High-touch,low-tech: Investigating the value of an in-person library orientation game

Since 2011, the Kraemer Family Library at the University of Colorado Colorado Springs (UCCS) has offered Scrabble Scramble, an in-person, student-centered library orientation game, to incoming first-year students. This article describes our journey of developing, assessing, and refining Scrabble Scramble, which focuses on introducing first-year students to the basic services and resources of an academic library. Through analysis of student and library staff feedback survey results, this article reflects on the value of offering a student-centered, impactful, and personal orientation in an environment of rising student enrollment, steady staff numbers, and a trend to move orientation activities online.     

Asking more of Siri and Alexa: feminine persona in service of surveillance capitalism

This paper illuminates how gendered stereotypes can be leveraged to assuage anxieties surrounding artificially intelligent virtual assistants (AI VA). In particular, the analysis shows that these AI objects routinely traffic in normative gender roles of the feminine as caretaker, mother, and wife in order to obfuscate modes of surveillance, and mediate the relationship users and potential users have with late-capitalist market logics in the platform economy. Mobilizing essentialist feminine personas characterized in this paper as “digital domesticity,” artificially intelligent objects orient users to engage productively with surveillance capitalism as natural. To illustrate this relationship between femininity and surveillance, this paper focuses on two case studies of AI VA. The essay turns to Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa as emblematic of AI VA that perform a stereotypically feminine persona that invites users to participate in increasingly intimate forms of data exchange that in turn contribute to surveillance capitalism. The study of AI VA, like Siri and Alexa, demonstrates the significant rhetorical capacities of the feminine persona as they are applied to objects with weak (that is, limited) artificial intelligence.     

Learning to Learn From Data: Benchmarks and Instructional Communities

This article examines the use of interim assessments in elementary schools in the School District of Philadelphia. The article reports on the qualitative component of a multimethod study about the use of interim assessments in Philadelphia. The study used an organizational learning framework to explore how schools can best develop the capacity to utilize the potential benefits of interim assessments. The qualitative analysis draws on data from intensive fieldwork in 10 elementary schools and interviews with district staff and others who worked with the schools, as well as further in-depth case study analysis of 5 schools. This article examines how school leaders and grade groups made sense of data provided through interim assessments and how they were able to use these data to rethink instructional practice. We found substantial evidence that interim assessments have the potential to contribute to instructional coherence and instructional improvement if they are embedded in a robust feedback system. Such feedback systems were not the norm in the schools in our study, and their development requires skill, knowledge, and concerted attention on the part of school leaders.     

The Token Teacher: representations of professional educators in school governing bodies

ABSTRACT

This paper, drawing on data from a four‐year study of the governing bodies of 10 English schools, is concerned with the way in which lay members of governing bodies tend to downgrade the voice of professional educators, in particular the elected teacher governor(s). It is argued that the teacher governor's position is often undermined by a fundamental ambivalence on the part of many lay governors regarding the desirability of teacher involvement, the implication being that only lay governors, by virtue of possessing a ‘non‐partisan’, ‘common sense’ perspective on education, can act in the best interests of all concerned with the school. The questioning of teachers’ competence in the context of school governing bodies can be seen as part of a wider ‘discourse of derision’ surrounding the teaching profession. The discourse of derision can, however, take many forms and is capable of being resisted and replaced with alternative discourses.     

‘Removing the chaos from the narrative’: preparing clinical leaders for practice development

This article explores the work of a group of ward leaders who worked in a large acute NHS Trust in London in identifying the need for practice development in their clinical settings and their own leadership development needs. The ward leaders worked with a facilitator over a period of 6 months to develop knowledge, skills and experience in leading practice developments. The project was deliberately focused on helping the ward leaders become aware of the need for change and increase their potential as leaders of changes arising from the project. The ward leaders worked with the facilitator (the lead author) over a 7-month period, utilising a variety of integrated developmental and data collection techniques. The methods employed included reflection on practice, observation of practice, discussions with practitioners, 360-degree feedback and the use of a variety of creative arts. The project was based on the narrative framework of Frank (1995), and this framework was utilised to shape the interpretation of the processes and outcomes of the project. This article thus presents the combined narrative journey of the facilitator and the participants.     

“Pluto Has Been a Planet My Whole Life!” Emotions, Attitudes, and Conceptual Change in Elementary Students’ Learning about Pluto’s Reclassification

Learning about certain scientific topics has potential to spark strong emotions among students. We investigated whether emotions predicted students’ attitudes after engaging in independent rereading and/or rereading plus discussion about Pluto’s reclassification. Fifth and sixth grade students read a refutation text on Pluto’s reclassification. Participants were randomly assigned to either the reread independently or the reread plus discussion group. Results showed that students in both groups experienced attitude change and that change was sustained over time. Students reported experiencing more negative than positive emotions at pretest. Emotions, which became more positive after intervention, were predictive of students’ attitudes and attitude change. Implications for the role of emotions when learning about controversial topics are discussed.     

Do Time in Child Care and Peer Group Exposure Predict Poor Socioemotional Adjustment in Norway?

Extensive exposure to nonparental child care during the first 4.5 years of life has been demonstrated in some American studies to negatively affect children's socioemotional functioning. Data from 935 preschool children who averaged 54.9 (SD = 3.0) months of age, from Trondheim, Norway were used to examine whether such negative effects, would emerge in Norway, a country with a different child‐care system. The children's externalizing problems and social competence were unrelated to their child‐care experience. More time spent in child care during the first 4.5 years of life and experiencing peer groups of < 16 or > 18 children predicted greater caregiver–child conflict. The effect sizes were small. The results are discussed in terms of cross‐national child‐care differences.     

Pre-service teacher perspectives on the importance of global education: world and classroom views

In an era of international multimedia exposure and a global economy, there is no question that global education (GE) must be part of the school curriculum. Effective delivery of GE is reliant on adequate teacher preparation. A group of teacher educators at one University sought to raise the profile of GE with pre-service teachers through the integration of global perspectives in various courses. This paper explores pre-service teacher perceptions of the importance of GE and their learning as a result of this emphasis. Additionally, pre-service teacher preferences for further learning about GE are examined. It is apparent that pre-service teachers are interested in GE, especially in terms of how they can incorporate it in their teaching and, with exposure over a number of semesters student understandings develop, creating better prepared teachers of GE. Not surprisingly, these students were primarily focused on their future classroom practices rather than their role in the world more generally. Additionally, it was clearly evident that unique GE approaches were linked to specific teaching disciplines, an indication that GE continues to be a difficult concept to incorporate without explicit guidance for integration, something not always easy in a university setting.     

Casual Academic Staff in an Australian University: Marginalised and excluded

Abstract

The transition from a planned centralist economy to a market economy over the last decade of the 20th century has presented Russian universities with many profound challenges. These challenges require universities to review and consider their organisational culture and deserve careful study. This paper describes the changes that have taken place at Tomsk Polytechnic University ‐ one of oldest, largest and leading Russian universities.