Innovation and Entrepreneurship: Journalism Students’ Interpretive Repertoires for a Changing Occupation

ABSTRACT

Amid ongoing disruption, discourse about journalism increasingly emphasizes innovation within the newsroom and the rise of entrepreneurial initiatives outside it. This article uses the concept of interpretive repertoires to explore how students enrolled in journalism programmes in Britain and the Netherlands understand innovation and entrepreneurialism in relation to changing industry circumstances and long-standing conceptualizations of occupational norms and behaviours. We find shared repertoires that embrace technological change, but generally within an acceptance of traditional normative practice.     

Review Essay: Cultivating a Rhetoric of Agrarianism

CONTROL AND CONSOLATION IN AMERICAN CULTURE AND POLITICS: RHETORICS OF THERAPY. By Dana Cloud. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 1998; pp. 224. Cloth $67.95; Paper $31.95.

DANGEROUS LIAISONS: GENDER, NATION, AND POSTCOLONIAL PERSPECTIVES. By Anne McClintock, Aamir Mufti, and Ella Shohat. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1997; pp. 560. Cloth $62.95; Paper $24.95.

WHITENESS: THE COMMUNICATION OF SOCIAL IDENTITY. Edited by Thomas Nakayama and Judith Martin. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 1999; pp. xiv + 314. Cloth $73.95; Paper $36.95.     

Reducing Parental Dissatisfaction With Special Education in Two School Districts: Implementing Conflict Prevention and Alternative Dispute Resolution

Parental dissatisfaction with special education services is a national problem. This article presents two districts that have undergone systemwide changes to decrease the dissatisfaction of families who have children with disabilities. Using qualitative inquiry, the authors analyzed documents and observed and interviewed 24 informants about the system problems and changes. Data analysis revealed three themes within the systems problems category: (a) lack of leadership, (b) not keeping up with the law, and (c) parents excluded. Systemwide changes were organized into seven themes: (a) new leadership, (b) partnerships, (c) creative use of resources, (d) updated educational practices, (e) relationship building, (f) teacher and parent support, and (g) alternative dispute resolution. Findings revealed effective leaders who focused on all levels of the system.     

Teacher Enactment Patterns: How Can We Help Move All Teachers to Reform-Based Inquiry Practice Through Professional Development?

The purpose of this study was to investigate high school teachers’ beliefs about inquiry instruction and determine how their beliefs influenced their use of inquiry after a professional development program. Thirty-six high school science teachers participated in this study. The professional development program consisted of a 2-week summer institute as well as academic year support. The summer program included discipline-specific content lessons that utilized inquiry-based instruction, pedagogical practice involving the use of a summer high school enrichment program, and reflection on this practice-teaching in content area groups. Both in-depth qualitative interview and written reflection data were collected as well as data from the teachers’ classroom implementation of inquiry. Based on the analysis of the teachers’ interviews and classroom enactments, the teachers were placed into four enactment categories: Integrated, Emerging, Laboratory-based, and Activity-focused. We used Windschitl’s (Rev Educ Res 72(2):131–175, 2002) four constructivist dilemmas as a framework to understand the teachers’ enactments. We describe the teachers’ beliefs and practices in each enactment category as well as the components of the professional development model that were important to making changes in the teachers’ practices. In the conclusion, we connect the enactment levels to the professional development experience and suggest future directions for professional developers to move teachers toward more integrated inquiry practices.     

Representations of proportional relationships: Are children part-part or part-whole reasoners?

This research describes an intensive study undertaken to determine children's representational strategies for relational numbers (e.g. proportions, ratios, fractions). Relational numbers have three quantities associated with them: a whole and two parts. Given these three quantities, children can form a representation based on a part-whole relationship or on a part-part relationship. Fifteen children (6th, 7th, and 8th graders) solved fifteen probability problems which varied information content and quantitative relationships between the quantities expressed in the problems. A quantitative and qualitative analysis revealed that children prefer a part-part representation to solve problems with relational quantities.     

