bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Interpersonal Mindfulness Training for Well-Being: A Pilot Study with Psychology Graduate Students
Authors: Cohen Jeanette Sawyer , Miller Lisa J.
Published: November 2021

Background/Context

Although mindfulness originated in Eastern meditation traditions, notably Buddhism, researchers, clinicians, and, more recently, educators suggest that the cultivation of mindfulness may be beneficial to Westerners uninterested in adopting Buddhist or other Eastern spiritual traditions. Mindfulness is understood as sets of skills that can be developed with practice and taught independently of spiritual origins as a way of being or relating to present-moment experience.

Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study

This pilot study adds to this literature on mindfulness training for nascent mental health professionals, who may be at risk for occupational stress and burnout. This study aims to (1) expand on preliminary research supporting the helpfulness of mindfulness interventions for graduate students in psychology and (2) investigate the feasibility and helpfulness of a novel adaptation of mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) that emphasizes relational awareness.

Population/Participants/Subjects

This sample consisted of clinicians-in-training (N = 21) within a graduate department of counseling and clinical psychology at an urban university. All students were in their first or second year of graduate school; 20 participants were enrolled in a psychology master's program, and 1 participant was a doctoral student in clinical psychology.

Intervention/Program/Practice

The authors investigated a novel 6-week interpersonal mindfulness training (IMT) program modeled after the manualized MBSR intervention, with an added emphasis placed on relational awareness. IMT aims to reduce perceived stress and enhance interpersonal well-being and, as such, may be particularly well-suited for psychotherapy trainees. IMT was integrated into a semester-long graduate course in psychology.

Research Design

A pre-post design was used to examine outcomes associated with participation in IMT.

Findings/Results

Results suggest that IMT with psychology graduate students is a feasible intervention that positively affects mindfulness, perceived stress, social connectedness, emotional intelligence, and anxiety. Of special interest are changes in interpersonal well-being that suggest potential benefits for future mental health professionals.

Conclusions/Recommendations

High attendance rate and positive program evaluations suggest that IMT can be successfully taught within a graduate psychology curriculum. We suggest that mindfulness training may be a useful complement to the standard training of future clinicians.
Synchronicity Awareness Intervention: An Open Trial
Authors: Cho Lydia Y. , Miller Lisa J. , Hrastar Mark G. , Sutton Nina A. , Younes John Paul
Published: November 2021

Background

Awareness of synchronicity may be an opening to more general spiritual awareness. Empirical research analyzing the process of increased synchronicity awareness and investigating shifts in personal spirituality and mental health is limited. Might synchronicity awareness be a porthole for a more general sense of personal spiritual awareness, namely the experience of directly lived daily events as spiritually meaningful?

Purpose

This study evaluated a six-week synchronicity discussion group, Synchronicity Awareness Intervention (SAI), delivered to emerging educators and human service professionals. Its aim was to increase awareness of synchronistic events and to support spiritual awareness.

Participants

Final enrollment consisted of 12 females and 1 male, with a mean age of 26.8 years (SD=5.29). Religious denominations were 38.5% Catholic, 30.8% Protestant, 15.4% Hindu, 7.7% Buddhist, and 7.7% Atheist.

Research Design

The study used a pretest-posttest within subject design. This report focuses on the postintervention qualitative data collected through semi-structured interviews.

Findings

Data suggested that SAI was associated with increased awareness of synchronicity and suggested beneficial effects of synchronicity awareness on personal spirituality and mental health. Results showed that the program was well received and highly rated by the participants, indicating that it was an acceptable form of a spiritually informed psychother-apeutic discussion group.

Conclusions

This preliminary study showed promising support for the feasibility, acceptability, level of engagement, and potential helpfulness of an SAI in a group setting. Synchronicity awareness may support spiritual awareness and improve mental health.
Action in a Shared World
Authors: Hinchliffe Geoff
Published: November 2021

Background/Context

The background of the article is the continued interest in the ideas of Hannah Arendt. In her book The Human Condition, Arendt draws on sources of ideas drawn from Ancient Greece to deliver a critique of modernity. The main burden of her criticism is that the imperatives of work and labor have virtually supplanted the ideal of action. By action, Arendt terms activity that was creative and risky, set in a public domain. Because the scope of the public has been severely decreased, the scope of action is attenuated also. In particular, Arendt closely identifies action with political action.

Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study

The research does not question the general thrust of Arendt's critique, but has three aims: (1) to supplement the concept of action that in certain respects is undertheorized by Arendt, (2) to argue that the domain of the public needs to be extended to the “shared world” that includes, for example, action in professional life and not only politics, and (3) to argue that education, as part of the shared world, should look to extending the capability for action.

Research Design

The research takes the form of philosophical and historical analysis. In addition to the works of Arendt, the ideas of Michael Oakeshott and H. P. Grice are analyzed to develop further the concept of action. The method of deploying action in a pedagogical setting is then explored through an examination of Sen and Nussbaum's concept of capability.

Conclusions/Recommendations

The article argues that teachers have a responsibility to develop the capability for action in their children and students. This goes beyond instruction to the creation of conditions in which students can start to take risks and responsibilities for themselves.
Human Conditions for Teaching: The Place of Pedagogy in Arendt's Vita Activa
Authors: Higgins Chris
Published: November 2021

Background/Context

If education centrally involves self-cultivation, and the teacher's own robust selfhood is necessary for inspiring self-cultivation in students, then teacherly self-cultivation is a necessary condition of education. But teaching is seen as a helping profession, where helping others always seems, in practice if not in principle, to preclude helping oneself. Some scholars refer to teaching as a praxis, a form of ethical/political conduct where knowing and doing become fused, where freedom is enacted. But is this simply wishful thinking? Perhaps, as institutionalized, teachers are a cog in a bureaucratic machine, or at best selfless servants of their students in a “noble” calling. This study asks what aspects of teaching, if any, might nurture the teacher's own quest to flourish, without thus becoming a selfish betrayal of the role. What might it mean to speak of teaching as “self-ful”?

Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study

The philosophy of Hannah Arendt is a fruitful context in which to refine and explore this question. Arendt offers a rich typology of practical activities, distinguishing “labor” and “work” from action proper. And she puts action at the center of her theory of education. However, it is the natality and action of students that drives education, and Arendt seems to suggest that teaching itself amounts to only labor or work. The problem is that if the teacher's core project is not actional, she will grow estranged from her own natality, and thus be incapable of recognizing and responding to the natality of her students. How can we theorize teaching as action without violating the spirit of Arendt's compelling accounts of education and of action?

Research Design

This is a theoretical paper and uses philosophical methods such as concept clarification and development, textual analysis, and thought experiments.

Conclusions/Recommendations

Arendt's conception of the classroom as mediating space, sheltered from full exposure to the public realm and the demands of action, is a sound one. However, this need not entail that teaching cannot be a form of action. The classroom mediates but does not entirely exclude the public. Meanwhile, action for Arendt itself involves mediation. The classroom is a theatrical space where participants may adopt roles, but politics too is theatrical for Arendt. The curriculum involves representations of aspects of the cultural inheritance, making education akin to an ongoing (cultural) constitutional convention, where making is always remaking, where the polis is again called into existence by its representatives.
Does the SES of the School Matter? An Examination of Socioeconomic Status and Student Achievement Using PISA 2003
Authors: Perry Laura B. , Mcconney Andrew
Published: November 2021

Background/Context

It is well established in the research literature that socioeconomically disadvantaged students and schools do less well on standardized measures of academic achievement compared with their more advantaged peers. Although studies in numerous countries have shown that the socioeconomic profile of a school is strongly correlated with student outcomes, less is understood about how the relationship may vary if both individual student and school socioeconomic status (SES) are disaggregated.

Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study

This study examines the relationship between school SES and student outcomes in more detail by asking two research questions. First, how does the association vary for students of different socioeconomic backgrounds? In other words, is the association stronger for students from lower SES backgrounds than for students from higher SES backgrounds? Second, how does the association vary across schools with different socioeconomic compositions? In other words, are increases in school socioeconomic composition consistently associated with increases in student academic achievement?

Population/Participants/Subjects

This study uses data from the Australian 2003 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). The sample includes over 320 secondary schools and more than 12,000 students from Australia.

Research Design

This study is a secondary analysis of data from the Australian 2003 PISA. Descriptive statistics are used to compare the average reading, mathematics, and science achievement of secondary school students from different SES backgrounds in a variety of school SES contexts.

