The Cultural Work of Teacher Education

Engaging teacher education as cultural work positions teacher educators and pre-service teachers as cultural workers. Cultural workers foreground the cultural complexities of their situated experiences while aiming to produce cultures that transform prevailing inequalities and injustices in public education. Doctoral students are also cultural workers translating the world of academia and their role in it as they learn to educate teacher candidates. How doctoral candidates engage in this cultural work depends greatly on the degree to which their faculty mentors are able to reveal the contradictions and opportunities for expansive learning that co-exist within schools of education and individual departments such as curriculum and learning. This article looks at this conundrum from the perspectives of a doctoral student and a senior faculty member.     

Designing a Deeply Digital Science Curriculum: Supporting Teacher Learning and Implementation with Organizing Technologies

This paper examines the impacts of technology (e.g., Chromebooks, Google Drive) on teacher learning and student activity in the development and implementation of a deeply digital high school biology unit. Using design-based implementation research, teachers co-designed with researchers and curriculum specialists a student-centered unit aligned to the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) that utilizes classroom technology. Qualitative and quantitative data were collected to understand the barriers that inhibit the implementation of a digital curriculum as well as the extent that teachers engage in the design process and begin to make shifts in their practice. We found that through the co-design process teachers began to shift their knowledge of NGSS, technology implementation, and adapted to tensions and barriers inherent in the process.     

Integrating marriage education into perinatal education

Couples making the transition to parenthood experience challenges that can threaten the quality and stability of their relationships and the health of family members. Currently, the educational infrastructure to support the delivery of couple-relationship education during the transition to parenthood is limited. Because new-parent couples interact with the health care system at many points during this transition time, an opportunity exists for strengthening couple relationships within the system to improve the well-being of adults and children. In this article, we propose a productive collaboration between marriage/couple educators and health care systems to integrate couple-relationship education into the standard of perinatal care.     

Organizing for Teacher Agency in Curricular Co-Design

Cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT) approaches to intervention aim for transformative agency, that is, collective actions that expand and bring about new possibilities for activity. In this article, we draw on CHAT as a resource for organizing design research that promotes teachers’ agency in designing new science curriculum materials. We describe how CHAT informed our efforts to structure a collaborative design space in which teachers and other participants sought to develop new curriculum materials intended to help realize a new vision for science education. Specifically, we describe the tools and routines we deployed to support the design process, and we analyze the ways in which teachers took up elements of our design process as well as how they adapted, resisted, and suggested alternative tools and strategies to help develop new curriculum materials. In so doing, we illustrate ways in which CHAT can serve as a guide both for organizing collaborative design processes and for analyzing their efficacy.     

Nausea is associated with endotoxemia during a 161-km ultramarathon

This study explored possible contributing factors to gastrointestinal distress, including endotoxemia, hyperthermia, dehydration and nutrition, during a 161-km ultramarathon. Thirty runners participated in the study and 20 finished the race. At three checkpoints and the finish, runners were interviewed to assess the incidence and severity of 12 gastrointestinal symptoms and to determine dietary intake. Core temperature was measured at the same locations. Runners were weighed pre-race, at the three checkpoints and the finish to monitor hydration status. Blood markers for endotoxemia (sCD14) and inflammation (interleukin-6 and C-reactive protein) were measured pre- and post-race. Gastrointestinal symptoms were experienced by most runners (80%), with nausea being the most common complaint (60%). Runners with nausea experienced significantly greater (P = 0.02) endotoxemia than those without nausea (sCD14 mean increase 0.7 versus 0.5 µg · mL^?1). There was a significant positive correlation (r = 0.652, P = 0.005) between nausea severity and endotoxemia level. Inflammatory response, core temperature, hydration level and race diet were similar between runners with and without nausea. This study links endotoxemia to nausea in ultramarathon runners. Other possible contributing factors to nausea such as hyperthermia, dehydration and nutrition did not appear to play a role in the symptomatic runners in this study.     

