Managing the Process: The Intradepartmental Networks of Early-Career Academics

This article relies on data from surveys and interviews to explore the networking behaviors and strategies of early-career faculty members within the contexts of their academic departments. Findings suggest that faculty members’ approaches to interactions and relationships with colleagues may be conceptualized according to a continuum of behavior, based on their political awareness of interactions and their strategic engagement in them, interactions as a means of impression management, the cultivation of relationships for symbolic inclusion in networks, and the presence of functional patterns in network. The article concludes with recommendations for future research.     

Diversity in collaborative research communities: a multicultural,multidisciplinary thesis writing group in public health

Writing groups for doctoral students are generally agreed to provide valuable learning spaces for Ph.D. candidates. Here an academic developer and the eight members of a writing group formed in a Discipline of Public Health provide an account of their experiences of collaborating in a multicultural, multidisciplinary thesis writing group. We consider the benefits of belonging to such a group for Ph.D. students who are operating in a research climate in which disciplinary boundaries are blurring and where an increasing number of doctoral projects are interdisciplinary in nature; in which both academic staff and students come from enormously diverse cultural and language backgrounds; and in which teamwork, networking and collaboration are prized but not always proactively facilitated. We argue that doctoral writing groups comprising students from diverse cultural and disciplinary backgrounds can be of significant value for postgraduates who wish to collaborate on their own academic development to improve their research writing and communication skills; at the same time, such collaborative work effectively builds an inclusive, dynamic research community.     

Co-constructing distributed leadership: district and school connections in data-driven decision-making

The purpose of this paper is to examine leadership practices in school systems that are implementing data-driven decision-making employing the theory of distributed leadership. With the advent of No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB) in the US, educational leaders are now required to analyse, interpret and use data to make informed decisions in all areas of education, ranging from professional development to student learning. The emphasis on data-driven decision-making practices to bring about improved student outcomes is relatively a new feature of the education reform landscape and thus requires educators to learn and develop new competences. Leadership is one crucial bridge that can support and direct these new learning efforts. Using qualitative data from a case study of four urban school systems, the authors’ findings indicate that: (1) leaders at all levels co-constructed the vision and implementation of productive data-driven decision-making by creating an ethos of learning and continuous improvement rather than one of blame; (2) in order to give data relevance, leaders also distributed decision-making authority in a manner that empowered different staff members to utilise their expertise; and (3) the school systems directed their resources on building human and social capacity mainly by focusing on modelling and knowledge brokering amongst their staff. The paper concludes with a discussion of research and policy implications based on the findings.     

Beyond mentoring and advising: Toward understanding the role of faculty “developers” in student success

It is old news that interactions between students and faculty enhance student learning. In this article, Vicki Baker and Kimberly Griffin offer another role for faculty in their relationships with students—that of developer.     

International and Citizen Faculty in the United States: An Examination of their Productivity at Research Universities

The study examined the differences between international and U.S. citizen faculty members’ productivity in the areas of research, graduate and undergraduate teaching, and service at research universities in the United States. Utilizing the 2004 National Study of Postsecondary Faculty (NSOPF:04) data set, we used a Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) to address the primary research questions in the study. The results indicated that international faculty members were significantly more productive in research, but less productive in teaching and service than their U.S. citizen colleagues. The study can potentially aid policymakers and university administrators to not only better serve and support international faculty members but also to fully utilize them as a resource that benefits the institution and the students in all functions of their work and not just in research.     

学生支持的地区结构与管理

作为学生和教材之间的一个重要的界面,英国开放大学的地区中心支持辅导教师通过学习中心为学生提供强有力的学习支持和行政指导.本文介绍了英国开放大学地区中心的职能和结构、地区中心的管理方式、以及地区中心下属的学习中心的职能和作用.     

Interethnic families: The development trajectory of a major study

Intersections of class, race, of culture and of gender are unavoidable and at the same time, highly politicised. The objective ofInterethnic Families is to foreground these intersections, positioning them within a sociological framework which acknowledges the impact of new times on identity, community and nation. I believe that the cultural and racial shift made visible by theInterethnic Families project and embodied in the lives of interethnic families—a shift which takes us beyond unproblematic notions of multiculturalism—is a fait accompli. Thousands of interethnic families and creolised cultural practices and identities are already altering the cultural and racial landscape of Australia. Their increasing presence and the emergence of a discourse of cultural and racial politics, presents an interesting challenge to policy-makers and educators alike. The Australia which these families have the potential to create is the Australia I hope for myself and other Australians: a country which has moved beyond the conceptual boundaries of multiculturalism and the static notions of community, ethnicity and race which underpin it.Interethnic Families represents a concerted attempt to reveal a pathway towards this awareness and a substantive reconfiguration of our cultural narratives.     

Soft-Core in TV Time: The Political Economy of a “Cultural Trend”

This essay deconstructs popular notions that “sex sells” in an increasingly sexualized U.S. popular culture by examining the specific political, social, and economic forces behind the creation and expansion of Girls Gone Wild, a home video series marketed through television infomercials. The crackdown on hard-core pornography, followed by the opening of television infomercial markets, paved the way for the series’ creator to bring together the structural organization of a new soft-core video industry with the marketing aims of a cable industry eager to sell young, male ratings.