Developing an HIV/AIDS Education Curriculum for Takalani Sesame, South Africa's Sesame Street

The HIV/AIDS pandemic in South Africa has prompted a need for extensive efforts to educate citizens of all ages about the disease and ways of coping with its impact. This paper describes the process of developing an HIV/AIDS education curriculum for Takalani Sesame, an educational media project for young South African children. The process began with formative research with adults and children, and extensive discussions with HIV/AIDS health specialists. Guided by the research and advice from specialists, a team of educators developed a comprehensive curriculum that the Takalani Sesame production team will use to create HIV/AIDS education messages for television, radio and outreach materials for children ages 3-7 and the adults who care for them.     

Differences between physical and social sciences in university graduate departments

The greater articulation of scientific fields with well-developed paradigms — in Kuhn's sense of the term — is viewed as facilitating scientific activities within those fields. Contrasting two physical science with two social science fields, earlier research reported greater consensus in the physical sciences, greater willingness to work with graduate students, and large advantages in research support and funding as compared to the social sciences.Data on influence in decision-making indicate that physical science departments enjoy greater autonomy from their central administrations, although physicists in lower-quality departments report some administrative pressures over choices of research areas. While social science departments feel less autonomous from their central administrations, they grant more autonomy to individual members. Decisions related to teaching processes are made differently across fields, with the physical sciences relying more heavily on committees, and the social sciences relying on individual-chairman negotiations.Across all four fields (physics, chemistry, sociology, and political science), departments with relatively high reputations exhibit collegial structures, while departments with lower reputations show marked tendencies toward bureaucratization. These findings hold when size of department or university is controlled, although departments in smaller universities report more administrative influence than those in extremely large ones.It is argued: (1) Departmental autonomy in the physical sciences is enhanced by the visibility of consequences made possible by greater paradigm development. (2) Maintenance of individual autonomy in the social sciences is necessitated by the lower visibility of consequences and the uncertainty of outcomes of those fields. (3) The maintenance of collegiality within universities may depend on visibility of favorable consequences relative to socially approved goals.The authors would like to acknowledge the support of the New York State School of Industrial and Labor Relations; of the Science, Technology, and Society Group at Cornell; and of Cornell University. Requests for reprints should be sent to Janice B. Lodahl, School of Management, Crosby Hall, State University of New York at Buffalo, Buffalo, N.Y. 14214.     

Telling and Retelling Our Stories on the Professional Knowledge Landscape

Drawing on a 3-year study focusing on the shaping influences of the professional knowledge landscape on the personal practical knowledge of experienced teachers, we first explore how stories are shaped as they are told and responded to in different places and, second, explore whether or not this sharing leads to imagining new possibilities for retelling and reliving stories. By sharing and exploring a story of a disagreement between a parent and a teacher, we focus on what we do when we tell stories in schools and what we do when we tell stories off the school landscape. In making meaning from this story, we show that both in the teacher's living of the story with the parent and in her numerous recountings of the story to others on the school landscape, she did not have opportunities to figure out new ways to relive the story. In our research group, she shared her story again. In this telling, we asked her to focus on who she, the mother, and the principal are in the story, and we inquire into what plotlines each were living. We ask questions about how they were positioned as characters in relation to one another. Re-searching the story in this way enabled us to understand the embodied nature of the teacher's knowing and how this knowledge shaped the events of the story as they were lived out, particularly how the teacher's living of a relational story countered the story of teacher and principal as positioned above parent. By drawing on Nelson's work on 'found' and 'chosen' communities, we imagine ways in which schools could become chosen communities where the story of school might be one of fostering the living out of multiple stories. We imagine the stories emerging from such communities might significantly shape the landscape of schools by opening up new possibilities for living in relation with others.     

So Many Bricks in the Wall: Young women in Nova Scotia speak about barriers to school-based sexual health education

Adolescents are sexual beings, and many are sexually active. They are very often able to develop the knowledge and skills required to protect their sexual health, and to take the action required for doing so. Unfortunately, many experience barriers to accessing information through school-based sexual health education. The research outlined here represents an effort to better understand the origins of barriers which prevent young women from receiving maximally effective sexual health education in their schools in Amherst, Nova Scotia, Canada. Building upon research which the authors carried out in the context of a community development project aimed at enhancing the sexual health of young people in Amherst, the article presents the lived experiences of young women in that community as they have attempted to acquire knowledge related to this very important aspect of their lives. The research examines barriers to learning about sexual health at the levels of the curriculum, teachers, and students themselves, leading to a better understanding of the potential for positive change in these domains.     

