Don’t Rush Me . . . Go the Full 40: AWHONN’s Public Health Campaign Promotes Spontaneous Labor and Normal Birth to Reduce Overuse of Inductions and Cesareans

Don’t Rush Me . . . Go the Full 40 is a grassroots public health campaign from the Association of Women’s Health, Obstetric and Neonatal Nursing (AWHONN) that educates women about the physiologic benefits of full-term pregnancy for themselves and their babies. GoTheFull40.com seeks to increase the percentage of women who complete at least 40 weeks of pregnancy, decrease the percentage of women who choose elective induction or elective cesarean surgery, and increase nurses’ and other pregnancy-care providers’ effectiveness in reducing the number of elective inductions and cesarean surgeries. Childbirth educators and other pregnancy providers are asked to share the campaign with women in preconception and prenatal settings to encourage waiting for spontaneous labor leading to full-term births when all is healthy and well with the mother and fetus.     

Biological explanation,political ideology,and “blurred genres”;: A Bakhtinian reading of the science essays of J. B. S. Haldane

J. B. S. Haldane, in attempting to show connections between Marxist political theory and Darwinian evolutionary theory, blurs the generic characteristics of political and scientific discourse. Read from the perspective of Bakhtin, this blurring of genres is also a blurring of ideologies. Haldane's essays thus contribute to our understanding of the cultural dimensions of scientific activities and accordingly help re‐define concepts of genre in scientific writing.     

Moving Beyond the Politics of Exclusion of Sexual Minorities in Schools

Macgillivray, I. K. (2004).

Sexual orientation & school policy: A practical guide for teachers, administrators, and community activists.

New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.

ISBN 0-7425-2508-2 Paperback. 224 pages. $26.95.     

Assessing students' understanding of inquiry: What do prospective science teachers notice?

The theoretical construct of teacher noticing has allowed mathematics teacher educators to examine teacher thinking and practice by looking at the range of activities that teachers notice in the classroom. Guided by this approach to the study of teacher thinking, the central goal of this exploratory study was to identify what prospective science teachers notice when evaluating evidence of student understanding in another teacher's inquiry‐based unit. Our results are based on the qualitative analysis of 43 prospective teachers' evaluations of assessment evidence presented to them in the form of a video case and associated written artifacts. Analysis of our data revealed two major categories of elements, Task‐General and Task‐Specific, noticed by our study participants. Task‐General elements included attention to learning objectives, independent student work, and presentation issues and they often served to guide or qualify the specific inquiry skills that were evaluated. Task‐Specific elements included the noticing of students' abilities to perform different components of an investigation. In general, study participants paid attention to important general and specific aspects of student work in the context of inquiry. However, they showed preferential attention to those process skills associated with designing an investigation versus those practices related to the analysis of data and generation of conclusions. Additionally, their interpretations of assessment outcomes were largely focused on the demonstration of general science process skills; much less attention was paid to the analysis of the epistemological validity or scientific plausibility of students' ideas. Our results provide insights into the design of meaningful learning experiences for prospective teachers that elicit, challenge, and enrich their conceptions of student understanding in the context of inquiry. © 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 50:189–208, 2013     

Language as Sensuous Action: Sir Richard Paget,Kenneth Burke,and Gesture-Speech Theory

This somatic genealogy of Dramatism's core terms—symbolic action, attitude, identification—argues for the importance of keeping rhetoric, rhetorical theory, and rhetorical pedagogy more closely tied to bodies that generate, induce, and respond to rhetoric. It does so by examining Burke's use of Sir Richard Paget's theory that spoken language derives from the use and development of bodily gestures. An examination of Paget's theory in Burke's early work serves as a jarring reminder that rhetoric is always a joint performance of body and mind.     

News and notes

EUGENE O'NEILL AND THE TRAGIC TENSION. By Doris V. Falk. New Brunswick, N. J.: Rutgers University Press, 1958; pp. iii+211. $4.50     

Grammar for writing? An investigation of the effects of contextualised grammar teaching on students’ writing

The role of grammar instruction in the teaching of writing is contested in most Anglophone countries, with several robust meta-analyses finding no evidence of any beneficial effect. However, existing research is limited in that it only considers isolated grammar instruction and offers no theorisation of an instructional relationship between grammar and writing. This study, drawing on a theorised understanding of grammar as a meaning-making resource for writing development, set out to investigate the impact of contextualised grammar instruction on students’ writing performance. The study adopted a mixed-methods approach, with a randomised controlled trial and a complementary qualitative study. The statistical analyses indicate a positive effect on writing performance for the intervention group (e = 0.21; p < 0.001); but the study also indicates that the intervention impact differentially on different sub-groups, benefiting able writers more than weaker writers. The study is significant in being the first to supply rigorous, theorised evidence for the potential benefits of teaching grammar to support development in writing.     

Factors Influencing Entering Teacher Candidates’ Preferences for Instructional Activities: A glimpse into their orientations towards teaching

The present study was designed to identify and characterize the major factors that influence entering science teacher candidates’ preferences for different types of instructional activities, and to analyze what these factors suggest about teacher candidates’ orientations towards science teaching. The study involved prospective teachers enrolled in the introductory science teaching course in an undergraduate science teacher preparation program. Our analysis was based on data collected using a teaching and learning beliefs questionnaire, together with structured interviews. Our results indicate that entering science teacher candidates have strong preferences for a few activity types. The most influential factors driving entering science teacher candidates’ selections were the potential of the instructional activities to motivate students, be relevant to students’ personal lives, result in transfer of skills to non‐science situations, actively involve students in goal‐directed learning, and implement curriculum that represents what students need to know. This set of influencing factors suggests that entering science teacher candidates’ orientations towards teaching are likely driven by one or more of these three central teaching goals: (1) motivating students, (2) developing science process skills, and (3) engaging students in structured science activities. These goals, and the associated beliefs about students, teaching, and learning, can be expected to favor the development or enactment of three major orientations towards teaching in this population of future science teachers: “motivating students,” “process,” and “activity‐driven.”     

Fighting baddies and collecting bananas: teachers’ perceptions of games-based literacy learning

This paper discusses how practicing teachers conceptualize commercial off the shelf (COTS) videogames within classroom-based English language arts instruction. Understanding how today’s teachers perceive virtual worlds and videogames as an instructional tool for schema building within literacy development will help researchers better understand ways to structure games-based learning in classroom environments. Data for this study were drawn from case study research of a graduate pilot course focusing on the intersections of virtual worlds, popular culture, and literacy instruction. Findings indicate that a limited understanding of videogames and virtual worlds does not hinder practicing teachers from desiring to create engaging units of study using videogames as a schema building tool. However, teachers feel that using videogames for schema building in the classroom will lead to negative perceptions of how they are viewed as teachers. This is compounded by the perception that they will not receive adequate financial support in the form of professional development from administration, nor will they receive monies for technological support to implement within instruction. However, despite these findings, teachers desire to use games-based learning and implement it as a schema building exercises with their students.     

Diagnosing Pathogenic Eschatology

In this essay, we explain the function and forms of prophetic Western end-time narratives that take a violent turn. We begin by describing how relatively benign end-time stories function for their adherents by analyzing the book of Daniel. Then, we analyze the end-time prophecy of David Koresh at the height of federal law enforcement pressure on his disciples in order to explain how relatively benign eschatology can take a pathogenic turn. In this pathogenic turn, the false prophet redirects the agency of teleological fulfillment away from God to himself and adherents. Implications for dealing with groups motivated by pathogenic Western end-time narratives are discussed in light of these arguments.