Authentic Connections Research Articles

Touch-Free Finger Sensing using Laser Light for Keys and Keyboards

Keys and consoles are used in various authentic connections, particularly human- machine interactions in the present state of art of Human Machine Interfaces (HMI). Automatic Teller Machines (ATMs), Charge/MasterCard machines, and pass-code-based support frameworks are a few cases wherein an individual has to touch the keys to provide a secret code are instructions to the machines. However, in situations such as the new COVID 19 pandemic, it is not desirable for customers to touch the same keys as it may cause easy spreading of chronic infections. There is therefore a need to provide a way to input data by users without physically touching any keys. This need is met in our design by offering a device and method to accomplish key or keyboard operation input operation based on the detection of a user finger with low power the laser light.

BELONGING: THE SECRET TO BUILDING ENGAGEMENT FOR EMPLOYEES OF ALL BACKGROUNDS

AbstractThe author posits that leaders must learn to welcome and implement a concept that, while newer to our talent management vernacular, is actually as old as human nature: belonging. This is a fundamental human need. Yet, to find it, we paradoxically often retreat into our “tribes”—those who share our opinions, ideologies, geographies, socioeconomic backgrounds, and, often, our ethnicities or races. We most naturally “bond” through similarities rather than “bridge” across differences. Belonging does not replace diversity or inclusion in the talent management vernacular: It supports and enhances them. Research is presented from The Power of Belonging, a unique study by Coqual (formerly the Center for Talent Innovation). It shows that belonging is the missing link, the dynamo that drives and delivers on D&I's promises to retain and advance all employees, by enhancing employee engagement, strengthening loyalty and retention, and decreasing feelings of stall. The research identifies five specific senior leader behaviors that connect to high employee belonging scores, which are described in detail in the article. They are (1) embody the organization's values, (2) model inclusive leadership, (3) openly talk about their values, (4) forge personal and authentic connections with employees across the organization, and (5) tell stories.

Children's Agency and Action in Nature Preschool: A Tale of Two Programs

Integral to sustainability is the active role of citizens to promote and participate in sustainable practices. In this report from the field, we describe two projects that demonstrate how early childhood educators supported children's development of ecologically sustainable practices by facilitating a shift from learning in and about environments to acting in ways that promote regeneration of the natural environment. Two practitioner-researchers, each paired with a critical friend, used the Project Approach as a framework for facilitating children's complex, authentic connections to, understandings of, and actions for their ecosystems, demonstrating the potential of the field of Early Childhood Education for Sustainability (ECEfS).

The TRAINing Technique: An Experiential Process Fostering Growth of Counselors in Training

ABSTRACT Students in counseling programs tend to learn better by being active participants in the classroom. Using a relational-cultural pedagogical approach, the authors share an experiential learning practice, the TRAINing technique, where an entire class of counseling students can relate to one another through a shared experience that builds connection and fosters professional growth and skill development. The TRAINing technique provides the opportunity for adult learners to understand, observe, and practice their counseling skills while receiving immediate feedback/supervision. This technique helps counselors in training to gain a deeper appreciation and understanding of the counseling process through authentic connections. The authors give a detailed description of the three phases of the TRAINing technique and its application in different settings. In addition, the authors discuss the counselor training implications.

Making connections: authenticity and alienation within students’ relationships in higher education

ABSTRACT In the context of a marketised higher education system, meaningful interpersonal connections remain of paramount importance to many students. Using a story-completion method, we examine how relationships impact upon students’ experiences of higher education, and explore the importance of relational pedagogies. We draw upon data from a longitudinal study in which students were invited to complete stories that enabled them to draw upon experiences and discourses surrounding relationships at university. Following the story completion stage, participants reflected on the stories they had written and discussed their experiences during semi-structured interviews. Our data suggest that meaningful connections are crucial to accessing support. However, most notable within the data are two outstanding themes that recur within the students’ stories and interviews: the importance of achieving authentic connections with others, and the experience of alienation when interactions are not genuine, or when communication breaks down. We explore these themes and examine their significance in relation to concepts of caring, and mattering, within higher education, and we discuss the implications for both staff and institutions.

