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Purpose – To help teacher educators understand how to more fully prepare pre-service teachers (PSTs) for meaningful and effective instruction with multimodal texts and the underlying technologies.

Design – This mixed methods investigation employed designed-based research in that as the authors observed and gathered data on PSTs’ outcomes within the context of a literacy methods course, the authors also engaged in an iterative process of collaborative design to develop a sustainable instructional model across three academic semesters with three cohorts of PSTs. The authors analyzed pre- and post-PST surveys measuring their knowledge of, disposition toward, and self-efficacy with technology and technology in teaching as well their intent to use technology in their future teaching. The authors also coded and analyzed PST lesson plans completed across each semester for instances of meaningful integration of multimodal texts and the underlying technology, and sound literacy instruction. Finally, the authors closely examined differences in how the course was shaped and “reshaped” across all three iterations and noted any differences in PST outcomes related to these shifts.

Findings – Overall findings suggest that enrollment in the literacy methods course improved both PSTs’ self-efficacy and knowledge about teaching with technology while also supporting PSTs’ ability to develop sound literacy instructional plans. Moreover, strategic positioning of multimodal texts and technology, in which integration is seamless, can help PSTs meaningfully and effectively weave multimodal text sets into their literacy lesson plans.

Practical Implications – This chapter contributes to the literature on integrating multimodal texts and the underlying technologies into PST programs by providing explicit, research-based recommendations for how teacher educators can meaningfully and seamlessly infuse multimodal text sets into core curricula and instructional practices.

In the last decades, many of the most talented and promising young graduates in the developed economies have joined the financial industry. Simultaneously, ill-designed incentives’ schemes have favored the development of a culture in which excessive greed, free-riders’ behavior, unreasonable appetite for risk, and short-term decision making have endangered the economy and, potentially, have laid the foundations for financial, economic, social, and environmental crises.

In this chapter, we review current challenges in the financial industry from the lens of human and social capital. We examine some of the factors that allowed unethical behavior and a short-term financial focus in the financial sector, examining how compensation and an extremely competitive culture became key elements that favored greedy and manipulative behavior and ultimately generated socially harmful human and social capital in the financial sector. Finally, we discuss the emergence of a number of game-changers (namely, Brexit, FinTech, the growing relevance of ethical standards, and the increasing participation of women and millennials in the industry) that might represent potential promotors of change and help restructure and reshape the financial industry.

This chapter discusses salient factors pertaining to the Global Financial Crisis (GFC), also called the Great Recession, which gave rise to contagion effects that continue to reverberate across the global financial landscape. The GFC is linked to three primary negative themes: build-up of credit in a global credit super cycle, New Financial Architecture (NFA) and financialization under neoliberalism, and a distorted relationship between laissez-faire economics/finance and normative political imperatives. The conclusion is that we need to rethink understandings of key principles in economics and finance and reform governance mechanisms of the financial system.

The essay examines an empirical phenomenon – the GFC – and discusses themes based upon the author’s insights gained from the vantage point of working in asset management during the Crisis. In addition, the author draws upon material from the academic literature and financial press. He problematizes finance through the lens of the GFC and suggests that the three causal factors being highlighted are enduring sources of instability in the financial system.

The conclusion is that financial crises such as the GFC are not caused by unpredictable exogenous variables but instead pertain to identifiable recurring factors and human failures. Structural, epistemological, and behavioral issues are aggravated by neoliberalism. Finance is integral to economic activity. But under neoliberalism, the global financial economy rapidly assumed a particular form of financialization founded on market fundamentalism and political and regulatory capture. Neo-liberal coöptation of finance, economics, and politics needs to be reversed to place financial and economic activity within more robust frameworks that take into account credit cycles, flaws, and instabilities inherent in the system while applying appropriate regulatory mechanisms to prevent crises.

Scholars and practitioners can draw upon claims made in this essay to propose more substantive reforms to the global financial system. These range from redesigning how finance and economics are understood and taught, to imposing circuit breakers to prevent credit cycles from becoming untenable bubbles.

Neoliberalism is a political project that has distorted understanding of empirical truths while also effecting a paralysis with regard to fixing problems. The market fundamentalism that neoliberalism prescribes and promulgates results, time and time again, in financial crises that have disastrous consequences including massive wealth destruction. It is crucial to reform the system and create more sustainable, less volatile paradigms of financial and economic life.

