Strategically Leveraging Learning Space to Create Partnership Opportunities

The Management & Economics Library at Purdue University began a major physical and conceptual renovation four years ago. The conceptual renovation involves a rethinking of library faculty and staff roles and responsibilities based on the library's and university's strategic directives. The LearnLab space is being used as a springboard to create new partnerships, to implement our new roles, and to transform the perspective of an academic library's present capability. This article will highlight the variety of opportunities that have arisen by leveraging the LearnLab space.     

Between the Structural and the Personal: Situated Sense-Makings of “Race” This research was supported by a grant from the MOSAIC Multicultural Center at San Jose State University.

Using a critical intercultural communication perspective and cultural studies interviewing method, this study traces individuals’ subjective sense-makings of diversity through the trope of “race.” Such sense-makings represent the key (and taken-for-granted) locus of the structural and personal where social actors live out the constructions of diversity and race in deeply felt ways. Our study reveals how individuals articulate and understand race via raceless diversity encodings (whereby race is seemingly stripped of its power inequalities, and all racial/ethnic groups are made equal) and racial pivoting (whereby participants both discursively pull away from and move toward race to suit their individual experiences).     

Promoting the Purchase of Textbooks in the Vietnamese Higher Education Sector

Higher education textbooks sales account for a significant portion of the overall book market. This study makes an important contribution to the extant literature by examining students’ purchase of original textbooks in a developing market, Vietnam. Notably, it seeks to investigate why students do not purchase original textbooks as well as the difference in purchase behavior between different groups of students. The findings reveal that some key obstacles to students’ purchase behavior include high prices, insufficient availability, low perceived value, and the emergence of pirated textbooks. Another notable finding is that senior students who are female tend to purchase more textbooks. In light of these findings, marketing strategies are suggested for publishers, bookstores and universities who aim to promote the sales and consumption of original textbooks.     

Innovation,Creativity, and Meaning: Leading in the Information Age

Today's fast paced global environment requires information professionals to be leaders keeping pace with user needs. Two academic research libraries share their work seeking to ensure and leverage the creativity in their organizations focusing on the most meaningful innovative opportunities. The premise is that usefulness and appropriateness is achieved through strategic alignment, thereby opening the door of opportunity for innovative products and services. The ability to seize the opportunity each group seeks to meet is due to the recognition by the organization of that alignment. And so, organizational perception, awareness, and value all affect the successful implementation of creativity. The products and services presented in this article, Harvard's Baker Library Historical Collections Online and Purdue University's career wiki, stem from organizational alignment, and the work of the leadership teams to influence perception, create awareness, and demonstrate value.     

Changing views of teachers and teaching in Vietnam

In order for Vietnam to seek better international integration into an increasingly globalised world, the Vietnamese Government has launched educational reforms requiring teachers to adopt ‘Western’ constructivist pedagogies. This paper reports on an action research study in a Vietnamese teacher training institution which found that Vietnamese student teachers were willing to accommodate and accept change and were often very enthusiastic about the ‘Western ideas’ of teaching and learning, but that their unquestioning respect for the authority of their tutors remained firmly fixed. The data also showed that the students’ tutors had a relatively limited exposure to the ‘Western theories’ and their implications and therefore did not model or demonstrate the theories effectively. The paper draws on these findings to argue that the focus for transforming Vietnamese teachers’ practice should be on promoting the responsibility of teacher educators to introduce student teachers to new ideas about the processes of teaching and learning. This strategy is likely to be more supportive of student teachers’ development as it allows them to separate the processes of teaching from culturally dominant beliefs about roles which are part of their established identities.     

Taking an internet field trip

Teachers in today’s mathematics classrooms are confronted with the challenge of meeting the needs of students with diverse needs and backgrounds. The NCTM standards and the literature on diverse learners suggest that all students may benefit from strategies that promote cultural and historical connections and the use of technologies, such as Internet Field Trips, and manipulatives that focus on the active engagement of students through exploration and communications. In a passionate plea for bridging the culture gap in our classrooms, Moore (1994) proposes that, Mathematics is definitely not culture-free … no mathematics teacher could even contemplate seriously taking only the values of his culture and a textbook which is a product of his culture and imposing both himself and the textbook upon individuals possessed by a culture that diverges from his in any significant area. (p. 13)     

Youth transition to employment in Vietnam: a vulnerable path

Literature suggests that educational attainment is one of the significant factors affecting youth transition to work. The process of capital accumulation through education is suggested as the key marker of social inclusion and exclusion. This paper compares the educational attainment among youth in Vietnam with their status in employment. It uses the data from the school-to-work transition survey of the International Labour Office with 2722 youth participants aged 15–29 in different geographical areas in Vietnam. The findings indicate that Vietnamese youth have to face many challenges when negotiating their transition to work, especially when the educational attainment of the majority youth is low. A wide gap between education and learners’ needs and interests, the economic burden many young people had to bear and the low level of development of the economy with a large proportion of the informal sector are the main reasons for youth in Vietnam to leave school early and to accept low quality work to earn their living. These problems need to be solved to help youth in Vietnam approach better jobs in the market.     

Children's Emotionality Moderates the Association Between Maternal Responsiveness and Allostatic Load: Investigation Into Differential Susceptibility

While emotionality is often thought of as a risk factor, differential susceptibility theory argues that emotionality reflects susceptibility to both positive and negative environmental influences. The present study explored whether emotional children might be more susceptible to the effects of both high and low maternal responsiveness on allostatic load, a physiological indicator of chronic stress. Participants were 226 mother and child dyads. Mothers reported on children's emotionality at child age 9. Maternal responsiveness was measured at age 13 using self‐reports and behavioral observation. Allostatic load was measured at age 13 and 17 using neuroendocrine, cardiovascular, and metabolic biomarkers. Emotionality was associated with higher allostatic load if self‐reported responsiveness was low, but with lower allostatic load, when self‐reported responsiveness was high.     

Complexities of Vietnamese femininities: a resource for rethinking women's university leadership practices

This paper develops a dialogical encounter between northern-inspired theorisations of gender and Vietnam's historical and cultural differentiation identified through the presence of matriarchy in ancient societies and its popularity in folklore and contemporary politics. The article draws on interviews with 12 senior women from 8 universities in Northern and Southern Vietnam. Three main themes are explored: (1) the Vietnamese woman as ‘general of the interior’; (2) the ‘woman behind the throne’; and (3) ‘behind a woman is another woman’. These themes illustrate the distinctiveness of a historically produced Vietnamese gender order as reflected in current university women's experience. By providing insights into the complex dynamics of Vietnamese women's ‘informal power’, as evident in both spheres of home and university, the paper presents a discussion of forms of Vietnamese femininity that contributes to re-theorising Connell's concepts of ‘hegemonic masculinity and emphasized femininity’.