Accommodations: staff identity and university space

Space has been of growing significance in social theory in recent years, yet, explorations of it in the scholarship of higher education have been limited. This is surprising, given the critical role space has in shaping staff and students' engagement with the university. Taking a practice-based approach and focusing on academic identities, this article analyses the spatial experience of an institution by defamiliarising spaces encountered in everyday work. We identify formative pressures upon institutional space, and how space then shapes experience: university spaces are designed for one purpose but come to be used for many, so that working within them can be a diverse and contradictory experience. The identification of academics with spaces is complex, and there are no simple experiences of belonging; rather, there is a constant project of identity-formation and change within mutable spaces.     

A comparison of drug literature coverage by Index Medicus and Drug Literature Index

We compared Index Medicus and Drug Literature Index during a search concerning the toxicity of eight drugs used in treating tropical diseases. Indexes covering the years 1969, 1970, and 1971 were searched. Index Medicus produced 198 citations and Drug Literature Index 309. There were seventy citations that appeared in both indexes, a duplication of 16%. Highest percentage of duplication for any one drug was 38.9%. We concluded that Index Medicus and Drug Literature Index provide complementary coverage in the area of drug toxicity and that, therefore, both tools should be consulted in searches of this nature.     

A Layered Approach to Critical Friendship as a Means to Support Pedagogical Innovation in Pre-service Teacher Education

In this article we describe and interpret how two distinct layers of critical friendship were used to support a pedagogical innovation in pre-service teacher education. The innovation, Learning about Meaningful Physical Education (LAMPE), focuses on ways to teach future teachers to foster meaningful experiences for learners in physical education. Critical friendship was applied in two ways: (1) the first two authors served as critical friends to each other as they taught their respective teacher education courses using LAMPE, and (2) the third author acted as a meta-critical friend, providing support for and critique of the first two authors’ development and enactment of the innovation. Over two years, data were gathered from reflective journal entries, emails, recorded Skype calls, and teaching observations. The two layers of critical friendship held significant benefits in advancing and supporting the development of the innovation while also contributing to the professional learning of all participants. Analysis of the first year’s data showed that we entered the critical friendship without thoroughly considering what we each hoped to give and take from the relationship or acknowledging the potential problems that might unfold. In the second year, guided by suggestions from our meta-critical friend, we took a more rigorous inquiry stance as critical friends, contributing contentious feedback and pushing each other beyond our personal and pedagogical comfort zones. This led to a noticeable improvement in our professional learning about teacher education practices and advanced the development of the LAMPE innovation.     

An Australian s Perspective of an American University

Since high school I have always wanted to study in a country other than my own. However my parents always informed me that it was too expensive. This was until luck turned my way one day while I was at university. My advisor called me and asked me to go and see him as soon as possible. I just knew it had to be good news. I could barely stand the suspense and went to his office with a nervous happiness in my tummy My advisor told me that I had been offered a scholarship to study at Central Washington Univers...     

Finding Diego: A Bilingual Student Integrates School,Language, and Identity

This article presents a mixed-methods case study of Diego, a bilingual teen who completed public school in Florida. During adolescence, Diego negotiated multiple identities: successful student, Mexican American, bilingual, and typical U.S. teenager. Diego provided interviews and bilingual (English/Spanish) writing (narrative/expository) in 2008 (at age 12, Grade 6) and in 2012 (at age 16, Grade 10). A qualitative analysis of his interviews and a quantitative linguistic analysis of his writing reveal central elements of Diego’s language development as related to academic English and identity. Educational implications for working with bilingual adolescents are discussed.     

The purpose, design and use of examples in the teaching of elementary mathematics

This empirical paper considers the different purposes for which teachers use examples in elementary mathematics teaching, and how well the actual examples used fit these intended purposes. For this study, 24 mathematics lessons taught by prospective elementary school teachers were videotaped. In the spirit of grounded theory, the purpose of the analysis of these lessons was to discover, and to construct theories around, the ways that these novice teachers could be seen to draw upon their mathematics teaching knowledge-base in their lesson preparation and in their observed classroom instruction. A highly-pervasive dimension of the findings was these teachers’ choice and use of examples. Four categories of uses of examples are identified and exemplified: these are related to different kinds of teacher awareness.