Teacher union legitimacy: Shifting the moral center for member engagement

This mixed-method case study explored teacher union members’ beliefs about the teacher union and their reasons for being active or inactive in the union. Findings suggest that teacher unions have gained pragmatic and cognitive legitimacy (Chaison and Bigelow in Unions and legitimacy. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY, 2002), but that participants’ perceptions of the union’s moral legitimacy (Chaison and Bigelow in Unions and legitimacy. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY, 2002) influenced their beliefs about the union. Specifically, participants’ beliefs about the union’s role in job protection, especially the protection of ineffective teachers, and social-professional supports (or lack of) strongly influenced their decisions to be active or inactive in the teacher union. These findings have implications for how effectively teacher unions are able to engage current members and sustain member engagement in the future.     

The Unbundling of Legal Services and its Implications for Law Librarianship

This article examines the role of law libraries with respect to free Web-based legal information sites and the lack of access to low-cost legal advice. The legal profession's reaction to these sites and suggestions on how to address professional and ethical concerns are discussed.     

Social Context and Video Game Play: Impact on Cardiovascular and Affective Responses

We examined if cardiovascular and affective responding to video game play changed across social context or with game content. Male participants (13–22 years old) played a violent or nonviolent video game. Each participant played the game individually, competitively against a male partner, and cooperatively with the partner. There was no effect of social condition on heart rate (HR) or diastolic blood pressure (DBP). Participants had significantly higher systolic BP (SBP) when playing individually and competitively than when playing cooperatively, probably because play was more continuous. There was no impact of game type for HR or SBP. DBP was significantly higher for participants who played the violent game, perhaps because participants found the violent game more exciting and enjoyable. Participants who played the violent game rated the experimenters more positively than those who played the nonviolent game. Participants found game play more exciting, enjoyable, stressful, and frustrating, but less boring and relaxing, when they played competitively or cooperatively than when they played individually. The results are discussed in terms of the general aggression model.     

A Political Analysis of Community Influence over School Closure

This study seeks to understand community member participation in and influence over an urban school district’s school closure process. Data from interviews with School Board members, district administrators, and community members, as well as district documents and newspaper articles suggest that district administrators limited participation through committee membership and public hearing procedures. In addition, the development of an “objective” process served to legitimize the decision. Finally, higher income community members influenced the closure process through formal and informal mechanisms, while low-income community members exerted power through alliances with external (powerful) groups.     

Hidden treasure: successful international doctoral students who found and harnessed the hidden curriculum

This paper draws from an institutionally-funded phenomenological study of international PhD students’ academic acculturation, which focuses on the distinctive strengths, challenges, and hidden opportunities facing this cohort within the context of their transition from one academic culture to another. The first section introduces the theoretical base employed in the study and is then followed by exploring the conceptualisations of the hidden curriculum and its associated concepts: ‘the third space’ and ‘darkness in higher education’. Drawing upon our study findings, the second section illustrates practical exemplars of finding and harnessing the hidden curriculum. Without discounting the wide range of formal and informal institutional support provisions designed to facilitate international PhD students’ acculturation to a new academic setting, our study findings strongly endorse that students themselves have a crucial role to play in their complex transitional journey. Our study also offers a unique insight, i.e. if found, the hidden curriculum is an effective tool not only for international PhD students’ coping and survival but even more importantly, in thriving in new societal and academic contexts.     

Authorization,rationalization, and moral evaluation: legitimizing acupuncture in Hong Kong's newspapers

Hong Kong has always been regarded as a critical region of Cultural China. Surprisingly, traditional Chinese medicine has not yet been accepted as legitimate in the city. This study uses acupuncture as a case to investigate the way media texts work to organize a field of knowledge and practices about health in a post-colonial society where contrasting perspectives and hybrid ideas rooted from the East and the West intermingle. Acupuncture is conceptualized as socially constructed health knowledge that has become increasingly legitimate in media discourse. Through a mixed-method approach that combines discourse and content analysis, a total of 666 news articles related to acupuncture published in two Hong Kong newspapers over a 10-year period were analyzed. Three major forms of discursive construction of legitimation – authorization, rationalization, and moral evaluation – were identified and elaborated in association with the texts and the social contexts. This study reveals a complex process of generating legitimacy for health knowledge through news narratives.     

Towards a personality understanding of information technology students and their IT learning in UAE university

This research investigates the personality characteristics of Information Technology students (CIT) in UAE University (UAEU) and how such features impact their IT learning. To achieve this objective, this research attempts to explain the impact of the Big-5 factors on learning using survey research. Results from 179 respondents suggested that agreeableness, extraversion, openness, and conscientiousness respectively were the most important strategies adopted by CIT students. However, neuroticism scored the lowest. Such results could be attributed to personal as well as to cultural reasons as highlighted in this research. The research highlights theoretical as well as professional contributions and implications. Some of challenges in this research could be addressed by designing programs aiming at enhancing student’s learning ability from the perspective of their personal traits.     

How Central Office Leaders Influence School Leaders’ Decision-Making: Unpacking Power Dynamics in Two School-Based Decision-Making Systems

ABSTRACT

While past studies on school district decentralization found that central office leaders can limit school leaders’ decision-making power, the studies did not examine how they do so. We investigated this in eight elementary schools in two large urban school systems with official policies of school site-based decision-making. We found that even though school leaders had legal authority over most instructional decisions, they overwhelmingly made decisions consistent with central office preferences. The question is why. By examining the micro process of interaction between central office and school leaders, we found that central office leaders in both districts used a range of persuasive strategies to influence school-level decisions. Specifically, they linked their suggestions to institutionalized norms, rules, and shared understandings in the district and profession. By doing so, central office leaders pushed against their decentralization policies. Differences in the combination of strategies that central office leaders used and the amount of interaction they had with school leaders led to (a) greater variability in the degree to which school leaders in one district made decisions aligned with central office preferences; and (b) greater feelings of coercion among school leaders in the second. These findings unpack the dynamics among local education leaders as they implement and sometimes alter the rules within policies through their daily practice.     

Into the Unknown: Examining Neural Representations of Parent–Adolescent Interactions

The parent–adolescent relationship is important for adolescents’ emotion regulation (ER), yet little is known regarding the neural patterns of dyadic ER that occur during parent–adolescent interactions. A novel measure that can be used to examine such patterns is cross-brain connectivity (CBC)—concurrent and time-lagged connectivity between two individuals’ brain regions. This study sought to provide evidence of CBC and explore associations between CBC, parenting, and adolescent internalizing symptoms. Thirty-five adolescents (mean age = 15 years, 69% female, 72% Non-Hispanic White, 17% Black, 11% Hispanic or Latino) and one biological parent (94% female) completed an fMRI hyperscanning conflict discussion task. Results revealed CBC between emotion-related brain regions. Exploratory analyses indicated CBC is associated with parenting and adolescent depressive symptoms.     

Physical,Mental, and Financial Stress Impacts of COVID-19 on Early Childhood Educators

Early Childhood Education Journal -