To See or Not To See: Preservice Teacher Attitudes Toward Color Blindness

This study examined the perspectives of 85 undergraduate preservice teacher candidates engaged in a required survey course on diversity at a midsized Midwestern university. Candidates completed the Common Beliefs Survey at both the beginning and end of the 16-week semester. Quantitative analysis of the pre- and postcourse Likert ratings of candidates indicated a significant negative shift relative to the statement, “I don't think of my students in terms of their race or ethnicity; I am color-blind when it comes to my teaching.” Further qualitative analysis of candidates who provided written rationale for their numeric response indicated prevailing themes of conscious bias, intentional color-blindness, and movement toward appreciation of racial difference as a critical cognizance. Implications for teacher education include experiences beyond the scope of a survey course if significant schematic shift leading to the potential for educational equity is to be realized.     

Becoming artist,becoming educated,becoming undone: toward a nomadic perspective of college student identity development

In this article, I place my ethnographic project among undergraduate university art students and their professor in dialog with Rosi Braidotti’s figuration of the nomadic subject and her reflections on the importance of creating theoretical alternatives for mapping the embedded and embodied social positions that we inhabit. As educational interlocutors, college students must negotiate expectations and categorizations about age-appropriate relations, career paths, and identity passageways, which are always already framed by Western psychological development discourses. Interested in loosening the grip of these closure-seeking and normalizing discursive practices, I argue for a revision of identity development grounded in a nomadic theory of the subject and engage my data through an alternative analytic of arts-informed assemblage in light of Braidotti’s ideas. In so doing, I uphold my feminist commitment to do theory as both critique and creativity, bringing into view poetic-enough writing and imagery as a response to the question how is it to be in the process of becoming?     

The influence of the frontier on American political oratory

This paper discusses three perspectives of intentionality—the encoder, decoder, and interactional—relevant to issues in interpersonal communication. Each perspective provides a different way of both conceptualizing and researching intentionality. The encoder perspective examines various ways in which intentionality manifests itself within human consciousness while the decoder perspective is primarily concerned with the way in which interactants attribute intentions to one another. Finally, the interactional perspective argues that intent manifests itself as part of a negotiated process between interactants and therefore encompasses both the individual encoder and decoder orientations.     

Antagonism Between Achievement and Enjoyment in ATI Studies

There is evidence that negative correlations between student achievement and their enjoyment of instructional methods exist under certain circumstances. In aptitude‐treatment interaction (ATI) studies where two or more methods are allowed to interact with student aptitudes to predict enjoyment and achievement, it appears that students often report enjoying the method from which they learn the least. Selected ATI studies are reviewed, and an explanation is suggested which may account for the negative correlations between achievement and enjoyment in instructional settings. It appears that students make inaccurate judgments about the amount of effort they will have to expend to achieve maximum learning outcomes. Low ability students typically report liking more permissive instructional methods, apparently because they allow them to maintain a “low profile” so that their failures are not as visible. However, in order to experience maximum achievement low ability students require less permissive methods which lower the information processing load on them. High ability students like more structured methods which they believe will make their efforts more efficient when these lower load methods seem often to interfere with their learning. High ability students seem to learn more from more permissive approaches which allow them to bring their own considerable skills to bear on learning tasks.     

The Environmental Education Banner

This century will be one of continued global population growth, technological advancement, and subsequent burdens on the natural world from consumer demands. A citizenry capable of understanding the complexity of environmental issues and actively participating in their resolutions is vital. The ultimate goal of environmental educators should be to facilitate the creation of this active citizenry. The means by which educators achieve this goal are equally important. Student autonomy in issue investigations and action planning should supplant coercive, advocacy programs if a new generation of critical thinkers is to solve new environmental problems and maintain or improve environmental quality on both the local and global scales. To date, nearly all evaluations of environmental education (EE) have focused on educational outcomes. Evaluations of impacts to environmental quality linked to actions resulting from EE efforts will be necessary if this discipline is to remain relevant in a world facing a century of great challenge in protecting environmental integrity while meeting the needs of our growing and increasingly consumptive population.     

The ‘dissertation marathon’ in doctoral distance education

Participation in “communities of practice” is often depicted as a central feature of various theoretical understandings of the social nature of learning. How are such communities of practice to be enacted in distance education, which, by definition, implies spatial detachment? This article reflects on the dimensions of communities of practice experienced by four students undertaking doctoral studies by distance education, working in different countries than the one in which the institution of their studies is based, and at four different phases of their doctoral program. In each writer’s experience, community of practice involvement was identified as critical in program completion, yet the source of the learning community was in each case outside of institutional provision.     

The Politics,Problems, and Potential Promise of School-Linked Social Services: Insights and New Directions From the Work of William Lowe Boyd

The purpose of this article is to illustrate Professor William L. Boyd's insights into the political ecology of schooling and his contributions and collaboration with others concerned about ensuring the well-being of students, families, and communities. Over his career, Boyd investigated the subtle and complex organizational constraints to school-linked coordinated services, including examining the reasons for the unrelenting resistance of public organizations to change, despite repeated efforts to reform them. We trace the history of the community schools movement and explore the influential, and at times prophetic, scholarly contributions of William L. Boyd to the research and discussion on the effectiveness, challenges, and future promise of this reform strategy. We hope that current and future researchers can learn from and build on his scholarship to develop new pathways to improve the lives of at-risk children.     

Longitudinal Associations Between Executive Control and Developing Mathematical Competence in Preschool Boys and Girls

Executive control (EC) is related to mathematics performance in middle childhood. However, little is known regarding how EC and informal numeracy differentially support mathematics skill acquisition in preschoolers. A sample of preschoolers (115 girls, 113 boys), stratified by social risk, completed an EC task battery at 3 years, informal numeracy assessments at 3.75 and 4.5 years, and a broad mathematics assessment during kindergarten. Strong associations were observed between latent EC at age 3 and mathematics achievement in kindergarten, which remained robust after accounting for earlier informal numeracy, socioeconomic status, language and processing speed. Relations between EC and mathematics achievement were stronger in girls than in boys. Findings highlight the unique role of EC in predicting which children may have difficulty transitioning to formal mathematics instruction.