Making new worlds at the intersection of mathematics and language learning : teacher professional identity in the neoliberal era

This multiple case study explored the professional identities of teachers at the intersection of mathematics and language learning. Situated within a neoliberal schooling context, teachers were required to adapt standardized instructional goals and practices to support the cultural, linguistic, and academic backgrounds of new-arrival refugee and immigrant youth while simultaneously contending with a range of accountability pressures (Block & Holborow, 2012). Of particular interest were the personal, professional, and political resources impacting teachers’ professional identity development and, ultimately, their resilience to neoliberal pressures (Holland et al., 1998; Mockler, 2011). A job crafting perspective (Wrzesniewski & Dutton, 2001) illuminated the extent to which teachers were successful in adapting the normative boundaries of their prescribed teaching roles to better support students’ academic backgrounds while building off their cultural and linguistic repertoires. Findings revealed that teachers’ resilience to high-stakes testing, standardization of instructional goals and practices, and oversight was mediated by key differences in their personal and professional backgrounds. This resilience was paramount for teachers to be able to counter neoliberal measures and support their professional identity development by aligning their moral purpose for teaching with their instructional practice. Implications suggest the importance of teachers developing the necessary political knowledge to untangle the effects of neoliberal pressures on their instruction (Gutiérrez, 2013; Yeh, 2018) by exploring how a variety of cultural resources impact the alignment between their moral purpose and their teaching practice (Mockler, 2011)

In search of a practice: large-scale moderation in a massive online community

People are increasingly looking to online social communities as ways of communicating. However, even as participation in social networking is increasing, online communities often fail to coalesce. Noted success factors for online communities are linked to the community\u27s purpose and culture. They are also related to structures that allow for increased volume of exchange and quality of conversation. Ravelry.com provides a case of a successful, large-scale, online community that has information exchange and conversation as its foci. These activities are supported through the work of thousands of volunteer moderators who sometimes manage groups with more than 3 million members. However, little is known about organizing and supporting volunteer groups to allow for such large-scale growth. To find information on moderators\u27 roles and tasks, and how they are supported in the Ravelry community, a study was conducted in 2 sequential phases. Phase I consisted of a survey of 73 moderators who led large, active groups. Phase II consisted of interviews with 8 moderators who led different types of groups within Ravelry, having purposes that range from purely social conversation to technical forums on craft-related work. Findings indicated that the tasks moderators performed did not vary greatly, despite differences in their group\u27s purpose and culture. Common among most moderators\u27 duties were encouraging group participation through stimulating discussion or organizing craft-based activities, resolving conflict between group members, and maintaining their site through routine housekeeping tasks. Moderators are motivated to volunteer to do these tasks by love of their group members, and are united by a common interest in their craft. Moderators are most often supported by informal networks of moderators in their own or in similar groups. These findings give insight into how to structure large, asynchronous, online conversation-based groups, and how to define a role for people to manage them. It provides an understanding of the work that moderators do, and how their work allows a sense of place to be established for informal learning

Tsinghua Issue- Generative AI, Learning And New Literacies

Launched in November 2022, OpenAI\u27s ChatGPT garnered over 100 million users within two months, sparking a surge in research and concern over potential risks of extensive AI experiments. The article, originating from a conference presentation by Tsinghua University and NTHU, Taiwan, provides a nuanced overview of Generative AI. It explores the classifications, applications, governance challenges, societal implications, and development trajectory of Generative AI, emphasizing its transformative role in employment and education. The piece highlights ChatGPT\u27s significant impact and the strategic adaptations required in various sectors, including medical education, engineering, information management, and distance education. Furthermore, it explores the opportunities and challenges associated with incorporating ChatGPT in educational settings, emphasizing its support in facilitating personalized learning, developing 21st-century competencies, fostering self-directed learning, and enhancing information accessibility. It also illustrates the integration of ChatGPT and text-to-image models in high school language courses through the lens of new literacies. The text uniquely integrates three layers of discourse: introductions to Generative AI by experts, scholarly debates on its merits and drawbacks, and practical classroom applications, offering a reflective snapshot of the current and potential states of Generative AI applications while emphasizing the interconnected discussions across various layers of discourse

Role of Social Media in Facilitating Organizational Socialization Effectiveness Among New Hires

Texas Southern University, 2021 Professor Maurice Odine, Advisor ABSTRACT Organizational Socialization is the process of inculcating corporate core values and culture in new hires (Jablin,1982). Notably, and contingent upon an organization\u27s vision and aims, integration communication strategies can either be conventional or unconventional, structured, or unstructured. New hires get familiarized, incorporated, and adapted into an organization via a set of corporate procedures. To ease and ensure quick realignment, institutions craft guidelines, tools, structures, and offer mentorships. The processes and assigned support are made promptly accessible to new hires through the transition from pre-entry to entry and post-entry. The transition period is typically from the first six weeks to twelve months of commencement, while the anticipatory phase primarily precedes resumption at institutions. The focus is to develop expectations about the institution; the encounter phase is the initial six weeks of resumption, and it is intended to make sense of unforeseen situations. The metamorphosis phase is completing the encounter phase by the first year. Above all, the core phase is transitioning from new hires to functional members (Yarbrough and Brown, 2003). This research proposal explores and identifies the role of social media in socializing new hires within an institution. Key Words: New hires, organizational socialization, social media, communication strategie

