What's sexy? Adolescent girls discuss confidence,danger, and media influence

Building on qualitative research about sexualisation by media and culture and the impact on girls' development, in this article we present a discourse analysis of three focus groups of teen girls of colour and of diverse ethnicities asked to talk about sexiness. We focus on the ways the girls both support and resist hegemonic discourses about femininity and sexuality as well as on the discursive strategies used by the girls to separate sexiness from lack of respectability and present themselves as both knowing consumers of media and passive responders. The girls constructed sexiness in three ways that we refer to as interpretive repertoires and analyse each for paradoxes, contradictions, and resistance to mainstream conceptualisations of sexiness. These are sexy as confident; disadvantages and advantages to sexy; and sexy as sold to you.     

Exploring Mathematics Teacher Educator Questioning as a Relational Practice: Acknowledging Imbalances

ABSTRACT

The desire to understand our questioning practices as relational led us to use collaborative self-study to construct images of our questioning practice within our mathematics teacher education practices. In a prior exploration of written feedback we had begun to consider how our practices supported relationships with preservice teachers. As a result, we began to consider ways we engaged preservice teachers during instruction and wondered how our questions supported or constrained growth of relationships. In this article we share ways our expectations for what we call balance in our questioning practices were disrupted. We describe three waves of inquiry that gave form to our exploration and resulted in awareness of the role and anticipation of imbalance in our questioning practice. Each new wave resulted from findings of the previous waves and pushed us back to the research literature and forward to new images of our questioning. We tell our story using one episode from our practice, images of that practice shared at the 2018 Castle Conference, and lenses that help us anticipate imbalance in our practice.     

Examples of the Use of Technology in Teaching Statistics

This article describes the use of Microsoft Excel, graphics calculators and a multimedia CBL package by students on an introductory statistics course.     

Elementary Preservice Teachers' Struggles to Define Inquiry-Based Science Teaching

Journal of Science Teacher Education -     

Easing the transition from school to HE: scaffolding the development of self-regulated learning through a dialogic approach to feedback

High quality feedback is known to be essential for learning, yet in higher education it has been highlighted as a problem area in the UK by both the Quality Assurance Agency (QAA) and National Student Surveys. Furthermore, a recent study has shown that there is a fault-line between the highly structured guidance system that exists in schools/colleges and the culture of ‘independent’ learning that is promoted in higher education and suggests that this is a significant barrier to a successful transition. This article reports research to improve the transition for first-year undergraduates by providing a structured set of guidance activities (scaffolding) as a means of an extended induction into the assessment processes in higher education. The activities are based on the dialogic feedback cycle, which encompasses principles of feedback as dialogue, emphasising guidance at the start of and during an assignment rather than summative written feedback. The intervention was evaluated by means of a questionnaire and supported by focus groups. The questionnaire was administered to a control group and an intervention group. Results showed statistically significant improvements (p < 0.05) in students’ perceptions of their understanding of assessment tasks and criteria and increased confidence in terms of completing assessment tasks and self-regulated learning.     

Student–Faculty Interaction and Discrimination from Faculty in STEM: The Link with Retention

Research in Higher Education - Previous studies have documented student–faculty interaction in STEM, but fewer studies have specifically studied negative forms of interaction such as...