Inclusive Practices in Institutions of Higher Education

In this chapter, the author will highlight some of the hurdles students with disabilities (SWDs) face in institutions of higher education (IHEs) and share some recommendations on how best faculty and staff can support SWDs matriculating through their programs and graduate on time with a baccalaureate degree. The author addresses concepts such as resilience, deficit models, instructional roles (instructor versus facilitator), myths, and misconceptions of working with SWDs, social justice, advocacy, public policy reform, and inclusive models for IHEs. In this chapter, the author approaches these concepts by illustrating the social justice notions related to identity and access to IHE as experienced by SWDs. The author considers whether institutions perceive some programs as unsuitable for some SWDs or whether SWDs perceive some courses as inaccessible, hence not worth pursuing.

Bioelectric signaling as a unique regulator of development and regeneration

ABSTRACT It is well known that electrical signals are deeply associated with living entities. Much of our understanding of excitable tissues is derived from studies of specialized cells of neurons or myocytes. However, electric potential is present in all cell types and results from the differential partitioning of ions across membranes. This electrical potential correlates with cell behavior and tissue organization. In recent years, there has been exciting, and broadly unexpected, evidence linking the regulation of development to bioelectric signals. However, experimental modulation of electrical potential can have multifaceted and pleiotropic effects, which makes dissecting the role of electrical signals in development difficult. Here, I review evidence that bioelectric cues play defined instructional roles in orchestrating development and regeneration, and further outline key areas in which to refine our understanding of this signaling mechanism.

Relationship between Provision of Students' Academic Advising Resources and Effective Performance of Instructional Roles by Teachers in Secondary Schools in Nandi East Sub-County, Kenya

This study sought to investigate the relationship between the provision of students' academic advising resources and effective performance of instructional roles by teachers' in secondary schools in Nandi East Sub County, Kenya. The study adopted a correlational research design. Test re-test method was used to test the reliability of the instruments. The study targeted secondary school teachers while the accessible population was 192 teachers teaching in the 30 secondary schools and 30 deputy principals in Nandi East Sub-County. The study used proportionate sampling to categorize respondents into female and male; Boarding and day schools. Proportional sampling was used to apportion teacher respondents from various schools. Simple random sampling method was adopted to sample the actual respondents. The Sample size was 127 teachers in the 30 sampled schools determined by using Krejcie and Morgan Table of Sample Size determination and the 30 deputy principals surveyed. The study reported that that there was a positive and significant relationship between the provision of academic advising resources and performance of instructional roles by teachers' The study concluded that teachers were ineffective in providing career guidance materials to students, regularly giving academic advice to students, and regularly providing students with recreational games, insufficient time was allocated to academic counselling sessions, and some teachers were not effective in regularly organizing school-wide academic advisory services. This study recommends that principals of secondary schools should ensure that academic counselling sessions are scheduled in the timetable to address the issue of insufficient time allocated to academic counselling.

Fat, Fit, and Fem: Exploring Performative Femininity for Fat Female Librarians

This chapter examines the nature of performative femininity within the context of library service roles, with a particular emphasis on fat women. It addresses the ways fat female bodies are desexualized or are viewed as agender in order to analyze the ways in which this influences fat women in library service roles, and the ways in which fat women are obliged to perform femininity to a greater degree than those with normative bodies. Our sites of analysis look at the expectations around fat women in instructional roles, committee membership, and public service interactions. It has been published in "Deconstructing Service in Libraries: Intersections of Identities and Expectations" (Library Juice Press, 2020).

Cultural Boundary Work when Inviting Constructivist Pedagogy into Polytechnic Schools

In this study, we focus on a process of change in a polytechnic school in Denmark where the school management team decided to promote a non-traditional pedagogical approach. We examine teachers’ moral evaluation of their own teaching, of students, and of learning during this transition in order to grasp the degree to which teachers needed to reconceptualize or reorient their traditional instructional roles and identities in order to meet the functional demands of the new forms of PBL-based teaching and learning. Based on qualitative interviews with teachers and heads of schools, we found that the process of change mobilized competing definitions of the legitimate teacher, the legitimate student, and legitimate knowledge in this organizational context.

