Creating an Instrument to Measure Social and Cultural Self-efficacy Indicators for Persistence of HBCU Undergraduates in STEM

Research in Science Education - This study is part of a larger research that explores the creation of an instrument to capture the social and cultural factors that affect Black students’...     

The invisibility of academic reading as social practice and its implications for equity in higher education: a scoping study

ABSTRACT

While the importance of academic language and literacies in students’ meaningful participation in higher education has been well-explored, studies have focused on writing rather than reading. There has been a significant silence in the literature around what constitutes reading in higher education, the sociocultural complexities of reader engagement with text, and contemporary understandings of situated experiences regarding reading practices in the disciplines, especially for traditionally under-represented student groups. Scholarly interest in academic literacies, and reading in particular, has significant implications for the equity and widening participation agenda. To this end this article critically engages with research examining reading in tertiary education and describes a scoping study of scholarly work at the intersection of three domains: academic literacies, reading studies, and widening participation and equity in higher education. In asking questions of these three overlapping fields of inquiry, we map trends in existing academic literature, and argue for a research agenda that examines the experiences, perceptions and enactments of academic reading in the context of South African and Australian efforts to widen participation to higher education.     

Humanism,modernism and designing education: exploring progressive relations between Australia,New Zealand and the West Riding of Yorkshire 1930s–1970s

Abstract

This article takes as a starting point the career of Sir Alec Clegg, Chief Education Officer for the West Riding of Yorkshire (1945–1974), and traces his professional connections with educationists in Australia and New Zealand. In exploring the nature of global exchanges between educators, artists, architects and designers in the decades immediately before and after the Second World War, the intertwining of modernism and progressivism is critically explored in the wider contextual frame of the Arts and Crafts Movement. The notion of increasing the humanity of the classroom occupied the efforts of a constellation of individuals caught up in the desire to redesign schooling in ways that would regenerate democratic relations of living in the post-war world. It is suggested that a common thread connected those concerned to strengthen democracy through combining progressive and modernist attitudes with the potent legacy of the Arts and Crafts Movement.     

Effects of Client Race‐Ethnicity on Perceptions of Counselor Trainees: Study 1 and Study 2

The authors investigated the impact that racial stereotypes have on counselor trainees' perceptions of the attributes and behaviors of ethnically diverse male clients. Two studies were conducted in which participants were counselor trainees (Study 1, N = 58; Study 2, N = 75) who received a case study in which a male student sought counseling for problems affecting his school work. No differences were revealed in Study 1. In Study 2, counselor perceptions of client attributes differed across client race–ethnicity. The results are discussed in terms of their implications for training counselors, particularly regarding multicultural courses and workshops.     

The invisible hand: designing curriculum in the afterward

This paper diffracts a curriculum design workshop via online collaboration of a collective emerging from that event. Through the workshop, involving theory, conceptual art, writing, photography and curriculum planning, and the subsequent sharing of words and images, we move beyond interrogating designs for future subjects to asking how the pedagogical imagination composes both the material and immaterial, the corporeal and incorporeal, within ecologies continually transforming in the process of making. We complicate ‘delivery’ or ‘conduit’ metaphors of education and perceive ‘design’ in co-compositions of human and nonhuman elements, resisting stasis, resisting closure. This workshop paper positions design in the realm of the artist–activist, rather than that of the bureaucrat–technician, and shifts intentionality beyond the invisible and controlling hand of humanism, as curriculum design we might do in the afterwards, rejecting instrumentalism.     

Two Are Better Than One: The Joint Influence of Maternal Preparedness for Parenting and Children's Self-Esteem on Academic Achievement and Adjustment

Research Findings: This study investigated the joint influence of maternal cognitive readiness to parent and children's self-esteem on children's academic achievement and behavioral adjustment in the classroom at age 10. Participants were 153 adolescent mothers and their firstborn children. Findings indicated that low levels of prenatal maternal cognitive readiness to parent were associated with impairments in children's achievement and adjustment at age 10, regardless of the children's level of self-esteem. Among dyads in which mothers were more cognitively prepared for the parenting role, however, children with higher self-esteem showed notably better achievement and adjustment compared to those with lower self-esteem. These results illustrate the joint influence of mothers' preparedness for parenting and children's self-esteem on the school performance of children who are generally considered to be at high risk for impairments in achievement and adjustment. Practice or Policy: Findings are discussed in terms of the enduring impact of cognitive readiness to parent and self-esteem on the academic achievement and behavioral adjustment of at-risk children, with a focus on implications for intervention and prevention based on the specific findings from this study.     

Reverberating chords: implications of storied nostalgia for borderland discourses in pre-service teacher identity

The research that is the subject of this paper set out to interrogate pre-service teachers’ responses to issues of national identity, ideology, and representation in contemporary multicultural Canadian picture books. While the research focused on whether and how the literature could serve to inform and broaden pre-service teachers’ conceptualizations of diversity, we retrospectively decided to re-visit the focus group and interview data to know which of the 70 picture books had most engaged the teachers and why. We critically consider the implications of teachers’ attachments for social justice education and teachers’ cultivation of a critical, ‘borderlands’ discourse aware of self and open to others. The research suggests that a significant source of teacher knowledge and thinking is lodged in teachers’ personal memories of childhood texts, called touchstones. Touchstones were a place from which teachers implicitly began; certain stories struck particular chords, chords largely attributable to childhood memories. Most intertextual connections were personal, with some tangential to the text. While touchstones performed different functions depending on the subject position of the pre-service teachers, they pointed to the existence of an underlying position of teacher as nostalgic subject. Given the importance of this subject position for teachers’ responses to picture books, we explore critical reconceptualizations of nostalgia that can support the development of borderland discourses. We suggest that pre-service teachers need to be invited to individually and collectively examine their responses to both old and new touchstone stories. More nuanced research also needs to be conducted on the role of nostalgia in teacher formation, how it influences teacher practice, and how to best design teacher education courses to foster ‘borderland discourses’ related to the storying of teacher identity, especially with respect to popular ‘collectibles’ and core teaching texts like picture books.