Search results

This paper reports on the ways in which a group of middle school students who received character education in elementary school define and experience character. The research was designed to improve our understanding of the meanings that the children ascribe to their character lessons in the long term, and to determine whether they see connections between these lessons and their experiences with character in middle school. The data come from interviews with 24 children who attended five different elementary schools in one town that used the Character Counts! curriculum at the time of the study. The students were questioned about their understanding of the curriculum and their own personal experiences with character-related issues in middle school. The results demonstrate that the elementary school character lessons are carried forward. Children are able to recall the formal meaning of many of the character traits that they studied. As they graduate to middle school, however, peer culture assumes an increasingly important role and their lived experience of character become more complex. Thus, the preteens studied here are actively working to reconcile the differences between character as a “learned,” and then a “lived” experience. While maturation and character lessons received beyond school may confound these findings, the results presented here suggest the need to bridge, and then perhaps adapt character programming to empower adolescent input and embrace the role of peer culture in defining and then redefining character.

The paper aims to describe a framework for a summer research/writing workshop for new university students, and its evolution over time and across institutions.

The University of Toronto at Scarborough (UTSC) has successfully offered its award‐winning two‐day Summer Learning Institute on Research, Writing and Presentation Skills for four years (2004‐2007), to increasing enrolments. Memorial University of Newfoundland (Memorial) adapted the UTSC model and successfully piloted its four‐day workshop, Summer Program in Academic Research and Communication (SPARC), in August 2006. Both programs were low‐cost, non‐credit summer workshops for new students to help them prepare for university‐level research and writing. Memorial offered its program a second time in August 2007. This paper focuses on the Memorial experience.

The success of these programs is attributed to a common framework used in each case: program planning, marketing, and delivery and assessment.

The framework described in this paper could be adapted by other institutions wishing to implement such a program. In addition, the SPARC team will continually improve the program by reflecting on each part of the framework.

Much research has been done to identify and address the specific needs of first‐year university students. For example, some institutions offer “first year experience” courses for credit, while others place first‐year students into Interest Groups. Most academic libraries offer information literacy sessions to groups of undergraduate students during the regular semester. This paper presents a model for reaching first year students before they take their first class at university.

The main purpose of this study is to create a complete physico‐chemical characterisation of Romanian heather honey.

A total of 30 samples of heather honey were harvested from three different geographical areas (Fântânele, Călăţele, Mărişel) from Transylvania region (Romania). This study contains a complete characterization of heather honey regarding its physico‐chemical composition, total phenols content, flavonoids content, antioxidant activity (expressed as radical scavenging activity – RSA) and micro‐ and macroelements content.

The results obtained for the total phenols content and total flavonoids demonstrate that honey samples have good bioactive properties and the antioxidant activities are similar to those of dark honeys. Heather honeys normally have a high content of minerals, having their origin in soil. All quantified minerals in heather honey presented values higher that those reported for other types of honey.

Heather honey is a very important type of honey for consumers, which due to its features has a high price on the local market. This study provides the main analytical methods for honey quality determination, which is very important for the students.

For the first time in Romania a complete study of heather honey was done.

Heather Loya started her custom designed wedding invitations business in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack, when she was no longer comfortable commuting to New York City from New Jersey for her corporate job. In the ensuing years, her business picked up to the extent that she was making a reasonable income from it. She was due to become a first time mother in July 2007. Her impending motherhood made her realize that she would not be able to work long hours in her one-person business after the birth of her child. She had started a webbased business that was set up to sell wedding invitation accessories (such as boxes, ribbons, etc.) procured from various vendors. This business was expected to take less of her time as compared to the custom business, but the custom business made better use of her creative talents. Heather now had to make a decision whether to emphasize the web-based business to compensate for the likely decrease in revenues from her custom business (because of motherhood) or to just continue her custom business in a scaled down form.

This paper adds depth to our understanding of how coaching works by exploring the experiences of 14 aspiring school principals who received one-to-one leadership coaching as part of a leadership development programme.

This study adopts a phenomenological approach. Individual semi-structured interviews were conducted with the participants. Thematic analysis was used to code the data and identify themes.

This paper reports on four themes based on the experiences of the participants: having time to reflect, feeling safe to explore, focussing on what's important for me and experiencing positive emotions.

The findings are unique to the participants who volunteered to take part in this study and therefore not representative of a general population of aspiring educational leaders. Further research is needed into the possible benefits of coaching to support educators undergoing leadership training.

The findings raise a potential dilemma within the teaching profession about the use of educators' time; while they need to give time and attention to multiple stakeholders, they also need to protect time for their own development and self-reflection. Based on the reported experiences of the participants in this study, it is recommended that coaching be considered a component of professional development for educational leaders.