The impact of teacher entrepreneurial behaviour: a timely investigation of an emerging phenomenon

PurposeThis study aims to understand of the role that teacher entrepreneurial behavior plays in developing teacher professional capital. The extant concepts around school leadership mostly encompass the transformative and instructional roles of school leaders in managing, mobilizing and supporting teachers for student achievement. However, school leadership has not focused strongly on promoting innovation and risk-taking for schools in a knowledge economy. As a timely promising response to the increasingly demanding and competitive school context, teacher entrepreneurial behaviour (TEB), which emphasizes teachers' willingness to take risks and be daring, has started to gain recognition in the school leadership literature, yet a nuanced understanding of TEB's potential impacts on schools is lacking.Design/methodology/approachBased on a combined consideration of institutionalized recognition and expert judgement, this study identified three innovative entrepreneurial teachers/teacher groups that had won the most competitive teaching award in Hong Kong. Employing a multiple-site case study design, this study conducted semi-structured interviews with 23 informants and collected supplementary school documents and records.FindingsThis study found that TEB enables the implementation of innovation and promotes cross-subject alignment. It cultivates trusting and coherent relationships among teachers. Teachers with TEB scaled up innovation among other teachers. Furthermore, entrepreneurial teachers enhance school attractiveness by creating competitive advantages.Originality/valueThis analysis showed that TEB enables formal and informal school leaders to bring forth critical school outcomes. This study elaborates how TEB enhances teachers' professional capital through building trusting and coherent relationships. It also adds to the research on school innovation by demonstrating that TEB fosters teachers' capacity for bottom-up innovation in the community.

A comparative analysis of instructional course themes in LIS and museum studies programs in the USA

Purpose Considerable overlap exists between the disciplines of library and information science and museum studies. Exploiting the overlap and examining those areas were library/museum instruction courses diverge may provide valuable insights for how to improve the quality of these courses and better prepare students for instructional roles in both disciplines. Design/methodology/approach Word frequency and thematic analysis of the instructional course descriptions for all 52 American Library Association-accredited Master of Library and Information Science programs in the USA and 49 museum studies and affiliated (e.g. MA in anthropology with museum studies concentration) programs is performed. Findings Each discipline has some specific language to describe tasks specific to itself (e.g. museums), but these comprise a small percentage of the total language usage. Among other terms and themes, overlap occurs at a rate of about 50%. The remaining 35-45% of terms and themes reveal areas that are emphasized in only one discipline, but could be beneficial to incorporate in the curriculum/content in both disciplines. Research limitations/implications This research builds on a growing corpus of work demonstrating relations between museum studies and library and information science, and their status within a metadiscipline of information; this research presents a comparison of course content that may inform future curriculum/content development. Originality/value To the best of the authors’ knowledge, no study of this type has been performed with museum studies courses, nor has a comparison between the two disciplines been investigated at this level.

Student Voices on the Roles of Instructors in Asynchronous Learning Environments in the 21st Century

<p class="3">This paper determines which instructional roles and outputs are important in the 21^st century from the perspective of students in asynchronous learning environments. This research work uses a literature review, in-depth interviews with experts, and a pilot study with students to define the instructors’ outputs. Following this, roles are determined by using a quantitative methodology (in a sample of 925 students). To our knowledge, the remaining research works on this topic identify the online instructors' roles by a qualitative analysis. The findings suggest that a new role, the life skill promoter, has emerged. Furthermore, analysis of the remaining roles (pedagogical, designer, social, technical and managerial) showed that: (i) online instructors are, first and foremost, pedagogues; (ii) the design of the particular online program influences the pedagogical and designer roles and; (iii) the managerial role has declined in importance over the years due to the development of more intuitive and transparent online scenarios from the beginning of the course onward.</p>

Language attention in content-based instruction

Subject-matter specialists teaching content via a foreign/second language in higher education often exhibit a meaning-based pedagogy, unsystematically attending to inaccurate language. This observational study examined whether two foreign-language-teaching-trained instructors teaching content in English in a Mexican undergraduate program would emulate these instructional patterns, or would attend to language favouring language-and-content-integrated pedagogy. In the study, over 400 instructional episodes, video-recorded during 18 hours of regular-classroom teaching, were analyzed using the COLT observation scheme (Spada & Fröhlich, 1995). Results showed that the foreign-language educators favoured content, erratically attending to inaccurate language during communication breakdowns. Language attention occurred reactively through word translations, lexical-gap scaffolding, and isolated explanations for non-target phonological forms. These instructional patterns may result from the language teachers’ newly assumed content-based instructional roles. To favour language attention during subject-matter teaching, language instructors need training and curricular support that helps them draw on their foreign language teaching experience as they deliver content.