Perception and practice of writing for publication by faculty at a doctoral-granting university

Of a faculty of 685 at a doctoral-granting university, 400 completed a questionnaire (the Writing Habits Survey) indicating the patterns and conditions under which they write for publication, the techniques they employ to facilitate their writing, and the factors that inhibit their writing. Overall, faculty seemed to devote substantial efforts to writing, they reported using rather unsystematic methods of writing, and they cited a lack of time as the chief constraint on their writing. The most productive writers seemed to work at writing in a regular (as opposed to sporadic) fashion, to have little anxiety about writing, and to minimize negative attitudes about the editorial process.     

NO CHILD IS AN ISLAND: CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT AND THE RIGHTS OF CHILDREN

In this essay Olivia Newman critically examines two opposing rights claims: the liberal claim that children have a right to become liberal choosers and the fundamentalist claim that children have a right to not become liberal choosers. These positions reflect differing views regarding the value of critically choosing, rather than simply accepting, a way of life. Given their assumptions regarding preference formation, both of these rights appear untenable in light of recent scholarship in psychology: we can neither select a way of life independent of our social milieu, as liberals often imply, nor can we predict how different experiences will affect our preferences, as fundamentalists assume. Nevertheless, each position points to important concerns. Children have a substantive right of exit from constraining social milieus, as liberals purport, as well as a right to respect in public institutions, as fundamentalists insist. When liberals and fundamentalists assert these more modest rights claims, educators can and should strive to satisfy both.     

Hierarchical Mentoring: A Transformative Strategy for Improving Diversity and Retention in Undergraduate STEM Disciplines

In the United States, less than half of the students who enter into science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) undergraduate curricula as freshmen will actually graduate with a STEM degree. There is even greater disparity in the national STEM graduation rates of students from underrepresented groups with approximately three-fourths of minority students leaving STEM disciplines at the undergraduate level. A host of programs have been designed and implemented to model best practices in retaining students in STEM disciplines. The Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) Professors Program at Louisiana State University, under leadership of HHMI Professor Isiah M. Warner, represents one of these programs and reports on a mentoring model that addresses the key factors that impact STEM student attrition at the undergraduate level. By integrating mentoring and strategic academic interventions into a structured research program, an innovative model has been developed to guide STEM undergraduate majors in adopting the metacognitive strategies that allow them to excel in their programs of study, as they learn to appreciate and understand science more completely. Comparisons of the persistence of participants and nonparticipants in STEM curricular, at the host university and with other national universities and colleges, show the impact of the model’s salient features on improving STEM retention through graduation for all students, particularly those from underrepresented groups.     

Cable and New Media

Cable Television in Canada ((January 1971)

Public Announcement: The Integration of Cable Television in the Canadian Broadcasting System (February 26, 1971)

Canadian Broadcasting “A Single System”: Policy Statement on Cable Television (July 16, 1971)

Joseph Newman (directing editor), Wiring the World: The Explosion in Communications (Washington, D.C.: U.S. News & World Report, 1971—$2.95, paper)

Herbert W. Meyer's A History of Electricity and Magnetism (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1971—$10.00)     

Emergence, Supervenience, and Introductory Chemical Education

In learning chemistry at the entry level, many learners labor under misconceptions about the subject matter that are so fundamental that they are typically never addressed. A fundamental misconception in chemistry appears to arise from an adding of existing phenomenal concepts to newly-acquired chemical concepts, so that beginning learners think of chemical entities as themselves having the very same ‘macro’ properties that we observe through the senses. Those who teach or practice chemistry never acquire these misconceptions because they were able to naturally pick up the nature of the subject to begin with. But as a result, they remain unaware of the foundational assumptions and understanding that they operate with and that many beginning learners persistently lack. Thus, a systematic picture of the workings of chemical theory as they relate to observable phenomena needs to be elucidated so that the attention of chemical educators is drawn to the fundamental understanding of the subject that they already possess and that beginning learners of chemistry lack, so that beginning learners can be given the opportunity to gain an understanding of how chemical explanations are in general related to observable phenomena. The ‘layered’ way in which chemical and physical entities are related to each other within chemical theory can also be clarified in this way. To afford this picture, the philosophical concepts of supervenience and emergence are explained and applied to chemistry, as philosophers of chemistry have already done. The result provides a model for teaching chemistry that, if consistently applied, has the potential to greatly enhance fundamental understanding of the subject matter.     

Potentiality for change? Revisiting an action research project with a sociomaterial approach

This article takes as its point of departure an action research project conducted in an upper secondary school in Sweden. The project had a practitioner research approach and was carried out with students in one class. In this article, I elaborate on the tensions that appeared during the project concerning collaboration and action. This is done by revisiting the project with a theoretical approach of sociomaterialism. Revisiting entails critically and creatively exploring how to comprehend collaboration and action differently. It raises question about who or what are involved in the collaborations and what are to be considered ‘good’ actions. Within the elaboration, collaboration and action become intertwined phenomena that are always working together. Furthermore, it proposes how the notion of intervention embraces the distributed and collective disposition of both collaboration and action. By addressing the notions of collaboration and action with a sociomaterial approach changing a teaching practice becomes a relational experiment without preset goals. The potential for change becomes within speculative interventions that affords various encounters and relations.     

Building life world connections during school booktalk

In criticisms of children's literature, notions of 'fantasy' and 'realism' are pivotal. In school 'booktalk' conversations pupils referred to what is 'real' in three different ways: (i) by referring to feelings of or semblance to 'real' life, (ii) by invoking shared facts and (iii) by making references to personal experiences. In cases when teachers or pupils initiated so-called text-to-life or real world connections, two types of dilemmas occurred. First, engagement was at times bought at the cost of quite literal reader responses. At other times, engagement was accomplished at the price of intrusiveness. There was, thus, a delicate balance between life world references, on the one hand, and literal readings or intrusion, on the other. Moreover, students sometimes resisted life world probing, but volunteered privileged information about their parents, displaying different notions from teachers about legitimate information in a school context.