Conclusions

The two main findings of the study are that increases in the mean SES of a school are associated with consistent increases in students’ academic achievement, and that this relationship is similar for all students regardless of their individual SES. In the Australian case, the socio-economic composition of the school matters greatly in terms of students’ academic performance.
Family, Neighborhood, and School Settings across Seasons: When Do Socioeconomic Context and Racial Composition Matter for the Reading Achievement Growth of Young Children?
Authors: Benson James , Borman Geoffrey D.
Published: November 2021

Background/Context

Seasonal researchers have developed a theory and hypotheses regarding the importance of neighborhood and school contexts for early childhood learning but have not possessed nationally representative data and precise contextual measures with which to examine their hypotheses.

Purpose/Research Questions

This empirical study employs a seasonal perspective to assess the degree to which social context and race/ethnic composition—in neighborhoods and schools—affect the reading achievement growth of young children. The authors ask, Were there specific seasons when context and/or composition were particularly salient for reading achievement? Also, did accounting for context and composition challenge established appraisals of the relationship between family factors and achievement?

Population

Data for a nationally representative sample of students proceeding through kindergarten and first grade came from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Kindergarten Cohort (ECLS-K). Neighborhood social and race/ethnic measures came from the 2000 Census. Research Design: This quantitative study employs a three-level model that assesses reading achievement at school entry and during three subsequent seasons. The model represents reading achievement as a time-varying process at level 1, conditional upon family socio/demographic factors at level 2, and dependent on social context and race/ethnic composition at level 3.

Findings/Results

Neighborhood social context mattered substantially for students’ reading achievement levels at school entry and for their reading achievement growth during the summer. The proportion of neighborhood residents from minority race/ethnic groups was not associated with reading achievement at school entry or during the summer season. During the school year, school social context was associated with reading growth during kindergarten, and school social context and race/ethnic composition were associated with reading growth during first grade.

Conclusions/Recommendations

The magnitude and frequency of contextual effects found in this national sample have considerable implications for achieving educational equality in the United States. The authors recommend that policy makers attend to the quality of neighborhood and school settings as a means of promoting literacy development for young children.
Social Reproduction of Inequality: The Racial Composition of Feeder Schools to the University of California
Authors: Teranishi Robert T. , Parker Tara L.
Published: November 2021

Background/Context

Previous research has pointed to the dismal state of secondary education in California and its implications for college access. These studies identified the extent to which disparities in access and outcomes in California are correlated with school demographics and the relative levels of segregation that exist in California's public high schools.

Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study

Our research advances understandings of this association within California's most selective sector of public higher education: the University of California. Three research questions guided our study: (1) In what ways, if any, are the racial compositions of high schools different for first-time freshmen (FTF) at different UC campuses? (2) How are the racial compositions of high schools that are the source of underrepresented minorities (URMs) at each UC campus different, if at all, from the racial compositions of high schools that are the source of White FTF? (3) Do the racial compositions of public high schools in California have an independent net effect on the likelihood that a school will send graduates to the University of California and individual UC campuses, controlling for other school characteristics?

Research Design

To answer our research questions, this quantitative study used descriptive correlations and multiple regressions to examine the high school source of FTF for 8 out of 9 UC campuses for the 2000–2001 academic year.

Findings/Results

Although the University of California as a whole may appear to be making gains in providing opportunities for students of color, accessibility to individual UC campuses for Black and Latino students varied depending on URM or White high school attendance. At 5 of the 8 campuses in this study, a greater proportion of URM FTF originated from White schools, as opposed to URM schools, where they were most concentrated.

Conclusions and Recommendations

Educational policies and practices in the UC system that hold some campuses accountable for goals of equity yet allow other campuses to exclude whole groups of students based primarily on the high school they attended are neither effective nor equitable. Researchers, policy makers, and educational leaders should examine the ways in which admissions policies may inherently privilege one group (those from White schools) and disadvantage other groups (those from URM schools). This problem needs to be addressed by both policy makers and practitioners in higher education and the K–12 system.
Teachers Providing Social and Emotional Support: A Study of Advisor Role Enactment in Small High Schools
Authors: Phillippo Kate
Published: November 2021

Background/Context

This study investigates the teacher's role in the student advisory process, which to date has generated limited research literature. Teachers who serve as student advisors assume a role that extends beyond the more traditional instructional role, and includes implied or explicit expectations to provide student advisees with academic and nonacademic support. Part of this nonacademic support role involves providing social and emotional support to students. This study particularly focuses on the advisor role and advisory programs in small high schools, which places a premium on strong student-teacher relationships, rendering advisory programs a central structure. Organizational theory that distinguishes role complexity from organizational complexity further frames the study, which explores the complex teacher-advisor role in an organizational setting that has intentionally decreased the number of differentiated professional roles.

