Developing a Reading Community: Involving LIS Students in Planning a Readers’ Advisory Event

Graduate students in an elective Readers' Advisory class created a variation of a one book–one community event. The event provided a forum for discussing issues related to technology and the future and how it relates to the evolving mission of the public library. Students gained experience in project management and reflected on how they expanded their readers' advisory skills. Future events could be improved with more careful task assignment, better marketing, and better timing.     

Epistemologies in the Text of Children's Books: Native- and non-Native-authored books

An examination of artifacts provides insights into the goals, practices, and orientations of the persons and cultures who created them. Here, we analyze storybook texts, artifacts that are a part of many children's lives. We examine the stories in books targeted for 4–8-year-old children, contrasting the texts generated by Native American authors versus popular non-Native authors. We focus specifically on the implicit and explicit ‘epistemological orientations’ associated with relations between human beings and the rest of nature. Native authors were significantly more likely than non-Native authors to describe humans and the rest of nature as psychologically close and embedded in relationships. This pattern converges well with evidence from a behavioral task in which we probed Native (from urban inter-tribal and rural communities) and non-Native children's and adults' attention to ecological relations. We discuss the implications of these differences for environmental cognition and science learning.     

Gender differences in science: parallels in interest,experience and performance

There are some interesting and significant differences in the interests, experiences and performances of girls and boys in science as well as a few similarities worth noting. The general pattern of similarity and difference has been shown to obtain on an international scale, and has been extensively discussed in the literature in recent years. In particular, the focus has been on girls’ relative performance underachievement in physics (and mathematics), and many hypotheses have been suggested to explain this phenomenon. In its simplest terms the argument surrounds the familiar nature/nurture issue. The ‘process'‐oriented APU Science surveys in the UK have served to confirm previous findings about pupils’ interests and abilities, but have also embellished these with more detail and with a broader base. This paper presents and discusses salient findings, and offers comment on the evidence of interconnections which could reflect cause‐effect relationships.     

The Effect of Task Instructions on Students’ Use of Repetition in Argumentative Discourse

The reasoning belief of argumentum ad nauseam assumes that when someone repeats something often enough, he or she becomes more convincing. The present paper analyses the use of this strategy by seventh-grade students in an argumentation task. Sixty-five students (mean age: 12.2, SD?=?0.4) from a public school in a mid-sized urban environment took part in the study. The students were asked to either argue to convince an opposing partner or argue to reach consensus with an opposing partner on three dilemmas that dealt with energy sources. Data were gathered according to a between-groups design that included one independent variable (argumentative goal: to convince vs. to reach consensus) and one dependent variable (the degree of argumentative repetitions). We predicted that in the condition to convince their partner, the students would use the repetition strategy more often in their attempts to be persuasive. Our findings show that the mean number of argumentative repetitions was significantly higher for the persuasion group for both of the most frequent argumentative structures (claim and claim data). The mean percentage of repeated claims for the persuasion condition was 86.2 vs. 69.0 for the consensus condition. For the claim data, the mean percentage for the persuasion group was 35.2 vs. 24.3 for the consensus group. Also, students in the persuasion group tended to repeat one idea many times rather than repeating many ideas a few times within the same argumentative structure. The results of our study support the hypothesis that the goal of the argumentative task mediates argumentative discourse and, more concretely, the rate of repetitions and the conceptual diversity of the statements. These differences in rates of repetition and conceptual diversity are related to the amount of learning produced by the instructional goal. We apply Mercer's idea that not all classroom argumentation tasks promote learning equally.     

A gaming frame of mind: digital contexts and academic implications

When considering the interdisciplinary nature of education, researchers need to acknowledge students' traditional and multimodal literacies and learning environments. Technological changes have brought about new learning spaces and what students learn through their video gaming experiences seems to have important academic implications and applications. This article presents data from three case studies of academically struggling 11th‐grade male video gamers, revealing the academic affordances of the participants' video game playing; the students developed a schema for academic material from their video game playing, fostering meaningful connections to classroom material. Overall, this paper reveals how the virtual gaming environment enabled three gamers to contextualize academic information, thereby making the material personally relevant.

Ein Glücksspielrahmen für den Verstand: Digitale Kontexte und akademische Auswirkungen

Wenn man die Bereichs überschreitende Natur der Bildung bedenkt, müssen Forscher die traditionellen und multimodalen Fähigkeiten der Studenten und auch ihre Lernumgebungen anerkennen. Technologische Änderungen haben neue Lernräume für die Studenten geschaffen, und was Studenten durch ihre Videospiel Erfahrungen lernen, scheint wichtige Auswirkungen im akademischen Bereich und den Anforderungen zu haben. Dieser Artikel zeigt Daten von drei Fallstudien über wissenschaftlich sich bemühende männliche Oberstufen‐Schüler und ‐ Video‐Gamer, bei der akademischen Anforderung die Videopartie der Teilnehmer zu spielen. Die Studenten entwickelten spielend ein Schema für akademisches Material aus ihrer Videopartie und förderten bedeutsame Verbindungen zu Klassenzimmermaterial. Insgesamt zeigt dieses Papier, wie die virtuelle Spielumgebung drei Spielern ermöglichte, akademische Information in einen Zusammenhang zu setzen und dadurch das Material persönlich für sich relevant zu machen.

