Race as a Factor in Persuasion

This study analyzed College Characteristics Index data for 207 students enrolled in a college of business administration to determine institutional press. The obtained scores were compared with Stern’s normative sample. Mean scores for College of Business Administration (CBA) and Arts (A) and Sciences (S) samples were analyzed in terms of the t ratio to determine the degree of press. No significant variance appeared for the groups in Work-Play, Group Life, and Academic Organization. In Non-Vocational Climate and Student Dignity significant differences appeared favoring the A and S sample. Mean scores for all other factors favored the CBA students. Press related to courses showed no threat. Factors related to Social Life interest the students only to a minor degree.     

Moving on (part 1): The physics of power and curriculum history

This is the first of two papers that map (dis)continuities in notions of power from Aristotle to Newton to Foucault. They trace the ways in which bio-physical conceptions of power became paraphrased in social science and deployed in educational discourse on the child and curriculum from post-Newtonian times to the present. The analyses suggest that, amid ruptures in the definition, role, location and meaning given 'power' historically in various 'physical' and 'social' cosmologies, the naming of 'power' has been dependent on 'physics', on the theorization of motion across 'Western' sciences. This first paper examines some (dis)continuities in regard to histories of motion and power from Aristotelian 'natural science' to Newtonian mechanics.     

College Chemistry: how a textbook can reveal the values embedded in chemistry

This paper explores the norms, values and ethical attitudes that Linus Pauling wanted to convey to his students in his famous textbook College Chemistry. In this classic textbook, Pauling aimed to introduce beginners into the world of chemistry by presenting chemistry as a systematic science based on a collection of empirical data and a recent theoretical framework. In doing so, he expressed his epistemic and didactic choices clearly. College Chemistry therefore offers an ideal opportunity to examine some of the norms at the core of chemistry's 'moral economy'.     

CSE and the 16+: Teachers' Views

During the interview ‘Mary’ – who had last year been a school pupil and this year is a first‐year undergraduate on the new degree in Education (with Teaching Certificate) – talked at some length, and with considerable feeling, about how her main frustration as a female pupil had been what she saw as her systematic disenfranchisement from influence over the content and process of the schools' curricula which she had pursued over the previous thirteen years. Although she felt that all pupils suffered this lack of influence she was convinced that girls suffered disproportionately. [Some time later in the interview], when talking about the ‘teaching practice’ she had recently completed, ‘Mary’ described how her ‘music and movement’ work had met with ‘loud and disruptive’ reaction from some of the boys in the mixed class of 7–8 year‐olds, even though the majority of the children had clearly enjoyed and been engaged by the scheme she had designed. Faced with this rejection, and experiencing some anxiety about how the teachers and her tutor would assess her potential as a future teacher if she was not seen to be exercising what they would count as ‘good control’ of the class, ‘Mary’ resolved her ‘problem’ by designing an alternative scheme which the few boys would not (and did not) reject. Although the girls had ‘subsequently shown less interest’, their quiet acquiescence to what she offered them reduced her anxiety about her assessment as a teacher. When she related her pupil experience to her teaching practice experience ‘Mary’ was dismayed to realise that she had ‘reproduced for others precisely that frustration which [she herself] had experienced as a pupil’.

Extract from author's notes when evaluating a new pre‐service degree course, June 1983.     

Individual Differences in Adapting to Three Different Tasks of Selecting Information from Texts

This study examined individual differences in selecting main points according to three types of tasks. In all, 133 students (10th-graders) participated. Each student studied three instructional texts, and each text was preceded by one instruction. In the linguistic task, the students had to underline the author's main points. In the educational task, students had to underline text elements considered to be important by a portrayed teacher. And in the interest task, interesting text fragments had to be underlined. The students were divided into five groups identified by a typical selection pattern. Only 24 students adjusted their selection of main points to each of the tasks (the adaptive group). This group differed in some study strategies and learning conceptions from the nonadaptive groups. In all, this study begins to give more insight into individual differences in selecting main points.     

Entering the occupational category of ‘Farmer’: new pathways through professional agricultural education in Ireland

Purpose: Understand the emergence of new potential career trajectories in the liberalised Irish dairy farming sector through analysis of the narratives of students of a Professional Diploma in Dairy Farm Management

Design/methodology/approach: A review of the literature highlights that entry to a working life in agriculture has been characterised by protracted farm succession processes; a strong association between being a farmer and owning land in the family name; lingering male identities esteeming manual labour; and a pragmatic need at farm level for manual work. The abolition of milk quota in 2015 was predicted to catalyse expansion of production on dairy farms with an increase in milk production; accompanied by a demand for qualified personnel. The BNIM method was employed.

Findings: Results confirm that agricultural education is perceived and experienced as offering new pathways for young farmers to enter the occupational category of ‘farmer’, helping to manoeuvre around the constraints of non-inheritance. The students’ narratives evidenced managerial identities, being strongly influenced by encountering management approaches through their agricultural education. All students desired to eventually own a farm someday and to be to employed as a professional dairy farm manager was a perceived as an intermediary goal.

Practical implication: Discontinuation of the traditional family farming model based on family farm/land ownership is not imminent even among a cohort qualified to become employed dairy farm managers.

Theoretical implication: This paper contributes to theoretical framework which highlights the shift in farmer masculine identity and the career trajectory of graduates of specialised agricultural education programmes.     

Here is something you can't understand: the suffocating whiteness of communication studies

ABSTRACT

The authors utilize a modernity-coloniality framework to highlight practices of whiteness and white dominance within the academy and the field of communication studies in particular. The article grounds its framework in personal experience and theories in the flesh to build comradery with feminist of color scholarly forebears and to share with those who struggle to create spaces of change within the academy today and in the future. The authors advocate for an active consciousness of “included exclusion” as the first step toward decolonization. Decolonizing discursive and embodied knowledges creates avenues for social justice and change within the academy and beyond.