Research Question

How do teachers in small high schools enact their advisor roles, specifically their roles relative to the social and emotional support of students?

Participants

Teachers assigned the role of advisor in three small public high schools.

Research Design

This is a qualitative study with a theoretical framework based on Giddens’ structuration theory.

Conclusions

Advisors were found to possess identifiable characteristics that impacted how they enacted their roles, and ultimately, provided support and guidance to their students. These characteristics concerned advisors’ background knowledge, relevant experience, skills and guiding principles about advising. Teacher education, either in preservice or professional development settings, contributed minimally to the personal resources and schemas, or guiding principles, that teachers used as they enacted the advisor role. Advisors with lower levels of personal resources, and less developed role schemas, tended to struggle more with the role, while advisors bringing more of these assets to their work experienced greater comfort and effectiveness with it. Implications are discussed for the small schools movement, teachers’ potential to provide social and emotional support to their students, and role complexity within organizations.
Open Access, Education Research, and Discovery
Authors: Furlough Mike
Published: November 2021

Background/Context

The open access movement has successfully drawn attention to economic and political aspects of scholarly communication through a significant body of commentary that debates the merits of open access and the potential damage it may do to scholarly publishing. Researchers within the field of education research, notably John Willinsky, have discussed the value and potential benefits of open access to fulfill the research mission and to improve the visibility of the field. There are now thousands of open access publications or content aggregators online. Researchers have adopted open access to varying degrees, but not as rapidly as proponents have hoped, while readers using traditional discovery services are less likely to encounter open access materials in their research than they are traditionally published scholarship.

Purpose

This article examines the opportunities that are available for researchers to adopt open access distribution and the factors that may impede their adoption. I synthesize recent studies of researchers’ attitudes toward, and understanding of, open access and examine the extent to which influential education research journals permit it. I focus on one of the primary methods of adopting open access—archiving versions of articles in open repository services—and demonstrate how that model can contribute to decontextualizing of research findings during discovery.

Research Design

This article is based primarily on a literature review and analysis, but also builds on an investigation of publisher policies through publicly accessible Web sites.

Conclusions and Recommendations

First, the success of the movement, and the ease with which data can be readily shared by anyone with net access, has contributed to an increasing expectation of “openness” and will change how research is conducted, shared, and authorized. Second, more research is needed on the attitudes and behavior of researchers in specific fields, especially education researchers, to understand how open access can support their needs as authors. Third, that understanding should be deployed to design services that can help close gaps in the research process. Openness should be adopted as a value in these services, not an end in itself.
Listening for Identity beyond the Speech Event
Authors: Wortham Stanton
Published: November 2021

Background

A typical account of listening focuses on cognition, describing how a listener understands and reacts to the cognitive contents of a speaker's utterance. The articles in this issue move beyond a cognitive view, arguing that listening also involves moral, aesthetic, and political aspects.

Focus of Study

This article attends to all four dimensions but focuses on the political. I argue that listening requires attention to the social identities inevitably communicated through speech. My account of “listening for identity” moves beyond typical approaches by construing listening as a collective, public process, not one located in an individual listener's mental states. To listen is to respond sensibly to others, such that participants can build a coherent interaction. Once we adopt this pragmatic account of listening, we must acknowledge that listening requires attention to patterns beyond the event of listening itself. Some of the signs and behaviors that cohere to form an instance of listening depend for their meaning on patterns from outside the event of listening. In addition to arguing that we listen for identity, then, I also argue that we must “listen beyond the speech event.”

Setting

The case study presented in this article comes from a yearlong study of a ninth-grade English and history class in an urban American school that served ethnically diverse working-class children.

Research Design

The research involved 3 years of ethnographic research in an urban American high school, 1 year of intensive ethnographic research in the classroom described, and discourse analyses of 50 hours of recorded conversation from this classroom.

