Participatory action research as pedagogy: investigating social and ecological justice learning within a teacher education program

A research collective comprised of teacher candidates, graduate students, and faculty set out to investigate the role and impact of social and ecological justice learning in a teacher education program. Amidst the tensions, negotiations, and articulations of the research design, the collective came to recognize the spaces of participatory action research as sites of growth and efficacy toward justice learning. And, each began to perceive themselves as both impacted by educational structures and as agents enacting their own visions of professional practice. These outcomes are discussed in the context of the growing body of participatory action research, emphasizing the dynamic learning precipitated within the intersections of the research collective. The empirical analysis, involving survey and interview data, brought to bear the rarity of events participants (teacher candidates) recognized as invoking meaningful social and ecological justice learning, and goes some way to describe such learning in terms of embodied experience. The paper closes with a selection of testimonials provided by members of the research collective, offering personal accounts of what was gained through participating in the research process.     

Public and private sectors in higher education: A comparison of international patterns

This paper seeks to extend understanding of the varying nature and varying forms of private higher education. Three basic structural divisions between private and public sectors of higher education are compared: mass private and restricted public sectors; parallel public and private sectors; and, comprehensive public and peripheral private sectors. The private sectors are then contrasted in terms of such functional characteristics as state authority, financial constraints and dominant orientation toward either academic goals, the student marketplace or external patrons. The highly diverse American private sector is viewed in this context. A consideration of mass private sectors then suggests that parameters of public policy are set by structurally derived characteristics of higher education systems.An earlier version of this paper was delivered to the Third International Seminar on Higher Education in Asia, sponsored by the Research Institute for Higher Education, Hiroshima University, Hiroshima, January 28–29, 1987. This version has benefited from the comments of the Conference participants, as well as those of Paul DiMaggio.     

私立高等教育与公共政策:私立高等教育在经济现代化过程中的角色

每个国家都把维护其高等教育的利益视为首要的任务 .在一个正在现代化的经济中 ,“充分教育”就如同充分就业一样已经成为实现社会和个人价值的潜在目标。私立高等教育是实现充分教育的一种理想途径 ,它不但为高等教育增加了资源而且拓宽了招生途径。当然 ,私立高等教育也存在许多不足 ,甚至还存在一些质量问题。公共政策应该保护私立高等教育的利益 ,减少其弊端。对实施“充分教育”的私立大学给予法律的保护 ,为其学生提供资助。公共政策的目标是确保公私立高等教育的共同发展     

Predicting SNAP Participation in Older Adults: Do Age Categorizations Matter?

Prior, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) research reveals limited age cohort analyses that may not accurately reflect nuanced age differences in SNAP participation. The purpose of this study was to add depth to older age analysis and SNAP participation via four models of age categorizations. This secondary data analysis used a sample of 10,116 older adults from the 2010 Health and Retirement Study (HRS). Controlling for demographic, socioeconomic, and physical factors, logistic regression tested four age categorization models: Third-Age and Fourth-Age groupings; young-old, middle-old, and oldest old groupings; generic decade cohorts; and continuous age. Hypotheses for each model predicted older age as negative to SNAP participation. Significant predictors of SNAP participation included female gender; non-White, non-Hispanic, and Hispanic ethnicities; lower household income; inadequate food budget; and difficulty in self-dressing. Odds ratios confirmed age as a negative factor to SNAP participation. Addition of age categorizations into each model yielded nominal effect size change. Yet, addition of age into the models changed the relationship between control variables and SNAP receipt: gender and Hispanic ethnicity. While age categorizations offered marginal effect predicting SNAP participation, difficulty dressing most strongly predicted increased participation across all models. This finding is relevant, as standard SNAP participation models for younger individuals rely heavily on socioeconomic indicators. Results suggest future research modeling SNAP participation in older individuals that emphasizes physical/medical issues.     

Sparsity and Independence: Balancing Two Objectives in Optimization for Source Separation with Application to fMRI Analysis

Because of its wide applicability in various disciplines, blind source separation (BSS), has been an active area of research. For a given dataset, BSS provides useful decompositions under minimum assumptions typically by making use of statistical properties—types of diversity—of the data. Two popular types of diversity that have proven useful for many applications are statistical independence and sparsity. Although many methods have been proposed for the solution of the BSS problem that take either the statistical independence or the sparsity of the data into account, there is no unified method that can take into account both types of diversity simultaneously. In this work, we provide a mathematical framework that enables direct control over the influence of these two types of diversity and apply the proposed framework to the development of an effective ICA algorithm that can jointly exploit independence and sparsity. In addition, due to its importance in biomedical applications, we propose a new model reproducibility framework for the evaluation of the proposed algorithm. Using simulated functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data, we study the trade-offs between the use of sparsity versus independence in terms of the separation accuracy and reproducibility of the algorithm and provide guidance on how to balance these two objectives in real world applications where the ground truth is not available.