The Oprah Effect: Texts,Readers, and the Dialectic of Signification

The West treasures few moments in its history the way it treasures the story of the democratization of print. [Eighteenth century] men of letters commonly linked the spread of letters to the growth of knowledge [and to] the democratization of power … in their eyes, the citizen s reading took on a mythic significance it has never lost, even to the present. (Warner, 1993, p. 7)     

Longitudinal Dynamic Analyses of Depression and Academic Achievement in the Hawaiian High Schools Health Survey Using Contemporary Latent Variable Change Models

The scientific literature consistently supports a negative relationship between adolescent depression and educational achievement, but we are certainly less sure on the causal determinants for this robust association. In this article we present multivariate data from a longitudinal cohort-sequential study of high school students in Hawai‘i (following McArdle, 2008; McArdle, Johnson, Hishinuma, Miyamoto, & Andrade, 2001). We first describe the full set of data on academic achievements and self-reported depression. We then carry out and present a progression of analyses in an effort to determine the accuracy, size, and direction of the dynamic relationships among depression and academic achievement, including gender and ethnic group differences. We apply 3 recently available forms of longitudinal data analysis: (a) Dealing with incomplete data—We apply these methods to cohort-sequential data with relatively large blocks of data that are incomplete for a variety of reasons (Little & Rubin, 1987; McArdle & Hamagami, 1992). (b) Ordinal measurement models (Muthén & Muthén, 2006)—We use a variety of statistical and psychometric measurement models, including ordinal measurement models, to help clarify the strongest patterns of influence. (c) Dynamic structural equation models (DSEMs; McArdle, 2008). We found the DSEM approach taken here was viable for a large amount of data, the assumption of an invariant metric over time was reasonable for ordinal estimates, and there were very few group differences in dynamic systems. We conclude that our dynamic evidence suggests that depression affects academic achievement, and not the other way around. We further discuss the methodological implications of the study.     

Investigating Change in Field Sites Through Mentor and Candidate Dialogues

The work of teacher candidates matters in particular ways to the quality of children's experiences and environments when they teach in preschools. We conducted a mixed-method study with survey, interviews, focus groups, and photographic documentation of classroom spaces, and theorized findings through Bahktin's dialogism and the notion of figured worlds. Ranked survey items confirmed that the physical environments of preschools were shaped by projects stemming from university courses. Although the physical traces of candidates' work were short-lived, ending with student teaching, the classroom climate changes garnered positive social and emotional supports to children in situ that made lasting changes in children's places in the social community of preschool. Dialogues allowed mentors and candidates to reinterpret their images of children and in some cases renew instructional approaches and act against standardized forms of accountability, which limited curriculum and pedagogic choice.     

Beyond Binaries and Condemnation: Opening New Theoretical Spaces in Jewish Television Studies

Abstract

The objective of this article is to critique the current literature on Jews and Jewishness in North American television. It is our contention that this work is problematic in a number of ways. First, it insists on a strict binary between ‘bad’ and ‘good’ television images, and ‘bad’ and ‘good’ audience responses to these images. Second, it assumes that a unified, ‘acceptable’ Jewish identity pre‐exists the production of these images, and that this identity merely needs to be incorporated into the television landscape to make its images ‘better’. Third, it assumes a direct and unproblematic relationship between what the viewers see on television and how they understand the world. In the second half of this essay we introduce scholarship in other areas of television and media studies, as well as in the emerging field of Jewish cultural studies, to point to the need to theorise a much more complex relationship between identity and spectatorship than is realised in much of the current literature on Jewishness and television. We argue that our relationship, as viewers, to television is inherently complex, contradictory, ambivalent, and shifting, and thus cannot be pinned down by rigid and hierarchical binary structures. Further, we argue that Jewishness cannot be reified as a single, visible, knowable identity, and that the ambivalent pleasures of viewers viewing Jewishness on television, including our own, must be accounted for rather than dismissed.     

A Comparison of Heart Rate Responses in Females by Player Position in Standard and Zoneless Ringette

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between game heart rates by player position during two types of ringette rules: standard rules and experimental rules which did not include zone restrictions (zoneless). Two hundred twenty-five female ringette players (104 standard rules and 121 zoneless rules) were monitored during regular league and tournament play during the 1985 ringette season. This included over 50 games, approximately half played under each set of rules; and included at least five games played in each of five age categories. Field measurement of the game heart rates was conducted by use of an EST Sport-Tester heart rate monitor, which recorded the average of each 30 s heart rate profile. An analysis of variance (ANOVA) with repeated measures was performed to determine the significance of the difference by player position and rules in the mean peak heart rates for six shifts on the ice, the first three and the last three. There were significant differences (p < .05) between mean peak heart rates for forwards and defenders between standard and zoneless rules, but there were no differences between centers. Significance tests were also conducted by position and age division, and the differences in the heart rates of the defenders were significant in the junior belles (13–14) and belles (15–17) age divisions.