Arguments in this chapter are simple and straightforward but have significant implications for achieving more nuanced understandings of the financial system. Claims are presented as distillations of how the system actually works, especially the way in which it tends toward conditions of crisis and stress. Mainstream finance and economics are characterized as predicated upon certain erroneous propositions, particularly concerning efficient markets and rational agency, core tenets of the neo-liberal project.

We find evidence that the runs on banks and trust companies in the Panic of 1907 were linked to the Bank of England’s contractionary monetary policy actions taken in 1906 and 1907 through the medium of copper prices. Results from our vector autoregressive models and copper stockpile data support our argument that a copper commodity price channel may have been active in transmitting the Bank’s policy to the New York markets. Archival evidence suggests that the plunge in copper prices may have partially triggered both the initiation and the failure of an attempt to corner the shares of United Copper, and in turn, the bank and trust company runs related to that transaction’s failure. We suggest that the substantial short-term uncertainties accompanying the development of the copper-intensive electrical and telecommunications industries likely played a role in the plunge in copper prices. Additionally, we find evidence that the copper price transmission mechanism was also likely active in five other countries that year. While we do not argue that copper caused the 1907 crisis, we suggest that it was an active policy transmission channel amplifying the classic effect that was already spreading through the money market channel. If the bust in copper prices partially triggered the 1907 panic, then it provides additional evidence that contractionary monetary policy may have had an unintended, adverse consequence of contributing to a bank panic and, therefore, supports other recent findings that monetary policy deliberations might benefit from considering the policy impact on asset prices.

When young children notice and comment about physical appearance differences often associated with race, adults may experience discomfort and uncertainty about how to respond. As a result, many adults try to avoid or terminate such discussion, leaving children with unanswered questions and misunderstandings. To prepare educators to be supportive of the development of children’s positive racial identity and racial awareness, it is important for educators to examine their own attitudes, biases, and knowledge about race and racism. This chapter summarizes research on children’s racial identity and awareness, describes critical approaches to anti-racist education, and provides resources and strategies through which professionals can better understand themselves and the young children they serve.

In this chapter, we introduce a new technology for facilitating and measuring learner engagement. The system creates a learning experience for students based on frequent feedback, which is critical to learning. We open by problematizing traditional approaches to learner engagement that do not maximize the potential of feedback and offer a research-based solution in a new classroom response system (CRS) two of the authors developed at Harvard University – Learning Catalytics. The chapter includes an overview of cognitive science principles linked to student learning and how those principles are tied to Learning Catalytics. We then provide an overview of the limitations of existing CRSs and describe how Learning Catalytics addresses those limitations. Finally, we describe how we used Learning Catalytics to facilitate and measure learner engagement in novel ways, through a pilot implementation in an undergraduate physics classroom at Harvard University. This pilot was guided by two questions: How can we use Learning Catalytics to help students engage with subject matter in ways that will help them learn? And how can we measure student engagement in new ways using the analytics built into the system? The objective of this chapter is to introduce Learning Catalytics as a new instructional tool and respond to these questions.

Although the trigger for the European economic and financial crisis was the subprime and subsequently banking crisis in the USA, the true roots of theEuropean malaise are to be found in the structural weaknesses of the European growth and Euro area development model based on debt financing of public and private expenditure and investment. These drivers were amplified by the lack of effective economic policy mechanisms from both the monetary and fiscal sides of macro-economic management. The global financial crisis of 2007–2009 did not cause the underlying imbalances that are currently acting to tear apart the Euro area monetary and fiscal systems. Instead, it crystallised markets and public attention on the underlying core cause of the overall Euro crisis – the insolvency of the public financing system of the European Union (EU) member states.

A key component of evolutionary models in economics and organizational research, the notion of organizational selection is rarely the object of inquiry. It generally suggests instead a neutral and unquestioned process, a mechanism explaining organizational success and survival. In this chapter, we explore the variation of selection; we problematize the notion of selection and do an exercise in conceptual genealogy. We differentiate between three patterns of firm selection: Darwinian, strategic, and institutional and define the associated “embedded rationalities” that buttress those different selection patterns. We illustrate how selection differed and evolved through time by exploring two empirical cases – France and the United States. Building upon our empirical exploration, we stress some important contributions for three theories familiar to strategy scholars – resource-based view, population ecology, and institutional theory. We also point to some consequences for empirical research and suggest new directions for future work on the dynamics of organizational action.