Conclusions

Speakers inevitably identify themselves and others when they talk, and this identification can only be successful if people listen and respond in appropriate ways. We certainly listen for the cognitive contents communicated by speech, but we also listen for the identities established through speech. The two central claims made in this article and illustrated by the case study are that we inevitably listen for identity and that listening requires attention to patterns beyond the speech event.
Listening: A Virtue Account
Authors: Rice Suzanne , Burbules Nicholas C.
Published: November 2021

Background Context

Despite its significance for learning, listening has received very little attention in the philosophy of education literature. This article draws on the philosophy and educational thought of Aristotle to illuminate characteristics of good listening. The current project is exploratory and preliminary, seeking mainly to suggest what a virtues orientation might offer in terms of understanding and fostering good listing in educational contexts.

Purpose

This work examines how listening in educational contexts may be understood when examined through an Aristotelian lens. Virtue ethics provides a systematic orientation for the analysis of a familiar but underanalyzed phenomenon: good listening.

Research Design

This is an analytic essay.

Conclusions/Recommendations

It is possible to identify characteristics of good listening, and at least some of these would almost certainly be counted among the virtues by many working within an Aristotelian framework. We have mentioned a few already—patience, tolerance, humility, and various intellectual virtues. Our aim is not to offer a new menu of virtues as a possible replacement for those advocated by others, but rather to give some sense of how virtue ethics can inform thinking about listening.
Family Background and School Effects on Student Achievement: A Multilevel Analysis of the Coleman Data
Authors: Konstantopoulos Spyros , Borman Geoffrey D.
Published: November 2021

Background/Context

A main objective of the Equality of Educational Opportunity Survey (EEOS), conducted in 1965, was to document the lack of availability of equal educational opportunities for minority students in public schools. Another equally important objective was to reveal specific inequalities in facilities and resources available to students in predominantly minority or predominantly White schools. Coleman et al. (1966) analyzed the EEOS data and found surprisingly few differences between the characteristics of schools attended by minority and White students. As a result, Coleman et al. concluded that school characteristics are not strongly related to student achievement in the presence of family background and that family inputs are much more valuable predictors of student achievement than school inputs are.

Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study

The present study revisited this issue about the importance of schools in promoting student achievement and reanalyzed the EEOS 12th grade data using multilevel models. Our sample included 12th graders in public schools in the U.S. in 1965. We sought to determine the predictive efficacy of school characteristics on student achievement net of the effects of family background. The overarching question motivating this research is: Would Coleman and his colleagues have reached the same conclusions had they had available today's multilevel modeling statistical methods that are more appropriate for determining school effects?

Research Design

We used both regression and multilevel models to gauge school effects and compared our findings to those reported by Coleman et al. Our estimates infer strictly correlational, not causal, associations between school characteristics and achievement.

Conclusions/Recommendations

We found considerable and significant between-school variance in achievement, which suggests school effects. Similarly, the observed school characteristics used in our models explained a substantial proportion of the between-school variation in achievement. Our results also indicated that schools play meaningful roles in distributing equality or inequality of educational outcomes to females, minorities, and the disadvantaged. These results are in congruence with recent studies that examined school effects from the 1970s to the 1990s using U.S. national probability samples of students (Konstantopoulos, 2006; Konstantopoulos & Hedges, 2008).
Constancy and Change in Work Practice in Schools: The Role of Organizational Routines
Authors: Sherer Jennifer Zoltners , Spillane James P.
Published: November 2021

Background/Context

Though change is constant in organizations, determining how to successfully implement planned change has been a perennial challenge for both organizational scholars and practitioners. While the empirical knowledge base on planned change in schools and other organizations offers numerous insights, the inattention to activity, or the practice of leading and managing change, remains. Organizational change theory, and specifically organizational routines, offers a useful lens with which to examine planned change in work practice in schools.

Purpose

The purpose of this study is to understand the role organizational routines play in changing school work practice.

Research Design

We employed a longitudinal case study of leadership practice at Adams, a K–8 urban school, over the course of four years. We spent 90 days collecting observations, interviews, and artifacts from a wide range of individuals (e.g., teachers and administrators). We identified one key routine, the Five Week Assessment Routine, and analyzed the ostensive and performative aspects of the routine, identifying similarities and differences in the routine over time. In addition, we identified two different kinds of change, planned and unplanned, as well as the reasons why participants changed the routine.