Psychosocial and behavioral factors related to the post-partum placements of infants born to cocaine-using women

OBJECTIVE: One objective was to determine if cocaine-using women who did not maintain infant custody (NMC) would report more psychological distress, domestic violence, negative coping skills, lower social support and more childhood trauma than cocaine-using women who maintained custody (MC) of their infant. A second objective was to evaluate the relative contribution of psychosocial factors to infant placement. METHODS: Psychosocial profiles of MC women (n=144) were compared with NMC (n=66) cocaine-using women. Subjects were low income, urban, African-American women who delivered an infant at a county teaching hospital. The Brief Symptom Inventory (BSI), an assessment of coping strategies (COPE), Multidimensional Scale of Perceived Social Support (MSPSS), Conflict Tactics Scale (CTS) and Childhood Trauma Questionnaire (CTQ) were administered. The associations of infant placement status to demographic factors, drug use and psychosocial measures were evaluated. RESULTS: The NMC group reported greater overall psychological distress, psychoticism, somatization, anxiety and hostility than the MC group. The NMC group had more childhood neglect and physical abuse and used more negative coping strategies than the MC group. Lack of prenatal care [OR=.83, CI (.75-.91), p<.0001], heavier prenatal cocaine use [OR=2.55, CI (1.13-4.34), p<.007], greater psychological distress [OR=2.21, CI (1.13-4.34), p<.02] and a childhood history of emotional neglect [OR=1.10, CI (1.02-1.19), p<.02] were associated with increased likelihood of loss of infant custody after control for other substance use and demographic variables. CONCLUSIONS: NMC women have more negative psychological and behavioral functioning post-partum than MC women. Less prenatal care and greater cocaine use, psychological distress and maternal childhood emotional neglect are associated with the post-partum placement of infants born to cocaine-using women. PRACTICE IMPLICATIONS: Results of this study indicate that poor, urban women who use cocaine prenatally display several measurable differences on psychosocial and behavioral risk factors based on child placement status. Among these risk factors heavier cocaine use, lack of prenatal care, more severe psychological symptoms and early childhood experiences of emotional neglect increase the likelihood of loss of infant custody. Routine, objective assessments of psychosocial and behavioral characteristics of women who use cocaine during pregnancy can aid Child Protective Service workers and clinicians by providing baseline data from which to tailor interventions and set improvement criteria for mother-child reunification.     

Effects of Processing Time on Comprehension and Calibration in Print and Digital Mediums

This study explored the effects of processing texts in print or digitally on readers' comprehension, processing time, and calibration. Eighty-six undergraduates read print and digital versions of book excerpts about childhood ailments presented in counterbalanced order. Comprehension was tested at three levels (i.e., main idea, key points, and other relevant information). Direct comparisons between print and digital reading demonstrated a significant advantage for reading in print on students' recall of key points and other relevant information but not the main idea. When processing time was added as a mediator variable, it significantly affected the relation between medium and comprehension for all question levels. In terms of calibration, students read more quickly and judged their performance higher when engaged digitally, although their actual performance was much better when reading in print. Implications of these findings for subsequent research are considered.     

Measuring Pedagogy and the Integration of Engineering Design in STEM Classrooms

The present study examined changes in high school biology and technology education pedagogy during the first year of a three-year professional development (PD) program using the INSPIRES educative curriculum. The Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) calls for the integration of science and engineering through inquiry-based pedagogy that shifts the burden of thinking from the teacher to the student. This call is especially challenging for teachers untrained in inquiry teaching and engineering or science concepts. The INSPIRES educative curriculum materials and PD provided a mechanism for teachers to transform their teaching to meet the NGSS challenges. This study followed a longitudinal triangulation mixed methods design. Selected lessons were video recorded, scored on the Reformed Teaching Observation Protocol (RTOP) rubric, and examined for qualitative trends. Year 1 results indicated that teachers had begun to transform their teaching and pointed to particular lessons within the INSPIRES curriculum that most facilitated the reform. Instructional practices of participants improved significantly as a result of the INSPIRES PD program and also aligned with previous, similar studies. These findings provide insights for rethinking the structure of professional development, particularly in the integrated use of an educative curriculum aligned with intended professional development goals.

     

In Search of Structures: How Does the Mind Explore Infinity?

When reasoning about infinite sets, children seem to activate four categories of conceptual structures: geometric (g-structures), arithmetic (a-structures), fractal-type (f-structures), and density-type (d-structures). Students select different problem-solving strategies depending on the structure they recognize within the problem domain. They naturally search for structures in challenging learning contexts. This tendency to search for structure might be a characteristic of human cognition and a necessary condition for human knowledge development. For example, specific fractal structures are intrinsic to concepts such as the numerical system that have been developed by the human race over a long period of time. When these structures are emphasized within teaching, they can facilitate the deep understanding of several basic concepts, in mathematics and beyond.