Teachable moments: Taking advantage of multicultural encounters

This paper presents the rationale of the Hartford Half Tuition Program at the University of Hartford which enrolls qualified graduates of city high schools. Since its inception four years ago, it has changed the demographics of the institution and been the catalyst for many events, discussions, and interactions that have served as teachable moments for the development of students, staff, and faculty. A critique of key elements of the program leads to the identification of lessons learned.Elizabeth A. McDaniel, Associate Vice President for Academic Affairs at the University of Hartford, received a B.A. in psychology from the University of Florida, M.S. in Education from Barry University, and a Ph.D. in Education from the University of Miami. She is actively involved in issues relating to curriculum, instruction, and community in higher education. Tamara Moreland, Director of the Office of Graduate and Adult Academic Services at the University of Hartford, earned her B.S. in Economics, and is expected to receive her master's in organizational behavior from the University of Hartford in December 1994. Her interests are organizational design, group dynamics, and the influence of culture on interpersonal relationships.     

Bioconservatism,bioenhancement and backfiring

ABSTRACT

The prospect of enhancing ourselves through the use of new biotechnologies is for the most part, hypothetical. Nevertheless, the question of whether we should undertake such enhancement is worthy of discussion as it may become possible in the future. In this article, we consider one form of argument that conservative opponents of biotechnological means of enhancement (bioconservatives) deploy in opposition to the use of enhancement technologies—the backfiring objection. This is the objection that the use of such technologies is liable to go wrong and lead to outcomes that are inferior to the outcomes intended. We will argue that the objection is not nearly as significant as bioconservatives suppose it to be. Bioconservatives sometimes supplement the backfiring objection by arguing that change will be irreversible, that the new (or the unconventional) is especially liable to backfire and that humans possess severe and permanent limitations which cannot be overcome. We consider these ways of supplementing the backfiring objection and argue that each of them, when properly understood, is of limited value to the bioconservative. We also consider how traditional approaches to moral education can be supplemented by bioenhancement.     

The Impact of Design-Based STEM Integration Curricula on Student Achievement in Engineering,Science, and Mathematics

The new science education reform documents call for integration of engineering into K-12 science classes. Engineering design and practices are new to most science teachers, meaning that implementing effective engineering instruction is likely to be challenging. This quasi-experimental study explored the influence of teacher-developed, engineering design-based science curriculum units on learning and achievement among grade 4–8 students of different races, gender, special education status, and limited English proficiency (LEP) status. Treatment and control students (n = 4450) completed pretest and posttest assessments in science, engineering, and mathematics as well as a state-mandated mathematics test. Single-level regression results for science outcomes favored the treatment for one science assessment (physical science, heat transfer), but multilevel analyses showed no significant treatment effect. We also found that engineering integration had different effects across race and gender and that teacher gender can reduce or exacerbate the gap in engineering achievement for student subgroups depending on the outcome. Other teacher factors such as the quality of engineering-focused science units and engineering instruction were predictive of student achievement in engineering. Implications for practice are discussed.     

Personality Type and Clinical Supervision Interventions

In this study, the authors investigated personality type of supervisors and supervisees and interventions chosen by supervisors for 78 supervisory dyads from 9 different counselor education programs. Gender effects were also investigated. Results indicated that interventions were not influenced by supervisor personality type as measured by the Revised NEO (Neuroticism, Extraversion, Openness to New Experiences) Personality Inventory (NEO PI‐R; Costa & McCrae, 1992a), nor were they influenced by similarity or dissimilarity of supervisory dyads by type or gender. Rather, most supervision interventions were Intuitive or Perceiving as measured by the Focus of Supervision Form. One exception was when supervisees scored high on Openness on the NEO PI‐R, which resulted in supervisors choosing Judging interventions.     

Preparatory effects of problem solving versus studying examples prior to instruction

Instructional Science - The Productive Failure (PF) approach prompts students to attempt to solve a problem prior to instruction – at which point they typically fail. Yet, research on PF...