Reclaiming Canada Through Its ‘Ancient’ Sport: Lacrosse and the Native Sons of Canada in Late 1920s Alberta

Lacrosse has long been considered Canada's national sport and, beginning in the latter half of the nineteenth century, became tied to the nationalist ambitions that sought to promote a national identity through the ‘creation’ of a uniquely Canadian game. Popular in the decades prior to the turn of the twentieth century, lacrosse in Alberta began to decline after the First World War, becoming a marginal sport played only in the province's larger cities. A brief and unexpected revival of lacrosse occurred in two communities, Edmonton and Lethbridge, in the 1920s championed by a nativist organization, the Native Sons of Canada (NSC). For this group lacrosse represented a natural means to promote their ‘Canada First’ ideology to young male Albertans. In Edmonton, the Native Sons sponsored a senior men's lacrosse team that garnered some local and regional attention, while attempts by the Lethbridge assembly to promote youth lacrosse in 1927 were largely unsuccessful. Despite the continuing affinity between Canadian nationalism and lacrosse, the NSC were ineffective in their efforts to revive interest in the sport. The ‘national’ game did not provide nativists in Alberta the platform they sought to promote their nationalist agenda.     

Students’ Perspectives on LGBTQ-Inclusive Curriculum

Implementing curriculum that is inclusive of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and questioning (LGBTQ) people has the potential to create an equitable learning environment. In order to learn more about students’ experiences of LGBTQ-inclusive curriculum, 26 high school students with diverse racial/ethnic, sexual, and gender identities were recruited from the Gay Straight Alliance (GSA) Network in California. Students participated in focus groups conducted by telephone by GSA staff, sharing their experiences of LGBTQ-inclusive curriculum in school. Qualitative coding methods, including grounded theory, were used to identify themes and interpret students’ responses. Data revealed that LGBTQ-inclusive curriculum was most often taught in social sciences and humanities courses as stand-alone lessons. LGBTQ-inclusive curriculum rarely met standards of social justice education, though opportunities for critical conversations about systemic oppression regularly emerged. For instance, teachers often failed to intervene in LGBTQ bullying and missed teachable moments conducive to inclusive curriculum. Some students learned positive LGBTQ lessons and highlighted the ways such curriculum reflected their identities and created a supportive school climate. Implications for equitable education are discussed.     

The European university landscape: A micro characterization based on evidence from the Aquameth project

This paper provides a new and systematic characterization of 488 universities, from 11 European countries: Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Switzerland and UK. Using micro indicators built on the integrated Aquameth database, we characterize the European university landscape according to the following dimensions: history/foundation of university, dynamics of growth, specialization pattern, subject mix, funding composition, offer profile and productivity.     

Improving early childhood teacher education: Preservice teachers' beliefs about inclusion

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to describe early childhood preservice teachers’ beliefs about the inclusion of children with special needs in early childhood settings. Nineteen female undergraduate early childhood education preservice teachers participated in one of five focus groups. Students were divided into three groups based on the courses they were enrolled in or had completed: Beginner (sophomore and junior courses), Intermediate (senior courses), and Advanced (student teaching). Additionally, 6 of the 19 students participated in individual interviews. Data analysis resulted in themes related to students’ beliefs and philosophies of inclusion, as well as their thoughts concerning practice in inclusive programs. This paper describes students’ beliefs within each group and compares responses across the different groups. Implications are discussed in relation to teacher education programs and directions for future research.     

The Rewards of Human Capital Competences for Young European Higher Education Graduates

The labour market rewards for a number of required human capital competences are analysed using a sample of young European higher education graduates. Factor analysis is applied to classify competences by jobs into eight orthogonal groups, namely participative, methodological, specialised, organisational, applying rules, physical, generic and socio-emotional competences. Estimates for the total rewards for competences are obtained through conventional wage regression, whereas estimates of the total rewards are derived in terms of job satisfaction through ordered logit regression. Explanatory variables include personal characteristics, job attributes, occupational titles, fields of study, type of higher education institution and country dummies. Results on wage rewards show that jobs with higher requirements of participativeand methodological competencesare best paid; conversely, jobs with higher requirements of organisational, applying-rulesand physical competencesare worse paid. Results on total rewards suggest that jobs with higher requirements of competences increase graduates' satisfaction, the only exception being applying-rules competences.     

¡Presente!: Affirming Latinx voices within health sciences library scholarship

Increasing diverse author representation within medical librarianship scholarship among BIPOC information professionals is an important endeavor that requires closer examination. This commentary looks to examine the ways in which the profession can support Latinx librarians and library workers in fully participating within the scholarly pipeline by exploring our unique and authentic voices, structural barriers, hesitation and fears, Whiteness in the profession and knowledge production, bias in the peer review process, lack of resources and support, and finally, a call to action.     

Child Readers and the Worlds of the Picture Book

Children as readers of picture books and the ways they respond to, and make meaning from, such texts are the focus of this article, which reports on a small-scale study undertaken in Norway and Wales, UK. The theoretical framing of the research draws on concepts of the multimodal ensemble in picture books and of the reading event as part of a social practice. The research design was developed from the team’s analysis of two texts, Pappa by Svein Nyhus (1998) and What does Daddy Do? by Rachel Bright (2009). Twenty-four children, who were 7 and 8 years old, took part in the study. This was built around two reading events for each book, staged as an immediate response and as a guided response. The data subsequently collected were analysed according to three overarching organisational principles, as book world, real world and play world. For both Daddy and Pappa, the first reading event showed the children’s responses were mainly directed towards exploring the book world. On the second reading event, references to the real world predominated for Daddy, while for Pappa the book world was again dominant. Across both reading events and for both books, the playworld revealed those occasions when the children expanded the meaning of the story, demonstrating an inventive ability to play with the text. Overall, the children’s responses moved fluidly across the three worlds, showing them to be energetically making connections between the reading, their experience of books and their own lives.     

Reliability and concurrent validity of a measure of critical thinking skills in biology

The present study investigated the utility of 52 items, selected from a readily available item pool developed for instructional purposes, when the items are used to measure critical thinking abilities of biology students. The items yield scores that have reasonable internal consistency reliability. Furthermore, analyses involving ACT, Watson-Glaser Critical Thinking Appraisal, and Group Embedded Figures Test scores also suggest that the critical thinking test items have good concurrent validity. Thus, the measure may be useful in both science instruction and future research regarding critical thinking phenomena.