Academic Aunting: Reimaging Feminist (Wo)Mentoring, Teaching, and Relationships.

In this essay, we explore the potential of aunting relationships for rethinking feminist selves and relationships, especially in academic settings. Relationships between generations of academic feminists have often been described using mother-daughter metaphors. We suggest some limitations to framing teaching and learning across academic generations (e.g., teacher-student) and among colleagues (e.g., peer review of scholarship) using maternal imagery. We then argue that the figure of the aunt offers a powerful trope for negotiating relationships between the waves of academic feminism. Aunts provide a generative alternative to mothering and sisterhood as frameworks for feminist womentoring, teaching, and scholarly reviewing

Cheshire Children's Fund learning mentor service: An evaluation

This report describes a learning mentor service based in a number of Chester primary schools and assesses whether the service is benefiting users, meeting Children's Fund objectives, and how the service is performing.Commissioned and funded by Cheshire Children's Fund

Mighty Teacher Mentors

Teaching is about cultivating curiosity, fostering a love for course content, and making connections with students. Educators who serve as mentors and pass on their passions for the profession and a love for sharing their craft can thoughtfully encourage prospective teachers into the field. This article captures and links one educator’s journey with the teaching mentors that encouraged a contagious love for teaching and learning in her. The article provides encouragement and practical suggestions for educators that desire to learn from authentic mentors and pay it forward with others in the faith. The article is adapted from a chapel talk given at Westmont College by the author on February 24, 2014

Situated cognition in implementation : what teacher professional development looks like from a socio-psychological perspective

textMuch has been documented regarding the characteristics of effective professional development, but there is a conspicuous lack of research that attends to the ways that situational factors influence its implementation. Identifying and interpreting these factors can have important implications for designers and evaluators of professional development programs, especially if we are to understand knowledge construction as being culturally mediated, agentic, and situated within local contexts. This study seeks to uncover the social and psychological factors that mediate the way local actors implement professional development by analyzing how facilitators and teachers enact a large-scale professional development program in the absence of strict fidelity expectations.Educational Psycholog

VCU Media Lab

We propose the establishment of a VCU Media Lab – a professional creative media technology unit whose mission is to support the development, design, production and delivery of innovative media, multimedia, computer-based instruction, publications and tools in support of VCU education, research and marketing initiatives. This centrally administered, budgeted and resourced facility will acknowledge, refine, focus and expand media services that are currently being provided at VCU in a decentralized manner

Preparing Tomorrow’s World Language Teacher Today: The Case for Seamless Induction

This essay is a call to action. It offers a comprehensive overview of the challenges facing world language (WL) teacher educators and their employers, the K-12 schools, during the teacher induction period. We propose a new paradigm for WL teacher education based on national accreditation standards, best-practice pedagogy, insights from the professional literature on methods education, and the enhanced role of the methods instructor/supervisor. In order to become successful in the classroom, the pre-service educator undergoes a seamless period of induction that is student-centered and college/university-supported beyond the classroom arena

Neuroscience and Education: The Importance of a Christian Understanding of Human Persons

The increased research in the neurosciences has affected the discipline of education in numerous ways, with publications translating this research into classroom practices. A caution is given to Christian educators to carefully reflect upon how this research influences our view of human persons and what difference this view makes in the teaching and learning process. The purpose of this paper is (1) to examine some of the ways that neuroscience is speaking into the discipline of education, particularly in understanding the capabilities and processes of the learner; (2) to develop an awareness of how this affects our understanding of persons; and (3) to establish the necessity for the preparation of future educators with a distinctly Christian perspective of the human constitution