Promoting Learner Agency Through Critical Pedagogy in the English Language Classroom

In this self-study action research project, I explored how students exercised agency and how it may be affected by a critical pedagogy approach in a community college English as a Second Language (ESL) setting. The participants were adults enrolled in an advanced ESL course in a community college in the greater San Diego area. Students engaged in three dialogic circles as part of a needs assessment dialogue and two successive critical pedagogy dialogues. Data were collected using a classroom observation protocol (supported by audio recordings of the dialogues), student writings in response to journal prompts, and an analytic journal which I completed after each dialogue. The data suggest that my attempts to implement a critical pedagogy approach improved the quality of my facilitative questions and altered how students participated in the dialogues, evolving from primarily statements of opinion and personal narrative to an increased level of evidential, dissenting, and metacognitive statements, but did not dramatically alter how much I spoke relative to the students. While contextual factors, such as the effects of COVID-19, may have affected the validity of this study, the data suggest that implementing a critical pedagogy approach has the potential to increase learner agency in adult ESL students, and that the skills required for engaging in such dialogues may require significant scaffolding for both instructors and students

Of journal editors and editorial boards: who are the trailblazers in increasing editorial board gender equality?

Female academics continue to be under-represented on the editorial boards of many, but not all, management journals. This variability is intriguing, because it is reasonable to assume that the size of the pool of female faculty available and willing to serve on editorial boards is similar for all management journals. Thus, we focus on the characteristics of the journal editors to explain this variability; journal editors or editors-in-chief are the most influential people in the selection of editorial board members. We draw on social identity and homosocial reproduction theories, and on the gender and careers literature to examine the relationship between an editor’s academic performance, professional age and gender, and editorial board gender equality. We collected longitudinal data at five points in time, using five-year intervals, from 52 management journals. To account for the nested structure of the data, a 3-level multilevel model was estimated. Overall, we found that the prospects of board membership improve for women when editors are high performing, professionally young, or female. We discuss these findings and their implications for management journals with low, stagnant, or declining representation of women in their boards

Dataset regarding access to information for persons with disabilities in Serbia

Access to information is key for improving the position of persons with disabilities in society. Familiarity with state regulations regarding access to information could be influenced by communication with state authorities concerning the rights of persons with disabilities, especially access to information. Familiarity with these regulations and the specified communication with state authorities might be affected by a number of background variables, such as age and education completed. To clarify relations among these variables, which would enable state authorities and other relevant institutions to define and implement policies that might improve matters, there is a need to prepare and analyze appropriate datasets concerning them. This paper describes such a dataset, preliminary in nature, obtained from answers to part of a questionnaire administered to persons with disabilities living in Serbia. Persons with innate or acquired physical and/or sensory disability were included in the research. This dataset contains raw data of nine variables, as well as analyzed data of ten variables derived from most of the raw data. Besides correlative analyses, the dataset was previously analyzed using PLS (partial least squares) path modeling. To reuse the dataset, a path model with Bayesian estimations may be applied, whose outcomes for different model priors (prior distributions) may be compared to those of the PLS path modeling. The dataset also contains data of two variables that may be included in further research

Is Quantitative Research Ethical? Tools for Ethically Practicing, Evaluating, and Using Quantitative Research

This editorial offers new ways to ethically practice, evaluate, and use quantitative research (QR). Our central claim is that ready-made formulas for QR, including 'best practices' and common notions of 'validity' or 'objectivity,' are often divorced from the ethical and practical implications of doing, evaluating, and using QR for specific purposes. To focus on these implications, we critique common theoretical foundations for QR and then recommend approaches to QR that are 'built for purpose,' by which we mean designed to ethically address specific problems or situations on terms that are contextually relevant. For this, we propose a new tool for evaluating the quality of QR, which we call 'relational validity.' Studies, including their methods and results, are relationally valid when they ethically connect researchers' purposes with the way that QR is oriented and the ways that it is done—including the concepts and units of analysis invoked, as well as what its 'methods' imply more generally. This new way of doing QR can provide the liberty required to address serious worldly problems on terms that are both practical and ethically informed in relation to the problems themselves rather than the confines of existing QR logics and practices.cited By

Ways of interacting: The standardization of communication in medical training

This study explains the effects of medical institutionalization on the framing of doctor-patient interviews. We draw on Weberian, Habermasian, and Foucaultian perspectives to explain the ways that occupational rationalities are embodied in doctor-patient encounters, and how these rationalities structure and are structured by occupational conceptions of medical clients. We use the results of participant-observer methods to demonstrate specific instances of the ways in which organization-client interactions are simulated in a standardized patient training programme. Finally, we discuss findings with respect to our theoretical perspectives, showing how each perspective contributes unique insights into understandings of organizations and the communities they serve

Statistics and probability have always been value-laden: An historical ontology of quantitative research methods

Quantitative researchers often discuss research ethics as if specific ethical problems can be reduced to abstract normative logics (e.g., virtue ethics, utilitarianism, deontology). Such approaches overlook how values are embedded in every aspect of quantitative methods, including ‘observations,’ ‘facts,’ and notions of ‘objectivity.’ We describe how quantitative research practices, concepts, discourses, and their objects/subjects of study have always been value-laden, from the invention of statistics and probability in the 1600s to their subsequent adoption as a logic made to appear as if it exists prior to, and separate from, ethics and values. This logic, which was embraced in the Academy of Management from the 1960s, casts management researchers as ethical agents who ought to know about a reality conceptualized as naturally existing in the image of statistics and probability (replete with ‘constructs’), while overlooking that S&P logic and practices, which researchers made for themselves, have an appreciable role in making the world appear this way. We introduce a different way to conceptualize reality and ethics, wherein the process of scientific inquiry itself requires an examination of its own practices and commitments. Instead of resorting to decontextualized notions of ‘rigor’ and its ‘best practices,’ quantitative researchers can adopt more purposeful ways to reason about the ethics and relevance of their methods and their science. We end by considering implications for addressing ‘post truth’ and ‘alternative facts’ problems as collective concerns, wherein it is actually the pluralistic nature of description that makes defending a collectively valuable version of reality so important and urgent

Making quantitative research work: From positivist dogma to actual social scientific inquiry

Researchers misunderstand their role in creating ethical problems when they allow dogmas to purportedly divorce scientists and scientific practices from the values that they embody. Cortina (J Bus Ethics. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-019-04195-8, 2019), Edwards (J Bus Ethics. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-019-04197-6, 2019), and Powell (J Bus Ethics. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-019-04196-7, 2019) help us clarify and further develop our position by responding to our critique of, and alternatives to, this misleading separation. In this rebuttal, we explore how the desire to achieve the separation of facts and values is unscientific on the very terms endorsed by its advocates—this separation is refuted by empirical observation. We show that positivists like Cortina and Edwards offer no rigorous theoretical or empirical justifications to substantiate their claims, let alone critique ours. Following Powell, we point to how classical pragmatism understands ‘purpose’ in scientific pursuits while also providing an alternative to the dogmas of positivism and related philosophical positions. In place of dogmatic, unscientific cries about an abstract and therefore always-unobservable ‘reality,’ we invite all organizational scholars to join us in shifting the discussion about quantitative research towards empirically grounded scientific inquiry. This makes the ethics of actual people and their practices central to quantitative research, including the thoughts, discourses, and behaviors of researchers who are always in particular places doing particular things. We propose that quantitative researchers can thus start to think about their research practices as a kind of work, rather than having the status of a kind of dogma. We conclude with some implications that this has for future research and education, including the relevance of research and research methods