Confronting Invisibility: Early Childhood Pre-service Teachers’ Beliefs Toward Homeless Children

Children make up half of the homeless population in the US, and of those, almost 50 percent are under age six. Homeless children face many different challenges in school. These children and their families have been invisible in school due to the indifference and stereotypes about them. This article focuses on early childhood pre-service teachers’ beliefs over the course of one semester at a private university in the United States. The pre-service teachers explored their own perceptions about homeless children through urban community-based field experiences. The pre-service teachers regularly worked with children in homeless shelter learning centers throughout the semester. The data revealed that the pre-service teachers had fears about interacting with the unfamiliar setting, as well as deficit perspectives about homeless children. However, while they were engaged in the community-based experiences, they started to re-examine their deficit views about young homeless children and their families, acquire more accurate information on their complex situations, and positively developed their professional perspectives on these children. This study suggests that raising awareness about homeless children and their families should be a part of both professional development in schools and early childhood teacher education programs     

Middle-level Academic Management: A case study on the roles of the Heads of Department at a Vietnamese university

Although information technology is increasingly used to deliver distance and conventional courses, there have been few studies of the effect of technology‐enhanced education on the organization and purposes of academics’ instructional work. I explore this issue in undergraduate and masters level education through the vehicle of case analyses of technology‐rich classes taught in a public research university in the United States. What the cases illustrate is an emergent pattern of what I am calling ‘Mode III’ instructional production, in which the production of a course involves a matrix of non‐faculty support personnel, and may be oriented to commercial purposes reflective of an increasingly embedded academic capitalism in the new economy.     

Finding common ground: enhancing interaction between domestic and international students in higher education

A feature of Australian Higher Education over the last 10 years has been the increased numbers of international students. This feature has been perceived to have great potential for enhanced learning for all students – both international and domestic. Yet, student surveys and research clearly indicate that there is very little interaction occurring between domestic and international students. This article reports on a study that investigated the extent to which university teaching can promote interaction between students from diverse cultural and linguistic background. Using an innovative video-analysis methodology, the research found that academics engage in a variety of activities to encourage interaction between student groups. In order to assist academics in planning interaction, one of the main findings of the study was the development of ‘The Interaction for Learning Framework (ILF)’, that identifies key dimensions for curriculum design that can be used by academics to inform ways that they can enhance interaction between diverse student groups within teaching and learning contexts.     

Challenging Performative Fabrication: Seeking authenticity in academic development practice

While extensive discussion has been devoted to internationalising the curriculum in a response to the presence of international students, little is known about how academic staff members perceive the presence of this student cohort. Using data collected through semi‐structured interviews with 80 academic staff from four different faculties in one higher education institution, this study investigates staff understanding regarding international students, with particular attention given to how disciplinary differences shape their responses. Findings indicate that staff from ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ disciplines hold different instructional beliefs, which then affect their teaching and learning practice. Discussions are provided on how these differing conceptions of teaching fit into the context of academic development with respect to international education.     

James Moffett’s Mistake: Ignoring the Rational Capacities of the Other

Using Alasdair MacIntyre’s theory of tradition-bound rationalities, this essay analyses James Moffett’s depiction of the censors who opposed his Interactions textbook series in the Kanawha County, West Virginia, schools. Many reviewers have found Moffett’s analysis of the censors in Storm in the Mountains even-handed and respectful. Such lauding of Moffett’s work obscures the ways in which his understanding of the censors and their motivations inadequately considers the cultural history of the Appalachian region, its relationship to literacy, and the rationality underlying the censors’ stance. A critical look at Moffett’s representation of the censors permits a reconsideration of his theory of literacy, and moves us closer to understanding how to realize pluralistic education in resistant locales.     

Deconstructing Education for All: discourse,power and the politics of inclusion

The UNESCO World Declaration on Education for All from 1990 sets in motion the new agenda for educational reform that provides basic education for all disadvantaged children and adults in the global context. Since its formulation, a set of consecutive policy texts has been issued by international agencies to monitor, evaluate, and strengthen the capacity of governments to ensure that the goals of Education for All are met by 2015. This paper applies critical theory and discourse theory to provide an in‐depth analysis of the hegemonic ideologies of this global policy framework through the deconstruction of policy texts and discourses. It is argued that Education for All is a modernist project of the new imperialism, structured through the selecting, assembling and underpinning of policy discourses, to expand the ideological project of new capitalism in the global context. Discourse of inclusion is discussed both at the educational and political levels to portray the tensions of the global community in grappling with the issues of justice at the international, national, and local context.     

Connecting theory and practice in mentor preparation: mentoring for the improvement of teaching and learning

As a group, entrepreneurs and small business managers require training which is specific to their skills gaps, and takes into account that they are geographically dispersed with limited time available for such activities. They also require training which is integrated with their business activities and sufficiently flexible to incorporate into their busy and changing schedules. Email potentially provides a means of delivering a training intervention which suits the particular training and learning needs of this growing group. In spite of the growth of development and delivery of e‐mentoring programs, there is limited academic research around structured e‐mentoring generally and, in particular, around the evaluation of online programs for professionals in the micro‐business and small to medium enterprise sector. Given this lag in the academic literature, this article aims to explore how e‐mentoring programs for this target group might be usefully evaluated by drawing on pedagogical discourse. Specifically, this article proposes an adaptation to a model for evaluating computer‐based education programs and applies this intepretative framework to an e‐mentoring scheme called Mentors Online with reference to other programs aimed at similar target groups. The adaptation provides a possible framework for grounding the evaluation of e‐mentoring programs and making explicit the theoretical and pedagogical basis of much of the literature to date. The Mentors Online program was developed and delivered in 2002 by an Australian employee association with a membership of around 25,000 professionals. The Mentors Online website is available at www.apesma.asn.au/mentorsonline     

Constitution

An ecological theory of health communication is offered that addresses how communications about health interdependently work together to influence health and/or health‐related behaviors. To explain how a multitude of variables work together in a synergistic manner, the present work borrows heavily from chaos theory. The use of chaos theory concepts represents a significant paradigm shift from previous, more reductionist, health communication perspectives. The present work (a) provides a definition of health communication, (b) offers an overall health communication framework, (c) introduces relevant chaos theory concepts into the health communication literature, and (d) illustrates how chaos theory concepts can be applied to the field of health communication in order to explain health‐related behavior. Specific operationalization procedures are suggested to test the theoretical ideas outlined.     

An electroactive microwell array for trapping and lysing single-bacterial cells

Interest in single-cell analysis has increased because it allows to understand cell metabolism and characterize disease states, cellular adaptation to environmental changes, cell cycles, etc. Here, the authors propose a device to electrically trap and lyse single-bacterial cells in an array format for high-throughput single-cell analysis. The applied electric field is highly deformed and concentrated toward the inside of the microwell structures patterned on the planar electrode. This configuration effectively generates dielectrophoretic force to attract a single cell per well. The microwell has a comparable size to the target bacterial cell making it possible to trap single cells by physically excluding additional cells. Inducing highly concentrated electric potential on the cell membrane can also effectively lyse the trapped single-bacterial cells. The feasibility of the authors' approach was demonstrated by trapping and lysing Escherichia coli cells at the single-cell level. The present microwell array can be used as a basic tool for individual bacterial cell analysis.