Search results

English teachers who write have valuable expertise that can benefit students. Although there is a fair amount of research on teacher-writers, little is known about teachers’ writing lives outside of educational or professional contexts. This paper aims to investigate the writing lives and teaching beliefs of five writing contest winners.

This qualitative study, which was guided by sociocultural theory and concepts such as literacy sponsorship, involved individual semi-structured interviews, questionnaires and writing and teaching artifacts.

Data analysis resulted in several themes describing participants’ writing lives: Writing Experiences, Writing Practices and Writing Attitudes. In addition, several themes emerged describing their teaching beliefs: Writing Assignments/Tools, Modeling and Credibility/Empathy/Vulnerability. Overlaps exist in the descriptions of their writing and teaching lives.

Teachers’ writing lives are valuable resources for instruction. It is recommended that teachers have opportunities to reflect on who they are as writers and what has shaped them. Teachers also need new experiences to expand their writing practices and strengthen their writing identities alongside fellow writers. More must be done to understand, nurture and sustain teachers’ writing.

This research expands the conversation on teachers as writers by involving writing contest winners, focusing on their writing lives and noticing how their writing experiences, practices and attitudes inform their teaching. This study suggests several ways to move forward in supporting teachers as writers, keeping in mind the social aspects of learning.

Do these reference requests sound familiar? “I need to know what has happened on this day in history. Can you help me?” Or, “I'm doing a paper on Thornton Wilder. He was born on 17 April. Can you tell me who else was born on that day?” Or, “Are any national or regional anniversaries coming up next Friday?” These questions call for a special type of reference work—a book of days. A book of days (or day book) lists important events that have occurred on each day of the year throughout history, and is arranged by month and day. These works often include not only historical, cultural, and literary events, but also the dates of the births and deaths of notable people, commemorative days of saints, and special anniversaries. A book of days, for example, can reveal that historians Will and Ariel Durant were married in New York City Hall on Halloween in 1913, or that Hart Crane and Ernest Hemingway were born on the same day in 1899 (21 July). This article will review some of the more useful books of days that are often found in reference collections—works that are uniquely suited to answer questions about each day of the year.

This article provides an overview of the current state of play of benchmarking in local government in the UK. It traces a trajectory of development for local authorities that diverges from that of the corporate private sector, in terms of the importance of external political drivers. A number of key constraints are identified that are together blocking the further development of benchmarking in the sector. These include a lack of awareness of potential scope; problems in securing needed skills; satisficing and low aspiration levels reducing the potential gain from benchmarking; and a marked lack of formal evaluation. Notwithstanding recent growth, a legitimate degree of scepticism remains in many local authorities as to the public value to be derived from benchmarking.

The research for this study engages and assesses the relationship of the media from the 20th to the 21st century, combining scholar activism and public leadership in the disability rights movement. Having chronicled the disability rights movement from its roots, this chapter presents the discourse of media and movement, sampling mainstream media along with the advocacy and alternative media in support of disability rights. A range of media forms are engaged from advocacy bulletins to mainstream news media to public broadcasts that represent the diversity and complexity of the movement as it continues into the 21st century, pressing for the universalism of human rights for all.

During the last three decades or so, the introduction of gender studies into higher education in Romania as a field of teaching and research has proved to be a very uneven and sometimes precarious process. The notion of gender has not been properly integrated into scholarly research, and women’s and gender studies have therefore been seen as an appendix to mainstream research in the humanities and the social sciences. This chapter aims at providing a meaningful picture of how gender studies have become part of the higher education system in Romania, what challenges have been met on the way and what future gender studies have in the education landscape. It also provides a comprehensive overview of the significance and importance of the TARGET project for the implementation of the first gender equality plan in the Romanian higher education system.