Serious or Not? Male Perspectives of Sexual Harrassment in Schools

This presentation was given during the Georgia Educational Research Association Annual Conference

The New Hello and Other Forms of Harassment in Schools

This presentation was given during the Georgia Educational Research Association Annual Conference

Exploring the Experiences of Female High School Dropouts in Georgia

This presentation was given during the Georgia Educational Research Association Annual Conference

Student Athletes’ Perception of Sexual Harassment

Purpose: This qualitative study examined the perceptions of student athletes regarding sexual harassment and other forms of gendered harassment (homophobic bullying) as well as knowledge of and/or experiences with harassment in high school and university settings, primarily in athletic school culture. Methodology: Semi-structured interviews were conducted with twenty-seven former high school athletes/active university athletes. The data were analyzed regarding theme and their relationship to the reviewed literature. Findings: Findings indicate that the athletic culture poses particular issues pertaining to the vulnerabilities and persistence of sexual bullying and harassment. Discussion: Educators, coaches, and administrators must understand harassment, work to establish and implement an educational precedent and policies to decrease the likelihood of occurrence and acceptance, and provide resources for addressing discrimination and hostility on campuses

Teacher Awareness of Trauma Informed Practice: Raising Awareness In Southeast Georgia

While the concept of trauma-informed care has been developed in other fields, its development within the field of Education is relatively new (Thomas, Crosby, & Vanderhaar, 2019), However, as the educational field is becoming more and more aware of this approach, we recognize there is a critical need for teachers and other educational professionals to recognize the symptoms of trauma in students, the associated behaviors of trauma-affected students, and instructional and environmental strategies for addressing these to support student success (trauma informed pedagogy). This paper outlines a study examining the extent to which teachers in the region of southeast Georgia are aware of trauma- informed strategies, the theory undergirding the approach, and the resources available to them for addressing issues related to adverse childhood experiences. With participation from over 500 educators in our study, it is clear that there is a strong need to support teachers and provide resources to support trauma-informed practice

Letter from the Editors

Most of us are used to seeing co-authored articles in the SoTL field. It is, after all, typical of the social sciences to collaborate on the construction, conducting, and communication of the results of an experiment. But as we were readying this issue for publication, we were struck by the number of articles here that are overt in their use of dialogue. And that got us thinking about the use of dialogues within our discipline. It would be easy to take every instance of dialogue as something sui generis, and just chalk this all up to coincidence, but there are some ways to look at the structure of our interactions and perhaps bring some analysis to bear on the nature of dialogues in teaching and learning

Letter from the Editors

This letter from the editors of IJ-SoTL introduces one of the overarching themes of volume 16, number 3. We discuss the idea of being “invitational,” and how that varies from being “welcoming.” We conclude that the scholarship of teaching and learning has to concern itself with structural matters that can be codified and evaluated, not just the interpersonal matters that happen within a classroom

