Weaving the threads of meaning: a characteristic of children's spirituality and its implications for religious education

Although well documented from a British perspective, empirical research exploring the spiritual lives of primary school children in the Australian context is a field in which scholarship is beginning to emerge. This article reports on one particular finding which emerged from an Australian study seeking to identify some characteristics of children's spirituality in Catholic primary schools. The characteristic has been termed weaving the threads of meaning. It describes the way in which the children who participated in this study appeared to use their sense of wonder as a means of expressing their spirituality by piecing together a worldview based around their attempts at meaning making. This article argues that the existence of this characteristic presents a challenge for religious education, in particular for those programmes which operate within faith schools where the Christian narrative forms a source of the authoritative wisdom to be handed on to its students.     

Factors Influencing New Entrant Dairy Farmer's Decision-making Process around Technology Adoption

Purpose: The aims of this paper are to (1) evaluate the main factors influencing grazing system technology adoption among new entrant (NE) dairy farmers within Europe and the Irish pasture-based dairy industry, and (2) to determine the extent to which economic factors influence decision-making around technology adoption and use among NEs to the Irish dairy industry.

Methodology: Multivariate analysis is used to investigate the associations between region, education level, previous experience in dairy farming, herd size, age and the farmer's perception of the usefulness (PU) and ease-of-use of a technology (PEOU), and the likelihood of that technology being adopted.

Findings: The results of this study identify a high rate of grazing, artificial insemination (AI) and financial management technology adoption among NE dairy farmers whose technology decisions are primarily motivated by financial considerations and are closely related to the PU and PEOU scores of the technology. Grassland measurement had the lowest adoption rate (51%) compared to AI (86%) and farm financial management (84%).

Practical Implications: The substantial importance of PU and PEOU to technology adoption decisions indicates that future research, extension and education programmes should place increased emphasis on the benefits and usability of key technologies in addition to evaluating their scientific merit.

Originality/Value: For the first time information assessing technology adoption amongst new dairy farmers is available. This has the potential to improve and increase extension and education for new dairy farmers in a future post-quota environment.     

Competition between ethanol-induced reward and aversion in place conditioning

Previous place conditioning studies in mice have shown that injection of ethanol immediately before a conditioned stimulus (CS+) produces conditioned preference, whereas injection of ethanol immediately after CS+ produces conditioned aversion. In the present experiments, we examined the learning that occurs when ethanol is injected in “ambiguous“ procedures that provide the opportunity for both types of conditioning. When ethanol was given midway through the CS (Experiments 1 and 2) or both before and after the CS (Experiment 3), the direction of place conditioning was the same as when mice were exposed only to whichever contingency occurred first (a primacy effect). That is, injection of ethanol in the middle of the CS conditioned aversion, whereas injection both before and after the CS conditioned preference. Because these results support the idea that ethanol elicits both aversive and rewarding effects, they are most consistent with conditioning theories that conceptualize unconditioned stimuli (USs) as events that can activate multiple representational components.     

Internationalization of the postdoctorate in the United States: analyzing the demand for international postdoc labor

The American academic research enterprise relies heavily on contributions made by foreign nationals. Of particular note is the large number of international postdocs employed at universities in the United States (US). Postdocs are among the fastest growing group of academic staff in the US, and over 50 % of all postdocs in the US are temporary visa holders. While academic mobility is sometimes understood using a ‘push–pull’ model, we argue that demand for educational migrants must be considered. Drawing from Marginson’s (Handbook on globalization and higher education. Edward Elger, Northampton, 2011; Marginson and Rhoades in High Educ 43:281–309, 2002) work, we develop a model for assessing local, national, and institutional (or local) variables that may shape the employment of international postdocs at universities in the United States, and we operationalize the model through a panel regression analysis using data covering the period 1989–2009. We find that the passage of time and federally supported research and development expenditures are strong predictors of postdoc employment. Institutional characteristics predict changes only in the subsample of private universities.     

Explanatory accounts in international and comparative higher education research

Developing plausible explanations rooted in theory and supported by evidence is a challenge for comparative higher education studies. The purpose of this article is to consider how comparative studies in higher education might develop accounts that allow the research community to enhance explanatory power. Higher education studies can advance explanations about what is happening and why, as well as interpret the meaning of occurrences by drawing broadly on realist scholarly traditions. Rather than prioritising a methodology, the field should prioritise essential questions and address them with all appropriate empirical tools. Avenues for explanatory research include bounded case studies, multi‐method investigations into specific phenomena, mechanism‐based approaches and macro‐social analysis.     

The Founding of ATTW and its Journal

Don Cunningham, the founding editor of The Technical Writing Teacher and a founding member of ATTW, recalls key moments in the history of ATTW and its journal, and the people who shaped the organization in its early years.     

Credential disconnection: a Marxist analysis of college graduate underemployment

Despite the world slowly recovering from the 2008 recession and reducing levels of unemployment, the problem of underemployment persists. Underemployment is a problematic work status determined by an array of factors, including hours worked, comparative wages, and various subjective elements. This particular employment condition is affecting a great number of college graduates, specifically in the realms of subjective underemployment where the skills and education obtained in one’s college experiences are not utilized in one’s occupation. In this way, college graduate underemployment (CGU) is the product of a dialectical interplay between higher education institutions and the world of work. A Marxist analysis is utilized here to parse out the nuances of this relation. Marx’s original examination of capitalism illustrates how the forces of capital manipulate labor power as a commodity. Capitalist manipulation, coupled with technological dynamism and automation, gradually appropriate skills from the worker into the larger apparatus of capital. Formerly limited to manufacturing, this formal subsumption has now moved to modes of labor that require a college education, forcing college graduates, across nearly all disciplines, to assume work discordant to their degree. Moreover, with new labor paradigms consisting of disempowered part-time work, CGU will continue to be an obstacle that graduates must navigate, beckoning more critical educational experiences.     

New languages of possibility: early experiments in education as dissent

This paper reviews the work of four early radical educators: the cultural nationalist Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941), Asia’s first Nobel Laureate; Bertrand Russell (1872–1970), Cambridge mathematician and philosopher; the Irish educationalist and insurgent Patrick Pearse (1879–1916) and Leonard Elmhirst (1893–1975), co-founder of Dartington Hall school in England. Each represents a type of radicalism that is particular to his own era but resonates in twentieth-century educational provision and policy. Each articulated his political vision through the establishment of a school and all contributed to modern pedagogical practice. The paper argues that ideological and methodological similarities not only compel us to consider them as radical founders, whose ideas are in many ways identical, but to identify them as pivotal theorists in early conceptualisations of education as dissent and disengagement, as a means of decoupling thought and habit from the mainstream of educational practice, colonial imposition or curricular conservatism. In particular, the paper concentrates upon the work of the Irish educationalist and political radical Patrick Pearse and, employing his educational writings and practice as a template for dissension, demonstrates that it was both typical of and reflected the wider tone of early formulations of education as dissent.