Methodology in Sports History: Learning from Legal Scholarship?

The brief note aims to illustrate how historical context has contributed to my writing on modern sports law and principally through two pieces of work – the first relating to the historical, sui generis origins of the legality of combat or fighting sports, which continues to stretch the boundaries of core principles of criminal law, such as reasonable consent to bodily harm, to their utmost; and second, and more generally, the ‘historicalegal’ influences on the development of modern sport in mid-nineteenth-century Britain. Before that is done, it is best to give some account of research methodologies in legal scholarship and principally as they apply to legal history.     

What Makes Access Services Staff Happy? A Job Satisfaction Survey

This article reports the results of a survey that analyzed the job satisfaction of 361 library access services practitioners. Library access services staff were surveyed and asked to rate job satisfaction based on Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs and Herzberg's Two-Factor Theory. Results show that access services staff have opportunities for satisfaction based on higher-level needs. Personal fulfillment, job opportunities, and relationships with coworkers rated as the top three most important factors. There are also contributing factors that affect job satisfaction based on lower-level needs, such as salary. Age, education level, and administrative responsibilities also play a role in job satisfaction of access services staff. The survey results demonstrated that most employees are satisfied, while improvements are needed in certain areas to provide employees with a more fulfilling work environment.     

“Loving,Knowing Ignorance”: A Problem for the Educational Mission of Museums

In this essay, I suggest that Mariana Ortega's concept of “loving, knowing ignorance” (2006) provides a useful conceptual tool for museum practitioners who seek to advance a progressive mission. This form of ignorance assumes authority in describing and acting on behalf of a subject, even as it fails to take seriously the subject's self‐knowledge and agency. While Ortega initially coined this term to describe the stance of white feminists toward women of color, here I extend the concept to describe a wider range of knowers—in this case, the institutional museum. Using a case study at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston to illustrate this problem, I will suggest that becoming aware of instances of loving, knowing ignorance and learning to avoid it is a key skill for museum professionals who hope for their institutions to fulfill their educational mission in a diverse and democratic society.     

Teaching ‘community engagement’ in engineering education for international development: Integration of an interdisciplinary social work curriculum

This article reviews the literature on challenges faced by engineering faculty in educating their students on community-engaged, sustainable technical solutions in developing countries. We review a number of approaches to increasing teaching modules on social and community components of international development education, from adding capstone courses and educational track seminars to integrating content from other disciplines, particularly the social sciences. After summarising recent pedagogical strategies to increase content on community-focused development, we present a case study of how one engineering programme incorporates social work students and faculty to infuse strategies for community engagement in designing and implementing student-led global engineering development projects. We outline how this interdisciplinary pedagogical approach teaches students from the two disciplines to work together in addressing power balances, economic and social issues and overall sustainability of international development projects.     

Los Sentimientos,Luchas, y Esperanzas de Cinco Familias Mexicana: The Sentiments,Struggles, and Hopes of Five Mexican Families

Within the everyday space of their modest trailer homes, I observed compelling environments in the households of 5 Mexican families. In their homes, there existed los padres con sus hijos (parents with their children) who intuitively expressed cariño, or love, for one another, conversed in multiple languages, practiced cultural traditions, and inculcated hope in their children’s minds and hearts. As I listened to their steadfast voices and felt their innermost emotions, a clearer understanding came to mind about ways in which educators and families might construct new alliances for the benefit of children’s future in America.     

Global pedigree and national imperative: Hong Kong universities’ response to China’s grand strategies

Higher Education - Literature offers a theoretical framework exemplifying the inherent tensions between “becoming Chinese” and “remaining global” in the evolution of the...     

How students reason about matter flows and accumulations in complex biological phenomena: An emerging learning progression for mass balance

In recent years, there has been a strong push to transform STEM education at K-12 and collegiate levels to help students learn to think like scientists. One aspect of this transformation involves redesigning instruction and curricula around fundamental scientific ideas that serve as conceptual scaffolds students can use to build cohesive knowledge structures. In this study, we investigated how students use mass balance reasoning as a conceptual scaffold to gain a deeper understanding of how matter moves through biological systems. Our aim was to lay the groundwork for a mass balance learning progression in physiology. We drew on a general models framework from biology and a covariational reasoning framework from math education to interpret students' mass balance ideas. We used a constant comparative method to identify students' reasoning patterns from 73 interviews conducted with undergraduate biology students. We helped validate the reasoning patterns identified with >8000 written responses collected from students at multiple institutions. From our analyses, we identified two related progress variables that describe key elements of students' performances: the first describes how students identify and use matter flows in biology phenomena; the second characterizes how students use net rate-of-change to predict how matter accumulates in, or disperses from, a compartment. We also present a case study of how we used our emerging mass balance learning progression to inform instructional practices to support students' mass balance reasoning. Our progress variables describe one way students engage in three dimensional learning by showing how student performances associated with the practice of mathematical thinking reveal their understanding of the core concept of matter flows as governed by the crosscutting concept of matter conservation. Though our work is situated in physiology, it extends previous work in climate change education and is applicable to other scientific fields, such as physics, engineering, and geochemistry.