Emeriti faculty as mentors: the benefits and rewards of mentoring the next generation

ABSTRACT

This holistic single-case study reports on the benefits mentors derived from participating in the Increasing Minority Presence within Academia through Continuous Training (IMPACT) mentoring program. The IMPACT program was sponsored by the National Science Foundation Office for Broadening Participation in Engineering 15–7680 (awards #1542728 and #1542524). In this program, emeriti faculty were matched with underrepresented minority faculty in the engineering professoriate for career-focused mentorship. The conceptual framework of the Benefits of Being a Mentor grounded this study. Findings indicate mentors appreciate the opportunity to give back and remain engaged in the field, to relive past academic career experiences, and to support the next generation of engineering professors while adjusting to retirement. These findings aligned with the conceptual framework on three factors: rewarding experience, improved job performance, and generativity. Implications for administrators and faculty, as well as additional research areas, are discussed.     

Un marco conceptual para la interpretación psicológica del juego infantil

Resumen

El artículo plantea un análisis conceptual de la teoría del juego de Piaget y la compara críticamente con la teoría que se desprende del pensamiento vygotskiano sobre el tema. Aunque hay una elección por parte de la autora del trabajo de este último constructo teórico, el estudio está dirigido a resaltar aquellos aspectos del discurso piagetiano que considera fundamentales para elaborar una teoría psicológica del juego infantil, y a criticar aquellos otros que le parecen contradictorios o deficitarios.     

Development and Validation of a Scale to Assess Students’ Attitude towards Animal Welfare

This work presents the development of a scale of attitudes of secondary-school and university students towards animal welfare. A questionnaire was drawn up following a Likert-type scale attitude assessment model. Four components or factors, which globally measure animal welfare, are proposed to define the object of the attitude. The components are animal abuse for pleasure or due to ignorance (C1), leisure with animals (C2), farm animals (C3) and animal abandonment (C4). The final version of the questionnaire contains 29 items that are evenly distributed among the four components indicated, guaranteeing that each component is one-dimensional. A sample of 329 students was used to validate the scale. These students were aged between 11 and 25, and were from secondary schools in Aragon and the University in Zaragoza (Aragon's main and largest city, located in NE Spain). The scale shows good internal reliability, with a Cronbach's alpha value of 0.74. The questionnaire was later given to 1,007 students of similar levels and ages to the sample used in the validation, the results of which are presented in this study. The most relevant results show significant differences in gender and level of education in some of the components of the scale, observing that women and university students rate animal welfare more highly.     

‘I'm your teacher,I'm Brazilian!’ Authenticity and authority in European capoeira

Capoeira, the Brazilian dance and martial art is now globalised and taught widely outside Brazil. Instruction is provided by Brazilians who are living in self-imposed exile from their homeland. The authentic capoeira that such teachers provide is a major attraction for non-Brazilian students. However, there is little research available on the motivations and strategies of overseas capoeira instructors. Building on a long term ethnographic study, this paper showcases the goals and strategies of one successful Brazilian teacher, from the Beribazu Group of Capoeira, working in the UK. This teacher reflects upon his four interlocking aims for his students and the strategies for achieving them. They should develop social cohesion, appreciate Brazilian culture, play good capoeira and learn to move their bodies acrobatically, flexibly and beautifully. Two sociologists embed the teacher's perspective on his work in an analytic framework derived from Bourdieu.     

Communities of Caring: Developing Curriculum That Engages Latino/a Students’ Diverse Literacy Practices

This study investigates the learning and work of a community of practice that engaged in a specific inquiry around family/community literacy and the development of a culture of caring that would connect family/community/school literacies in ways that allowed their mostly Latino/a students to develop positive student identities, enhanced personal connections to their peers, and stronger experiential responses to literacy instruction.     

Unemployment and Work Interruption among African American Single Mothers: Effects on Parenting and Adolescent Socioemotional Functioning

Using interview data from a sample of 241 single African American mothers and their seventh- and eighth-grade children, this study tests a model of how 2 economic stressors, maternal unemployment and work interruption, influence adolescent socioemotional functioning. In general, these economic stressors affected adolescent socioemotional functioning indirectly, rather than directly, through their impact on mothers' psychological functioning and, in turn, parenting behavior and mother-child relations. Current unemployment, but not past work interruption, had a direct effect on depressive symptomatology in mothers. As expected, depressive symptomatology in mothers predicted more frequent maternal punishment of adolescents, and this relation was fully mediated by mothers' negative perceptions of the maternal role. More frequent maternal punishment was associated with increased cognitive distress and depressive symptoms in adolescents, and consistent with predictions, these relations were partially mediated by adolescents' perceptions of the quality of relations with their mothers. Increased availability of instrumental support, as perceived by mothers, predicted fewer depressive symptoms in mothers, less punishment of adolescents, and less negativity about the maternal role. Both economic stressors were associated with higher levels of perceived financial strain in mothers, which in turn predicted adolescents' perceptions of economic hardship. Adolescents who perceived their families as experiencing more severe economic hardship reported higher anxiety, more cognitive distress, and lower self-esteem.     

Word problem solving approaches in mathematics textbooks: a comparison between Singapore and Spain

European Journal of Psychology of Education - Singaporean children are the best performers on international achievement tests in mathematics (i.e. the TIMSS). Their excellent results could be due...     

Definitions of bullying: a comparison of terms used,and age and gender differences,in a fourteen-country international comparison

The study of school bullying has recently assumed an international dimension, but is faced with difficulties in finding terms in different languages to correspond to the English word bullying. To investigate the meanings given to various terms, a set of 25 stick-figure cartoons was devised, covering a range of social situations between peers. These cartoons were shown to samples of 8- and 14-year-old pupils (N = 1,245; n = 604 at 8 years, n = 641 at 14 years) in schools in 14 different countries, who judged whether various native terms cognate to bullying, applied to them. Terms from 10 Indo-European languages and three Asian languages were sampled. Multidimensional scaling showed that 8-year-olds primarily discriminated nonaggressive and aggressive cartoon situations; however, 14-year-olds discriminated fighting from physical bullying, and also discriminated verbal bullying and social exclusion. Gender differences were less appreciable than age differences. Based on the 14-year-old data, profiles of 67 words were then constructed across the five major cartoon clusters. The main types of terms used fell into six groups: bullying (of all kinds), verbal plus physical bullying, solely verbal bullying, social exclusion, solely physical aggression, and mainly physical aggression. The findings are discussed in relation to developmental trends in how children understand bullying, the inferences that can be made from cross-national studies, and the design of such studies.