Faculty Liaisons: an embedded approach for enriching teaching and learning in higher education

This paper explores the experiences of a group of academic developers who support educational development work as Faculty Liaisons at a large, research-intensive university. These academic developers inhabit complex ‘third spaces’, providing support through an embedded partnership relationship that requires lateral movement across functional and organizational boundaries to create new professional spaces, knowledge, and relationships. The authors utilize narrative inquiry and auto-ethnographic approaches to present an interpretive qualitative analysis of their experiences supporting Faculty and University projects across complex and evolving organizational boundaries. From this analysis, they highlight key roles and responsibilities associated with their blended context and identify challenges that academic developers who occupy third spaces within academic organizations face as they negotiate competing interests, identities, and requirements associated with the diverse range of their projects and the blended experience of working in scholarly and administrative, central- and Faculty-based roles. The lessons they have learned from these experiences will be of particular interest to academic developers who are experiencing the flux of change within higher education settings that are impacting teaching and learning practices both for faculty in the classroom and for those across the institution who support them.     

An exploratory investigation into factors affecting visual balance

Throughout the history of art more attention has been given to pictorial balance than to any other principle of visual composition. When examining pictorial balance, the visual weights of significant elements within a given field must be taken into consideration. This study, by means of ocular photography and the analysis of eye fixations, examined factors that have an effect upon visual weight. Confirming earlier studies, the upper half of a visual field was found to have inherently greater visual weight than the lower half. While several researchers have attributed greater visual weight to the left side of a field, others have favored the right. Data from this study were not sufficiently reliable to indicate a preference for either side. Results were insufficient to support the hypothesis that the upper left quadrant has greater inherent visual weight than the upper right quadrant. While it was shown that the interrelationships between tone and size have an effect on visual weight, the exact nature of these relationships must await future investigation.     

AN OVERVIEW OF ENVIRONMENTAL EDUCATION IN A SAMPLE OF EUROPEAN COUNTRIES WITH PARTICULAR REFERENCE TO PROVISIONS OF DISTANCE TEACHING

This article gives an overview of current provisions for environmental education in the context of distance education programmes in a sample of European countries. The methodology, that was employed by means of a postal survey aimed at identifying current trends in environmental education in relation to distance teaching, is described. The sample surveyed consisted of approximately 500 higher education institutions, members of the Association of European Universities (CRE), over 200 of which had signed the CRE‐Copernicus Universities Charter on Sustainable Development. The article presents a regional summary of the research findings that formed part of a larger enquiry into the status of environmental education in European countries, Commonwealth countries, and individual countries such as the United Kingdom and Pakistan.     

Relating early childhood teachers’ working conditions and well-being to their turnover intentions

High turnover rates of early care and education teachers reduce the quality of education; unsatisfied teachers, suffering from stress or emotional exhaustion, are less equipped to promote children’s development and more likely to leave the classroom. We used data from a national survey of US early childhood educators (n?=?1129) to examine associations between teachers’ working conditions, well-being, and motivation with professional commitment and turnover intentions to move, leave, or remain. Multiple regression analyses revealed that more intrinsically motivated teachers were more likely to report intentions to move over leave, emotionally exhausted teachers were more likely to report intentions to leave, and lower teacher-reported working conditions predicted intentions to move or leave the field over staying. The results suggest that teachers’ well-being and perceived working conditions relate with their intentions to remain at their job or within the field and to their commitment to the profession.     

Teacher Consultation to Enhance Implementation of School-Based Restorative Justice

ABSTRACT

Restorative justice (RJ) is an alternative approach to school discipline that has been gaining recognition in the public and academic spheres as a way to engage students who misbehave in school. RJ has promise to address racial/ethnic, gender, and disability disproportionality in school discipline. One aspect of school-based RJ that has received almost no attention in the literature is the professional development and ongoing support of teachers in schools using RJ. This article provides a review of extant literature on school-based RJ, teacher training, and consultation methods. Integrating the empirical literature on school consultation and teacher professional development, we argue that schools should implement a multitiered model of professional development to build teacher competency in RJ, specifically including the use of targeted teacher consultation. The proposed model is complementary to an RJ framework, systematic, and capable of evaluation; future research is needed to evaluate its effectiveness in practice.     

Blueprint for Bologna: University of Prishtina and the European Union

Countries hoping to demonstrate an adequate educational infrastructure need a national framework that meets Bologna requirements, a national accreditation agency which sets out the approved framework, and national accreditation processes by which individual institutions can be measured against the standards set by the national acvcreditation agency. For many countries, the national framework remains to be articulated, the accreditation processes are non-existent, and individual institutions have no means by which to assess their internal readiness for accreditation scrutiny. While the status of Kosovo as a separate entity remains unresolved, the institutions within the potential country struggle to meet the infrastructure conditions necessary for inclusion in the European Union. Ironically, the Faculty of Education at the University of Prishtina is in a remarkably advantageous position if it were to overcome the current political bickering and start the preparations required for meeting the education infrastructure criteria. This paper articulates that advantage by laying out the process by which this could be realized – with optimistic disregard for the political uncertainties that mitigate against its realization. It also provides a summary of the tasks that would need to be undertaken as part of this process.     

Can Examinees Use a Review Option to Obtain Positively Biased Ability Estimates on a Computerized Adaptive Test?

Part of the controversy about allowing examinees to review and change answers to previous items on computerized adaptive tests (CATs) centers on a strategy for obtaining positively biased ability estimates attributed to Wainer (1993) in which examinees intentionally answer items incorrectly before review and to the best of their abilities upon review. Our results, based on both simulated and live testing data, showed that there were instances in which the Wainer strategy yielded inflated ability estimates as well as instances in which it yielded deflated ability estimates. The success of the strategy in inflating ability estimates depended on the ability estimation method used (maximum likelihood versus Bayesian), the examinee's true ability level, the standard error of the ability estimate, the examinee's ability to implement the strategy, and the type of decision made from the ability estimate. We discuss approaches to dealing with the Wainer strategy in operational CAT settings.