Discovering the More: Reading Wright's,Colette's,and Cather's Texts as Philosophy of Education

Rather than using literary texts to evidence an analytic argument, within this piece we read Julia McNair Wright's (US, 1840–1902), Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette's (France, 1873–1954), and Willa Cather's (US, 1873–1947) texts through theoretical lenses that expose their educational meaning and value and that create conversation among them concerning girls’ and women's educations. While we do not claim that one can generalize these women's works and lessons to every life, we contend that these women and the literary products they created offer girls and women powerful lessons about resistance, subversion, and nurturing one's intellect, lessons that in some ways transcend class and race in particular. First, we define and explain Bruner's concept of the more using Rosenblatt, Gallagher, and Gardner's theories and findings to illuminate his concept. Next, we identify and examine three themes that emerge across these authors’ texts—subverting through the everyday, becoming one's own steward, and moving from survival to self-actualization. Establishing these themes first in Wright's texts, we then use them to frame Colette's and Cather's fiction and support these themes by focusing on one lesson that emerges from each author's work(s). Finally, we ask what one might learn about educating girls and women from these texts and others whose educative meaning and value remain hidden.     

School-linked and school-based health services: A renewed call for collaboration between school psychologists and medical professionals

Health care and education reform provide opportunities to build systems that promote rather than retard collaboration between school psychologists and medical professionals. School-linked and school-based health services (SLSBHS) are a family of approaches that provide medical, social, and mental health services to students through school settings. These services have potential to provide more than acute care or first-aid services. SLSBHS provide medical care to uninsured children, students with chronic medical needs, at-risk children, and the overall school population. However, there are usually not enough funds to hire new staff members in most school districts. Expanding the roles of current school staff, promoting interdisciplinary collaboration, and implementing creative fiscal strategies are necessary to develop SLSBHS. Interdisciplinary collaboration may be the largest hurdle to developing SLSBHS. As such, school psychologists and medical professionals may need to rethink their professional roles and develop new techniques of interdisciplinary consultation to fulfill the potential of SLSBHS.     

Task-based evaluation of text summarization using Relevance Prediction

This article introduces a new task-based evaluation measure called Relevance Prediction that is a more intuitive measure of an individual’s performance on a real-world task than interannotator agreement. Relevance Prediction parallels what a user does in the real world task of browsing a set of documents using standard search tools, i.e., the user judges relevance based on a short summary and then that same user—not an independent user—decides whether to open (and judge) the corresponding document. This measure is shown to be a more reliable measure of task performance than LDC Agreement, a current gold-standard based measure used in the summarization evaluation community. Our goal is to provide a stable framework within which developers of new automatic measures may make stronger statistical statements about the effectiveness of their measures in predicting summary usefulness. We demonstrate—as a proof-of-concept methodology for automatic metric developers—that a current automatic evaluation measure has a better correlation with Relevance Prediction than with LDC Agreement and that the significance level for detected differences is higher for the former than for the latter.     

Media,Culture, and the Meanings of Hockey

This essay describes a plan for investigating the cultural meanings of hockey in Canada by examining media narratives of high-level amateur and professional hockey during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In particular, this project analyzes English Canadian newspaper coverage of Stanley Cup games between 1894 and 1907, as well as the telegraph reconstructions that enabled fans to share a simultaneous experience of distant games. Media coverage of hockey brought Canadians into local and national communities of interest, while constructing narratives of manhood, regional rivalry, and civic pride. Hockey played a significant role in the construction of gender and class identities, and in debates about amateurism, professionalism, and community representation in sport. By exploring key issues related to media, gender, and community identities in early hockey, this research addresses important gaps in the study of sport history and the analysis of sport and Canadian popular culture.