Conscious Engagement Research Articles

From the Editors

Dear Colleagues, The investigations in this issue of Reading Research Quarterly span early childhood through high school and include research examining a wide range of cognitive processes and teacher practices that potentially influence literacy acquisition and proficiency. Existing theory is expanded, new constructs are developed, and promising models are tested, as topics as broad as comprehension and as specific as syllable awareness are considered in innovative ways. Among the authors contributing to this issue is Meghan D. Liebfreund, the recipient of the ILA Outstanding Dissertation Award for 2015. We are pleased to include a summary of her dissertation, “Success With Informational Text Comprehension: An Examination of Underlying Factors.” With the increased (and justified) emphasis on informational text across grades, understanding the factors that contribute to the comprehension of such text is essential. Using hierarchical linear regressions, Liebreund investigates the impact and predictive value of vocabulary knowledge, prior knowledge, decoding efficiency, and motivation on the informational text comprehension of students in grades 3–5. Comprehension ability is also a key variable in the next article. Framing the nuances of comprehension in terms of a battery of mental exercises, Carolyn A. Denton and colleagues examine the cognitive processes that adequate and poor comprehenders use when reading accessible and challenging passages of both narrative and informational text. The authors employ a think-aloud protocol to investigate the conscious engagement of inference generation, paraphrasing, text repetition, and text monitoring of seventh-, ninth-, and 11th-grade students during reading tasks. A nonparametric canonical discriminant analysis was performed to shed light on the differences among groups based on reader ability and passage genre. New insights are gained, including challenges to some generally held notions. Cognitive considerations also figure in Lindsay Clare Matsumura, Richard Correnti, and Eaine Wang's study of writing task quality and fifth-grade students’ analytic text-based writing. The authors, conceptualizing writing task quality in terms of the cognitive demand of the task and the grist of the text, examine the quality of writing assignments given to students and the impact that task quality has on analytic text-based writing. The results of this study suggest that the way in which tasks are structured has greater impact on students’ writing development than the quality of a text in and of itself. Findings regarding teachers’ perceptions of what constitutes high-quality writing highlight a potential need for professional development specific to the increasing expectations for writing and higher order thinking. The next three articles turn our focus to the emergent and early literacy skills of young children. Molly Welsh Chilton and Linnea C. Ehri report on an experiment in which vocabulary instruction using random exemplar sentences is compared with instruction using cohesively themed exemplar sentences. Third-grade students were randomly assigned to one of these two conditions and taught six novel verbs. Findings from the study illuminate a variety of predictive factors for vocabulary learning and support the hypothesis that vocabulary learning is facilitated for students who receive instruction that includes the target vocabulary imbedded in related sentences depicting a familiar scenario. In a study of 5- and 6-year-old Korean children, Young-Suk Grace Kim explores text-reading fluency by examining the complexities of its relation to other literacy constructs, how those relationships evolve over time, and the ways in which text-reading fluency is different from word-reading fluency and reading comprehension. Data collected at two points eight months apart were primarily analyzed through confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modeling. In addition to addressing a gap in the research regarding reading comprehension's relation to text-reading fluency while accounting for listening comprehension, and vice versa, Kim's research provides an interesting opportunity for comparison of emergent literacy in a transparent orthography (Korean) versus that in an opaque orthography (English). Heidi Anne E. Mesmer and Thomas O. Williams assert that “the early literacy instruction of letters, phonemes, names, and sight words makes little sense to the child”—that is, when children lack knowledge of how words are organized and represented in print. Pressing this notion, the authors provide a sound theoretical framework for justifying concept of word as a research construct worthy of empirical attention and offer a model of concept of word that integrates syllable awareness, beginning sound awareness, and knowledge of letters. Structural equation modeling was implemented to test the model, and multiple indexes were used to assess goodness of fit. The research presented in this issue offer critically relevant studies exploring cognitive factors related to literacy. They span age/grade designations, as well as particular skills that are critical for success in reading and writing proficiency. We are sure that you will find something that captures your attention in these informative studies.