Conclusions

Organizational routines structure work practice, stabilizing it over time, even in the face of considerable change. They represent one mechanism for sustaining leadership. In addition, routines can be a source of both episodic and continuous change in the work place. New routines can serve as a mechanism to build instructional coherence, internal accountability, and professional community. This account suggests that one way to change norms and culture in an organization is through the design and implementation of new routines. Leaders can create opportunities for change in school practice. By designing and supporting an organizational routine, the leaders at Adams focused the practice of the faculty on improving teaching and learning in ways they had never done before. The case of Adams demonstrates that in the enactment of a routine, school staff can also create change in practice. How they make sense of the routine, and integrate it into their practice, can create shifts in teaching and learning. Change happens in the interplay between individual agency and the structure of the routine. Through a case study of one organizational routine in one school, we analyzed how organizational routines can enable both change and constancy in school practice.
So NOT Amazing! Teach for America Corps Members’ Evaluation of the First Semester of Their Teacher Preparation Program
Authors: Carter Heather , Amrein-Beardsley Audrey , Hansen Cory Cooper
Published: November 2021

Background

Much of the research related to Teach For America (TFA) is related to the concerns surrounding whether such teachers should assume primary teaching responsibility and whether alternatively certified teachers are effective in the classroom. This research study takes a different approach and moves the conversation into a new domain of evaluating the coursework that TFA teachers undertake to meet state-mandated certification requirements. Based on initial course evaluations at a college of education, TFA students rated their university courses and instructors more critically than did non-TFA students.

Purpose of Study

The purposes of this study were (1) to explore the aforementioned differences in quality ratings of courses and instructors and (2) to examine what items on the student evaluation instrument could be used to identify salient constructs that are most necessary to meet the needs of TFA students.

Setting

This research was conducted at a college of education at a Research I university involved with a TFA partnership through which TFA students earn master's and certification while teaching in high-needs schools.

Participants

Participants in this study were TFA students who were teaching on an alternative teaching certificate, as compared with traditional students who were enrolled in the same methods courses with the same instructors. Both sets of students were enrolled in their first year of their teacher preparation program.

Research Design

The researchers analyzed the numerical differences between student evaluation scores posted for the same instructors by different groups of students (TFA and traditional students enrolled in the same methods coursework). The researchers also analyzed survey (Likert-type and open-ended) data to evidence and explain differences.

Findings/Results

(1) TFA students did in fact rate their courses and instructors significantly lower than did their non-TFA peers; (2) TFA students, as practicing teachers in charge of real-time classrooms, were more critical consumers, critical in the sense that they needed—or, more appropriately, felt that they needed—coursework that provided just-in-time knowledge; and (3) TFA students did not feel as if they were treated like master's students. They wanted instructors who modeled practical teaching strategies and did not dumb down course activities, many of which they believed were irrelevant and a waste of time given their immediate needs.

Conclusions/Recommendations

Issues related to certification coursework are highlighted, and included are specific and immediate course improvement recommendations and a call to reexamine educational policies related to alternative teacher certification.
The Role of Context in Understanding the Contributions of Financial Aid to College Opportunity
Authors: Perna Laura W. , Steele Patricia
Published: November 2021

Background/Context

Financial aid is a critical policy lever for increasing college access, choice, and attainment. Even with the substantial investment in financial aid programs, however, inadequate financial resources continue to limit postsecondary educational attainment. The persistence of financial barriers despite the substantial annual investment in student financial aid programs suggests the need to better understand the role of financial aid in promoting college opportunity.

Purpose

The study explores three questions: What are high school students’ perceptions of and expectations for financial aid? How do these perceptions and expectations inform college-related behaviors? How are perceptions and expectations for financial aid influenced by the state and school contexts in which students are embedded?

Research Design

The study uses data from descriptive case studies of 15 high schools, three in each of five states: California, Florida, Georgia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania. Within each state, we purposively selected three high schools. The three high schools, selected from one school district or metropolitan region, may be characterized as relatively “low,” “middle,” or “high” resource based on the demographic and academic characteristics of enrolled students.