Letter from the Editors

15 Years of Predictions and Realities With this issue we begin our fifteenth year of publication. This decade and a half has certainly seen a number of changes to the field, and to the academy in general. If we compare the present state of the field, and higher education in general, to what was predicted for us 15 years ago, we can get a 30,000-foot view on some interesting advancements and disappointing stalls. We’d like to look at just two of those predictions, where the current state of affairs illustrates just how fluid and nuanced higher education is as we crawl out of the global pandemic. Parsing the field in any way we choose, via institutions, or disciplines, or geographic regions, or modes of instruction, etc., we can see but one commonality: we are not monolithic, and do not move in lockstep. Online / Digital / Remote instruction Perhaps the most ubiquitous and incessant prediction, one that began in the mid-1990s and which we are still working hard to manifest, is that online education will conquer the digital divide and democratize higher education. We can all point to successful online programs, degrees, and even entire universities. However, as we have learned in the past year, the potential for remote instruction is still high, but other factors, unanticipated fifteen years ago, mitigate against it becoming the panacea for all the ills of higher education. ZOOM fatigue is real, and a student’s success in an online environment relies heavily on their internal locus of control. Remote instruction, we have learned, requires students to be far more responsible for their own time and effort than any face-to-face instruction ever required. We’re not sure if this is the reason why students dislike remote instruction, but the fact is that they do, or at least they did. A survey of undergraduates conducted by SimpsonScarborough in March of 2020 (at the beginning of the lockdown of higher ed here in the US) revealed that 63% of the respondents said that online instruction was worse than the in-person instruction they received at their school. When SimpsonScarborough repeated the same survey just a month later, than number had risen to 70%.1 But, oh, what a difference a year makes. The Digital Learning Pulse survey of undergraduates in the US, published in April of 2021 by Bay View Analytics (in partnership with a number of entities heavily invested in the use of technology in education), notes that 73% of their respondents either somewhat agreed or strongly agreed that they would like to take some fully online courses in the future.2 Maybe we got better at remote instruction once we had a chance to breathe after the mad scramble to jump online in the spring of 2020. Maybe students rose to the occasion and remained persistent in their coursework. Or maybe the real explanation here is the distinction between being forced to have all your courses online and choosing to take some fully online courses. And there are other reasons why we are not all teaching MOOCs as we sit poolside, relying on ZOOM to make us look engaged with a nicely academic virtual background. Even before the pandemic, the rise (and subsequent fall) of many for-profit online universities painted online instruction with a broad brush, and soured many on it as just a cash grab. Some not-for-profit institutions, looking to cut instructional expenses and get good returns on their investments in large Learning Management Systems, played fast and loose with intellectual property rights, and the professoriate (whom those institutions saw as merely content providers) balked at having their instructional designs and course materials co-opted into turnkey courses that could be taught by adjuncts or teaching assistants. Fortunately, the tide has turned in this matter at least, as many institutions have articulated IP policies that benefit greatly from faculty input. Other enhancements or appendages to online instruction, things like the gamification of learning or the use of virtual reality, have sputtered and seen little penetration in the culture. Big Data Another prediction that has been proven true, but in unexpected ways, is one bruited about for decades. Decisions in higher education, this prediction states, will rely less on historical models, institutional or disciplinary inertia, and the vagaries of theoretical models. Rather, these decisions will be driven by data. And those data sets are overwhelmingly numerical rather than verbal. Everything from student ratings of instruction to annual reviews of faculty members, from your methodology for evaluating student performance to Comprehensive Administrative Review dashboards, relies on numbers. While the distinction between, say, a score of 4.6 and a score of 4.7 out of 5 may be minute, for many faculty members such fine distinctions matter a great deal, because they are tied to their compensation packages. We can, in good faith, argue both sides of the tendency to boil