The characteristics and perceptions of teachers engaged in leading professional communities

Following educational reform in Israel, teacher-leaders create and lead professional development communities (PDCs), which are professional learning communities with a focus on in-service professional development and/or improving pedagogical effectiveness. Interviews with 30 teacher-leaders and all four district-level program coordinators revealed that, prior to assuming the role, teacher-leaders developed their professional and leadership skills largely in a self-directed manner. They described their PDCs as cohesive and dedicated, cooperative, involving peer-learning, and as creating a knowledge bank of teaching methods and tools. PDCs enable teachers to advance projects within the school and affect school culture. Principals’ involvement with PDCs varied, with their usually considerable involvement very favorably regarded. This article describes these findings and discusses their implications for the professional development of teachers in the international context.     

性别表演与反思社会学

布迪厄为后现代女性主义研究者提供了反思社会学和惯习等学术理念和社会学方法,试图通过对朱迪斯．邑特勒的性别表演理论的解读和释疑来发掘布迪厄对女性主义社会学的贡献。     

To Sign or Not to Sign? The Impact of Encouraging Infants to Gesture on Infant Language and Maternal Mind‐Mindedness

Findings are presented from the first randomized control trial of the effects of encouraging symbolic gesture (or “baby sign”) on infant language, following 40 infants from age 8 months to 20 months. Half of the mothers were trained to model a target set of gestures to their infants. Frequent measures were taken of infant language development and dyadic interactions were scrutinized to assess mind‐mindedness. Infants exposed to gesture did not differ from control conditions on language outcomes; thus, no support was found for previous claims that encouraging gesturing with infants accelerates linguistic development. Microgenetic analysis revealed mothers in the gesture training conditions were more responsive to their infants' nonverbal cues and encouraged more independent action by their infant.     

Positive emotions: passionate scholarship and student transformation

This paper challenges the practical and conceptual understanding of the role of emotions in higher education from the twin perspectives of transition and transformation. Focusing on the neglected area of positive emotions, exploratory data reveal a rich, low-level milieu of undergraduate emotional awareness in students chiefly attributed to pedagogic actions, primarily extrinsically orientated, and pervasive throughout the learning experience. The data conceive positive affect as oppositional, principally ephemeral and linked to performative pedagogic endeavours of getting, knowing and doing. A cyclical social dynamic of reciprocity, generating positive feedback loops, is highlighted. Finally we inductively construct a tentative ‘emotion-transition framework’ to assist our understanding of positive emotion as a force for transformational change; our contention is that higher education might proactively craft pedagogic spaces so as to unite the feeling discourse, the thinking discourse (epistemological self) and the wider life-self (ontological) discourse.     

Community‐based early intervention for children with behavioural,emotional and social problems: evaluation of the Scallywags Scheme

Scallywags is a community‐based, early intervention programme for young children (aged 3–7) with behavioural, emotional and social problems, which integrates work in the home and school with a parenting curriculum and direct work with children. A pre‐post intervention study across multi‐sites of 340 participants is reported. Using standardised measures, the study found statistically significant reductions in problems at home and school experienced by children who completed the programme, and in parental stress levels. Participation was found to be high and the project acceptable to parents, many of whom would be described as hard to reach. The rigorous evaluation of this real‐life service and its positive outcomes highlight the potential of such programmes to tackle the needs of these children and families, and help prevent longer‐term problems associated with early onset behavioural problems, including social exclusion, antisocial behaviour and educational failure.     

The effects of exercise in hypoxic and normoxic conditions on endothelin-1 and arterial compliance

The purpose of this study was to determine the effects of short-term normoxic and hypoxic exercise on plasma endothelin-1 and nitric oxide levels, and the relationship of arterial compliance and pulmonary artery pressure to endothelin-1. Seven endurance-trained males completed two incremental and two steady-state exercise tests performed at ventilatory threshold in normoxia and hypoxia (fraction of inspired oxygen = 0.14). Plasma endothelin-1was measured throughout steady-state tests. Arterial compliance using applanation tonometry, plasma nitric oxide and pulmonary artery pressure using Doppler echocardiography were measured before and after exercise. Small arterial compliance and pulmonary artery pressure significantly increased following exercise. There were no main effects of condition or time for plasma endothelin-1and nitric oxide levels. There were no significant relationships between plasma endothelin-1 and arterial compliance or pulmonary artery pressure. In conclusion, mechanisms other than the endothelial system may play a role in the exercise-induced changes in small artery compliance in this study population. Moderate hypoxia and a 30-minute steady-state exercise have limited effects on plasma endothelin-1 in endurance-trained males.     

Fungal diversity in adult date palm (Phoenix dactylifera L.) revealed by culture-dependent and culture-independent approaches

Endophytic flora plays a vital role in the colonization and survival of host plants, especially in harsh environments, such as arid regions. This flora may, however, contain pathogenic species responsible for various troublesome host diseases. The present study is aimed at investigating the diversity of both cultivable and non-cultivable endophytic fungal floras in the internal tissues (roots and leaves) of Tunisian date palm trees (Phoenix dactylifera). Accordingly, 13 isolates from both root and leaf samples, exhibiting distinct colony morphology, were selected from potato dextrose agar (PDA) medium and identified by a sequence match search wherein their 18S–28S internal transcribed spacer (ITS) sequences were compared to those available in public databases. These findings revealed that the cultivable root and leaf isolates fell into two groups, namely Nectriaceae and Pleosporaceae. Additionally, total DNA from palm roots and leaves was further extracted and ITS fragments were amplified. Restriction fragment length polymorphism (RFLP) analysis of the ITS from 200 fungal clones (leaves: 100; roots: 100) using HaeIII restriction enzyme revealed 13 distinct patterns that were further sequenced and led to the identification of Alternaria, Cladosporium, Davidiella (Cladosporium teleomorph), Pythium, Curvularia, and uncharacterized fungal endophytes. Both approaches confirmed that while the roots were predominantly colonized by Fusaria (members of the Nectriaceae family), the leaves were essentially colonized by Alternaria (members of the Pleosporaceae family). Overall, the findings of the present study constitute, to the authors’ knowledge, the first extensive report on the diversity of endophytic fungal flora associated with date palm trees (P. dactylifera).     

Information effects on the response-reinforcer association

Pigeons were trained on a discrete-trial delayed reinforcement procedure with respect to one response key that was periodically illuminated. In some conditions, a second response key, or a tone, both previously paired with reinforcement, was interpolated in the delay-of-reinforcement interval. In comparison to a control condition with neither stimulus in the delay interval, the interpolated stimulus attenuated (blocked) the amount of responding that was maintained by the delayed reinforcement contingency. The degree of blocking was unaffected by whether the interpolated stimulus was the tone or keylight, in spite of the fact that the keylight evoked responding and the tone did not. A second study showed that the blocking effects involved the response-reinforcer association in that blocking occurred when the delayed reinforcement was response-dependent but did not occur when reinforcement was response-independent. The results thus show that response-reinforcer associations are affected by informational variables in the same manner as has been shown for stimulus-reinforcer associations. They also demonstrate that preexisting stimulus-reinforcer associations can block response-reinforcer associations, thus suggesting that both types of association depend upon the same associative process.