Family feelings

Rachel Theilheimer teaches early childhood education at Borough of Manhattan Community College in New York City.     

How Do Profoundly Deaf Children Learn to Read?

Reading requires two related, but separable, capabilities: (1) familiarity with a language, and (2) understanding the mapping between that language and the printed word (Chamberlain & Mayberry, 2000; Hoover & Gough, 1990). Children who are profoundly deaf are disadvantaged on both counts. Not surprisingly, then, reading is difficult for profoundly deaf children. But some deaf children do manage to read fluently. How? Are they simply the smartest of the crop, or do they have some strategy, or circumstance, that facilitates linking the written code with language? A priori one might guess that knowing American Sign Language (ASL) would interfere with learning to read English simply because ASL does not map in any systematic way onto English. However, recent research has suggested that individuals with good signing skills are not worse, and may even be better, readers than individuals with poor signing skills (Chamberlain & Mayberry, 2000). Thus, knowing a language (even if it is not the language captured in print) appears to facilitate learning to read. Nonetheless, skill in signing does not guarantee skill in reading—reading must be taught. The next frontier for reading research in deaf education is to understand how deaf readers map their knowledge of sign language onto print, and how instruction can best be used to turn signers into readers.     

Job ads,jobs, and researchers: Searching for valid sources

Research on librarians' roles and responsibilities often takes the form of content analysis of job advertisements found in aggregators such as print journals and websites. Whether these ads help us better understand librarianship depends on how representative the source data is for each study—the line going from jobs, to job ads, then to job ad sources. Print sources dominate even in studies published after 2000. This study examines where reasonably representative job advertisements for academic libraries may be found by starting at the origin: the institutions themselves. It finds that commonly used print sources provide only a small fraction of available positions (the majority of which are those in doctoral institutions), and even the most comprehensive aggregator misses nearly half of the available positions. Taking job ad samples directly from institutions is time-consuming but provides more representative data. Smaller colleges pose a particular challenge for finding ads as few of them have openings at any one time and few of their ads appear in national aggregators.     

为学生营造舒适的学习共享空间——以美国印第安纳州普渡大学印第安纳波利斯分校图书馆为例

对印第安纳州普渡大学印第安纳波利斯分校(IUPUI)图书馆非计算机区和非图书馆区域的系统观察表明,图书馆在个人和小组学习区域选择中有重要作用,图书馆是学生首选的学习场所。研究表明,图书馆座位的设置、空间使用情况包括笔记本电脑的使用需求及性别偏好等都是图书馆设计应该考虑的重要问题。     

The challenging academic development (CAD) collective

Nurse education is characterised by dissonance, ambiguity and uncertainty. Such a context makes demands on the educator's authenticity or sense of self. This paper reports an attempt to provide a space where dissonance, ambiguity and uncertainty could be held, tolerated and examined and where authenticity could be recovered or developed through the practice of artistry. Three art workshops were offered to eight nurse educators over a period of three months. Each of the participants and the co‐facilitator were subsequently interviewed. All welcomed the opportunity to find meaning in their practice and to be listened to in a climate of empathy, acceptance and congruence. They undertook novel activities that allowed for discovery and surprise. They explored their sense of self and coined fresh metaphors to communicate their experiences. The paper argues that there is room for approaches to academic staff development that go against the mainstream.

La formation des infirmières se caractérise par la dissonance, l'ambiguïté et l'incertitude. Un tel contexte exerce des pressions sur l'authenticité et le sens de soi d'un éducateur. Cet article rend compte d'une tentative de fournir un espace o[ugrave] l'authenticité peut être redécouverte et développée au moyen de la pratique artistique. Trois ateliers artistiques ont été offerts à huit formateurs d'infirmières sur une période de trois mois. Des entretiens ont été effectués auprès de chaque participant et du co‐facilitateur. Les répondants ont tous accueilli l'occasion de trouver un sens à leur pratique et de pouvoir être écouté dans un climat d'empathie, d'acceptation et d'harmonie. Ceux‐ci on entrepris des activités nouvelles faisant place à la découverte et à la surprise. Ils ont exploré leur sens de soi et ont trouvé de nouvelles métaphores pour communiquer leurs expériences. Cet article défend l'idée que des activités de développement pédagogique qui vont à l'encontre de la majorité ont leur place.     

Out of the ordinary: recapturing the liberal traditions of a university education through field courses

This article aims to stimulate debate about the nature of field courses in higher education. We use a colloquium format that allows each of us to reflect on the philosophy of field course teaching and our writing endeavours to establish a dialogue between the authors and leave the reader with a sense of curiosity. It starts with a position paper that sets out a particular viewpoint on field courses to which responses were invited. Two of the respondents were experienced field-course teachers in disciplines traditionally associated with this type of curriculum, the other a lecturer in a non-field-course-oriented discipline.     

Being a protégé: an autoethnographic view of three teacher education doctoral programs

Those in professional and academic fields generally perceive mentoring as a positive relationship that enhances the lives of protégés. Kram (1985 Kram, K.E. 1985. Mentoring at work: Developmental relationships in organizational life, Lanham, MD: University Press of America.  [Google Scholar]) posits that such relationships between dyads in organisational life are an evolutionary, developmental process. The purpose of this article is to explore protégés’ perspectives on their mentoring relationships within doctoral programs. In order to lessen the insurmountable distance between writers and readers that is often associated with a traditional research study, we employ an autoethnographic approach to research writing. We share our journey after having studied the mentoring relationships within our own doctoral programs. Qualitative data collected over a two‐year period consist of journal entries, email correspondence, and phone conversations. This research offers insight into the mentor–protégé relationship and processes, and it provides implications for practice for protégés and mentors, as well as future research directions.