Planktonic Relationships! Authentic STEM Connections Through Partnership Between University of Southern California’s Marine Researchers and Los Angeles Unified Elementary School Students

Plankton here, plankton there, phytoplankton everywhere! This was the messaging behind the pleasantly planktonic programming that sought to introduce fifth grade students to the work of marine and environmental biology researchers at the University of Southern California. A classroom of 29 fifth grade students from Lenicia B. Weemes Elementary toured the research labs on campus. They learned more about how research is conducted at the university level, and what specifically these labs focus on within the study of marine phytoplankton and cnidarians (corals and anemones), which students were able to view under the microscope and in aquariums. These lab tours provided the students with valuable context for conducting scientific research in the real world, bridging the gap between the information they learn in school and where this research data is generated.

TCU and UNTHSC School of Medicine.

TCU and UNTHSC School of Medicine.

Online student perceptions of their communication preparedness

Though scholars have identified a myriad of student characteristics and skills necessary to prepare individuals for online education, one notable gap in the literature is a focus on preparedness for online communication and interaction. To address this gap, the purpose of the present study was to explore what elements of interaction students identified being most and least prepared for when communicating with their instructor and peers in an online class. Participants responded to four open-ended questions on their perceptions of communication preparedness in the online classroom. Responses were open-coded and findings reveal that there is a lot of potential uncertainty surrounding communication and interaction within this context, as well as challenges for creating authentic connections within this space. Based on participant responses, practical implications for both online instructors and online students are offered.

Authentic Connections Groups: A Pilot Test of an Intervention Aimed at Enhancing Resilience Among Nurse Leader Mothers.

Nurse leaders who are mothers are at significant risk for experiencing stress, burnout, and occupational fatigue. Authentic Connections (AC) Groups is an intervention shown to be effective for fostering resilience among at-risk moms, including physicians; however, it has not previously been tested with nurse leaders. Our aims were to test the feasibility and acceptability of the AC Groups intervention with nurse leader mothers and examine its effects on participant resilience, as measured by increased self-compassion and decreased distress, depression, perceived stress, and burnout. A randomized controlled trial design was employed for this pilot study, with 36 nurse leaders atMayo Clinic. AC participants attended group sessions for an hour per week for 12weeks. Control group members were provided 1hr per week of free time over 12weeks. Multiple self-report psychological measures were completed at baseline, post-intervention, and 3-month follow-up. The AC Groups intervention was feasible and well-received by nurse leaders. Session attendance rates averaged 92%. Despite the small n's, repeated measures of Analysis of Variance showed significantly greater improvements (p<.05) for participants in the AC Groups than control condition for depression, self-compassion, and perceived stress, with large effect sizes ( 0.18-0.22). In addition, effect sizes for anxiety and feeling loved approximated the moderate range ( 0.05 and .07). The AC intervention shows promise as a feasible intervention for mitigating nurse leader mothers' stress by positively impacting indices of well-being, including depression, self-compassion, and perceived stress. Given, the prevalence of stress and burnout among nurse leaders, the effectiveness of the AC intervention in fostering resilience in this population has significant implications for research and practice. Further research is warranted with larger numbers from multiple sites, longer follow-up periods, and biomarker measures of stress.

