'No goats in the mother city': using Symbolic Objects to help students talk about diversity and change

This paper reports on a first year project in a South African engineering foundation programme which attempted to bring a cultural studies perspective to teaching academic literacy. Students identify and investigate everyday objects that have symbolic meanings in their communities. Objects are seen as catalysts for enabling student narratives to emerge, and are a way of exploring the tensions between convention and change in cultural practices. A project such as this breaks disciplinary frames, working across diverse contexts such as engineering and cultural studies. The aim is to begin to explore some of the complexities around ‘development’ in contexts of diversity and change, globalization and relocalization.     

Multimodal texts in Higher Education and the implications for writing pedagogy

Although studies on writing pedagogy and academic literacies have examined changing genres in tertiary education, there has not necessarily been an emphasis on how a range of modes and media have influenced texts in various disciplines. This paper explores the influence and incorporation of the visual into student texts in Higher Education, looking at the semiotic weighting of modes, conventions and functions of images, visual / verbal linkages and visual composition. These aspects of multimodal texts have implications for the ways in which we teach ‘academic literacies’ practices and writing as multimodal composition to students.     

Music and Popular Culture

Gaye Tuchman, Arlene Kaplan Daniels, and James Benet, eds. Hearth and Home: Ima9es of llomen in the Mass Media (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978—no price given, but available in hardback and paperback)

Maurice Horn's Women in the Comics (New York: Chelsea House, 1977—$15.00)

Charles K. Wolfe's Tennessee Strings: The Story of Country Music in Tennessee (Knoxville, Yniversity of Tennessee Press, 1977—$3.50, paper)

Anthony Hopkins' Downbeat Music Guide (London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1977—$4.95)

Peter L. Skolnik's Fads: America's Crazes, Fevers & Fancies From the 1890s to the 1970s (New York: Crowell, 1978—$9.95)     

Relationship of Technical Skill Rank to Age,Gender, and Number of Years in Dance Training

Abstract

The field of movement behavior has been strongly led by a research tradition in which manipulations are performed in order to search for differences in dependent variables. In this article, I argue for an alternative viewpoint, in which experimental manipulations are provided so that invariances in dependent variables can be seen. If, in the face of changes in nearly countless dependent variables, a particular simple or derived value remains constant, strong suggestions are provided about the underlying control of the motor system. This method is illustrated with examples of invariances in motor behavior, the most important of which is the tendency for the temporal events in a movement to expand or contract nearly proportionally with movement time so that relative timing is invariant. A model following from these invariances, and criticisms of it, are discussed.     

Facilitating Professional Development during International Practicum: Understanding our Work as Teacher Educators through Critical Incidents

This collaborative self-study details the experiences of an Australian teacher educator and a Canadian teacher educator, who led teacher candidates on international practicum placements to the Cook Islands and Kenya respectively. Focusing on critical incidents, they collaboratively analyzed dilemmas that occurred when providing professional development sessions for local teachers during these placements. These dilemmas required the teacher educators to think deeply about their beliefs and practices in these contexts. Findings from the study included the teacher educator’s tendency to make assumptions about good teaching and learning practices that were reflective of their personal pedagogical values and beliefs; their discomfort with their perceptions of some neo‐colonial practices within these international practicum sites and uncertainty about how to navigate the resultant tensions; and, the need to view the work of teacher educators though a new cultural lens when working in transnational contexts. Implications for teacher educators working with local hosting teachers during international placements include the need to understand and acknowledge the complexity of this dimension of teacher educators’ work, and for teacher educators to engage in parallel learning journeys with the teacher candidates they accompany. This involves critically reflecting on the experiences, assumptions, and beliefs that they bring to their new contexts, as well as adopting a global perspective and a deep consciousness of how one is perceived by others who are culturally, racially, or linguistically different.     

Comparison of interrater reliability on the torrance tests of creative thinking for gifted and nongifted students

Despite their widespread use in identifying and evaluating programs for gifted and talented students, the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking were standardized on samples that excluded gifted children. The interrater reliability of measures like the TTCT has been questioned repeatedly, yet studies with average students have demonstrated high interrater reliability. This study compares the interrater reliability of the TTCT for groups of gifted and nongifted elementary-school-aged students. Results indicated most interrater reliability coefficients exceeding .90 for both gifted and nongifted groups. However, multivariate analysis of variance indicated significant mean differences across the three self-trained raters for both gifted and nongifted groups. Consequently, use of a single scorer to evaluate TTCT protocols is recommended, especially where specific cutoff scores are used to select students.     

The Way Forward: Improving Interlibrary Loan Service Delivery at a Caribbean Academic Library

The Alma Jordan Library (AJL) is located on the St. Augustine Campus, Trinidad and Tobago and is the largest academic library in the University of the West Indies' library system. This article examines interlibrary loan and document delivery (ILL/DD) services, discusses existing ILL/DD activities, and analyzes usage statistics at this Caribbean educational institution. It reviews the current literature that exists about ILL/DD in the Caribbean and other academic institutions outside the region. This article serves to add to the body of literature on this topic and provides practical recommendations for improving the current service.     

A Review of “Reference Reborn: Breathing New Life Into Public Services Librarianship”

No abstract available for this article.