Fuzzy books and sideways looks: discourses of schooling on Australian television advertisements

Media constructions of schooling provide suggestions about what should be expected of the school experience. Studies on discourses of schooling have examined how the school is framed in media discourses, but few have examined how it is formed mundanely and repeatedly in advertisements promoting products that are not directly educational. This paper examines how the school is constructed in a range of television advertisements that sell products that are not directly educational such as cereal and broadband Internet, focusing on how schools come to be framed negatively in advertising narratives. The television advertisements often use the technique of governmentality, whereby they attempt to direct the conduct of viewers by suggesting that self-improvement is achievable through personal enterprise. These advertisements position parents as agentive consumers of education, whose consumption habits are central to their children's scholarly success within problematic educational spaces.     

Education on the rails: a textual ethnography of university advertising in mobile contexts

ABSTRACT

As universities have succumbed to market discourses, they have adopted advertising strategies. It is not uncommon to see advertisements for them displayed in such mobile spaces as railway stations and alongside highways. Whilst it is true that such environments have always sought to take advantage of populations in transit, the fact that higher education institutions have turned to them as promotional sites, reflects the fact that the ‘transit’ demographic now includes large numbers of young people and high school students. In this paper, a sample of higher education advertisements found in Sydney’s transit spaces is analysed along with the ‘rationale’ provided by advertising companies responsible for their design. It is argued their existence reflects the fact that universities compete against one another for students and need to develop a persuasive ‘brand’. Thus in line with neo-liberalist constructions of subjectivity, they individualise the educational experience, and translate that experience into an economic asset, as a value-adding process. It is of note then that much of the imagery and copy of the advertising ‘visualises’ education as a journey and underpins the fact that mobility is an inescapable predicate of quotidian life.     

The space between: Mix taping as a ritual of distance

ABSTRACT

As an affectively charged medium of communication, the mix tape embodies a registry of human longings. In their accounts of exchanging mixes and their reflections on the meanings attached to them, mixers display the gamut of hopes and fears surrounding their relationships. While the mix tape often is represented as a token of unreserved intimacy, the practice of making and exchanging mixes can as easily be understood as a ritual of distance, one that betrays our ambivalence about dialogue and our delight in one-way communication. Based on interviews with donors and recipients of mix tapes and CDs, I will summarize four versions of the mix as a ritual of distance—communion, devotion, display, and fantasy—each building on its predecessor to round out the mix’s relational meaning.     

Reexamining technology’s role in learner-centered professional development

The American Psychological Association’s Learner-Centered Principles provide empirically-based approaches to improving teaching and learning. However, in order to facilitate learner-centered, technology-rich instruction to K-12 students, teachers must be afforded opportunities to develop key understandings and skills, rarely evident in most professional development programs. In this paper, we synthesize empirically-based studies and recommendations for teacher learning and propose a learner-centered professional development (LCPD) framework to guide both professional development and empirical work on teacher learning. We describe LCPD components, discuss ways that technology can support LCPD, and highlight implications for research and practice.     

Persistence and Fadeout in the Impacts of Child and Adolescent Interventions

Many interventions targeting cognitive skills or socioemotional skills and behaviors demonstrate initially promising but then quickly disappearing impacts. Our article seeks to identify the key features of interventions, as well as the characteristics and environments of the children and adolescents who participate in them, that can be expected to sustain persistently beneficial program impacts. We describe three such processes: skill-building, foot-in-the-door and sustaining environments. We argue that skill-building interventions should target “trifecta” skills—ones that are malleable, fundamental, and would not have developed eventually in the absence of the intervention. Successful foot-in-the-door interventions equip a child with the right skills or capacities at the right time to avoid imminent risks (e.g., grade failure or teen drinking) or seize emerging opportunities (e.g., entry into honors classes). The sustaining environments perspective views high quality of environments subsequent to the completion of the intervention as crucial for sustaining earlier skill gains. These three perspectives generate both complementary and competing hypotheses regarding the nature, timing, and targeting of interventions that generate enduring impacts.     

Ernest L. Boyer and the American Christian College: Historical Considerations

This article explores the historical roots of Ernest Boyer's impact on Christian higher education in the United States. Boyer's stints as a student at two Christian colleges (Messiah College in Pennsylvania and Greenville College in Illinois) and his first faculty and administrative posts at Upland College in California were significant influences in the development of his vision for the Christian college—a vision that led to greater legitimacy and credibility in the landscape of American higher education. Ernest Boyer's innovative, yet historic understanding of the distinctives of Christian higher education contributed to the successful accreditation process of nearly one hundred small, private institutions.