates since the late 1960s. Due particularly to demographic changes and cost considerations, U.S. universities have accepted and grown somewhat dependent on these foreign students. This raises the questions of what caused the increased international demand for U.S. education and will that demand continue to grow? We attempt here to provide a theoretical model of educational demand and to test the model employing both time series and cross-sectional data. First, we give background information and a brief literature survey; then we develop the model. Next, we test the model by examining the time series evidence. We then present cross-sectional findings employing the Zellner SUR technique. The paper concludes with policy implications.     

太阳能捕集器

太阳每天向地球倾泻成万倍于人类活动所需的能量,人们需要解决如何廉价地开发太阳能的问题.而自然界则不存在这个问题."太阳能电池"就长在树上,绿叶的光合作用把太阳光转化为化学能,几乎为一切自然生态系统提供着能源.的确,人们可以从植物得到启迪:如何充分利用太阳光.     

Levels of phonological awareness and learning to read

The paper reports studies of segmentation performance by a Nursery group of children, who had not yet started to learn to read, and by Primary 1 and 2 groups, who were in the early stages of learning by a standard method of whole word acquisition combined with letter-sound learning. Rhyme and alliteration production tasks were applied, together with segmentation tasks requiring division of monosyllabic words or non-words of simple or complex structure into two parts, three parts, or as many parts as possible. Performance was related to the hierarchical model of the syllable which distinguishes a two-dimensional (2D) level (onset/rime), a three-dimensional (3D) level (initial consonants, vowel, terminal consonants) and many-dimensional (nD) level (phonemes). The hypothesis that phonological awareness (PA) normally develops down the hierarchy, from larger to smaller units, predicts that segmentation ability should emerge in the sequence 2D 3D nD. In practice, the reverse of this order was found. The results are discussed in relation to theories of the relationship between literacy development and the different levels of PA.     

Child abuse and neglect—rare, but perhaps increasing, phenomena among the samia of Kenya

This study shows that child abuse and neglect as understood in the West are comparatively rare phenomena among the Samia of western Kenya. The existence of an extended family situation and a strong clan structure are importantly related to positive care accorded to children. However, due to increased migration to towns, socioeconomic change, and interethnic marriages, the clan unit has been eroded thus resulting in cases of child abuse and neglect. Several such cases are reported in this study. The Samia traditionally practice the “evil eye” which is here considered to be a form of child abuse. Our findings, therefore, also have implications for previous efforts to define child abuse cross-culturally.     

An investigation of the situated learnability effects of single- and dual-modal systems in education: a report of music-oriented learning environment and science computer-assisted teaching studies

The evolution of the World Wide Web has encouraged a huge surfacing of e‐learning technologies over recent years. Often, such technology is rolled out devoid of consideration towards the way in which students process and assimilate information. To date, there exists inconclusive and contradictory evidence concerning learnability effects of single‐ and dual‐model systems in education. To overcome this, we advocate that the design of e‐learning systems requires a managed mix of elements grounded in cognitive psychology. In this paper, we report the results of a study concerned with determining an effective mix of multimedia elements. This is with regard to the situated learnability effects of single‐ and dual‐modal systems tested via ‘text only’ and ‘text and auditory–verbal’ conditions. We report on these experiments using science computer‐assisted teaching and music‐oriented learning environment, e‐learning environments developed to act as test platforms for this research. The results indicated that simultaneous presentation of identical information via text and narration was associated with enhanced learnability.     

大学排行榜之困

大学排行榜在全球各地风靡一时,在21世纪充满竞争、面向市场的学术界,大学排名势所难免,但因评选方法存在诸多缺陷以及排行榜自身的原因,大学排名活动已招致多方批评。排行榜存在的问题跟实践有关,而与原则无关,要解决这些问题,首先应确立公众普遍认可的排名原则,而为这些原则提供合适的衡量办法也必不可少。