Penser en joueur: les contexts numériques et leurs implications scolaires

Lorsqu'ils considèrent le caractère interdisciplinaire de l'éducation, les chercheurs doivent prendre en compte à la fois les savoirs traditionnels, les savoirs multimodaux ainsi que les environnements d'apprentissage. Les changements technologiques ont donné naissance à de nouveaux espaces d'apprentissage et, ce que les élèves apprennent de leur pratique des jeux vidéo, semble avoir des conséquences et des applications importantes sur le plan scolaire. Cet article présente les résultats de trois études de cas portant sur des élèves masculins de fin de secondaire en difficulté, par ailleurs adeptes des jeux vidéo, qui montrent les possibilités scolaires de leur pratique des jeux vidéo; ces élèves ont développé à partir de leurs pratiques des jeux un mode d'approche des documents scolaires qui a fait naître des liens significatifs avec les documents de classe. Plus généralement cet article montre comment l'environnement des jeux virtuels a permis à trois joueurs de contextualiser l'information scolaire donnant ainsi aux documents une pertinence personnelle.

Un estado de animo de. Los contextos digitales y sus implicaciones académicas

Cuando los investigadores estudian el carácter interdisciplinario de la educación, tienen que tomar en cuenta tanto los saberes tradicionales como los saberes multimodales y los entornos de aprendizaje. Los cambios tecnológicos han conllevado nuevos espacios de aprendizaje y lo que los alumnos aprenden a través de sus experiencias con los juegos de video acarrea aparentemente importantes aplicaciones y implicaciones para la escolaridad. Este artículo presenta los datos de tres estudios de casos sobre alumnos varones de fín de la enseñanza secundaria aficionados a los juegos de video con dificultades escolares, revelando el potencial académico de su actuación en esos juegos; los alumnos han adquirido un esquema para el material escolar a partir de su práctica de los juegos de video y desarrollado vínculos significativos con el material de aula. En general este artículo revela como el entorno de los juegos de video ha permitido a tres jugadores de contextualizar la información académica, transformando así el material en algo personal y pertinente.     

Safety in Science Classrooms: What Research and Best Practice Say

Turnaround leadership concerns the kind of leadership needed for turning around a persistently low-performing school to one that is performing acceptably as measured by student achievement according to state tests. I first treat this question in the narrow sense, i.e., as a strategy for targeting low-performing schools, and then place it in a larger context—namely, how such turnaround can be part of an overall approach to sustainable system change. The sequence I will consider moves from the school to the district to the system as a whole. My conclusion, which I state upfront, is that what looks like apparent success in turning around schools is actually quite superficial and indeed illusory.     

Feminist pedagogy in the research class: an example of teacher research

This article illustrates the development of a feminist pedagogy in a graduate-level course on research design and qualitative analysis. The course, entitled ‘Teaching as Research’, was conceptualised for classroom teachers, supervisors and administrators. Stories in this narrative analysis describe the changes across four sequential courses relative to course goals: short-term instructional, political, epistemological, and personal or transformational. Though feminist pedagogies are situated and not generalisable, the author hopes these stories will help illuminate and encourage others.     

Haraway's ‘bag lady story-telling’: relocating childhood and learning within a ‘post-human landscape’

In this article, we explore some alternate ways of approaching childhood and learning by taking three short forays into what Donna Haraway calls a ‘post-human landscape’. This exploration takes us beyond the horizons of orthodox educational approaches, in which the individual child is typically seen to be developing and learning within his/her (exclusively human) sociocultural context. The post-human landscape relocates childhood within a world that is much bigger than us (humans) and about more than our (human) concerns. It allows us to reconsider the ways in which children are both constituted by and learn within this more-than-human world. Adopting Haraway's feminist narrative strategy, we offer three very different ‘bag lady’ stories that consider the ethics and politics of child/non-human animal cross-species encounters. Each of these stories gestures towards the ways in which we can learn to live with ‘companion species’ rather than only ever learn about them.     

Integrating lifelong learning in university management

Universities in a capitalistic society have been expected to produce graduates for the labour market which in turn contributes to the economic development of the nation. In today's environment where the social spending on education grows faster than the economy, it becomes increasingly difficult for the education system to maintain an existing level of provision. Hence, institutions are required to legitimate themselves through the value they provide. The capitalistic process in Hong Kong has generated the demand for lifelong learning in the higher education system. The resulting evolution of the system has compelled the policy makers of higher education to redefine the purpose of higher education and re-evaluate the university management. This paper discusses Liu's (1997) holistic approach of evaluating and planning for the university academic programmes as well as building an ‘enterprise culture’ at the institutional level with a Hong Kong case analysis. When strategically planning for the future in a volatile and transient environment, university management plays an important role in integrating continuing professional education (CPE) and mainstream academic programmes and in cultivating a market-oriented ‘institutional enterprise-culture’ which responds to environmental changes more proactively.     

Neighborhoods Matter: The Role of Universities in the School Reform Neighborhood Development Movement

Where you find distressed neighborhoods, you will also find poorly performing public schools. Yet many contemporary school reform efforts ignore neighborhood-level factors that undeniably impact school performance. The purpose of this study is to use a case study approach with social institutional and urban school reform regime frameworks to demonstrate why school reform and the re-creation and redevelopment of distressed neighborhoods should occur simultaneously. At the same time, researchers will examine the role of higher education in catalyzing partnerships with so-called anchor institutions for the explicit purposes of simultaneously improving neighborhoods and reforming schools. By focusing on a federal Choice neighborhood initiative, the study will not only make the case for connecting school reform and neighborhood development but also present a model that demonstrates how this can happen. The study will also make a strong case for the university's unique role in fostering neo-collaborative structures fit to take on wicked problems of neighborhood distress and urban decline.