Kinesiology—A “Homeless” Field: Addressing Organization and Leadership Needs

Motivated by her belief in the contributions of physical activity to the “good life” for all people, Amy Morris Homans was infl uential in the development of physical education as a viable and respected academic field of study in higher education. Over the past 100 years, however, as the field faced pressures to become more scientific, it has become increasingly decentralized into subdisciplinary units, thus, losing much of its unified mission and focus as an integrated field of study in academia. This fragmentation, along with the lack of an “umbrella” professional association or organizational home for the field (now most commonly called kinesiology) has hampered the field's ability to gain national recognition as a disciplinary field of study, its effectiveness as a political voice, and its ability to conduct the kind of cross-disciplinary research needed to best address important questions and issues in the field. Such overspecialization, together with a lack of a common name and common purpose, has raised concern about the field's identify and importance in higher education, with program cuts continuing to be the unfortunate result at a number of major universities. This paper addresses the importance of reconnecting the field and suggests a possible strategy for developing a new umbrella professional association dedicated to the unification and advancement of the field.     

JUNIOR COLLEGE ARTICULATION: ADMISSION,RETENTION, REMEDIATION,TRANSFER

The “open‐door” policy, which described admissions into the public junior college, was an expression of the ideal of universal access to postsecondary education. The intention was that disadvantaged high‐school graduates would be given another chance to break the poverty cycle, and minority students an opportunity to extend their skills and realize wider career choices. As the number of applicants thus becoming eligible for a college education increased, so did the problems of the two‐year institutions. The open door was beginning to look like a revolving door, when more and more of these students could not perform satisfactorily in any college program. The state boards of education began to realize that not only admissions policies, but also retention standards, degree requirements, and transfer credits would need review.     

Unforgivable Blackness: Visual Rhetoric,Reader Response,and Critical Racial Literacy

Perceptions of black representations in literature and other visual mediums as positive or negative continuously cause consternation and debate (Fleetwood, 2011). Because African American children are literacy participants and consumers, they are not immune from experiencing this tension. This essay considers the effects and affective threads of racism and racialization connected to visuality (Foster, 1988), and how educators might support and nurture children’s roles as aesthetic critics and critical readers of books featuring racial imagery and representations. The young African American readers in this study resist a picturebook using colorist logic and macro-level social indexing of phenotypic traits. The author argues that negative social messages about blackness within the larger ethos of society, as well as the absence of diverse representations in children’s literature, contribute to such interpretations. She suggests explicitly teaching African American children about counter-visuality and the ways in which “art works” to shape and transform understandings about complex experiences like racism.     

The birth of words: ten-month-olds learn words through perceptual salience

A core task in language acquisition is mapping words onto objects, actions, and events. Two studies investigated how children learn to map novel labels onto novel objects. Study 1 investigated whether 10-month-olds use both perceptual and social cues to learn a word. Study 2, a control study, tested whether infants paired the label with a particular spatial location rather than to an object. Results show that 10-month-olds can learn new labels and do so by relying on the perceptual salience of an object instead of social cues provided by a speaker. This is in direct contrast to the way in which older children (12-, 18-, and 24-month-olds) learn and extend new object names.     

Digital technology and creative arts career patterns in the UK creative economy

In this article, we ask what role both digital and artistic human capital play in the creative economy by examining employment patterns of digital technology (DT) and creative arts and design (CAD) graduates. Using student micro-data collected by the Higher Education Statistical Agency (HESA) in the United Kingdom, we investigate the characteristics and location determinants of these graduates. The article deals specifically with understanding how digital and creative skills in the UK are embedded across industries, or are concentrated in creative sub-sectors. Furthermore, it explores the role that these graduates play in each of the different sectors and their financial rewards. Findings suggest that digital technology graduates tend to concentrate in the software and gaming sub-sector of the creative industries, but also are likely to be in embedded creative jobs outside of the creative industries. DT and CAD graduates are more likely to be in a creative job than other graduates. Although they are more likely to be in full-time employment than part-time or self-employment, DT graduates suffer from a higher level of unemployment than CAD graduates.     

Images of mathematics held by university teachers of mathematical sciences

For some time now mathematics educators have been studying elementary and secondary school teachers' views of mathematics. A knowledge of university teachers' views of this discipline can provide a useful background to these research endeavours. As part of a national survey of men and women teachers of mathematical sciences in Canadian universities, I included a question concerning the definition of mathematics. In this article I present the themes emerging from a content analysis of the responses obtained and discuss them in relation to research on school teachers' perception of mathematics. I also report the results concerning the university teachers answers to a second question relevant to the image of mathematics, namely identifying up to ten books which, in their opinion, have had the most influence on the development of mathematics.     

Pre‐service teachers explore cultural identity and ideology through picture books

This paper draws on early data from a cross‐Canada research project in which researchers at six Faculties of Education have been engaged in introducing picture books with multiple and diverse representations of Canadians to classes of pre‐service teachers, inviting them to explore the pedagogical possibilities of the picture books and to discuss their cultural identities in focus groups and interviews. The paper reports the participants' expressed understandings of multiculturalism and their own relations and experiences with it, as well as their thoughts on classroom implementation of curriculum that incorporates picture books with multicultural and diversity themes. The paper also includes a case study of one Canadian province to further explore the wider context of pre‐service teachers' understandings and ideologies by examining discourses in policy and practices in Newfoundland and Labrador.     

A look at creativity in public and private schools

This research study investigated the perspectives of teachers on student creativity. A group of 15 teachers from public schools and 24 teachers from private schools completed an Early Childhood Creativity Rating Scale (ECCRS) on four of their students. A total of 156 students were rated on this ECCRS. The major question asked in this study was: How do teacher perspectives of student creativity differ in public and private schools, between kindergarten and grade 3, and are these perspectives influenced by teacher characteristics. Results found that private school teachers rated their students higher on creativity, third grade students were rated lowest on creativity, and teachers who perceived themselves as most creative also rated their students as most creative.