Harassed: Gender, Bodies, and Ethnographic Research

As a graduate student conducting interviews alone in rural locations, I experienced flirtatious comments (directed to me, or between men talking about me) and physical contact from participants that made me uncomfortable; some of my friends faced far worse. We occasionally talked about these incidents among ourselves and developed some strategies to feel safer—sharing a list of our expected locations for the day or agreeing to call each other by a certain time to check in. But mostly we just hoped for the best. Our focus was on proving we were capable researchers, able to get worthwhile data. Besides, our training about human subjects protection taught us that we were in positions of power over the people we interviewed; if anything, we needed to be sure we weren’t harming them. As I read Harassed, I recognized myself. Rebecca Hanson and Patricia Richards interviewed ethnographers who reported flirting by interview participants, requests for sexual favors from local informants, groping and other unwanted contact, attempted break-ins to their rooms, and sexual assault. The authors analyze these experiences not just to highlight risks women face while doing fieldwork but to critique common understandings of “good” ethnographic research: that it is solitary, dangerous, and requires intimacy to create authentic connections between the researcher and participants. These are common features of popular ethnographies that receive mainstream media attention, win book awards, and appear frequently on course syllabi.

Cultivating Connection

Student leadership is an increasingly utilized tool on college campuses for welcoming and supporting new students as they transition to college. In our various experiences as previous student leaders turned student affairs professionals, we found a common thread in our work which made a tremendous difference in the development of student leaders and the students they served—the ability to create and maintain meaningful empathic connections. This paper will provide structure for orientation, transition, and retention (OTR) professionals to cultivate empathy in student leaders who may use those skills to build stronger and more authentic connections as they welcome and help students successfully navigate their transition to college. The purpose of this paper is to fill a gap in empathic leadership development and its potential to positively impact the transition and retention of new students.

The Efficacy of a Resilience Intervention Among Diverse, At-Risk, College Athletes: A Mixed-Methods Study.

BACKGROUND: Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) have been associated with psychological and physiological disease, and risky health behaviors. A person's ability to be resilient may protect them from these negative health outcomes, as resilience has been associated with increased emotional awareness, coping, belonging, and greater likelihood of good health and well-being. AIMS: The purpose of this pilot study was to assess the efficacy of a strengths-based resilience intervention to improve access to internal and external resources that effect perceptions of stress, resilience, emotional awareness, and belonging among student-athletes. METHODS: A mixed-methods design was used to examine variables of interest between intervention and control groups. A sample of 56 college athletes completed surveys and engaged in expressive writing during a 5-week resilience intervention. RESULTS: Self-report data indicated that student-athletes in the intervention group improved decision making, lowered perceived stress, and increased resilience compared with controls. Of note, participants with ACEs showed greater increments of positive change in emotional awareness scales than participants without ACEs. Descriptions of emotion management, authentic connections, and increased ability to request support from others were identified in the qualitative data. CONCLUSIONS: A strengths-based course designed to increase resilience-offered as academic and athletic stress is mounting-provided a unique opportunity to promote student-athlete success. Participants gained skills key to victory on and off the field, including health-promoting behaviors, a sense of belonging, persistence, and the ability to negotiate external resources.

Toward fostering resilience on a large scale: Connecting communities of caregivers.

In interventions for at-risk children, Tom Dishion strongly exhorted programs that are short term, cost-effective, and delivered in families' own communities, just as resilience researchers underscore the need for programs that provide ongoing support for children's primary caregivers, and are implementable on a large scale. Presented here are preliminary results on a short-term intervention for mothers, the Authentic Connections Virtual Groups. A previous randomized trial of the in-person version of this program, conducted with mothers at high risk for stress and burnout, showed significant benefits. There had been zero dropouts across the 3-month program, and participants showed significant improvements on psychological indices as well as cortisol, even 3 months after the program ended. In the present study, virtual groups were conducted with five sets of women, all white-collar professionals with highly stressful, exacting careers, and most also primary caregivers of their children. Again, there were zero dropouts. Mean satisfaction ratings were 9.6 of 10, and the Net Promoter Score (promoters vs. detractors) fell in the "world class" range. To illuminate mechanisms of change, participants' responses to open-ended questions on the groups' value are presented verbatim. Recurrently mentioned were the development of new, authentic connections and invaluable ongoing support. These results, with the low costs and ease of women's attendance, attest to the value of expanding offerings such as these, toward benefiting even more highly stressed mothers themselves as well as the children for whose care they are responsible.

