Safe Schools for LGBTQI Students: How Do Teachers View Their Role in Promoting Safe Schools?

This literature review presents insights from existing research on how teachers view their role in creating safe schools for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer/questioning, and intersex (LGBTQI) students. Analysis of the literature shows that there are concerns for LGBTQI students’ safety in schools, that educational settings operate from a position of heteronormativity, and that heterosexual teachers are uniquely positioned as part of the dominant group in which they help to define what is normal and what is deviant in school culture. Research findings on the ways heterosexual teachers respond to institutional heteronormativity are summarized and compared. This review of research provides considerations for and recommendations to school administrators and teacher educators to address needs of teachers. Areas for future research also are identified.     

An Examination of Black Science Teacher Educators’ Experiences with Multicultural Education, Equity, and Social Justice

Diversity, multicultural education, equity, and social justice are dominant themes in cultural studies (Hall in Cultural dialogues in cultural studies. Routledge, New York, pp 261–274, 1996; Wallace 1994). Zeichner (Studying teacher education: The report of the AERA panel on research and teacher education. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Mahwah, pp 737–759, 2005) called for research studies of teacher educators because little research exists on teacher educators since the late 1980s. Thomson et al. (2001) identified essential elements needed in order for critical multiculturalism to be infused in teacher education programs. However, little is known about the commitment and experiences of science teacher educators infusing multicultural education, equity, and social justice into science teacher education programs. This paper examines twenty (20) Black science teacher educators’ teaching experiences as a result of their Blackness and the inclusion of multicultural education, equity, and social justice in their teaching. This qualitative case study of 20 Black science teacher educators found that some of them have attempted and stopped due to student evaluations and the need to gain promotion and tenure. Other participants were able to integrate diversity, multicultural education, equity and social justice in their courses because their colleagues were supportive. Still others continue to struggle with this infusion without the support of their colleagues, and others have stopped The investigators suggest that if science teacher educators are going to prepare science teachers for the twenty first century, then teacher candidates must be challenged to grapple with racial, ethnic, cultural, instructional, and curricular issues and what that must mean to teach science to US students in rural, urban, and suburban school contexts.     

“Doing What I can,but I got no Magic Wand:” A Snapshot of Early Childhood Educator Experiences and Efforts to Ensure Quality During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Early Childhood Education Journal - The COVID-19 pandemic impacted early childhood programs serving infants, toddlers, and preschoolers in dramatic ways. After temporarily closing, many educators...     

Dynamic dictionary updating

A method for updating the dictionary in a dynamic information retrieval system is presented. It is shown that as a collection changes through addition and deletion of documents, the appropriate set of index terms may be determined without complete periodic regeneration of the dictionary. Results are presented for experiments involving a complete change in collection membership, with the dynamic dictionary updating methods shown to be effective.     

The computation of discrimination values

Results have been reported showing the usefulness of discrimination value in automatic construction of dictionaries for information retrieval. While discrimination value is defined in the literature, no specific explanation of its computation is given. In this paper the computation of discrimination value is discussed, a relatively efficient algorithm is presented and an example is given.