Now you’re playing with audience power: the work of watching games

As electronic sports (e-sports)—the configuration of competitive videogaming as spectator sport—surges in popularity, industry organizations such as Major League Gaming (MLG) continue to experiment with techniques for capturing, and capitalizing on, the work of watching play. This article critically considers these techniques of “audiencing” by comparing observations of two MLG tournaments, in 2008 and 2012, situating them within broader cultural, technological, and economic transformations in the competitive gaming landscape. Even as games continue to be lauded as “participatory” media, this account shows a shift within some e-sports contexts towards rebuilding, rather than blurring, the boundaries between content producers and audiences.     

Doing time and motion diffractively: academic life everywhere and all the time

This article offers a diffractive methodological intervention into workplace studies of academic life. In its engagement of a playful, performative research and writing practice, the article speaks back to technocratic organisational and sociological workplace ‘time and motion’ studies which centre on the human and rational, and presume a linear teleology of cause and effect. As a counterpoint, we deploy posthumanist new materialist research practices which refuse human-centric approaches and aim to give matter its due. As a means to analyse what comes out of our joint workspaces photo project we produce two ‘passes’ through data – two diffractive experiments which destabilise what normally counts as ‘findings’ and their academic presentation. The article deploys the motif of ‘starting somewhere else’ to signal both our intention to keep data animated, alive and interactive, and to utilise visual and written modes of seriality as enabling constraints which produce a more generative focus on the mundane, emergent, unforeseen, and happenstance in studies of daily working life.     

Exploring Inquiry in the Third Space: Case Studies of a Year in an Urban Teacher-Residency Program

Using case studies, we describe what happens from novice to apprentice when preservice teachers learn to teach in an urban teacher-residency (UTR) program with a focus on inquiry. Our UTR operates within a “third space” in teacher education, seeking to realign traditional power relationships and to create an alternate arena where the roles of the university, school, teacher candidate, and community can be reimagined. This third space encourages preservice teachers to be inquirers themselves in order for them to support their students as inquirers.     

‘It's in the water here’: the development of a community‐focused literacy strategy

This paper considers the pioneering development of a community‐focused literacy initiative that began in Derbyshire, a county in the middle of England. Read On‐Write Away! (ROWA!) is viewed from the standpoint of its former director. The article describes the strategy in the context of national policy and other government initiatives in England, and gives a historical account of the project's inception and development.     

Is there a thing called dyslexia?

A controversy whether developmental dyslexia is qualitatively different from other forms of reading disability has existed among reading specialists for many years because poor readers, regardless of the labels attached to them, resemble each other symptomatically (i.e., in reading achievement). For this reason, it is difficult to establish a priori criteria based on symptoms to identify dyslexia and compare it with other forms of reading disability. One possible solution to this impasse is to see if poor readers differ in the etiology of their reading disability and, if they do, then to see whether one group of poor readers fits the traditional definition of dyslexia. This strategy was adopted in the present study. In this paper, it was hypothesized that the etiology of dyslexia is different from that of other forms of reading disability because there is a difference in the components that malfunction in dyslexia and other forms of reading disability. Studies have shown that the two components that account for a large proportion of variance in reading are decoding and comprehension. Previous studies also indicate that dyslexic children are deficient in decoding skills but not necessarily in comprehension. In this study, reading-disabled children were divided into two groups on the basis of their listening comprehension. Children whose listening comprehension was at or above grade level were placed in one group; poor readers with below-grade-level listening comprehension were placed in the second group. Both groups, however, were matched for reading comprehension. The two groups and a control group of normal readers were administered a number of tasks that were designed to assess the efficiency of the components of reading. It was found that poor readers with normal listening comprehension were deficient in tasks that involved grapheme-phoneme conversion (Component I, decoding). When tested on tasks that minimized decoding requirements, their reading comprehension was comparable to that of normal readers. In contrast, the group with sub-average listening comprehension was poor in measures of reading comprehension, even when decoding requirements were minimal. With the exception of very few children, this group also had adequate decoding skills. Because poor readers with normal listening comprehension had average or above average IQ, they conform to the traditional definition of dyslexia. Poor readers with below average listening comprehension had below average IQ and could be considered as “general reading backward.” It was, therefore, concluded that the etiology of developmental dyslexia is different from that of general reading backwardness. In this paper, the termetiology refers to proximal causal factors such as decoding and comprehension and not to distal causal factors such as genetic and neurological characteristics.     

School and Residential Segregation in School Districts with Voluntary Integration Policies

ABSTRACT

Since the Supreme Court’s 2007 Parents Involved decision, school districts have been pursuing integration in more legally and politically charged environments. The retreat of the federal government in the racial integration of schools is well documented, but less understood is what local school districts are doing to fill that void. This study documents the districts in the United States that are engaged in voluntary integration. We measure the racial and income segregation in these districts at the school level from 2000 to 2015, examining the relationship between integration methods and levels of segregation. We also measure block group-level segregation in these school districts during this time period to better understand residential patterns of segregation within the districts and contextualize school-level trends.     

Prior knowledge and primary pupils' interaction with a museum display

Conclusion The study was developed within the constructivist tradition which stresses the importance of prior knowledge in determining learners' interaction with the world around them. Accordingly, information was gathered about primary school children's ideas about diet and dentition in animals, since it was assumed that this would determine the learning that would take place when they observed a display of skulls based on a structure-function generalization about teeth. In retrospect it seems a pity that the subjects weren't asked what they thought were the purposes of labels in the museum, as an appropriate use of labels seems to be crucial in determining whether the objective of the display is realized.