Annihilation anxiety and crime

This article explores the psychoanalytic construct of annihilation anxiety in order to develop a more thoroughgoing engagement between criminological theory and contemporary psychoanalysis. Though a few criminologists have commented on crime, scapegoating and retribution using classic psychoanalytic ideas, we bring Hurvich’s current empirical work on annihilation anxiety to the discourse. Beginning with his definition of annihilation anxiety as ‘fears of being overwhelmed, merged, penetrated, fragmented, and destroyed’, we apply Hurvich’s measures to reactions to crime and insecurity and interpersonal, collective and international crime. We discuss doing criminology interpretively, applied to the dynamic connections between crime and reactions to it, including political and policy responses. We conclude that criminologists could and should help distinguish between potential and imminent threats, to advance a post-positivist approach to crime and other security threats. We argue that such an approach moves criminology toward a social science more humane and pragmatic for its conscious engagement with unconscious fears harboured amidst the purportedly rational calculi of justice.

From Jerusalem to Athens: A Journey of Pentecostal Pedagogy in Australia

The history of the national training college of Australian Christian Churches (formerly Assemblies of God in Australia) provides a fitting case study for a journey of development in Pentecostal pedagogy. Using well-known city typology, this study argues that various internal and external factors carried this institution on a journey of pedagogical transition. Its missions-orientated origins in “Jerusalem” were driven by a pragmatic need for expansion, a characteristic anti-intellectualism, and a focus on experiential spirituality. Following the charismatic renewal and the rise of “new” Pentecostals, the college transited into a more conscious engagement with the broader community and intentional alignment with government quality assurance mechanisms. Ultimately, “millennial” students encouraged a more transformational approach, typified by the “Athens” model of pedagogy, demonstrating that scholarly acumen and Pentecostal spirituality are a potent combination.

The First Person Inversion: Conscious Engagement and the Practical Past

Hayden White’s work has underlined that a researcher’s choice of sources, questions, epistemological frameworks and modes of representations are always already imbued with a subjective excess. If we accept this position it means that claims for objectivity are simply untenable. In the following essay, I argue for replacing this impossible demand for detachment with a difficult but nonetheless more feasible (and ethical) conscious engagement. The lynchpin of this approach is that the historian treat the past as though it were present — selecting for the focal point of this inversion the very locus at which s/he subjectively and existentially feels the past to be closest and most pressing (Benjamin’s ‘moment of danger’). This is what I am calling the ‘first person inversion’. By treating this (unpleasant and dangerous) past as present a historian might be able to consciously fall into the past while retaining a kernel of critical consciousness which is lost in the submersion constitutive of unconscious engagement.

The Lack of Conscious Engagement with the Reality of the Holocaust or: On the non-reception of Jan Karski in the Federal Republic of Germany

In my essay, I argue that because German public remembrance, which has a selfserving and instrumental undercurrent to it, is mostly concerned with perpetrators and victims, the questions of how German society played its part in Nazi crimes and why there was nobody among German diplomats who acted like the Polish diplomat Jan Karski have not been sufficiently addressed. I demonstrate why Karski represents a model for an ethical engagement with the Holocaust that the Germans could never aspire to. In contrast to Karski, Germans were not able to treat the past as if it was present. After the war, the majority of Germans behaved as if the Zivilisationsbruch (rupture in civilisation) had nothing to do with them.

Corporate smart phones: professionals' conscious engagement in escalating work connectivity

This article explores how the adoption of company sponsored smart phones inflicts upon the lives of professionals. Drawing upon qualitative interviews at a law firm in Brazil, the experiences of new smart phone users are reported upon in detail. Increased accessibility, accuracy and speed in exchanges gave the users a sense of autonomy and flexibility. However, the technology also helped to intensify the organisation's hold on employees outside of regular working hours, reaching into new settings, time slots and social contexts. Employees expressed concerns regarding demands from superiors that negatively affected their private spheres, yet many of them paradoxically requested more efficient smart phone connectivity. The article focuses on the justifications, the different narrative strategies, employed by professionals for their conscious engagement in escalating work connectivity. It is suggested that these justifications display users' attempt to ‘dis‐identify’ with the role and practice they perform.

Evidence-based Medicine: A Framework for Emotional Regulation, Intuition, and Conscious Engagement.