our professional lives down to a series of numbers, but the movement away from anecdotal evidence and the “it works for me” mentality has, in large part, improved both curricula and instruction. The SoTL field, more than almost any other discipline in higher education, has sorted itself over the period of the last fifteen years, demonstrating a strong preference for data-driven decision-making. IJSoTL itself illustrates this point. If you look at the articles from our first year of publication, you see a far wider variety of article types. There are some articles that follow the social science model--where data is generated then analyzed, but there are a number of other forms, like essays, reflections, and personal narratives. Our most recent issues are almost completely filled with articles that follow the social science model, since what it offers is reliability and repeatability. In other areas, however, this drive toward data has moved in fits and starts. Predictive analytics, where instructors can drill down into huge data sets to predict the success or failure of individual students, has been one of the largest carrots dangled in front of us in recent years. It represents the most enticing promise of data, yet it still cannot offer the level of certainty that the big data sales teams continue to claim. But the efficacy and the possibility of data for transforming higher education is seen at its most engaging in what we might call the rise of assessment culture. As we employ the Continuous Quality Improvement or Total Quality Management cycles first used in the US in the 1950s, honed to their streamlined perfection in Japan in the 1970s, then rediscovered in the west in the 1980s, we participate in the “plan-do-study-act” process that is the foundation for any sound and lasting change in a culture or institution. And the grist for this mill, the fuel for this engine, is the data we generate then analyze. We think we can say with certainty that nothing in higher education has had such a positive impact, or possesses such still-untapped potential, as the data generated through program assessment. A Special Issue Moving from the past to the very immediate future, we will be celebrating our fifteenth year of publication with a special issue that will come out in January of 2022.That issue will focus on the scholarship of teaching and learning here where the journal is housed, at Georgia Southern University. We would like to show the innovative work that our colleagues are doing here, in the hope that you may be able to use what they’re doing in your own work. We’ll still be publishing our regular issue in May of 2022 so this special issue is a bonus, and this volume will contain three issues rather than two. A Change to the Masthead Before we show you a variety of our colleagues on our several campuses in our special issue, we’d like to introduce just one, a new addition to our masthead. Nikki DiGregorio is an Associate Professor in the School of Human Ecology and a member of the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Executive Board at Georgia Southern. She joins the journal as an Editor-in-Chief. Nikki teaches courses in sexuality and diversity in human development, public policies affecting families, as well as programming and evaluation, and conducts research on the interplay between social policy, language appropriation, and the experiences of gender and sexual minorities. Nikki has published in SoTL, examining especially the effectiveness of teaching strategies centered around concepts including diversity-related issues, homophobia, trauma-informed care, objectification, and sexualization. She is also the current Vice President of the Family Science Association, the premiere teaching-focused organization in the discipline. As many of us head back to face-to-face instruction in the fall of 2021, we hope you all can keep safe, and will find both fulfillment and joy in the new normal, whatever that may be. The Editors Notes 1. See “Higher Ed and COVID-19: National Student Survey,” SimpsonScarborough, April 2020, available at https://f.hubspotusercon- tent30.net/hubfs/4254080/SimpsonScarborough%20National%20Student%20Survey%20.pdf, and “Higher Ed and COVID-19: April Replication of the National Student Survey,” SimpsonScarborough, April 2020, available at https://f.hubspotusercontent30.net/ hubfs/4254080/The%20April%20Replication%20of%20the%20National%20Student%20Survey%20by%20SimpsonScarb orough.pdf. 2. For complete results, see https://info.cengage.com/wrec_PulseSurveyResults_1470945, which requires a free registration. For a summary of results, see “Students Want Online Learning Options Post-Pandemic,” by Lindsay McKenzie, in Inside Higher Ed, 27 April 2021, available at https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2021/04/27/survey-reveals-positive-outlook-online-instruction-po st-pan- demic#:~:text=The%20majority%20of%20students%2C%2073,in%2Dperson%20and%20online%20instruction

