The language and rhetoric of quality: Made in the U.S.A.

Corporate attention to quality products and services is expressed in the language used to communicate that attention. Language that is redundant, intense and elevated to iconic status both reflects and shapes attention. This study examines how end‐users, corporate bodies and employees communicate about quality. A series of propositions are inductively derived.     

The Teacher's Role in Creating a Positive Verbal and Nonverbal Environment in the Early Childhood Classroom

Teachers play a critical role in establishing the verbal and nonverbal environment in the early childhood classroom. Within this article, children's literature is used as a vehicle for enhancing understanding of (a) how teachers talk to children, (b) how teachers allow children to talk to each other in positive and reinforcing or negative ways, and (c) how teachers help children talk to themselves about their learning and participation in class. The role of the teacher as a positive, conscious, and deliberate model of self-regulated learning is promoted.     

A broader educational and vocational outlook in compulsory education has consequences for social justice

International Journal for Educational and Vocational Guidance - This article explores a new approach to career education and career guidance activities within compulsory education, with a shift in...     

The unbearable lightness of organizational learning theory: organizations, information technologies, and complexities of learning in theory and practice

Over the last decades the notion of learning has become increasingly popular both as an intellectual site of investigation and as an organizational aspiration. However, learning has many—sometimes contradictory—meanings. For pragmatic sociologists and researchers in science and technology studies (STS) the notion may appeal because of its connotations of ongoing and unpredictable transformation. Yet, a more predominant viewpoint associated with cognitive research, conceive of learning in terms of organized and controllable change processes. We characterize the latter viewpoint as the unbearable lightness of learning. We use Argyris and Schön’s model of organizational learning to illustrate some of the problematic theoretical assumptions and empirical consequences, which are entailed by viewing learning in exclusively cognitive terms. Prominent among these is the inability to analyze social and technologically mediated organizational learning. In conclusion, we argue that alternative models for organizational learning could find inspiration in science and technology studies.     

Finding her way: a beginning teacher's story of learning to honour her own voice in teaching

This article examines the ways in which a collaborative action research design became the lens by which a classroom teacher and two university teacher educators examined the practice of a novice during her second year of teaching. Together the three authors tell a story of a young woman's struggle to find and honour her voice as a new teacher. Three overarching themes were identified from the date, including university preparation, formal/informal support networks and finding and honouring her voice. Findings revealed that the collaborative nature of this research provided for unintended praxis for all researchers. Ultimately, the teacher's quest for voice and ultimate articulation of self-as-teacher emerged as a result of her participation in this collaborative inquiry.     

Occupational Physical Activity,Overweight, and Mortality

Abstract

This population-based 24-year follow-up study evaluated the association of occupational physical activity (OPA) with overweight and mortality in 47,405 men and women, healthy at baseline, and reporting OPA as sedentary (reference), light, moderately heavy, or heavy. The adjusted odds ratio for overweight was slightly less than 1 for all categories of current nonsedentary work in men but increased by OPA in women. Only heavy OPA conferred a lower mortality with an adjusted rate ratio of 0.84 (95% confidence interval, 0.76–0.92) for men and 0.69 (95% confidence interval, 0.52–0.91) for women. This observational study, with OPA recorded in the 1970s and 1980s, suggested a slight protective effect for overweight by nonsedentary work for men and lower mortality by heavy OPA for both genders.     

Essential skills for creative writing: Integrating multiple domain-specific perspectives

The aim of this work was to gather different perspectives on the “key ingredients” involved in creative writing by children – from experts of diverse disciplines, including teachers, linguists, psychologists, writers and art educators. Ultimately, we sought in the experts’ convergence or divergence insights on the relative importance of the relevant factors that may aid writing instruction, particularly for young children. We present a study using an expert knowledge elicitation method in which representatives from five domains of expertise pertaining to writing rated 28 factors (i.e., individual skills and attributes) covering six areas (general knowledge and cognition, creative cognition, conation, executive functioning, linguistic and psychomotor skills), according to their importance for creative writing. A Many-Facets Rasch Measurement (MFRM) model permitted us to quantify the relative importance of these writing factors across domain-specific expertise, while controlling for expert severity and other systematic evaluation biases. The identified similarities and domain-specific differences in the expert views offer a new basis for understanding the conceptual gaps between the scientific literature on creative writing, the writer's self-reflection on the act of writing creatively, and educators’ practices in teaching creative writing. Bridging such diverse approaches–that are, yet, relatively homogeneous within areas of expertise – appears to be useful in view of formulating process-oriented writing pedagogy that may, above all, better target the skills needed to improve children's creative writing development.     

Teachers’ potential to promote students’ deeper learning in whole-class teaching: An observation study in Norwegian classrooms

Journal of Educational Change - Teachers worldwide are challenged to adjust their teaching to meet students’ needs for deeper learning. The lack of mutual understanding among researchers,...