Guest editors' introduction to special theme issue [of Teaching and Teacher Education]: marginalised pedagogues?

[Background and Rationale]: Writing in the International Handbook of Teachers and Teaching, Good, Biddle and Goodson (1997) referred to “the recent flowering of works on the lives of teachers” (p. 672). Although this “flowering” can be traced to earlier publications (see for example in the Australian context Connell, 1985 and Turney, Eltis, Towler & Wright, 1986), its existence is reflected in the creation and expansion of Special Interest Groups in various Educational Research Associations: Lives of Teachers in the American Educational Research Association; Teachers’ Work and Lives in the Australian Association for Educational Research; Primary School Teachers’ Work in the British Educational Research Association; and Continuing Professional Development for Teachers and Leaders in Schools in the European Educational Research Association. In addition, there is the publication of texts such as the 2 collections edited by Goodson and Hargreaves (1996) and Tattam (1998), entitled respectively Teachers’ Professional Lives and Tales from the Blackboard; books like Huberman with Grounauer and Marti’s The Lives of Teachers (1993) and Muchmore’s A Teacher’s Life: Stories of Literacy, Teacher Thinking and Professional Development (2004); and texts written by authors who have contributed to this volume, including June A. Gordon’s The Color of Teaching (2000) and Beyond the Classroom Walls: Ethnographic Inquiry As Pedagogy (2002). There are also the cinematic representations of educators’ lives, from Robin William as John Keating in Dead Poets Society (1989) to Julie Walters’ memorable portrayal of Dame Marie Stubbs in Ahead of the Class (2005). These developments are manifestations of the recognition of the crucial links between what educators do and who they are – that is, between their work and their identities. Given the “flowering” noted by Good and his colleagues (1997), it is timely to interrogate those links in relation to a particular topic: the impact on educators of teaching so-called ‘minority’ learners. By this term we mean the diversity of individuals and groups who by one measure or another are defined as ‘different’ from the ‘mainstream’, including on the basis of age, ethnicity, gender, location, political and/or religious affiliations, and socioeconomic position. Given that ‘difference’ often shades into ‘deficit’ and ‘discrimination’, it is necessary to consider the extent to which educators teaching these learners see themselves as ‘marginalised’ – and/or perhaps as ‘privileged’ to be working with these learners, as ‘innovators’ because they are away from the surveillance directed at ‘mainstream’ education and so on. Through a close examination of several incarnations of this ‘difference’, we have sought to explore in this special theme issue of Teaching and Teacher Education the character and existence of “marginalised pedagogues” through posing such questions as the following: What attracts educators to teaching learners who are ‘different’ or ‘minority’? What distinctive challenges and opportunities for the educators’ work arise from their interactions with ‘minority’ learners? What are the effects of such interactions on the educators’ identities? What are the implications of these international studies for extending understandings of both educators’ lives and the education of ‘minority’ learners? The aims of the special theme issue have been as follows: to represent a broad diversity of international studies of the work and identities of educators teaching ‘minority’ learners to investigate whether and how these educators construct themselves as ‘marginalised’ and/or as other kinds of pedagogues to link that investigation to the broader literature on educators’ lives and the education of ‘minority’ learners

Where teachers are few: documenting available faculty in five Tanzanian medical schools.

BACKGROUND:Faced with one of the lowest physician-to-population ratios in the world, the Government of Tanzania is urging its medical schools to train more physicians. The annual number of medical students admitted across the country rose from 55 in the 1990s to 1,680 approved places for the 2015/16 academic year. These escalating numbers strain existing faculty. OBJECTIVE:To describe the availability of faculty in medical schools in Tanzania. DESIGN:We identified faculty lists published on the Internet by five Tanzanian medical schools for the 2011/12 academic year and analyzed the appointment status, rank, discipline, and qualifications of faculty members. RESULTS:The five schools reported 366 appointed faculty members (excluding visiting, part-time, or honorary appointments) for an estimated total enrolled student capacity of 3,275. Thirty-eight percent of these faculty were senior lecturers or higher. Twenty-seven percent of the appointments were in basic science, 51% in clinical science, and 21% in public health departments. The most populated disciplines (more than 20 faculty members across the five institutions) were biochemistry and molecular biology, medicine, obstetrics and gynecology, pediatrics, and surgery; the least populated disciplines (less than 10 faculty members) were anesthesiology, behavioral sciences, dermatology, dental surgery, emergency medicine, hematology, ophthalmology, orthopedics, otorhinolaryngology, oncology and radiology, psychiatry. These figures are only indicative of faculty numbers because of differences in the way the schools published their faculty lists. CONCLUSIONS:Universities are not recruiting faculty at the same rate that they are admitting students, and there is an imbalance in the distribution of faculty across disciplines. Although there are differences among the universities, all are struggling to recruit and retain staff. If Tanzanian universities, the government, donors, and international partners commit resources to develop, recruit, and retain new faculty, Tanzania could build faculty numbers to permit a quality educational experience for its doctors of tomorrow

Publishing patterns within the UK accounting and finance academic community

This study reports on publishing patterns in the UK and Irish accounting and finance academic community for the 2-year period 1998-1999 using the data contained in the BAR Research Register. It is found that the community has been growing modestly since 1991, with a doubling in the number of PhD-qualified staff (to 30%) and a reduction in the number with a professional qualification (from 81 to 58%). Nearly half of all outputs appear in other than academic journals. The mean number of publications is 1.76 per capita, with significantly more staff active in publishing than in 1991 (44% compared to 35%). However, only 17% publish in a subset of 60 'top' journals. Just over half of all articles are published in the core discipline journals, the rest appearing mainly in management, economics, sociology, education and IT journals. This may indicate a growing maturity in the disciplines, whereby applied research findings are flowing back into related foundation and business disciplines. Nearly two-thirds of academic articles are co-authored, with 25% of contributions coming from outside the community, indicating an openness to interdisciplinary collaboration, collaboration with overseas academics and collaboration with individuals in practice. The findings of this study will be of assistance to those making career decisions (either their own career or decisions involving other people's careers). They also raise awareness of the way in which the accounting and finance disciplines are developing

Productive partnerships: cross-departmental connections in a tertiary context

This chapter describes the development of productive and collegial relationships in a cross-departmental capacity-building project. The MMTP built on a first year experience program-the FYI Program (using the acronym that could stand for First Year Infusion or For Your Information)that we had designed, and had been conducting within our Faculty of Education for 1 year. Even though the program had involved a fairly small number of students, we were convinced that it had the potential to assist the 1 st year students in their transition into university study. It also provided a positive faculty response to student retention and progression issues (for further details, see Noble & Henderson, 2008). We used the Associate Fellowship to extend this first year program, and to promote the approach we used through the development of a professional development toolkit

Incite 2011: The power of art, March 10-14, 2011

This is the concert program of the Incite 2011: The power of art performance on Thursday - Monday, March 10 - 14, 2011 at 8:00 p.m., at the BMCC Tribeca Performing Arts Center, 199 Chambers Street, New York, New York. The work performed was Fallujah by Evan Sanderson. Digitization for Boston University Concert Programs was supported by the Boston University Center for the Humanities Library Endowed Fund

A low-cost sensing system for quality monitoring of dairy products

The dairy industry is in need of a cost-effective, highly reliable, very accurate, and fast measurement system to monitor the quality of dairy products. This paper describes the design and fabrication works undertaken to develop such a system. The techniques used center around planar electromagnetic sensors operating with radio frequency excitation. Computer-aided computation, being fast, facilitates on-line monitoring of the quality. The sensor technology proposed has the ability to perform volumetric penetrative measurements to measure properties throughout the bulk of the product