Early education teachers’ conceptualizations and strategies for managing closeness with the class in child care

This study investigated teachers’ experiences of closeness during interactions with the group of children in child care. Structured interviews were conducted with 24 female teachers who were teaching children between the ages of three and five (mean age = 3.9) regarding their perceptions of closeness with the group of children in the class. Qualitative analyses of the interviews revealed a group solidarity domain of teacher–group relationships composed of three dimensions which comprise emotional solidarity, consensual solidarity, and functional solidarity, with emotional solidarity most dominant in the teachers’ perceptions. This group solidarity domain was interpreted as being consistent with qualities found in Grusec and Davidov’s group participation domain. The findings that, teachers’ closeness with the group of children in the class were dominated by the emotional dimension is similar to previous research results which report the predominance of personal and intimate interactions in relational closeness between teachers and individual children. Teachers described intentional strategies for managing close group relationships that made use of interactional histories between the teachers and children in the class. These discoveries provide a new perspective on teacher closeness with groups, an area of research not often investigated. It also provides insights into the importance teachers place on connecting emotionally with children when they are with the collective group in the classroom.     

Changing the English Classroom: When Large-scale ‘Common’ Testing Meets Secondary Curriculum and Instruction in the United States

This article explores the intersection of new, large-scale standards-based testing, teacher accountability policy, and secondary curriculum and instruction in the United States. Two federally funded consortia – the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium and the Partnership for Readiness of College and Careers – prove focal to this paper, as these two organisations are creating new tests that will assess 42–49% of the K–12 student population in the United States in 2014–2015. Because greater teacher accountability for student performance will be given for these tests, there is more reason to pay attention to what these tests measure and what they do not. Our analysis suggests that these new tests will hold secondary English teachers accountable for literacy and disciplinary knowledge outside the field of English and thus raise important questions about what English teachers should, can and will do, especially when their jobs are on the line.     

Managing Discovery and Linking Services

There is a growing trend toward a consolidation of services for electronic resources management, A–Z journal listings, full text link resolving, and discovery services under a single service provider. In many cases, the adoption of a discovery service from a provider that is not the same as the libraries’ existing link resolver service means managing multiple knowledgebases. In this session, three librarians gave an overview of their experiences and strategies for maintaining separate link resolving and discovery services in lieu of adopting a full suite of services from a single service provider. Each speaker presented a case study on the advantages and challenges of managing their chosen discovery service: EBSCO Discovery Service, Ex Libris’ Primo and ProQuest’s Summon, in conjunction with the CUFTS/GODOT open source knowledgebase and link resolver service.     

Teachers’ union activism for gender equity: Social movements and policy processes

This article documents the contribution of teacher union activists in their campaigns to put gender issues on government policy agendas in the 1970s and 1980s in Australia. The collective accounts document the way the activists forged new relationships and alliances, based on common goals and shared feminist values, and worked strategically with femocrats in state bureaucracies. But the effectiveness of the activists depended also on a particular set of political and cultural factors which were present in Australia at the time. Such contextual factors were also significant in the later marginalisation of gender equity issues in education in the 1990s. At a theoretical level, the study illustrates the ways in which social movements challenge dominant discourses to bring about social change, and in particular how they ‘work’ in relation to policy development. It is argued, drawing on Melucci (1989) and Yeatman (1994), that social movement theory can be useful in explaining the waxing and waning of both gender equity activism and gender equity policy development. Within social movement theory, policies need to be viewed as negotiated settlements which are constantly redefined as contexts change, new forms of domination emerge, and new social networks form and coalesce to become new social movements.     

“State plans”: Their development and potential for regional depository libraries participating in the GPO depository program

Many librarians affiliated with regional depositories are concerned about the ability of their libraries to receive, process, store, and service all the titles and series available on deposit from the Government Printing Office. Some of them have even questioned whether their library can maintain regional status and fulfill all the service elements specified in the Guidelines for the Depository Library System (1977). As this article demonstrates, regional librarians supported the concept of state plans because they believed that this process offered an excellent means to address their concerns. However, in only a few instances have the plans fulfilled the purpose which regional staff envisioned. Nonetheless, the foundation which they laid, if pursued and if the basic documentation underlying the depository program are rewritten, could lead to the type of changes sought by regional libraries.