An Exploratory Examination of a Grant-making Project in Social Work Education

Educators secure funding for MSW students to become a grant-making entity and provide monies to address local needs. An exploratory research design is used to obtain quantitative and qualitative data from students participating in the course-based project. Feedback suggests that students perceived increased abilities in the area of community needs assessments, grant writing, grant making, fund raising, public relations, and professional interest in efforts to secure monies. The merits and challenges of implementing a course-based grant-making and philanthropic project in the social work education are examined.     

News framing of the Chinese embassy bombing by the people's daily and the New York Times

This paper looks at the news framing choices made by the People's Daily and the New York Times in reporting the bombing of the Chinese Embassy and the events that followed it. The study compares textual choices made by the papers across the ten days of post‐bombing news and commentaries. The authors discuss this incident and their findings in the context of reciprocal Chinese‐US media images over the last few decades.     

Interpreting Art through Metaphors

This article argues that much of the meaning of artworks comes through metaphors, though we do not always recognise them as such. The argument draws on the work of Lakoff & Johnson, who assert a similar claim about metaphors in general (especially in language). It analyses the notion of a visual metaphor, gives a number of illustrations and claims that, contrary to linguistic metaphors, there can usefully be more than one visual metaphor (‘mixed metaphors’) active in a visual image and that visual metaphors can be interpreted in both directions. Verticality is presented as one basic metaphor in visual images.     

The research-teaching nexus in nurse and teacher education: contributions of an ecological approach to academic identities in professional fields

In developing graduates for the knowledge society lecturers in higher education may seek to strengthen links between research and teaching. Much of the previous work on the research-teaching nexus is within traditional universities and subject disciplines. In aiming to deepen understanding of the research and teaching nexus this paper focuses on the academic identities of higher education lecturers working in newer higher education institutions and in the professional fields of nursing and of teacher education. A qualitative study, informed by professional identity construction as an ecological concept, was conducted. The findings align with previous studies concerning similarities between lecturers in nurse and teacher education, but they contrast with previous studies concerning differences between these two groups of lecturers. Similarities include the priority given by professional educators to their responsibility for preparing new clinical practitioners; the research-led model as the lecturers’ main approach to the research-teaching nexus; and their difficulties in coping with current demands in academic work. Differences between the two groups of lecturers include the way that ‘practitioner identity’ is positioned within their current academic identities and the way that they position initial education within the wider professional field. These differences indicate different kinds of connections between teaching and research. The paper proposes an ecological approach to understanding the research-teaching nexus.     

The New Evaluation: A Cautionary Note*

Pluralistic education is an educational concept which aims at the development in students of a so-called 'pluralistic attitude'. For its epistemological foundations the concept is based on Dewey and for its educational and psychological underpinning on the Vygotskian tradition. The concepts of activity , dialogue , and the importance of diversity are central. Furthermore, an important tenet is that education can have a real impact on the development of the students. When invited to react to the concept of pluralistic education, a group of teachers show a certain degree of affinity with it: they all hope to educate their students for a positive participation in a pluriform society. They differ from it, however, in some fundamental ways: in their conception of knowledge, in their stressing of security over insecurity, in their individualistic approach to teaching and learning, and in their quite pessimistic view of the possibilities for making a real contribution to the development of their students.