Death of a Salesman and Skeleton Crew

Death of a Salesman and Skeleton Crew

Students’ perceptions of learning about qualitative inquiry in online contexts

ABSTRACTThis paper reports findings from a 2-year study of online coursework in a graduate certificate program in qualitative research methods in the USA. Thirty-four interviews with students enrolled in coursework offered over a 2-year period were analyzed to explore their perceptions of engagement with the course content and one another. Findings are related to student perceptions of their learning to (1) value the course design and structure, (2) make authentic connections in the absence of physical proximity, and (3) appreciate feedback from others.These themes are considered in light of principles of qualitative pedagogy outlined by scholars of qualitative methods, and the community of inquiry (CoI) model, in which social, cognitive, and teacher presence support student learning. Findings provide insight into the processes by which students’ engagement with course content and interactions with instructor and peers contribute to the development of a CoI involving cognitive, social, and teacher presence. Although the learning context described in this study pertains to teaching graduate-level qualitative research methods, findings are relevant to teachers of other subject areas.

A Part of and Apart from Sport: Practitioners’ Experiences Coaching in Segregated Youth Sport

Sport can present a site of exclusion for many youth who experience disability even when it has a focus on inclusion (Fitzgerald, 2009). While sport practitioners can play a critical role in creating inclusive environments, they frequently struggle to do so. As a consequence, the sport opportunities for young people who experience disability are often inadequate and inequitable. The purpose of this study was to explore the experiences of youth sport practitioners who teach and coach youth in primarily segregated settings. The overall goal was to gain a better understanding of how sport practitioners think about disability and sport within the context of their practices. Guided by the method of interpretive description, we interviewed 15 sport practitioners. Analysis of the data led to the overarching theme, ‘a part of and apart from sport’, highlighting the ways in which segregated youth sport was understood to be more or less inclusive/exclusive by sport practitioners. Within this overarching theme, four subthemes were drawn: a) authentic connections, b) diversity and adaptations, c) expectations same…but different, and d) (dis)ability and competitive sport. While highlighting the need for self-reflective and knowledgeable coaches, our findings also bring attention to the concepts of ability and ableism and their impacts on the sport opportunities of youth who experience disability. Our discussion highlights the need to question assumptions underlying segregated sport.

But We Don’t Got Nothing: Countering Rural Brain Drain by Forging Authentic Connections through Text

This article, based on a study in a sixth-grade middle school classroom in the rural southern United States, details a writing project that questions the nature of text and how text might positively affect students’ perceptions as they become change agents for their communities.

Fostering Resilience among Mothers under Stress: “Authentic Connections Groups” for Medical Professionals

BackgroundWe report on effects of an intervention to foster resilience among professional women at high risk for stress and burnout: health care providers (physicians, PhD clinicians, physician assistants, and nurse practitioners) who are mothers. MethodsBetween February and November 2015, 40 mothers on staff at the Mayo Clinic, Arizona, were assigned randomly to either 1) 12 weekly 1-hour sessions of a structured, relational supportive intervention, the Authentic Connections Groups (n = 21) with protected time to attend sessions or to 2) 12 weekly hours of protected time to be used as desired (controls; n = 19). Participants were assessed at baseline, after the intervention, and 3 months follow-up on multiple psychological measures plus plasma cortisol. ResultsAcross the 12 weeks of the intervention groups, there were zero dropouts. After the intervention, analyses of covariance showed significantly greater improvements (p < .05) for mothers in the Authentic Connections Groups than control condition for depression and global symptoms. By 3 months follow-up, significant differences were seen for these two dimensions and almost all other central variables, including self-compassion, feeling loved, physical affection received, and parenting stress, with moderate effect sizes (ηp2 0.08–0.19; median, 0.16). Participants in the Authentic Connections Groups (but not control) condition also showed significant reductions in cortisol levels at both after the intervention and follow-up. ConclusionsFacilitated colleague support groups could be a viable, low-cost, preventive intervention to mitigate burnout and distress for mothers in high-stress professional settings such as hospitals, resulting in personal benefit, greater engagement at work, and attenuated stress associated with parenting.

