A mentoring programme based on competency development at a Spanish university: an action research study

This article describes an action research (AR) project for designing and implementing a structured mentoring programme in a Spanish university. A student affairs unit, a team of researchers, faculty-mentors and student-protégés worked together on three cycles of AR. The result is a programmatic mentoring programme for the development of non-technical personal and professional competencies for undergraduate students. This paper describes the original situation that sparked the project, the iterative process followed, the tools and guides developed and the final programme designed. In addition to the increase in the level of satisfaction perceived by the entire university, the paper outlines the five critical factors that emerged from the AR project: the competency development process, programme value added, trust between mentors and protégés, the prominence of the student-protégé in the improvement plans and the continuous improvement culture generated.     

Teaching empathic concern and altruism in the smartphone age

Numerous studies show empathic concern promotes altruistic motivation and prosocial behavior. Here, we discuss empathic concern, its relation to altruistic motivation, and how empathic concern is invoked in experimental studies. We do this with an eye toward applying laboratory techniques in the classroom, and everyday life, to foster empathic concern and altruistic responding. This goes beyond teaching about empathic concern to setting up conditions that help people experience this psychological state, and its benefits, firsthand. Smartphone-based ecological momentary interventions (EMIs) can help us do this by raising self- and other-awareness, and by promoting empathic states and practices in daily life. While smartphones often pull us away from direct personal interaction, we explore ways of using these devices to redirect our attention to those around us. We end by suggesting that these ways of helping people regularly experience and act upon empathic concern in daily life might help nurture a compassionate disposition.     

Gratitude for teachers as a psychological resource for early adolescents: A mixed-methods study

In this mixed-methods study, we examine students’ gratitude for their teachers and the implications of that gratitude for their psychological adaptation. We report findings that gratitude for teachers (GT) is, in fact, a resource for students facing difficult circumstances outside school. More specifically, our hierarchical multiple regression models demonstrate that this form of gratitude decreases the negative association between adverse life events and students’ life satisfaction. GT also decreases the positive association between negative life events and students’ perceived stress. Then, we use coded material from student interviews to illustrate how they understand the ways that their GT helps them manage challenges in their personal lives. We conclude that students’ GT buffers the negative impact of adverse life events, because it helps students attend to the positive interactions and mentorship they have with their teachers and maintain focus on their future-oriented goals.     

Teaching About Energy

Science & Education - In this article, we draw upon the Conceptual Profile Theory to discuss the negotiation of meanings related to the energy concept in an 11th grade physics classroom. This...     

Interdisciplinary collaboration as a prerequisite for inclusive education

This article reports on findings from a research project on interdisciplinary collaboration between mainstream school teachers and special school teachers. The aim of the research project has been to examine the knowledge of special school teachers and how this knowledge can contribute to the development of an inclusive learning environment in mainstream schools. Not as a simple task of transferring knowledge, but as a process of transforming knowledge through interdisciplinary collaboration and co-teaching. The design of the study is inspired by the notion of participation within action research as a research approach. Thus the thick data generated from reflective activities in the study design are analysed within a narrative and practice directed strategy of analysis.     

‘Children’s clans’; social organisation and interpretive reconstruction as aspects on development of peer-groups in outdoor play

The focus of this article is children’s self-organisation of peer-groups through play. The play was initiated by encounters with the environment. The use of ethnographic methods in early childhood research has proved helpful to elucidate, interpret, and understand children’s experiences and the creation of meaning in their everyday lives. This inquiry draws on field notes, informal conversations with the children, and photos from a study of kindergarten children’s experiences of outdoor places and landscapes in Norway. Going out of doors together with the children regularly over a period of 10 months revealed aspects of how children’s interactions in play connect to their use of natural landscapes and its place in peer-group social organisation. The data are presented as ‘narrative maps’ and episodes written as ‘emplotted’ narratives.     

Proxy-produced ethnographic work: what are the problems,issues, and dilemmas arising from proxy-ethnography?

This article addresses the implications of researcher-student cooperation in the production of empirical material. For the student to replace the experienced researcher and work under the researcher’s supervision, we call such work proxy-produced ethnographic work. Although there are clear advantages, the specific relations and positions arising from such a set-up between the teacher/researcher and the proxy ethnographer/student are found to have implications for the ethnographies produced. This article’s main focus is to show how these relations and positions have shifted the focus of the ethnographic work and in some way have distorted the ethnographies in certain ways. It is shown how the participating researchers have distinctive, incorporated dispositions with which they pre-consciously participate in an implicit and subtle relation that can make it easy to overlook the distortions during the research process. These ethnographic distortions are generated within a framework drawn primarily on the work of sociologist Pierre Bourdieu.     

Hierarchical linear dynamical systems for unsupervised musical note recognition

In this paper we develop a new framework for time series segmentation based on a Hierarchical Linear Dynamical System (HLDS), and test its performance on monophonic and polyphonic musical note recognition. The center piece of our approach is the inclusion of constraints in the filter topology, instead of on the cost function as normally done in machine learning. Just by slowing down the dynamics of the top layer of an augmented (multilayer) state model, which is still compatible with the recursive update equation proposed originally by Kalman, the system learns directly from data all the musical notes, without labels, effectively creating a time series clustering algorithm that does not require segmentation. We analyze the HLDS properties and show that it provides better classification accuracy compared to current state-of-the-art approaches.     

Leveraging community sport organizations to promote community capacity: Strategic outcomes,challenges, and theoretical considerations

Community sport organizations (CSOs) provide valuable contexts for promoting community development. These initiatives are most effective when they involve local stakeholders in the process of development. A key first step to achieving this objective is building community capacity, defined as local stakeholders’ skills, knowledge, and resources that may be leveraged for change. Interestingly, despite this conceptual importance, few researchers have focused on capacity building in the sport context. This has limited the theoretical advancement of community capacity theory as it relates to CSOs and community development. Using a qualitative case study approach, the authors analyze the outcomes and challenges of implementing community capacity building strategies in an American CSO, and draw on the empirical data to contribute to this theoretical conversation. Interviews, participant observation, and document analysis were used to generate data, and deductive techniques were used for thematic analysis. The results highlight the outcomes of the capacity building strategies and challenges associated with implementation. In addition, the conclusion focuses on theoretical contributions to community capacity theory, namely the role of sport in facilitating inter-community relations across social groups and the link with process models of organizational capacity.