Even though most people—including scientists—use intuition every day, clinicians are advised to stick with evidence-based medicine and for the most part steer clear of spirituality, consciousness, and intuition. This is changing as scientific evidence emerges to support the notion that the practice of good medicine includes attention to these factors. In fact, the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO), the organization that sets standards for healthcare institutions, requires organizations to include a spiritual assessment as part of the overall assessment of patients,2 an acknowledgement that both science and spirit provide important contributions to optimal health.

Essential Engagement: Nicu Nurses' Relationships within End-of-Life Care

Lindsay, Cross, and Ives-Baine (2012) explored the experiences of neonatal intensive care (NICU) nurses with infants at end-of-life and their families. In keeping with our research agreement, the findings were presented to the rest of the NICU staff at two sets of education days. The nurses affirmed the research pattern of essential engagement through telling stories of grief and professional growth. We conceptualized how nurses construct relationships through conscious engagement, dialogue, and reflection and reframing. Connecting the original findings with the nurses' responses from the education days has led to innovative actions within this NICU. This article also examines the development of an End-of-life Resource Team and Voicing Space as well as addressing ideas for further research.

An exploration of the role of schema theory and the (non-indigenous) construction of indigenous identity

Community engagement is increasingly important in environmental management. While such engagement has tended to comprise only one-way communication, genuine engagement often requires meaningful cross-cultural communication. This paper explores issues surrounding engagement with Australian indigenous communities, suggesting that the construction of the cultural identity of these communities is an important impediment to meaningful social engagement. Drawing on schema theory and the notion of Bhabha’s interstitial space, we argue that environmental management needs to embrace such ideas. Using examples from a study of the non-indigenous construction of Australian Aboriginal identity through a long-established Australian newspaper, we explore implications of non-indigenous construction of Australian Aboriginal identity in environmental management. We argue, thus, that contemporary environmental management needs to encourage a focus on conscious engagement or self-critique of identity statements. This focus would have an emphasis on the constructedness of cultural identity and conscious rejection of the unthinking assumptions they engender.

The Unchained Bible: Cultural Appropriations of Biblical Texts. By HUGH S. PYPER.

This collection of essays offers a wide range of unexpected readings of the Bible in popular culture, literature, film, music, and politics. It emerges from various invited lectures that the author has given on cultural appropriations of the Bible, and builds on his earlier work in this area, notably An Unsuitable Book: The Bible as Scandalous Text (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix, 2005). Hugh Pyper’s point throughout the present volume is that the Bible’s effects may surprise and sometimes dismay both religious and secular groups when it is ‘free to roam’, unchained from the constraints of the Church. Infused with his characteristic wry humour, Pyper’s book seeks to provide a conscious engagement with these effects, ‘both in terms of historical cultural critique and as an important element in biblical reception and interpretation’. Its scope is broad, and as a result some of the essays fit together more closely than others. The sixteen essays are clustered into seven themed sections. Their content is disparate and ranges from ‘The Bible in the Metropolis’ (which examines the biblical view of the city in relation to late Victorian views of London) to ‘Wrestling the Bible’ (a disturbing account of the Bible’s manipulation in World Wrestling Entertainment, part of American popular culture). There is much to make the reader uncomfortable in Pyper’s volume, and deliberately so, as the author sets out to expose aspects of the Bible’s influence that have been either purposefully hidden or unconsciously assimilated. It is a shame that the volume is marred by a large number of typographical errors, but this should not deter the reader from persevering to gain many valuable insights.

