Teacher Educator Identity Development of the Nontraditional Teacher Educator

The development of a professional teacher educator identity has implications for how one negotiates the duties of a teacher, scholar, and learner. The research on teacher educator identity in the USA has been largely conducted on traditional teacher educators, or those who have started their careers as public school teachers and then went on to the collegiate level as teacher educators. This auto-ethnography considers the professional identity formation of a nontraditional teacher educator, one whose professional career did not include a career as a public school teacher. Although there are common influences on professional development between the traditional and nontraditional teacher educator, such as biography, institutional contexts, and personal pedagogy, there are significant differences in the process as those influences are experienced. This research proposes an extended process for nontraditional teacher educators, including the search for legitimacy and belonging in the community of educators.     

Mapping changes in students’ English and math self-concepts: a latent growth model study

The aims of this study were to examine changes in students’ English and math self-concepts and to investigate the effects of gender and school ability level on these changes. Self-concept in English and math were measured thrice across three years among a sample of 2618 secondary school students from Hong Kong. Gender and school ability level were included as time-invariant predictors. Results indicated that students’ English self-concept slightly increased across time, while math self-concept marginally declined. Gender influenced both the initial levels and rates of change for English and math self-concepts, while school ability level predicted initial levels of self-concept. Implications are discussed.     

Attachment dimensions as predictors of mental health and psychosocial well-being in the transition to university

This study sought to investigate the predictive relationship that dimensions of attachment shared with an array of indicators of psychosocial well-being and mental health in a sample of students making the transition to higher education. One hundred and thirty-one students completed the Vulnerable Attachment Styles Questionnaire (VASQ) prior to enrolment in their first semester of university education. Subsequently, the students completed measures related to perceived loneliness, institutional integration, psychological need satisfaction, depressive symptoms and ways of coping during their first semester. Results suggested that higher scores in relation to the insecurity dimension of the VASQ were instrumental in predicting negative psychosocial well-being and mental health. The results discussed the key vulnerability dimensions of attachment when seeking to predict indices of psychosocial well-being and mental health.     

CONCEPTUAL MODEL FOR THE LIBRARY'S SERVICE TO THE ELDERLY

By providing services to the elderly and to those who deliver services to the elderly, the library has three functions parallel to those of an institution of higher education: knowledge production, knowledge dissemination, and knowledge utilization.

Applied to a library setting, knowledge production involves basic research in the community and its subpopulations. Knowledge dissemination includes providing information and material to the elderly as consumers and dispelling common stereotypic attitudes toward the elderly. Knowledge utilization is a function of supporting the social service providers who are responsible for implementing mandated programs.     

Curriculum forms: On the assumed shapes of knowing and knowledge

Historically, the logico-rational mode of argumentation co-evolved with particular mathematical systems and particular geometrically-informed manners of interpreting experience and perception. We examine some of the ways these geometries continue to shape the sensibilities, practices and structures of much of curriculum discourse, in spite of the well-developed critiques of their associated logics. We draw on fractal geometry, a new field of mathematical study, to illustrate the pervasiveness and the constraining tendencies of classical geometries. We develop the suggestion that fractal geometry is a mathematical analogue to such discourse fields as post-modernism, post-structuralism and ecological theory. We attempt to show how, through the visual metaphor of a fractal image, conventional theories of knowing and knowledge might be seen as not only compatible, but as nested in and suggestive of one another. We briefly examine how fractal geometry can complement and inform other emergent sensibilities in curriculum, in particular, those discussions critical of the linear structures associated with classical logic.     

What Your Patient Reads: Creating a Value-Added Tool for Physicians

Through a number of media sources, today's consumers have unprecedented access to health information of varying reliability and authority. Empowered by this information, patients are more involved in their health care decisions and more willing to question physicians' advice. This poses a challenge for physicians who must now find time to read mass media health reports in addition to medical research. In order to help physicians with this task, librarians at the University of Manitoba Health Sciences Libraries created What Your Patient Reads – one-page summaries of health-related media reports supplemented with references to evidence-based medical literature.     

Using Students to Make Instructional Videos: Report of an Initial Experiment

Librarians employed student assistants and tasked them with the mission of creating library instruction video tutorials for their fellow digital natives. This article describes the benefits of peer instruction and learning within a participatory culture, a culture in which students are not only consumers of content but also creators. It also covers how a university library used these tutorials to teach first-year common experience courses and surveyed 200 students from these courses about their knowledge and comfort levels with specific library services after viewing the videos.