Linking research and practice through teacher communities: a place where formal and practical knowledge meet?

This study characterises the links between research and practice across 12 projects concerned with the collaborative design of lesson plans by teacher communities (TCs). Analyses focused on sources of knowledge used to inform lesson design, participants’ roles and knowledge generated by the teacher community. Three patterns emerged pertaining to the sources of knowledge informing lesson plans: design guided by formal and practical knowledge, by classroom-data and practical knowledge or by a combination of all three. Findings further suggest that the emphasis given to the use of formal knowledge over classroom-data or vice versa restrains the full accomplishment of research and practice links. Across the projects studied, university researchers contributed to linking research and practice by directly or indirectly supporting community activities. Surprisingly, the role of teachers in the generation and dissemination of formal knowledge was limited. Further research should explore the effects of collaboration within TCs on researchers and policy-makers.     

Culture-General and Culture-Specific Approaches to Counselling: Complementary Stances

For the past 40 years, the helping professions have attempted to address the uniqueness of therapeutic relationships that involve clients and counsellors of different cultures. Counselling psychology has been at the forefront in the cultural movement within the helping profession. Approaches utilized by multicultural counsellors can be classified into two basic stances: culture-general and culture-specific. This paper argues that an either/or perspective does not stand to benefit the profession; however, a framework that encompasses the best of both approaches provides the building blocks for a hermeneutic approach to multicultural counselling. The two stances are explained and each is critiqued. The false dichotomy that has evolved within the profession between these two stances is discussed and an argument for focusing research on multiethnic counselling relationships is given. Finally, an integrative approach that privileges hermeneutics is presented.     

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.     

Frequency range size and the frequency range constraint in auditory perception by European starlings (Sturnus vulgaris)

We report data bearing on the ability of European starlings to generalize a serial auditory pitch pattern discrimination from one frequency range to another. In earlier research (e.g., Hulse & Cyrix, 1985), European starlings failed to generalize such a discrimination from one 1-octave range of frequencies to another 1-octave range above or below the initial training range. The starlings thus demonstrated a hitherto unknown phenomenon, thefrequency range constraint. In the present research, we first explored the frequency limits over which the range constraint might hold. The constraint was obtained after initial training in both a narrow (1÷2-octave) and a wide (3-octave) training range. The latter range encompasses a substantial portion of the entire frequency range audible to starlings. Therefore, the constraint is independent of the size of the training range. No known principles of stimulus discrimination or generalization account for the constraint. We also obtained further evidence on starlings’ sensitivity to relative pitch in auditory pattern perception. We used probe stimuli to explore pattern discrimination in narrow local regions of the wide frequency range. The probe data showed that, in spite of the frequency range constraint, the starlings were able to process pitch patterns on a relational basis. The results join earlier data indicating that both absolute and relative pitch processing may be involved in the natural auditory communication of songbirds.     

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.