The Changing Faces of Citizen Action: A Mapping Study through an ‘Unruly’ Lens

SummaryChanging faces of citizen action:For the activist, the academic interested in power and politics, the development practitioner and the engaged citizen, the last couple of years or so have offered a veritable treasure of moments with which to re‐imagine the world, and the place of the ‘citizen’ in it, the relationships between rulers and the ruled, and the very meaning of ‘democracy’. In this context this working paper develops an approach based on thinking at the IDS about ‘Unruly Politics’, a framework that offers new ways to understand and engage politics and political action. ‘Unruly Politics’ is a broad conceptual space rather than a descriptive or nominal category. Broadly, it is an approach that looks at politics beyond what has conventionally been defined as ‘politics’, institutionally and formally. It is simultaneously the insistence on new languages of politics, the redefinition of spaces of politics, ruptures in the aesthetic regimes of power, and the creation of imaginaries of power beyond what is already intelligible.This publication is constituted of 5 pieces in conversation with each other. The first piece, the main paper, brings together theoretical approaches from philosophy, anthropology and activism with four case studies – the Egyptian uprising as one part of the ‘Arab Spring’, the protests in Greece, the hunger‐strike that sparked off an anti‐corruption movement in India, and the more diffuse context of the role of Information and Communication Technologies such as mobile phones and internet platforms in citizen action. The paper examines new modalities of political action being generated in these contexts and argues that current approaches to citizen action, (approaches concerned either with the relationship between citizens and state apparatus, or identity related collective action) characterised by the assumptions of that politics relates to ‘interests’, or ‘representation’, fail to appreciate the potential of these emergent modalities. The paper also asks whether the framework of ‘citizenship’ is adequate for understanding these modalities, whether ‘conscious engagement’ or explicit ideological interpretation of action is necessary to constitute it as political, how we might understand the role of ICTs in these emergences, the role of the ‘bare life’ in generating unruly political action and the usefulness of the notion of ‘Event’ in understanding the changing face of citizen action. The main paper concludes with a discussion on the cynical deployment of discourse in politics, and argues that several of the recent events might be seen as generating the possibilities of a politics that is not cynical.Main paper is followed by three essays written by academics, activists and development practitioners in response to the main paper. Sonia Correa, Shahrukh Alam and Ute Seela each engage the paper from different locations, contesting claims and examining implications of the arguments therein, providing insights from their own locations and perspectives. The final piece of the publication is a response to these essays, highlighting the directions of thought and practice that these engagements open up, clarifying particular points and making some final provocations.

Variations in Practice Adoption: The Roles of Conscious Reflection and Discourse

We argue that our understanding of practice adoption has been limited by the prevailing view that variations in adoption stem from consciously made decisions. We counter this position by arguing that a key—and neglected—aspect of the adoption process concerns the level of conscious engagement of those involved. In so doing, we theorize that there are two distinct institutional dimensions necessary for understanding how practice adoption takes place: acceptance and implementation. We develop these dimensions to provide a framework showing that different within-organization responses will be associated with differing levels of acceptance of the need to adopt a practice—the acceptance dimension—and differing levels of conscious reflection during implementation of the practice—the implementation dimension. We then unpack this framework to explain how variations in discourse play a determining role in how practice adoption unfolds. This reveals an interesting institutional paradox: the discursive characteristi...

Health promotion and crime prevention: recognising broader synergies

Although health promotion and crime prevention have been brought together to address specific social ills, such as illicit drugs and road trauma, there is little literature that seeks to lift the connections between the fields of health and justice to a more general level. The present paper explores the synergies between health promotion and crime prevention by considering a range of parallels between them. Health promotion and crime prevention can be shown to have several parallel interests, agendas, systemic locations and shared population foci, indicating a potential for more conscious engagement between each field. There are a range of synergies, parallels and shared interests that crime prevention and health promotion share. These fields could develop more supportive networks with each other. So what? There is scope for those who champion both crime prevention and health promotion to align more readily in activities of public policy, academia and practice. In addition, the two fields and their advocates could be more supportive of each other in progressing agendas of social equity. Health promotion practitioners could consider seeking to extend their employment and opportunities by being aware of projects, employment and relationships outside of health in the field of crime prevention.

Acts of Activism: Human Rights as Radical Performance (review)