Conclusions/Recommendations

The results of this study suggest the importance of considering perceptions and expectations about aid, rather than actual amounts of available aid, when examining the relationship between financial aid and students’ college-related decisions. The results also suggest that knowledge and understanding of aid are related to characteristics of the schools that students attend and characteristics of available aid (an aspect of the state context). In addition, the results indicate that perceptions of and expectations about aid may encourage students to engage in other behaviors that promote college access and success, particularly academic preparation. The article concludes by offering implications for future research.
Global Seeing
Authors: Gaudelli William
Published: November 2021

Background/Context

This essay is a part of a special issue that emerges from a year-long faculty seminar at Teachers College, Columbia University. The seminar's purpose has been to examine in fresh terms the nexus of globalization, education, and citizenship. Participants come from diverse fields of research and practice, among them art education, comparative education, curriculum and teaching, language studies, philosophy of education, social studies, and technology. They bring to the table different scholarly frameworks drawn from the social sciences and humanities. They accepted invitations to participate because of their respective research interests, all of which touch on education in a globalized world. They were also intrigued by an all-too-rare opportunity to study in seminar conditions with colleagues from different fields, with whom they might otherwise never interact given the harried conditions of university life today. Participants found the seminar generative in terms of ideas about globalization, education, and citizenship. Participants also appreciated what, for them, became a novel and rich occasion for professional and personal growth.

Purpose/ Objective

The aim of the essay centers on a question: What can we see beyond seeing? This essay considers the typical ways in which we see the world in the a-typical settings of travel. I consider how this type of seeing, when the very purpose of the excursion is to see, often positions the seer to do so as a spectator, consumer or flattener of others.

Conclusions/ Recommendations

I consider how empathic, interpretative and intimate domains can frame seeing others differently within the plasticity of seeing, moving from a position of global seeing as knowing more towards one of knowing with. I offer a distinctly humanistic and pedagogical approach to reimagining seeing that is cognizant of the rich life-world of the viewed.
¡Sí se Puede en Colaboración! Increasing College Placement Rates of Low-income Students
Authors: Militello Matthew , Schweid Jason , Carey John
Published: November 2021

Background/Context

Today we have moved from the debate of student opportunity to post-secondary educational setting to 100% access. That is, today's high school settings have been charged with preparing “college ready” graduates. Educational policy has leveraged mandates and sanctions as a mechanism to improve college placement rates, especially in high schools with a high percentage of low-income students. However, little empirical evidence exists to assist us in understanding how college readiness is actualized for low-income students.

Focus of Study

The purpose of this study was to identify specific strategies that schools employ to raise college application and attendance rates for low-income students.

Research Design

This study investigated 18 College Board Inspiration Award winning or honorable mention high schools across the United States. Phone interviews with all 18 schools informed the selection of five case study high schools. Data collection included interviews and observations with high school educators, parents, students, and other community members.

Findings

In this study, we describe evidence within and across the five case schools using a framework that was generated from the first phase of this study. These schools effectively improved college readiness by developing collaborative practices around: (1) Program Management, (2) External Partnerships, (3) Leadership, (4) College-focused Intervention Strategies, (5) Achievement-oriented School Culture, (6) Parental Outreach, (7) Systemic, Multileveled Intervention Strategies, (8) Use of Data, (9) Development and Implementation of Inclusive School Policies, and (10) Routinizing or Offloading Routine or Mundane Tasks.

Conclusions/Implications

This study operationalizes what effective practices look like in high schools with low-income students. The findings move beyond normative models to be implemented across sites to illustrations of exemplar practices that can guide collaborative efforts to enact the specific tasks necessary to improve college readiness for students.
Disability Life Writing and the Politics of Knowing
Authors: Ferri Beth A.
Published: November 2021

Background/Context

Scholars in disability studies in education, like scholars in other critical fields of inquiry, increasingly draw on a more interdisciplinary range of texts in their research and teaching, including art, fiction, film, and autobiography.

Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study

The author asserts that contemporary disability life writing can and should be read with view to challenging a tangle of oppressive ideologies and destabilizing any claim to a normative or fixed center. Autobiography as a genre, however, requires a particular set of critical reading practices to fully illuminate myriad ways in which these texts can serve as important and politically grounded counternarratives to the dominant discourse. Read critically, these texts have the potential to unravel the myth of normalcy that undergirds so many of the exclusionary practices in education.

Research Design

Analytic essay.

