Working conditions in urban schools

The recent wave of reform reports in education promulgated a wide variety of recommendations to address identified concerns. This research explores an issue mostly ignored by the reform reports, the working conditions teachers face. Utilizing ethnographic techniques and multisite analyses of in-depth case studies of six schools in two large urban areas, the authors identify five broad categories of stressors in the work environment, including governance/leadership, budget cuts, security, staff relations, and student issues. In addition, two major themes characterizing working conditions for teachers are specified, the no respect syndrome and barriers to teaching. The need to address these issues before attempting to implement the major reforms in the national reports is highlighted.     

In practice ‐ Venturing into scary places: The minority experience

Students who have lived as part of a majority for their entire life may find it frightening to be asked to visit a place where they will be in the minority. Craig Bennett uses this assignment to demonstrate to his students how some people feel every day.     

Determinants of Impact: Towards a Better Understanding of Encounters with the Arts

The article argues that current methods for assessing the impact of the arts are largely based on a fragmented and incomplete understanding of the cognitive, psychological and socio-cultural dynamics that govern the aesthetic experience. It postulates that a better grasp of the interaction between the individual and the work of art is the necessary foundation for a genuine understanding of how the arts can affect people. Through a critique of philosophical and empirical attempts to capture the main features of the aesthetic encounter, the article draws attention to the gaps in our current understanding of the responses to art. It proposes a classification and exploration of the factors—social, cultural and psychological—that contribute to shaping the aesthetic experience, thus determining the possibility of impact. The ‘determinants of impact’ identified are distinguished into three groups: those that are inherent to the individual who interacts with the artwork; those that are inherent to the artwork; and ‘environmental factors’, which are extrinsic to both the individual and the artwork. The article concludes that any meaningful attempt to assess the impact of the arts would need to take these ‘determinants of impact’ into account, in order to capture the multidimensional and subjective nature of the aesthetic experience.     

Student workers wave goodbye to the government documents default list

Many libraries with federal depository collections have relied on loading large files of MARC records to add catalog records into their online systems. The addition of tens of thousands of MARC records created a catalog maintenance problem for the Sterling C. Evans Library of Texas A&M University. This paper discusses the use of student workers to clean the catalog of these problem records, describing lessons learned and procedures developed.