Reviewed by: Acts of Activism: Human Rights as Radical Performance Ben Dorfman (bio) D. Soyini Madison , Acts of Activism: Human Rights as Radical Performance, (Cambridge University Press, 2010), 322 pp. (incl. index), ISBN 9780521519229 That human rights are a matter transcending law is by now well-recognized. Human rights are a philosophical position, a history (or histories), a cultural practice, and a mode of self-understanding. The self's life and action in concrete ethnographic situations is important for D. Soyini Madison. To her, performance includes "tactics and emergence," with "tactics" understood as acts of subversion, and "emergence" understood as the assertion of collective and individual selves against those forces denying dignity.1 Madison's focus is on Ghana, and the issues her performer-activists address include water rights, the liberation of women and girls from servitude ("Trokosi"), problems of domestic violence, and the cultural and political-economic interests underlying such practices.2 [End Page 264] Madison is aware of the tension between universality and particularism in human rights. As one of her many interview subjects phrases it, the problem may be less the multiplicity of religious and gender-based practices on a global basis than their "corruption."3 The problem is the emergence of an authentic, situated voice from under the dual levels of oppressive cultural practices—corrupted or not—and institutionalized colonialist and neoliberal practices encompassing problems of economic development and neoliberal political-economics. For Madison, the battle for human rights involves the use of public space and the incorporation of politics and advocacy into the body: "organic musculature," she claims, can "embellish" and "re-perform" identity.4 Through this method, the transformations sought by rights advocates in civil, legal, and socioeconomic status become realized and engaged by publics. Ideology, international relations, and international political economy become both transcended and reproduced in social performance. While Madison states that "one of the overriding root causes troubling local human rights and social justice activism are the machinations of neoconservatism and a corporate, global political economy,"5 the patchwork of human rights is more than global politics. Human rights are the "small stories everywhere" engaged by grassroots activists: the problems with the Ghana Water Company; "six mile humiliation walks" to fetish shrines; groups of slam poets mocking Western bottled waters being sold in locales with fundamental water distribution problems; and lines of women in simulated bloodied wedding gowns protesting domestic violence and questioning the meaning of marriage. Madison's book is provocative but not revolutionary. Human rights rarely gain cultural studies or performance studies treatments, and the theoretical apparatuses of Henri Lefebvre and Michel de Certeau are not often brought into human rights studies. Space, ideology, and the body go hand in hand, maintains Madison, and while the term is not often used in her book, rights must be comprehended aesthetically, as well as intellectually or legally. Politics gain body through their performance, but they can hardly be approached as simple theoretical or philosophical constructs. By asserting such ideas, Madison asserts not only that policy demands symbolism, but that the contest over fundamental freedoms and social change demands, and only becomes real, through the expressions of physical bodies and the conscious engagement of political-oppositional acts in public spaces, made available for public consumption. Madison's approach is ethnomethodological. The work is comprised of transcripts of conversations with activists, descriptions of performances, a smattering of photographic documentation, and clear and often thought-provoking accounts of her subjective reaction to such events (and sometimes her own involvement in them). To this extent, Acts of Activism is a needed book. It begs the question of how, in relation to human rights, do claims become performed, and rights cases petitioned and argued at popular, grassroots levels? More case studies, beyond Ghana, would be valuable. One wonders, however, if the [End Page 265] empirical evidence Madison provides could not have been bolstered with a more thorough account of theoretical claims concerning the body, aesthetics, and the investment and divestment of political power (e.g., via figures such as Foucault or Judith Butler)? One also loses the immediacy of social protest and artistic acts of political resistance in having to read about them. Of course...

The impact of e-learning on workplace capability: creating a framework of development

Since 2007, the Waikato Institute of Technology has conducted a range of research studies investigating the use of information and communication technologies (ICT) in building New Zealand workforce capability. This research has revealed both employers and employees require assurance the e-activities they engage in are effective, efficient and provide value for the resources invested. This paper will focus on three aspects integral to such assurance – quality, impact and reflection. Quality explores the processes used in the creation of the workplace e-learning event and proposes a model, the 5-Ds, to create quality learning experiences. Measurement of impact investigates how the effectiveness of e-learning events is evaluated at two analytical levels – individual and organisational. A model, Return on Investment, Impact, Application, Accomplishment, Satisfaction (R.I.A.A.S.), based on slight modifications to the widely-applied Kirkpatrick-Philips evaluation pyramid, is presented. Reflection is presented as a conscious engagement wherein individuals and organisations review their existing activities against acknowledged frameworks and are able to identify actions to improve their capability. A reflection-action-measurement cyclical model, Reflection, Action, Measurement (R.A.M.), is proposed.

Are Alliterative Word Combinations Comparatively Easy To Remember For Adult Learners?

