New Teacher Identity and the Edublogosphere: A Multi-Case Study of First Year Teacher Bloggers

New Internet and communication technologies (ICTs) facilitate collaboration and interaction among teachers. The increased presence of web-based tools in education settings prompted this qualitative inquiry. Widely available and inexpensive, these webbased tools (e.g., blogs, wikis, podcasts) provide opportunities for publishing content online. This multiple case study explores the sociocultural construct of identity formation (Holland & Lachicotte, 2007) of four first-year teachers who voluntarily blogged about their experiences. Data sources include the blog posts written by participants during the 2006-07 school year and responses to an electronic questionnaire emailed to participants at the end of the year. A qualitative content analysis (Alaszewski, 2006) was conducted to identify emergent themes in the data. Analysis was guided by a set of dimensions drawn from the research literature on teacher identity and grounded in the data. Findings represent six dimensions of teacher identity that include pedagogical, personal, intuitive, intellectual, social, and political aspects of teaching. The following conclusions were drawn by the researcher: (1) new teachers who capitalize on the affordances of blogging generate feedback from readers that substantiates their experiences and provides encouragement in times of struggle, (2) new teachers rely on their own educational histories to shape themselves as teachers, and (3) new teachers want a “safe place” to interact with other teachers, so much so that concerns about privacy, security and critique are outweighed by the benefits of communicating with other teachers through blogging

Improving Teaching and Learning through Instructional Partnerships: Building Librarian Relationships with One-on-One, In-Depth Conversations

How can librarians work to improve their teaching and student learning and build relationships and community? One solution at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Libraries is the creation of an Instructional Partnerships Program. The Program enables librarians to work on individual instructional goals with the help of a partner. Partner librarians help each other improve their teaching through self-directed activities of reflection, discussion, and observation. Presenters will discuss how the Program was developed and how partnerships are currently helping librarians improve their teaching skills and build supportive relationships with colleagues. With input from attendees, presenters will consider how the Program might be used in a variety of library and campus settings. Attendees will participate in an activity illustrating how partner librarians can facilitate reflection and give feedback on teaching. Benefits and challenges will be highlighted. Resources and tools produced to support partnerships will also be shared

Revising the Intolerance of Uncertainty Model of Generalized Anxiety Disorder: Evidence from UK and Italian Undergraduate Samples

The Intolerance of Uncertainty Model (IUM) of Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD) attributes a key role to Intolerance of Uncertainty (IU), and additional roles to Positive Beliefs about Worry (PBW), Negative Problem Orientation (NPO), and Cognitive Avoidance (CA), in the development and maintenance of worry, the core feature of GAD. Despite the role of the IUM components in worry and GAD has been considerably demonstrated, to date no studies have explicitly assessed whether and how PBW, NPO, and CA might turn IU into worry and somatic anxiety. The current studies sought to re-examine the IUM by assessing the relationships between the model’s components on two different non-clinical samples made up of UK and Italian undergraduate students. One-hundred and seventy UK undergraduates and 488 Italian undergraduates completed measures assessing IU, worry, somatic anxiety, depression, and refined measures of PBW, NPO, and CA. In each sample, two mediation models were conducted in order to test whether PBW, NPO, and CA differentially mediate the path from IU to worry and the path from IU to somatic anxiety. Secondly, it was tested whether IU also moderates the mediations. Main findings showed that, in the UK sample, only NPO mediated the path from IU to worry; as far as concern the path to anxiety, none of the putative mediators was significant. Differently, in the Italian sample PBW and NPO were mediators in the path from IU to worry, whereas only CA played a mediational role in the path from IU to somatic anxiety. Lastly, IU was observed to moderate only the association between NPO and worry, and only in the Italian sample. Some important cross-cultural, conceptual, and methodological issues raised from main results are discussed

Exploring a cardio-thoracic hospital ward soundscape in relation to restoration

Hospitals can provide stressful experiences for both patients and medical staff. A well-designed hospital soundscape should avoid adding to negative emotional states (e.g. stress), limit any detrimental cognitive effects (e.g. attentional fatigue), and enable restoration. Experiences of the cardio-thoracic ward soundscape, in a UK public University hospital, were explored via semi-structured interviews with 11 patients and 16 nurses. Thematic coding analysis resulted in 11 key themes including notions of restoration and emotional responses. The themes were used to develop a conceptual model to describe the processes involved in the perception and evaluation of the soundscape. The language used by patients and nurses indicated the emotional response to the soundscape was at times stressful and at others potentially restorative. Coping methods of accepting and habituating to individual sounds were noted. The impact of the patients' and nurses' ability to maintain these coping strategies are discussed in relation to restoration and the temporal variation of the soundscape. A period of 'quiet time' was in operation at the hospital and the importance of this was noted through various responses relating to emotion and restoration. The results suggest the soundscape has potentially, a beneficial role in facilitating restoration thus helping patients' recovery and medical staff's ability to remain productive. This research supports the need to study hospital soundscapes further so that design implications can be considered for the production of a more restorative environment, possibly through the masking/removal of unwanted sounds and optimising positive sounds