Search results

This chapter seeks to help and support online educators in their efforts to improve tomorrow. Specifically, the chapter shares practical strategies and tools that online educators can easily apply, adapt, and/or personalize in order to help promote a mindfully multicultural classroom in their online classrooms and programs. The chapter includes a wide range of actionable tools and exercises to help online instructors optimize the learning experience for all students by building upon the unique strengths and diverse cultural backgrounds of all students in their online classrooms. The strategies help instructors leverage diversity as a means to promote equity and social justice in online programs and, ultimately, the world as a whole. The chapter relies upon Gollnick and Chinn’s (2017) six beliefs that are fundamental to multicultural education and presents strategies from two perspectives or lenses (student-focused and faculty-focused). Approaching the issue from a dual-sided lens is intended to best support the ultimate goal of improving the student learning experience. Emphasis is placed on both public and private interactions between faculty and students. Public interactions include all discussion board and announcement communications. Public interactions also include resources that are shared in the online classroom for all students’ benefit.

The authors examine the tensions between the public and commercial functions of social media platforms with a particular focus on how Instagram influencers look to demonstrate their “authenticity” whilst also pursuing commercial objectives. Drawing on a large-scale quantitative content analysis of the accounts of prominent Dutch fashion and lifestyle influencers, the authors demonstrate an “authenticity gap” between the way these influencers claim to be authentic in the way they talk about influencer culture, and the extent to which they actually implement “authenticity marker’s” in their Instagram posts.

In her introductory chapter, the author has two main objectives. First to offer an overview of changing approaches towards researching authenticity in digital spaces, which have, alternatively, emphasised issues of congruence, authorship, verification and vulnerability. Second, to provide an intensely personal reflection on the concept that ultimately asks us, as researchers, to question what we do when we try to perceive and interrogate the notion of ‘authenticity’.

In this chapter, we develop an argument in support of comparative framing in teacher education research with the purpose of strengthening the education profession and particularly the professional field of teaching and teacher education. There is little agreement in the field on the required knowledge needed to become a highly effective teacher and on how to know that teachers know enough of a subject to teach it. We argue that comparative and collaborative cross-national studies serve as ideal catalytic forces to develop much-needed ontologies to develop definitions and realize contrasts, possibilities, and limitations. The construction of ontologies supports the epistemological bases of the profession. Comparative studies help to understand what others with similar goals such as the education and support of teachers have been able to achieve under what conditions, resources, and contexts.

This article looks at the alignment of performance management system with the strategy, structure, and organizational outcome in Canadian health care organizations. In this study, balanced scorecard is the framework adopted for assessing the health care organization's performance management system (PMS) and outcome. CEO and clinical unit managers were surveyed for their perceptions on their organization's strategy, autonomy structure, PMS, and organizational performance. Path analysis was the methodology used in examining the relationship about the above organizational variables. The results indicate that patient satisfaction is the primary and most significant perspective of the depicted balanced scorecard in organizational performance. Patient satisfaction and research criteria, on the other hand, are the significant perspectives of a balanced scorecard in an organization's PMS, which are linked to strategy, autonomy structure, and organizational performance. Moreover, the results show that the strategy/structure links operated as suggested. Surprisingly, strategy on service innovation has a negative impact on the organizational outcome of patient satisfaction. Uncertainty from continuous development and organizational change in pursuing service innovation and cost-cutting measures in response to fiscal constraints are plausible explanations of the adverse impact reported.