Analyzing Whispers: college students’ representation and reproduction of sociocultural discourses about bodies,relationships, and (hetero)sexuality using a mobile application

Previous research about college students’ social media usage emphasizes social media practices, often ignoring the content that students’ post. Increasing knowledge about the language that college students use to describe their intimate relationships can inform student affairs practice. Using a digital ethnographic data collection approach and queer theoretical framework, this paper explores the dominant discourses about race, sexuality, and relationships circulated in a mobile social networking application. This paper used content analysis to describe the meaning of text and images produced by college-aged youth in the US. Through this analysis of social media content, I contend that college students engage in the complex representations and reproductions of sociocultural norms about bodies, sexuality, and relationships and that these representations and reproductions influence campus climate. I develop implications for student affairs administrators.     

From Pipelines to Tasting Lemonade: Reconceptualizing College Access

Pipeline metaphors are ubiquitous in theorizing and interpreting college access processes. In this conceptual article, we explore how a lemonade metaphor can open new possibilities to reimagining higher education access and going processes. We argue that using food metaphors, particularly the processes of mixing, tasting, and digesting lemonade, may help constitute new meanings of college going. Rather than focus on production, mechanization, and ignoring social justice, a lemonade metaphor emphasizes the nonlinear aspects of college-going processes, foregrounds power relations within these processes, and humanizes educational purposes and journeys. We encourage educational researchers to take up taste as a heuristic device to reveal something different about educational phenomena that will, in turn, have material consequences.     

Notes

This article introduces TVbyGIRLS, a nonprofit organization supporting girls in the development of critical thinking, digital literacy and storytelling, leadership, compassionate collaboration, and social justice engagement. Religious educator Claire Bischoff interviews Rebecca Richards Bullen, TVbyGIRLS mentor, and Molly Nemer and Rachel Quednau, two core girls, to gain wisdom from the ways TVbyGIRLS works with girls in the flow of media, religion, and culture. “Undercover,” a film conceived of and produced by the girls, in which the girls went “undercover” to experience each other's faith traditions for themselves, serves as a case study for inter-faith dialogue and education.     

‘There’s stuff that comes with being an unexpected guest’: experiences of trans* academics with microaggressions

Historically, minority stress theory focused on the experiences of ‘sexual minorities;’ this study extends minority stress theory to understand the unique stressors that trans* individuals face in academic workplaces. Using interview data from 10 trans* college and university faculty, I fill a noted gap in the literature and examined the unique stressors that these faculty faced within the academy. In this study, microaggressions, a kind of minoritized stress, included: (mis)recognition, including misgendering and mispronouning, being an impossible person, and tokenization. Additionally, trans* faculty reported strategies to resist these stressors. These findings suggest that trans* academics navigate hostile academic work environments and experience minoritized stress deriving from their minoritized gender identities. Implications for research indicate that addressing the personal and professional consequences of minoritized stressors is an important step in understanding how microaggressions affect trans* academics. Implications for practice include the need for rethinking cisnormative assumptions within academe.     

Quantitative Methods — An Integrated Approach

This article is a brief discussion of some approaches to the occasionally problematic subject of Quantitative Methods courses for students following Hospitality/Catering/Tourisrn courses, and derives from Anne Pitcher's own experience in teaching Quantitative Methods to first year students on a degree course in Hospitality Managemen.     

The Staging of Agency in Girls Gone Wild

This paper addresses the ambivalence produced by Girls Gone Wild (GGW) as both text and social practice by interrogating the ways in which it functions hegemonically by staging an effect of agency. I draw on Bakhtin's notion of the carnivalesque as a means to examine how contradictory spatio-temporal contexts of GGW function as spaces that offer the opportunity to momentarily transgress—yet simultaneously reify—white, bourgeois norms of femininity. The videos reinforce a neoliberalist mentality of personal responsibility through the inclusion of the consent—and dissent—processes on camera. After analyzing how postfeminist discourses emphasizing “individual choice” justify GGW as a mode of female empowerment, I turn to a complementary textual analysis of GGW's role-reversal counterpart, Guys Gone Wild (2004), in an effort to show the ways in which this “mirror image” text ultimately reinforces the structure of exploitation in the original.     

Extended metaphors for pedagogy: using sameness and difference

This article looks at the use of extended metaphor in teaching. Our case studies as two teachers using metaphor in different settings show how metaphor is experienced by learners to different pedagogical effect. The article demonstrates that metaphor can be used not only for the similarity between vehicle and target systems, but also for the difference. In the subject of electronics, extended metaphor (water, waves and webs) scaffolds learning by merit of the similarity of the vehicle system to the target. However, when teaching doctoral students to improve their writing skills, extended metaphor exploits the difference between vehicle and target. In this case the frustration of academic challenge is defused by using metaphors that are homely and ordinary in contrast to the formal academic genre of thesis writing. Our experience in using metaphors to teach provides support for the theory that they may be monistic (forgotten once they have fulfilled the pedagogical scaffolding task) or dualistic (remembered because both systems remain in play). The article prompts other higher education teachers to more consciously consider the potential of metaphor as a pedagogical aid.     

Can we trust levelled texts? An examination of their reliability and quality from a linguistic perspective

Over the past decade in the United States, levelled texts, or ‘little books’ with finely graduated levelling of text difficulty, have regained their status as a literacy staple for beginning readers. Despite their resurgence, questions remain regarding the reliability and quality of these books. In this study, we conducted a detailed analysis of 20 sample texts at levels 5, 10, 15 and 20, from one series of levelled books published in the United States. We found that the levelling system used in this series is not a particularly reliable indicator of text difficulty and that the quality of these books varies considerably between and within levels. We suggest that close attention to text levels could be detrimental in the reader–text matching process. We further recommend that in order to judge and select quality books that answer the needs of their students, teachers become more aware of the various factors influencing text comprehensibility and quality.