This paper adds to the growing research base for coaching in education, providing a unique insight into the experiences of aspiring school principals who received one-to-one leadership coaching as part of a leadership development programme.

This article focuses on one court case concerning the regulation of Anti-Abortion protesting and asks: (1) Do the various actors involved in this case recognize a tension between their actions and their broader beliefs concerning the regulation of political protests? (2) If this tension is recognized, how do the actors resolve it, and if it is not recognized, why is it not? While concerned with legal consciousness and cognitive dissonance, the article is framed by broader questions concerning tolerance and the interaction of law and political passions.

Most women who serve time in prison will eventually be released and expected to reintegrate back into society. To maximize the chances of success, careful support is usually required. An example of this support work was the Healthy Relationships Program (HRP, 2016) offered to women inmates of the Adelaide Women’s Prison (South Australia) pre-release. The content of the HRP was influenced by a gender-responsive framework and constructed as a social work program. The purpose of this paper is to report on a small qualitative study that used semi-structured interviews pre- and post-program to explore women participants’ expectations, perceptions and experiences of the program. In this paper, the focus is on the women inmates’ interview transcripts where a thematic analysis was conducted. Two main research questions drove this analysis. First: How did the women experience the HRP? Second: What does their reported experience reveal about the ongoing need for gender-responsive support? The key findings are that domestic violence and relationships with children are strong motivators for participation in programs; therefore, gender-responsive support is still required in prison programs. However, the paper also advocates that future iterations of gender-responsive support and social work interventions become more consciously intersectional feminist in orientation.

A qualitative design was used to explore what women thought the HRP taught them. Individual face-to-face interviews were used to explore women’s perceptions, ideas and experiences of healthy relationships. Thematic analysis was used to draw out the themes across interviews.

The key arguments made are that gender-responsive support is still required but that future iterations of gender-responsive support become more consciously intersectional feminist in orientation.

The researchers experienced strict time restrictions to conduct interviews and therefore depth was somewhat compromised. To try and compensate for this restriction, the researchers visited potential participants as part of program recruitment and information sharing to help enable and build general rapport before the interviews. Time restrictions and prison security protocols did not allow for researchers to check transcripts with the women.

Reporting on this case study also showed that social work practice can influence relationships with institutions, such as prisons, that perpetrate marginalization and therefore enable a setting that facilitates safe participation in programs.

Gender-responsive frameworks provide the much needed validation of gender differences, but also require a feminist intersectional lens to more consciously aid in the conceptualization and evaluation of future programs for women in prison. It is this intersectional lens that is more likely to bring multiple experiences of oppression into focus so that personal issues and problems can be analyzed in a richer wider social context, particularly intersections between gender, class and/ethnicity race.

This paper has reported on women’s expectations and experiences of a health relationships program and provides insight and learnings for future practitioners intending to run similar programs. Overall, the women participants were able to articulate their own personal learnings about interpersonal relationships and were able to acknowledge the impacts of abuse and violence in their lives in the program.

The term “curriculum” has been used almost exclusively in educational circles to refer to plans for the conduct of learning lessons in school classrooms. This paper argues that the concept can be productively expanded to describe learning processes in workplaces, including those in which learning is not the intentional outcome of an interaction. The article first reviews conventional conceptions of curriculum, and then draws on theories of cognition and learning base in phenomenology, symbolic interactionism and situated learning to identify some of the features of a naturally‐occurring curriculum in the workplace: the socio‐technical and pragmatic elements of the knowledge used in the work environment, the classification and framing of knowledge‐use, and the extent to which participants are expected to use the various forms of knowledge. That is, curriculum is essentially a socially‐constructed ordering of the knowledge‐use in a social context. These concepts are applied to two settings in which high school interns were supposed to be learning something: a history museum and a veterinary clinic.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate power and its influence on the teaching assignment process and school-based decision making.

Qualitative interpretive design and thematic analysis were used. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with teachers and administrators.

Both teachers and administrators discussed power and social capital as components of the teaching assignment process. Teachers viewed the origins of their social capital differently than administrators and felt social capital was evident in school-based decision making and the teaching assignment process.

Participants were demographically rather homogeneous. Further studies with a diverse sample could examine race and gender as factors in the teaching assignment process.

This study demonstrates a need for administrators to examine how they consider social capital when distributing teaching assignments and involving teachers in school-based decision making. Administrators’ actions may result in teacher tracking, disadvantaging marginalized and at-risk student populations.

There is a clear disconnect between administrator and teacher understanding of the purpose and practice of teaching assignment distribution. Administrators were unaware of their own power, how they wielded it, and the effect it had on teachers.

Few studies have examined teacher–administrator power relations or the teaching assignment process at the secondary level. This study connects the teaching assignment process to social capital and power.