Conclusions/Recommendations

A critical disability studies approach requires more than the infusion of different kinds of texts; it also requires the incorporation of diverse methods of analysis and theoretical framing of those texts in order to fully appreciate their transgressive potential.
Inviting Interdisciplinary Alliances Around Inclusive Educational Reform: Introduction to the Special Issue on Disability Studies in Education
Authors: Baglieri Susan , Bejoian Lynne M. , Broderick Alicia A. , Connor David J. , Valle Jan
Published: November 2021

In March 2008, we, the guest editors of this special issue, served as cochairs to the Eighth Annual Second City Conference on Disability Studies in Education hosted by Teachers College, Columbia University.1 We organized the conference around the theme, “Mitigating Exclusion: Building Alliances Toward Inclusive Education Reform in Pedagogy and Policy.” As explicated in our call for proposals, the purpose of this conference was to explore the politics of exclusion with view to strengthening alliances in complementary areas of study (e.g., feminist studies, queer studies, critical race studies, and so on) as we continue to agitate for and implement change toward more inclusive policies and practices in public education…. The sponsoring organization for this conference is the Disability Studies in Education (DSE) special interest group (SIG) [of the American Educational Research Association]. As such, the participants and audience of this conference have historically been comprised of scholars working in the field(s) of disability. This year we aim to broaden our alliances in working toward inclusive education reform, by seeking both to build alliances with researchers in complementary areas of study, as well as by seeking the broader input and participation of other constituencies invested in inclusive education reform (i.e. classroom teachers, individuals labeled with disability/disabled people, family members of individuals labeled with disability/disabled people).
Toward Communal Negotiation of Meaning in Schools: Principals’ Perceptions of Collective Learning from Success
Authors: Schechter Chen
Published: November 2021

Background

In light of the growing complexity of schoolwork, it is important that faculty members move away from isolated learning toward a more collective type of thinking regarding teaching and learning issues.

Purpose

Whereas collective learning has mostly been approached from a deficit-based orientation (finding/solving problems and overcoming failures), this study examines principals’ perceptions (mindscapes) about the notion and strategy of collective learning from faculty members’ successful practices.

Research Design

The study employed a qualitative topic-oriented methodology to explore principals’ mindscapes concerning collective learning from success in schools.

Data Collection and Analysis

Data were collected via face-to-face interviews with 65 elementary, middle, and high school principals. The analysis process involved identifying common themes, contrasting patterns, and elucidating the differences among principals’ voices.

Findings

Principals argued that in contrast to collective learning processes to evaluate failures and problems, collective learning from successful practices requires a deliberate and conscious shift in mindset with regard to collaborative learning in schools. Principals perceived the competitive culture and the comparison of professional abilities among faculty members as major determinants of a productive collective learning from success. Principals envisioned their role in this interactive process as promoting a learning culture of inquiry, openness, and trust.

Recommendations

As a leadership strategy to foster collective learning in schools, both practitioners and researchers need to evaluate whether a learning community can be developed when staff members are encouraged to collectively analyze their successful practices and receive affirmation for doing so. It is important to further inquire how different stakeholders perceive this collaborative learning from successful practices.
Undocumented Immigrants in Higher Education: A Preliminary Analysis
Authors: Garcia Lisa D. , Tierney William G.
Published: November 2021

Background/Context

Undocumented immigrant postsecondary students are an understudied group on American campuses. The authors suggest that increased national attention on the topic of undocumented immigration warrants an in-depth study of a small subset of the larger undocumented population—college students.

Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study

The research questions guiding this analysis are: (1) How do the formal educational experiences of unauthorized college students affect their postsecondary education goals? (2) How do undocumented students attend college on a daily basis (e.g., transportation, finances, studying, employment, support networks)? (3) What role does social, political, and economic support play in unauthorized students’ success in college? The purpose of the analysis is to outline the most significant challenges that undocumented college students face in pursuing a postsecondary education. The intent is to inform a research community about those challenges and suggest future research directions.

Research Design

The manuscript begins with an overview of previous research on the topic of undocumented immigrant postsecondary students. The authors discuss three traditional areas in which first-generation, low-socioeconomic-status students encounter difficulties while pursuing a college education—financial obstacles, academic preparation, and perceptions of belonging. The article then considers the challenges these students face by way of a yearlong qualitative study that involved interviews and observations with 40 students and 5 educators knowledgeable about undocumented students. The authors frame these findings within a social capital theoretical framework that helps identify two themes—relationships and finances—concerning how undocumented students’ access to social capital can be limited by their immigration status.

Conclusions/Recommendations

Research pertaining to undocumented students is growing in its production and diversity. The authors conclude with recommendations for improving future research focusing on undocumented college students based on the project's emerging themes.