Letter from the Editors

How we measure success This issue, volume 15, number 2, is certainly one of our most substantial. Over the past couple of volumes we’ve averaged about 85 pages per issue, and this one is clocking in at over 150. We’d like to say that we’re just cleaning up a backlog of accepted manuscripts, but the truth is that we’re receiving more and more quality submissions. Since the date of the initial submission included in this issue, we’ve received almost 200 manuscripts for consideration. And this uptick in quality is not going unnoticed. We’ve had over 46,000 articles downloaded since the publication of our last issue. We’ve averaged almost 104,000 articles downloaded every year for the past five years, and we’re on pace this year to exceed that number. Although this means more work for our tireless editorial board, this is a happy problem to have. If you’re interested in contributing to the field by joining our Editorial Board, you can complete a self-nomination form at this address: https://forms.gle/4VT2hbcW33uLJEEh9. Since moving to our current platform, we’ve had almost 700,000 articles downloaded, with another 71,000 complete articles read online. We now have 595 articles online (this issue will make it 610). And while the math here doesn’t account for the relative popularity of each article, a simple back-of-the-envelope calculation says that articles are downloaded an average of about 1,000 times in a decade. We would like to be able to offer authors a more concrete and reliable methodology for determining the penetration and effectiveness of their work. We could be very precise, and offer some cross-discipline comparisons with metrics like the impact factor of an article or an entire journal, a citation analysis for an article, or a particular author’s h-index. But while the SoTL field has continued to gain more practitioners and garner more attention from scholars, it still has difficulty articulating its own legitimacy, and therefore its justification for inclusion in the analytic tools that sit behind the metrics above. The Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI), used by the Web of Science in determining the impact factor of a journal or a single article, indexes 1,645 journals on teaching and learning, yet fewer than a dozen of these are not specific to a particular discipline. Scopus (run by Elsevier) provides three separate metrics: CiteScore, SJR (SCImago Journal Rank) and SNIP (Source Normalized Impact per Paper). Its database contains over 22,000 journals, and 1,468 of those cover education. But, once again, no more than a dozen of these move beyond a single field. You get the point; until we speak with a unified voice about our own efficacy, we’ll have a difficult time articulating such a thing as individuals. The intersection of this issue with the emerging standard we speak of below is certainly ripe for our analysis. Relearning the Familiar As we inch our way back to whatever our “new normal” will be in higher education, we’re struck by the unfamiliarity of what used to be so familiar to us: teaching in a face-to-face setting, engaging in discussions (even though we’re still masked), and having interactions with students that are unmediated by electronic means. Of course, we have new administrative minefields to negotiate, but the solidity of day-to-day dealings with students still sometimes seems insubstantial, like we’re learning how to teach all over again. In many ways, this means relearning habits of mind that had gone stale from disuse, and hopefully imbuing them with techniques, best practices, and evidence gained from our experiences of the past two years. The Emerging Standard And while we’d like to think that we’re lowering disciplinary barriers and offering material that can inform and improve your teaching no matter your home field, we’ve also been thinking about the progress of SoTL as a discipline. Over the past few years, the balance of manuscripts we’ve received has shifted from the theoretical, the anecdotal, or the “think piece,” to reports on studies or experiments, replete with checks on both their efficacy and their validity as a study. So while it’s not completely accurate, it is at least fair to say that the accepted standards for publishing in this field have coalesced around a social science model, perhaps because it offers the best blend of evidence-based decision-making and praxes based on such an analysis. We editors are a varied lot; our “home disciplines” are Education, Physics, Psychology, and Literature. So we feel like we can address a number of disciplinary categories as a team, and speak with some sense of authority when we address the work in our disparate fields. And all of us are familiar with the conventions of the evidence-based report that is becoming, if not the majority, at least the plurality of articles published in SoTL. But it’s not a natural form for us all, and may not be a natural form for all of you (says the humanist of the group). In carving out its own disciplinary space, is SoTL disenfranchising great swaths of potential practitioners and authors because of the very way it creates and validates knowledge? This isn’t a question that any one person can answer. It may take us another decade or so to finally come to clarity about this. But we’re interested in engaging in such a dialogue about the future of this enterprise within higher education. This is especially appropriate given our upcoming venture. In celebration of 15 years of publication at Georgia Southern University, we will be publishing a special issue, coming out in January of 2022. In this issue practitioners, theoreticians, and some of the leading lights in the field, all associated with both the University and this journal, will look back on the past decade and a half to reflect on the current state of the discipline and how far we’ve come in those 15 years. From there, we hope to continue to help shape the future of the field for at least the next 15 years, and we’ll get back to that with our regular issue in May of 2022

Joy : a phenomenological and aesthetic view

The word Joy, as represented in common language, falls short of its original meaning or logos. Having been steeped in contemporary Western culture, Joy has been weakened and trivialized. I use the term Joy to refer to a powerful way of coming to sense phenomena, in which and through which broad interpretations of our worlds become possible. Nondualistic Joy bridges the Cartesian distinctions between matter and spirit, body and mind, and therefore, cannot be 'captured' through dualistic interpretations. I do not seek to create an entirely new sense for the word 'Joy.' Rather, I seek to re-create its original and ontological Greek meaning; its logos and world-making power. My understanding of Joy grows out of related concepts in Buddhist, Hindu and Western traditions, especially the work of Martin Buber and Martin Heidegger. In part due to this, the relationship of aesthetics (both body and spirit), mystery, and phenomenological consciousness form the matrix for my exploration of Joy. I have chosen to conduct my exploration through poetic-thought. This viewpoint allows me to explore Joy in relation to human consciousness