“I Managed It Pretty Good”: Birth Narratives of Adolescent Mothers

The aim of this study was to understand adolescent mothers’ childbirth experiences. Semistructured interviews were conducted with participants recruited from a community-based program for adolescent mothers. Fourteen mothers described their birth experiences. Using a narrative analytic approach, responses were reconstructed into birth stories. Stories, condensed into poetic form, were compared and contrasted. Four unique categories emerged: connected births, surreal births, disconnected births, and disempowered births. Categories differed by agency, support, and emotional tone. Positive support was found in stories that portrayed high agency and positive affect, whereas problematic support was apparent in stories that conveyed passivity, frustration, and disappointment. This study has implications for tailoring childbirth education for adolescent mothers and can inform health-care professionals working with this population.     

Information literacy in South-East Europe: Formulating strategic initiatives,making reforms and introducing best practices

South-East Europe (SEE) is one of the geographic regions in the world which is lagging behind positive global Information Literacy (IL) developments. An informed, authoritative and enlightened understanding of the state of Information Literacy conceptual understanding and best practices across the region was recently provided by two important UNESCO co-sponsored workshops that addressed specific IL challenges in this part of Europe. The first meeting, the Workshop on Information Literacy Initiatives for Central and South-East European Countries, co-organized by UNESCO, with the support of the CEI (Central European Initiatives, an arm of the EU), took place in 2006 in Ljubljana, Slovenia. The second, also co-organized by UNESCO, was held in Ankara, Turkey, as a part of a series of eleven Training-the-Trainers in Information Literacy («TTT») workshops that covered all regions of the world. This paper will review and analyse some of the main policy agreements reached by the participants at these meetings, as well as best practices shared by the participants at the two workshops, and discuss remaining Information Literacy advocacy and promotional barriers. The authors will endeavour to identify region-specific barriers to IL in the SEE region and, based on the aforementioned Ankara and Ljubljana workshop outcomes, define focal points for future local and regional IL events, meetings and other initiatives that could and should be taken.     

Implementation of best practices for online teaching and learning in an online institution

The article documents the creation of and rationale behind best practices to maintain high performance for teaching and learning at an online university. The grassroots involvement of faculty, building on best practice efforts that guided faculty in the past, the effort to engage the full faculty in the review of documents describing best practices that were generated by a team of faculty, and the support for implementation of best practices to maintain high performance for Capella University faculty are described.     

Prosodic sensitivity and reading fluency of musicians and non-musicians

Reading and Writing - This study investigates the effects of prosodic sensitivity on reading. Highly capable adult musicians (i.e., persons with potentially excellent prosodic skills) and...     

Intergenerational activities

Early Childhood Education Journal - How can we prepare the young children of today for the future, when 20 percent of all Americans will be old? Education about the process of human aging can help...     

Determinants of Disciplinary Practices in Low-Income Black Mothers

Disciplinary attitudes and practices of low-income black mothers were examined. Mothers were interviewed about their parenting attitudes and control practices, and their responses were coded in terms of the degree to which they took a parent- versus a child-oriented approach to discipline. Mothers in the sample varied widely in their attitudes toward physical punishment, and mothers who used power-assertive techniques were as likely to take the child's perspective and give input into the socialization process as those who did not. Factors associated with maternal disciplinary styles included: maternal education, father absence, maternal age, and self-reported religious beliefs. Findings are discussed in terms of the variability in disciplinary practices in this population, as well as the factors contributing to these individual differences.     

The Development of Consciousness Through the Supervision Process

The process of supervision can be regarded as an integrative process that enables the development of consciousness, since it helps counselors become aware of problems and search for ways of solving them. In this article the processes of supervision that lead towards growth and development of the professional and personal selves of an individual are examined. The process of supervision is related to several theoretical concepts that explain development in adulthood. Special emphasis is given to wisdom as a potential, natural stage of adult development, to the systemic or ‘construct aware’ stage of reasoning and to an attitude of self-questioning.     

Faculty development in medicine: A field in evolution

This article focuses on the evolution of faculty development in medicine. Of note, improving teaching in medical education is not a new concept. At a minimum, it was seriously discussed by pioneers like George Miller and Steve Abrahamson as early as the 1950s [Simpson & Bland (2002). Stephen Abrahamson, PhD, ScD, educationist: A stranger in a kind of paradise. Advances in Health Science Education Theory Practice, 7, 223–234]. By 2005, significant numbers of medical school faculty have participated in teaching improvement methods [Clark et al. (2004). Teaching the teachers: National survey of faculty development in departments of medicine of US teaching hospitals. Journal General Internal Medicine, 19, 205–14]. Yet, views of the importance and value of faculty development have evolved slowly. Fortunately, we are now in a more receptive era for program developers to assist faculty in their difficult roles.     

Supporting learning with interactive multimedia through active integration of representations

When learners explore dynamic and interactive visualisations they are often not able to interact with them in a systematic and goal-oriented way. Frequently, even supporting learners in processes of discovery learning does not lead to better learning outcomes. This can be due to missing pre-requisite knowledge such as the coherent mental integration of the pictorial and symbolic sources of information. In order to support learners in this process, we encouraged them to interactively and externally relate different static sources of information to each other before exploring dynamic and interactive visualisations. We evaluated the benefit of this instructional support in two experimental studies concerning the domains of statistics and mechanics. It revealed that the active integration of static representations before processing dynamic visualisations resulted in better performance and can provide a basis for a more systematic and goal-oriented experimentation behaviour during simulation-based discovery learning.in final form: 16 November 2004