Neglected realities: exploring the impact of women’s experiences of violence on learning in sites of higher education

Feminist pedagogy offers an exciting alternative to more conservative, traditional academic approaches, as it offers a site where women’s lives and experiences are accorded a place of importance and are considered worthy of theorizing. Within the last decade, feminism has been increasingly challenged to broaden its perspective and include the standpoints of those who are not part of the dominant group, whose voices have been traditionally silenced within academia. Issues of race, class, sexuality and ability have subsequently become a core focus of most women’s studies classrooms. Yet despite its transformative goals and sometimes radical pedagogical practices, these spaces often remain complicit in not fully acknowledging the impact of trauma on women’s lives. Drawing on the journal entries of first year social work students, this inquiry explores the impact of trauma on three women, struggling to negotiate the demands of academia, while simultaneously coping with memories of past abuse. It is argued that violence against women is a collective responsibility, rather than an individual pathology, as it has been conceptualized in the past. The findings highlight the need to address women’s experiences of violence as a legitimate barrier to learning.     

Adult Literacy: Monitoring and Evaluation for Practice and Policy

With the advent of the UN Literacy Decade launched in 2003, there is increased emphasis on monitoring and evaluation of adult literacy around the globe. The present paper presents an overview of the main approaches that have been taken to measure adult literacy within and across countries. A particular focus of the present review is to compare and contrast three models of literacy assessment: (1) the “traditional” model based largely on census enumeration, which has been used over recent decades to collect national and regional rates of illiteracy; (2) the large-scale survey techniques employed with the International Adult Literacy Survey and similar models; and (3) an intermediate type of assessment that borrows from the previous two models, and attempts to “tailor” the size and complexity of the survey methodology to the policy questions needing answers (called the SQC model). The present paper suggests that there is no single model or set of methods that are universally appropriate to monitoring and measuring in adult literacy around the world, but that blending both programmatic and comparative models through the SQC approach may bring greater involvement in, and insight into, adult literacy evaluations.     

History of Science in Physics Teaching

Science educators are increasingly using a historical approach to pedagogy as a way to enable students to understand the process of the construction of science in a more contextualized manner. Considering the meaning of context in a broader sense, this article has two objectives. First, it aims to explore how physics lessons using a Cultural History of Science approach allowed the development of activities that encouraged students to have discussions about science where their own socio-cultural context was considered, referring to Brazilian scientific production. Second, the article to investigate which understandings about scientific practices could be developed by students from in-class discussions inspired by the Cultural History of Science approach focusing on a historical and students’ own social contexts. The historical episode selected to be introduced in their physics lessons was the development of the Leiden jar in Europe, in the eighteenth century, focusing on the quotidian practices and habits that enabled the construction and use of this artifact. The lessons developed from the Cultural History approach seemed to allow the students to understand that science was developed by many different social actors, in sites that exceed the laboratory and by actions performed in various dimensions. The findings suggest that this approach in science teaching can be a strategy to historically contextualize the development of science while allowing students to reflect about the scientific production in their social context.

     

Student satisfaction in higher education: a meta-analytic study

This paper discusses the results of a meta-analysis performed to identify key antecedent and consequent constructs of satisfaction in higher education. We offer an integrated model to achieve a better understanding of satisfaction in the context of higher education. To accomplish this objective, we identified 83 studies that were valid and relevant to the research objective of the current study, generating a total of 469 observations. We identified studies published from 1986 to 2016 and analyzed six antecedent dimensions (perceived value of educational services, resources provided to the student, service quality perception, marketing orientation, identity of the higher education institution, university environment) and one consequent dimension related to satisfaction. The 7 dimensions exhibited a total of 51 relationships. We believe that the originality of the findings clearly contributes to future academic research in higher education.     

Privacy and Policy for Genetic Research

I begin with a discussion of the value of privacy and what we lose without it. I then turn to the difficulties of preserving privacy for genetic information and other medical records in the face of advanced information technology. I suggest three alternative public policy approaches to the problem of protecting individual privacy and also preserving databases for genetic research: (1) governmental guidelines and centralized databases, (2) corporate self-regulation, and (3) my hybrid approach. None of these are unproblematic; I discuss strengths and drawbacks of each, emphasizing the importance of protecting the privacy of sensitive medical and genetic information as well as letting information technology flourish to aid patient care, public health and scientific research.     

Credentialism among graduate students

Writers on higher education frequently assume that American undergraduate and graduate students enroll mainly to obtain credentials, and care little about acquiring competence. An exploratory study of students entering four elite fields found that most soughtboth credentials and competence. Empty credentials appealed to some, but stiff competition within their chosen occupations evidently led the great majority of students to seek every advantage that graduate education could provide.