Walanbaa warramildanha: The impact of authentic Aboriginal community and school engagement on teachers’ professional knowledge

The conundrum of Indigenous education in Australia is that there are multiple, highly contested and polarising narratives that vie to inform both public and policy debate about how to construct effective schooling of Aboriginal students. Two of these contested discourses, which are seen to drive much of this debate, highlight the complexity of concerns—one which is essentially aspirational in its intent but unperceptive to the realities of Aboriginal student achievement and a second data focused discourse that is managerial and evaluative in its focus to disclose policy and pedagogic failures on student outcomes. The first has posed the politically more palatable proposition that there has been a slow, sometimes faltering but inexorable improvement in Aboriginal education, while the second highlights a mounting body of qualitative data that document an overall failure by school systems to lift Aboriginal student education achievement. The author recognises the complex and historical nature of the multilayered ‘issues’ that sit at the heart of Aboriginal underachievement. He argues that one of those underpinning issues that has plagued Aboriginal education centres on the depth of the socio-cultural disconnect between Aboriginal students and their communities, and teachers. He also argues that, too often, teachers are appointed to schools with limited social, political and professional knowledge about the particular needs and aspirations of Aboriginal students such that it impacts on their capacity to establish authentic connections to students. The research on which this article is based sets out to provide an understanding of both the nature and dynamics of community and school engagement in sites with high proportions of Aboriginal students. The study aimed to investigate teachers’ capacity to develop authentic pedagogic practices that are responsive to the educational, cultural and aspirational needs of Aboriginal students. In particular, the research highlights how the relational dynamics between schools and Aboriginal people have been deeply affected by colonial histories of exclusion and systemic disadvantage, pervasive school discourses of marginalisation and in particular an ignorance about holistic needs of Aboriginal students at school and the resultant negative relational interactions between schools and Aboriginal families. This multisite ethnographic study was undertaken with Aboriginal community members, teachers and school principals in 2012 as doctoral research. It was conducted within a relational landscape characterised by an enduring socio-cultural dissonance between schools and their Aboriginal communities. The study focused on examples of authentic collaboration and purposeful interactions between Aboriginal communities and schools that were shown to support teachers in building deeper understanding that enhanced their cognisance of the wider needs of Aboriginal students. The findings in this article highlight that when authentic engagement between Aboriginal people and schools occurred, it appeared to positively impact the teachers’ professional knowledge and created a consequent interest within these communities to engage with their schools. The research further identified that in each site the Aboriginal participants articulated an interest in developing authentic school collaborations that would enhance student outcomes. These findings suggested that teachers need to honour, understand and actively reflect on community history, contexts and aspirations to develop the skills and knowledge to address the particular socio-cultural and educational needs of Aboriginal students.

An interview with Olivia Gude about connecting school and community arts practice

ABSTRACTOlivia Gude has a long and distinguished career as both a public artist and an art educator. She is currently the Angela Gregory Paterakis Professor and Chair of Art Education at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), where she works with graduate and undergraduate students to prepare for working as artist educators in school and community settings. Her scholarly work includes a number of articles and book chapters about art education and community art. Prof. Gude has worked as a community public artist for many years and has created over 30 large-scale mural and mosaic projects, working with intergenerational groups, teens, elders, and children. I interviewed Prof. Gude at the SAIC building in downtown Chicago to discuss how her school, university, and community art engagement as well as her work with the National Coalition for Core Arts Standards, might offer suggestions for transforming arts education for the twenty-first century and provide authentic connections between school and community. Prof. Gude discusses important enduring understandings and big ideas from the new Visual Arts National Core Arts Standards, the Spiral Workshop youth art and research project she created while at University of Illinois at Chicago, and how her experience as a community artist informs her work with students in classroom settings.