Lindstromberg and Boers (2008a, 2008b) have reported experiments with adult learners of English which revealed a comparative mnemonic advantage afforded by word combinations that display sound patterns such as alliteration ( green grass) and assonance ( home phone). These findings are relevant for TESOL, given the fact that English phraseology abounds with alliterative and assonant expressions (Boers and Lindstromberg, 2009, chapter 6). The authors recommend classroom interventions that draw learners’ attention to the alliteration or assonance in standardized word strings such as collocations so as to unlock their mnemonic potential. They contend that such interventions are justified because learners are unlikely to take notice of a sound pattern such as alliteration spontaneously, while noticing is widely believed to be a crucial step towards retention (e.g. Schmidt, 2001). The mnemonic advantage of alliteration and assonance in Lindstromberg and Boers’ (2008a, 2008b) experiments was attested after tasks that required the participants’ conscious engagement with the given sound pattern. This does not actually preclude the possibility that learners reap some mnemonic benefits of these sound patterns also without being made aware of the sound repetition. In this article, we report a new within-participant experiment in which matched samples of alliterative and non-alliterative word pairs were dictated to upper-intermediate to advanced learners of English. The participants were not briefed about the presence of alliterative stimuli; they were merely asked to repeat each dictated word pair before writing it down. The results of an unannounced free recall test revealed significantly better recall of the alliterative stimuli, but the difference was not at all as pronounced as in the aforementioned experiments, where the participants had engaged in more explicit and more elaborate processing of phonological form.

Anxiety, conscious awareness and change detection

Attentional scanning was studied in anxious and non-anxious participants, using a modified change detection paradigm. Participants detected changes in pairs of emotional scenes separated by two task irrelevant slides, which contained an emotionally valenced scene (the 'distractor scene') and a visual mask. In agreement with attentional control theory, change detection latencies were slower overall for anxious participants. Change detection in anxious, but not non-anxious, participants was influenced by the emotional valence and exposure duration of distractor scenes. When negative distractor scenes were presented at subliminal exposure durations, anxious participants detected changes more rapidly than when supraliminal negative scenes or subliminal positive scenes were presented. We propose that for anxious participants, subliminal presentation of emotionally negative distractor scenes stimulated attention into a dynamic state in the absence of attentional engagement. Presentation of the same scenes at longer exposure times was accompanied by conscious awareness, attentional engagement, and slower change detection.

India, Brazil, and South Africa (IBSA): South-South Cooperation and the Paradox of Regional Leadership

Abstract This article argues that the long-term sustainability of the trilateral partnership established in 2003 between India, Brazil, and South Africa (IBSA) rests on a more conscious engagement with their regional partners. The construction of a strong regional leadership role for IBSA based on its members' strategic positions in South Asia, South America, and southern Africa is the proper common ground to legitimize a diplomatic partnership between the IBSA states. This is even more pressing as China is actively competing for markets and influence with the IBSA trio within their respective regions, particularly in Africa. The paradox, though, is that while Northern powers have welcomed the regional leadership role of IBSA's members, most of their neighbors are not convinced of the actual intentions of New Delhi, Brasilia, and Pretoria. As a result, leadership within IBSA is defined in global terms as a claim to lead the developing world. At the regional level, however, IBSA's claim for leadership is l...

Breathwork as a Therapeutic Modality: An Overview for Counselors

Using the breath as a vehicle for accessing psychological material is a topic rarely discussed in the counseling literature, despite the use of conscious engagement with the breath by many spiritual traditions for the purpose of personal transformation. This article describes 3 types of conscious breathing (circular breathing, conscious connected breathing, and fast and full breathing) and the use of therapeutic breathwork within the counseling process. The authors describe the many facets of the breathwork experience, provide a case study, and address clinical considerations when engaging in breathwork with clients.

The Sociospatial Mechanics of Domination: Transcending the ‘Exclusion/Inclusion’ Dualism

This article takes issue with Zygmunt Bauman's thesis that physical exclusion depends on the hindrance of cognitive associations, emotional quandaries, and moral inhibitions, hence victims and their lot remain out of sight. It is counterargued that conscious engagement in directly physical forms of exclusionary behaviour is possible insofar as victims are known in ways that provoke emotional disdain and moralise violence. Such knowledge consists in the relegation of others to the status of morally lesser human beings, and is produced via prior symbolic mediations. To the extent that mediations operate according to the power differentials they both reflect and help to sustain, there is a need to shift analytical attention from exclusion to the 'meta-category' of domination.