Going Outside in Winter: A Qualitative Study of Preschool Dressing Routines

The exploratory study focused on describing typical routines of preparing for winter outdoor play with preschool children and their teachers. Naturalistic observations, interviews and photographs resulted in extensive examples of children’s development in cognitive understanding of winter and winter-related concepts. Observations of teachers and assistants revealed task-oriented perspectives including detailed strategies and planning. Asynchronous communication and directive language were typical of teacher/child communication. Photo analyses confirmed physical skills used by preschoolers to accomplish dressing tasks and extensive curricular changes to indoor environments.     

Paint and Pedagogy: Anton Ehrenzweig and the Aesthetics of Art Education

Anton Ehrenzweig's work training art teachers at Goldsmiths College in London was groundbreaking in its field. The work of the studio fed back into Ehrenzweig's writings through his reflections on teaching and the work produced in end of year shows. In The Hidden Order of Art (1967), he theorised the creative process in psychoanalytic terms and elsewhere likened the task of the art teacher to that of a psychotherapist. In this article I argue that, by taking psychoanalytic art theory into the teaching studio, Ehrenzweig provided a psychic space within which students were freed from convention and encouraged to pursue their own practice.     

Revisiting the dialogue on the transition from coteaching to inservice teaching: new frameworks, additional benefits and emergent issues

In this rejoinder, we respond to the major points made by Gallo-Fox (this forum), Beers (this forum), Carambo and Stickney (this forum), and Murphy, Carlisle and Beggs (this forum). We focus primarily on the benefits and considerations that stem from employing additional theoretical frameworks for analyzing research in coteaching. We also address some of the future directions that should be explored in coteaching research.

Will Undergraduate Students Play Games to Learn How to Conduct Library Research?

This exploratory study examines whether undergraduate students will play games to learn how to conduct library research. Results indicate that students will play games that are an integral component of the course curriculum and enable them to accomplish overall course goals at the same time they learn about library research.     

Re-mythologizing mathematics through attention to classroom positioning

With our conceptualization of Harré and van Langenhove’s (1999) positioning theory, we draw attention to immanent experience and read transcendent discursive practices through the moment of interaction. We use a series of spatial images as metaphors to analyze the way positioning is conceptualized in current mathematics education literature and the way it may be alternatively conceptualized. This leads us to claim that changing the way mathematics is talked about and changing the stories (or myths) told about mathematics is necessary for efforts to change the way mathematics is done and the way it is taught.

Agency,sociomateriality, and configuration work

Social informatics research offers insights into the relationship between information technologies and social contexts. However, the material roles of information technologies, and their interplay with the agentic work of social actors, have not been addressed. Drawing on a field study of 37 mobile knowledge workers, we examine the dual material roles (enabling and constraining) played by information technologies in their work practices. We also investigate how these workers exert agency by fashioning multiple information technologies into a functioning digital assemblage. Although information technologies provide consequential affordances that enable mobilization of work across spaces and times, they simultaneously present design-driven, local, organizational, and temporal technological constraints that require mobile knowledge workers to engage in “configuration work” to make information technologies function effectively. Building on a sociomaterial perspective, we further discuss the interplay of information technologies and work practices enacted by mobile knowledge workers, in which both human and technological agency are materialized.     

The changing landscape of grading systems in US higher education

The following study explores the landscape of grading systems utilised in higher education, focusing on the frequency of different types of assessment scales (including Straight Letter, Plus/Minus, and other alternative policies). Although numerous studies have explored the relationship between university grading system and student behaviour, motivation, and overall perception of education experience, little research has been done to quantitatively analyse the number of colleges and universities that employ a specific grading policy. The present study addresses this gap in scholarship, using a sample of 620 schools from 12 states (and the District of Columbia) in the Northeast region of the USA. Results of the study find significant patterns of difference in the grading procedures across universities.     

Associations between peer bullying and classroom concentration: evidence for mediation by perceived personal safety and relationship with teacher

Being bullied is associated with a psycho-social maladjustment during childhood. One hitherto largely overlooked correlate is disrupted classroom concentration. Using data collected from 364 9–11-year-old children attending seven junior schools in the UK, we tested a model in which children’s perceived safety in two contexts (classroom and playground) and their perceived relationship with their teacher were hypothesised to mediate the association between being bullied and classroom concentration. Two analytical approaches to testing multiple mediation – product of coefficients and bootstrapping – supported the model. None of the mediation effects was moderated by sex but they were by year; in all cases the mediation effect was stronger in the older children than in the younger children (but still significant among the latter). These data suggest mechanisms through which bullying might have its effects on classroom concentration. The practical and theoretical implications are discussed.     

Exploring the Effects of Television Viewing on Perceived Life Quality: A Combined Perspective of Material Value and Upward Social Comparison

American television programs have been criticized for being filled with images endorsing capitalist consumerism and for being weighted toward the upper middle classes. This study proposed that heavy viewing of these distorted representations may culminate in decreases in viewers' life satisfaction. A path model investigated this supposition, based on material value and social comparison perspectives. Surveys were administered to 225 adults in a northeastern town in the United States, and the data were subjected to path analysis. The findings of this study suggest that heavy television viewing may be associated with material value, estimates of other people's affluence, and perceived gaps between the self and others in material affluence. Of importance, the findings also suggest that the perceived gaps between the self and others may be associated both with dissatisfaction with personal life and dissatisfaction with current social equality, whereas material value may be associated only with dissatisfaction with personal life.