COPING WITH THE RABIN MURDER: A SOCIAL WORK POINT OF VIEW

Acknowledgments

It is an exceptional pleasure for me to greet you at this conference of the National Council for Jewish Education. In the first place, I deeply appreciate the honor of being able to do so as your president. Secondly, all of us involved in making the policy decision to have this separate conference were a bit anxious about the degree of membership participation and attendance. To see the full attendance here is both a vindication of our judgment and an endorsement of the idea that the NCJE needs occasions to meet as a group.     

Rupture and repair: Episodes of resistance and resilience in teachers’ learning

This action inquiry article examines veteran teachers’ learning in a week-long professional development seminar. We describe moments of disconnection in key learning relationships (teacher, learner, text) and analyze relational–cultural dynamics that contributed to the disconnections. We investigate the dynamics that facilitate repair within the relationships. We argue that disconnections were often acts of resistance which preserve teachers’ sense of self as learner. We aver that moments of reconnection were acts of resilience. This study’s significance demonstrates the inherent links between resistance and resilience. Implications point to the centrality of taking an inquiry stance in the study of professional development experiences.     

Emotional labor in librarianship: A research agenda

Many occupations, including librarianship, require emotional labor, which can be defined as the awareness of the emotional expressions required of a job, and the strategies used to express those emotions. To date, little research has examined emotional labor in library work, even though strong evidence exists to suggest emotional labor is a key component of many library jobs. Research on emotional labor shows that there can be positive and negative effects on individuals such as job satisfaction and job burnout. Research also shows that the negative outcomes from emotional labor may be buffered to some extent by factors such as support from the organization, or job autonomy. Individual differences such as personality traits and attitudes toward customers also impact the effects of emotional labor on employees. Because emotional labor is a critical issue in library work, and because evidence suggests positive outcomes can be fostered, there is a need to study how emotional labor is carried out in libraries, and to identify management techniques for emotional labor that will yield positive outcomes for both employees and organizations. Empirical research on emotional labor is reviewed, and a research agenda for exploration of this important construct in the field of librarianship is presented.     

First Experiences with Reading Primary Literature by Undergraduate Life Science Students

Learning to read and understand research articles (primary literature) is an important step in the enculturation of higher education students into the scientific community. We presume, based on ideas from the field of genre analysis, that it is important for the development of reading skills to become conscious of the rhetorical structures in research articles. So, we determined how well science students are able to identify 2 important elements of this rhetorical structure: conclusions and grounds. First-year undergraduate life science students who followed a course called ‘Biomedical Research’ made assignments in which they had to identify these 2 elements. We analysed the answers of 20 students in detail and compared their answers with 2 expert readers. Furthermore, we conducted task-based interviews with 4 students to gain more insight into their reading strategies and to determine how they identify conclusions and grounds. Our results show that students and experts defined conclusions and grounds in different ways. Students and experts agreed on the most important conclusion of the articles. However, students identified a wide range of sentences which were not seen as conclusions by the experts. The grounds students mentioned mostly matched their conclusions. Students sometimes failed to mention important grounds for a particular conclusion. In conclusion, our study shows the differences between student and expert readers of primary literature. Based on our results, we formulated criteria for the design of a teaching strategy that aims to improve students' skills for reading primary literature.     

Haraway's ‘bag lady story-telling’: relocating childhood and learning within a ‘post-human landscape’

In this article, we explore some alternate ways of approaching childhood and learning by taking three short forays into what Donna Haraway calls a ‘post-human landscape’. This exploration takes us beyond the horizons of orthodox educational approaches, in which the individual child is typically seen to be developing and learning within his/her (exclusively human) sociocultural context. The post-human landscape relocates childhood within a world that is much bigger than us (humans) and about more than our (human) concerns. It allows us to reconsider the ways in which children are both constituted by and learn within this more-than-human world. Adopting Haraway's feminist narrative strategy, we offer three very different ‘bag lady’ stories that consider the ethics and politics of child/non-human animal cross-species encounters. Each of these stories gestures towards the ways in which we can learn to live with ‘companion species’ rather than only ever learn about them.     

基于国际大规模学生评估的中国高中毕业生质量研究

在过去的二十年间,国际大规模学生评估主要对教育研究、学校体系和教育政策产生影响.本文着重介绍这些项目的主要结果,并在此基础上,于2003年在中国四个省份展开数学胜任力测试.作为过去几十年国际大规模学生评估的非参与国,中国无疑提供一个特殊视角.因而,本文所报告的中国学生成绩国际比较是一项独特工作.     

Young girls’ spatial and arithmetic performance: The mediating role of maternal supportive interactions during joint spatial problem solving

The present study addresses girls’ (6–7-year-olds; N = 162) early spatial and arithmetic skills within the context of learning environments provided by their mothers. The study was designed to determine the relationship between maternal supportive interactions on a joint origami spatial problem-solving task and their first grade daughters’ spatial and arithmetic skills. During home visits the mothers and daughters were videotaped jointly solving origami tasks with maternal supportive interactions assessed through ratings of maternal stimulation of cognitive development and maternal quality of assistance; the girls were separately assessed in school on spatial and arithmetic skills. Using structural equation modeling, the main findings were (1) maternal supportive interactions on a mother–child origami task mediated the relation between mothers’ spatial skills/educational level and their daughters’ spatial skills and (2) their daughters’ spatial skills in turn mediated the relation between quality of maternal supportive spatial interactions and the daughters’ arithmetic achievement. The present findings indicate the importance of early maternal supportive interactions relating to spatial problem solving for girls’ spatial and arithmetic achievement. Furthermore, all pathways linking girls’ home environments and arithmetic skills were mediated through the girls’ spatial skills, suggesting that for young girls, development of early spatial skills may be important for effective arithmetic learning.     

Maps & GIS Data Libraries in the Era of Big Data and Cloud Computing

In upcoming years, two major changes in the computing landscape will reshape how map and GIS data libraries (MGDLs) will be required to perform their core functions in the future. These advancements—cloud computing and the “Big Data era”—offer opportunities and challenges for libraries, but most dramatically changes. Commercial cloud computing solutions are available as on-demand service; low-cost, internal private clouds are now a financial possibility. Simultaneously, Geographic Information Science (GISci) data and services have advanced at an ever-increasing pace into the “Big Data,” swelling the types and amounts of GIS data and services available. These two shifts have and will impact the entire GIS world and MGDLs, in response, and will now be required to collect, curate, and make available more data and services than ever. The MGDL community must be prepared to respond and react in order to remain effective. This article explores the evolving landscapes within which MGDLs must operate and examines how their roles and operational organization will be impacted. The hope of the authors is that such analyses will spark community-driven discussion to motivate the next major phase of research and implementation in the world of MGDLs.