Direction of regard and the still-face effect in the first year: does intention matter?

In the first study, 3-, 6-, and 9- month-olds' behavior was assessed as a stranger broke contact to stare at the infant, to look at a wall, or to look at another person. Regardless of age and the reason contact was broken, the still-face reaction did not depend on the experimenter's intention. In the second study, 3-, 6-, and 9-month-olds interacted with their mother who broke contact to look away for no apparent reason or in the direction of a sound. Infants at all ages responded to the still-face episode, but not as a function of the underlying reason contact was broken. The findings suggest a primacy of interpersonal communication in the first year.     

The strong poetry of place: a co/auto/ethnographic journey of connoisseurship,criticality and learning

Through a co/auto/ethnographic approach informed by a theoretical bricolage of critical pedagogy, place-based education, science education, human geography, feminism, and indigenous ways of knowing, the authors demonstrate the power of place in and as pedagogy. Using rich personal narratives, they reclaim their stories as an urban island-dweller and nomadic music-dweller, and they illuminate place as an epistemological, ontological and axiological anchor for the Self in the neoliberal wasteland. Specifically, the authors attend to their familial lineages and reasons for migrating from Southern Europe to the USA’s Northeast section, the Northern Mid-Western and to the Southeast. They examine their and their families’ connections with place in relation to the ideological fictions embedded within their shared narrative of “for a better life,” which is the story that was told to them about their families’ migrations. They probe under the surface by asking, “better than what,” “according to whom,” and “why?” In doing so, they peel back the veil of hegemony and expose the ways that economic disadvantage impacted their families’ relationships with their homelands. The article concludes by conceptualizing critical connoisseurship as a means for guiding students to tap into the embodied knowledge of place in order to notice, question, appreciate and critically reflect upon curricular content and subject matter and resist neoliberalism’s removal of person from place and local knowledge.     

Leadership provided by non-academic middle-level managers in the Australian higher education sector: the enablers

This study seeks to identify the leadership behaviours displayed by non-academic middle-level managers in the Australian higher education sector. The study also identifies the importance of these leadership behaviours and the leadership effectiveness of these managers. The integrated competing values framework was used to measure leadership behaviours and effectiveness. A total of 75 middle-level managers participated in a 360-degree feedback programme that sought responses from 816 of their work colleagues (line manager, peers and staff). Repeated measures analysis of variance was used to analyse the data. The results of the analysis found that the managers were reasonably effective, were reflective and learnt new behaviours, displayed all leadership behaviours at a reasonable level and considered all the leadership behaviours to be important. In the main, the managers held similar perceptions to their work colleagues. Future research is needed to identify gender and cultural differences.