Negotiating (Inter)Disciplinary Identity in Integrative Graduate Education

abstract: Identity, or peoples’ situated sense of self, can be conceptualized and operationalized in a myriad of ways, including, among others, a person’s gender, socioeconomic status, degree of expertise, nationality, and disciplinary training. This study conceptualizes identity as fluid and constructed through social interaction with others, where individuals ask themselves “Who am I?” in relation to the people around them. Such a discursive conceptualization argues that we can observe peoples’ performance of identity through the close reading and examination of their talk and text. By discursively drawing boundaries around descriptions of “Who I am,” people inherently attribute value to preferred identities and devalue undesirable, “other” selves. This study analyzes ten workshops from the Toolbox Project conducted with graduate student scientists participating in the Integrative Graduate Education Research Traineeship (IGERT) program. The emotional tone, mood, and atmosphere of shared humor and laughter emerged as a context through which collaborators tested the limits of different identities and questioned taken for granted assumptions about their disciplinary identities and approaches to research. Through jokes, humorous comments, sarcasm, and laughter, students engaged in three primary forms of othering: 1) unifying the entire group against people outside the group, 2) differentiating group members against each other, and 3) differentiating oneself in comparison to the rest of the group. I use action-implicative discourse analysis to reconstruct these communicative practices at three levels—problem, technical, and philosophical—and explore the implications of group laughter and humor as sites of “othering” discursive strategies in graduate students’ efforts to negotiate and differentiate identity in the context of integrative collaboration.Dissertation/ThesisDoctoral Dissertation Communication 201

Understanding dynamic change in perceptions of person–environment fit:An exploration of competing theoretical perspectives

The longstanding assumption in person–environment (PE) fit research is that perceived fit embodies the subjectively experienced match between personal and environmental attributes and hence triggers affect and behavior (i.e., normal causation perspective). This argument is however increasingly debated, with some scholars suggesting that the causal flow may also run from affect and behavior to perceived fit (i.e., reverse causation perspective), and others even arguing that perceptions of PE fit are not substantially different from how people feel and think about their environment (i.e., synchronous relationship perspective). In this research, we propose that these three competing perspectives correspond with different assumptions on how PE fit perceptions dynamically change over time (i.e., by means of comparative reasoning, logical deduction, or heuristic thinking). We empirically validate these three competing perspectives by teasing out the causal ordering of the within-person relationships between perceptions of fit and workplace affect and performance. In two separate diary studies, one with weekly (N = 153) and one with daily (N = 77) repeated measures, support was found for the synchronous relationship perspective with heuristic thinking as the plausible underlying process. This research contributes to the PE fit literature by providing new insight into the dynamic nature of perceived fit

Prompting discussion : writing prompts, habits of mind, and the shape of the writing classroom.

Much of the important writing students will be tasked with in their college careers calls upon them to approximate the writing styles academics and professionals use to shape and advance their respective fields. Many disciplinary values are encoded within the such texts. Learning these styles can be difficult for students who lack the experience and ingrained habits that their instructors may take for granted. In most cases, college writers are outsiders peeking in from the outskirts of academic and professional discourse. Also, the “Expert Blind Spot” (Ambrose et. al) can make college instructors oblivious to the nuances of the writing styles they take for granted, which can make acquisition of those styles difficult for their students. These factors can lead to students feeling that different courses/disciplines are giving them contradictory lessons in writing, which often leads them to pay more attention to the differences in teachers instead of the differences in disciplinary habits. These conflicts or contradictions in instruction can become “double binds,” which are intractable roadblocks caused by the inability to reconcile two contrary commands or signals. This project utilizes Genre Theory, Activity Theory, and research in writing across the disciplines to examine conflicts and double binds students face in the disciplinary writing classroom and what role writing prompts play in ameliorating or exacerbating those difficulties. It does so by tracing across four disciplines (philosophy, psychology, nursing, and biology) several common conflicts and double binds encountered at the intersection between ideal academic writing and the realities of the classroom environment (and in the case of one chapter, the complicated boundary between academia, the classroom, and the workplace). This dissertation illuminates common conflicts and double binds inherent in disciplinary writing instruction and makes an argument for effective writing prompt design as an important mediating tool in promoting effective thoughtful student writing. When students know what the rules of the assignment are, they can act more confidently within those boundaries and more easily gain disciplinary awareness and confidence as authors and agents

The First Year of Teaching Classroom Research to Increase Student Learning

Victor and Janisha were two of the focal students in Daniels's research project on her first year of teaching in an urban public school. Together they reflect the two major groups in this high school that has 45% Latino, 35% African American, ..

Characterizing Novelty as a Motivator in Online Citizen Science

Citizen science projects rely on the voluntary contribution of nonscientists to take part in scientific research projects. Projects taking place exclusively over the Internet face significant challenges, chief among them is the attracting and keeping the critical mass of volunteers needed to conduct the work outlined by the science team. The extent to which platforms can design experiences that positively influence volunteers’ motivation can help address the contribution challenges. Consequently, project organizers need to develop strategies to attract new participants and keep existing ones. One strategy to encourage participation is implementing features, which re-enforce motives known to change people’s attitudes towards contributing positively. The literature in psychology noted that novelty is an attribute of objects and environments that occasion curiosity in humans leading to exploratory behaviors, e.g., prolonged engagement with the object or environment. This dissertation described the design, implementation, and evaluation of an experiment conducted in three online citizen science projects. Volunteers received novelty cues when they classified data objects that no other volunteer had previously seen. The hypothesis was that exposure to novelty cues while classifying data positively influences motivational attitudes leading to increased engagement in the classification task and increased retention. The experiments resulted in mixed results. In some projects, novelty cues were universally salient, and in other projects, novelty cues had no significant impact on volunteers’ contribution behaviors. The results, while mixed, are promising since differences in the observed behaviors arise because of individual personality differences and the unique attributes found in each project setting. This research contributes to empirically grounded studies on motivation in citizen science with analyses that produce new insights and questions into the functioning of novelty and its impact on volunteers’ behaviors