Reflections of an Online Social Work Professor: Illuminating an Alternative Pedagogy

ABSTRACT

Research in distance education has investigated student satisfaction and learning outcomes, comparing face-to-face with online delivery formats, and tested various technological tools, but has yet to consider alternative pedagogies. Liberatory pedagogy facilitates critical thinking, awareness, reflection and social action around constructs such as race, gender, and class. This paper uses Scholarly Personal Narrative to explore opportunities and challenges of implementing liberatory pedagogy within a virtual classroom. Themes include identity, body, mind, spirit, voice, authenticity, and self-actualization. Liberatory pedagogy emphasizes critical consciousness of oppression, aligns with professional values and ethics, encourages societal well-being, and would appear to enhance online social work education.     

The effect of instruction on early nonword reading strategies

This paper reports the results of a study examining the role of early reading instruction on the nonword reading strategies employed by beginning readers. Three groups of children given different styles of reading instruction were asked to read a list of nonwords presented (a) in isolation and (b) using the clue word technique (Goswami, 1986, 1988). The three groups of children were following either (i) the Early Reading Research project (small units instruction), (ii) the National Literacy Project (instruction emphasising onset‐rime and rhyme awareness), or (iii) usual classroom practice (combined large and small units instruction). Children given small units instruction (Early Reading Research) were found to make significant use of grapheme‐phoneme correspondences (GPCs) and were more accurate than the other two groups of children at reading the nonword items. The National Literacy Project children demonstrated a preference for a rime‐based strategy, once familiarity with the analogous words was controlled, and made significantly more use of this strategy than the Early Reading Research children. The results suggest that early reading instruction does have a significant impact on early reading strategies and should be taken into account in future studies of this type.     

Toward multimodal inquiry: opportunities,challenges and implications of multimodality for research and scholarship

In this article, we suggest that we are witnessing a challenge to the hegemony of text-based knowledge in academic scholarship, brought about by newly available modes of expression, and a cultural shift in our notions of reading and writing, authorship, and networked knowledge production. The central question we address here concerns the implications of widening our ideas of acceptable forms of inquiry, analysis and representation in academic scholarship. As a collective of scholar-practitioners exploring new modes of expression and working both within and outside the formal structures of academia, we argue for the increasing significance of multimodal research in the contemporary context of academic inquiry. By more equitably valuing different ways of thinking, knowing and communicating, multimodal research can facilitate wider and more diverse participation in the production of knowledge, offer a more nuanced and ethical mode of inquiry, emphasize different ways of knowing and connecting, and make scholarship more broadly accessible beyond academic contexts. Here, we analyze the key opportunities facilitated by multimodal inquiry, as well as the obstacles that stand in the way of a wider adoption of this type of research in higher education.     

Reflective analysis as a tool for task redesign: The case of prospective elementary teachers solving and posing fraction comparison problems

Mathematical task design has been a central focus of the mathematics education research community over the last few years. In this study, six university teacher educators from six different US institutions formed a community of practice to explore key aspects of task design (planning, implementing, reflecting, and modifying) in the context of comparing fractions using reasoning and sense-making. By presenting results of their implementation of two tasks with 63 prospective elementary teachers across three institutions and their reflective analysis of the implementation, the authors highlight the importance of collecting and analyzing data and reflecting on this analysis to inform the redesign of tasks. The authors also found that considering different types of tasks (problem solving vs. problem posing) helps illuminate different aspects of prospective elementary teachers' understanding, which can inform task redesign. Finally the authors contribute to the knowledge base on reasoning strategies for comparing fractions and prospective elementary teachers’ knowledge of these strategies.     

Students’ experiences of supervision in academic and industry settings: results of an Australian study

The joint supervision of Research Higher Degree (RHD) students by an industry and university supervisor is likely to increase in forthcoming years with a rise in the number of university–industry collaborations. Research students may become involved in these collaborative arrangements for a variety of reasons and may launch into their RHD without considering how they will serve two masters, and how this complex relationship will affect their RHD experience. Moreover, little research has been conducted to assess the impact of these arrangements on current RHD students’ experiences. The experiences of students with academic and industry supervisors were, therefore, explored in a survey of confirmed RHD students at an Australian research‐intensive university. This paper investigates whether RHD students conducting research in traditional academic settings have a different experience to students working on industry‐related projects in industry settings, specifically in regards to supervision and institutional access and engagement.     

Does (No) Discovery Lead to (ILL) Delivery? Comparing Transaction Logs to ILL Requests to Determine the Persistence of Library Patrons

This study looks at known-item searches within a university catalog that come up with a “no results” response to see whether patrons will then place an ILL request for that material and how persistent a user might be in order to obtain something that they want. Catalog search transaction logs were compared against interlibrary loan (ILL) requests placed during the same time frame. Overall, the rate of persistence, or the frequency with which ILL requests were placed when no results were found in the catalog is very low.