Experiences of Music Therapy Junior Faculty Members: A Narrative Exploration

Very few music therapists have educational background or training to be proficient at teaching at institutions of higher education. With only minimal (if any) training in andragogy and in research methodology, music therapy junior faculty (MTJF) members find themselves novice academics in the highly structured, competitive environment of the academy. In order for music therapists to be successful in their career change from clinical work to the academy, improvements and modifications to the education of future music therapy professors are likely, but data are necessary to intimate and to guide those changes. This narrative research study explored the lived experiences of nine MTJF members as they sought to become successful members in the academy. Semi-structured interviews were conducted, and participants reviewed their narratives. Transformative Learning Theory was used as the theoretical framework and social constructivism as the interpretive paradigm. This study’s findings indicated participants had similar experiences in their paths to music therapy, in their preparation for a future in higher education, in their pivotal relationships, in the tenure process, in their struggles, and in their knowledge of self. Recommendations for modifications to the music therapy graduate curriculum and for music therapy programs are made based on indications from the findings. These modifications include expanding opportunities for teaching, researching, and exposure to institutional politics; implementing extensive professor-graduate student mentorship; requiring a doctoral degree for tenure-track positions; extending professor mentorship to junior faculty members; developing a textbook on the academy for potential music therapy professors; and striving for improved diversity in graduate programs

Action is demonstrative of critical reflection and “disorienting dilemma” is démodé

This paper explores transformative learning and 1) roles of decision-making and actions as outward expressions of critical reflection and 2) vocabulary that encapsulates the essence of the “disorienting dilemma.

Navigating Scholarly Development Through a CoP: #generational-lenses

CoPs provide opportunity for professional identity exploration. Extant research neglects how multiple identities, including generational memberships, influence development. This study explores professional identity development of scholars within a multigenerational CoP

Unexpected Learning: Development of the CoP and Its Members #generational-shift

Our research explores how multigenerational CoPs may provide graduate students, particularly doctoral students, the space to explore and develop their professional identities and find their scholarly voices

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe