Diversity In Curriculum Research Articles

Diversity Experiences and Attitudes toward Literacy: Is There a Link?

This article reports on a study that explored whether diversity experiences influence students' attitudes toward literary activities during the first year of college. Interactional diversity and attending a diversity workshop had a positive net influence on the outcome measure. Exposure to curricular diversity, however, had only a chance effect on the dependent variable.

Towards a Global Understanding and Standardisation of Education and Training in Microsurgery

With an increasing emphasis on microsurgery skill acquisition through simulated training, the need has been identified for standardised training programmes in microsurgery. We have reviewed microsurgery training courses available across the six continents of the World. Data was collected of relevant published output from PubMed, MEDLINE (Ovid), and EMBASE (Ovid) searches, and from information available on the Internet of up to six established microsurgery course from each of the six continents of the World. Fellowships and courses that concentrate on flap harvesting rather than microsurgical techniques were excluded. We identified 27 centres offering 39 courses. Total course length ranged from 20 hours to 1,950 hours. Student-to-teacher ratios ranged from 2:1 to 8:1. Only two-thirds of courses offered in-vivo animal models. Instructions in microvascular end-to-end and end-to-side anastomoses were common, but peripheral nerve repair or free groin flap transfer were not consistently offered. Methods of assessment ranged from no formal assessment, where an instructor monitored and gave instant feedback, through immediate assessment of patency and critique on quality of repair, to delayed re-assessment of patency after a 12 to 24 hours period. Globally, training in microsurgery is heterogeneous, with variations primarily due to resource and regulation of animal experimentation. Despite some merit to diversity in curricula, there should be a global minimum standard for microsurgery training.

University diversity and preparation for a global society: the role of diversity in shaping intergroup attitudes and civic outcomes

Although there is growing research showing that students' views, attitudes, and university diversity experiences promote preparation for a global society, little research is available outside of American contexts. This study utilised data collected at one Australian university to examine whether students' views and attitudes towards diversity, and their university diversity experiences, stimulate the development of key attributes needed to function effectively in a global society, namely positive intergroup attitudes and civic engagement. The findings demonstrate that high-quality engagement with curricular diversity activities (institutionally structured opportunities for students to engage with diversity) and with diverse peers (positive diversity interactions) are associated with improved intergroup attitudes and civic engagement outcomes. The findings also reveal that poor quality engagement with diverse peers (negative diversity interactions) are negatively associated with gains in these outcomes. These findings are consistent regardless of students' pre-university experience with diversity and their openness to diversity.

Diversity Experiences and Attitudes Toward Literacy: Is There a Link?

This article reports on a study that explored whether diversity experiences influence students’ attitudes toward literary activities during the first year of college. Interactional diversity and attending a diversity workshop had a positive net influence on the outcome measure. Exposure to curricular diversity, however, had only a chance effect on the dependent variable.

Measuring the Diversity Inclusivity of College Courses

Most studies of curricular diversity have focused on the effects of participation in diversity courses on student outcomes. Though the results have been positive, these studies have used limited measures of curricular diversity and there is a great need for a complimentary body of research demonstrating what faculty and what types of courses are more likely to include diversity. This study relies on 12 diversity inclusivity items derived from a comprehensive model of how diversity is included into a course to investigate how much diversity is being included in collegiate courses and what predicts diversity inclusivity, as measured by two scales: diverse grounding and inclusive learning. The results, based on 7,101 responses from faculty participating in the 2007 Faculty Survey of Student Engagement, suggest that most faculty are including diversity in their courses in some way, but that women and faculty of color tend to include diversity to a greater extent than their colleagues. Also, courses taught in the soft fields are more likely to be inclusive of diversity.

Advancing by Degree: Placing the MA in Writing Studies

Master’s programs have been absent from writing studies’ scholarship on graduate education, primarily because they are not sites of disciplinary research. The MA, however, should be valued in writing studies for its demographic and curricular diversity, its responsiveness to local conditions, and its intra- and interdisciplinary flexibility.

Impact of Globalization on Higher Education: An Empirical Study of Education Policy & Planning of Design Education in Hong Kong

This paper focuses on the impact of globalization in the domain of higher education, particularly, design education. It reviews how globalization may affect educational policy and planning in Hong Kong by drawing on an empirical study involving senior management, a course leader and a design trainer/facilitator. This paper not only illustrates the challenges of globalization to education sectors worldwide, but also brings the merits of globalization in education to the fore and considers the challenges that it presents to multidimensional phenomena. The diversity of curricula; professional mobility; accountability and quality remain as parts of a continuing dialogue in the context of the global community. Research into these issues could trigger and influence thinking on how local design education (in the tertiary and higher education sectors) might be restructured to satisfy educators’ hopes and desires for an ideal future in which design is promoted as being more imaginative, innovative, and eliciting wider responses to ideas, experiences, feelings, emotions, and intercultural cooperation in a globalizing world in both developed and developing nations. Rich data were collected through a series of individual interviews with design students, teaching staff and design practitioners together with a focus group discussion with key members of a curriculum planing team. This data were analyzed with reference to current literature on globalization, education reform and course planning strategy. The author was inspired by the fact that globalization drives changes in education towards global perspectives. However, institutions, society, stakeholders and the public, as well as governments in this global world, should be sharing the goal of ever-increasing excellence in teaching combined with concern for local and global contexts. The impact of globalization on education (design education) is a subject of debate and discourse within the whole global community.

Gauging the effect of compositional and curricular diversity on freshman success

AbstractFindings connect cognitive growth and enrollment persistence to racial diversity in the classroom using objective measures.

A New Short Course ?: A. V. Filippov and the Russian State's Search for a "Usable Past"

A New Short Course?A. V. Filippov and the Russian State's Search for a "Usable Past" David Brandenberger (bio) History textbooks have long played an unusually political role in Russo-Soviet society, serving as a mechanism for indoctrination from above and a metaphor for authoritarian heavy-handedness for those below. If texts by N. M. Karamzin and D. I. Ilovaiskii epitomized this tension during the 19th and early 20th centuries, they were replaced during the early Soviet period with similarly controversial texts by M. N. Pokrovskii, Emel´ian Iaroslavskii, and A. V. Shestakov. This process culminated in 1938 with the launch of the infamous Short Course on the History of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks), which reigned over Soviet society for nearly two decades until it was pilloried in 1956 by N. S. Khrushchev as a symbol of the excesses of the Stalin regime. Although subsequent textbooks never acquired their predecessor's notoriety, they too ruled unchallenged over Soviet educational institutions until 1991. It was only after the fall of the Soviet Union that this monopoly gave way to a much looser system in which a variety of officially approved titles vied with one another for sales within a newly competitive public school textbook market. The curricular diversity of this new period is illustrated by the fact that in 2007 as many as 27 different textbooks were in use in classrooms across the Russian Federation.1 But as the heterogeneity of the 1990s has been eclipsed in recent years by consolidationist tendencies under V. V. Putin and D. A. Medvedev, talk has again turned to the re-establishment of a single official account of the Russo-Soviet past in the public schools. Notable in this regard have been discussions surrounding the release of a controversial new teachers' manual, A. V. Filippov's The Contemporary History of Russia, 1945–2006, and a textbook derived from [End Page 825] it for senior high schools by A. A. Danilov.2 This essay examines the content of these new texts (particularly Filippov's), the circumstances under which they came to represent the new "official line" on the past, and the extent to which they raise the specter of a Short Course-like return to the dark days of state-sponsored indoctrination. Although the Filippov and Danilov texts display many of the modern production values of the contemporary Russian textbook market, they are also unusually partisan and tendentious. These shortcomings have received a lot of attention in the Russian press, particularly in regard to the books' tendency to rehabilitate Stalin as a political visionary.3 According to Filippov, the nature of Stalin's leadership was governed by a 500-year political tradition which demanded that power be concentrated in the hands of a single, autocratic ruler and his centralized administrative system (81). Stalin apparently not only embraced this governing principle but essentially dedicated his reign to the restoration of the Russian empire (88). At the same time, Filippov writes, Stalin also prioritized the perennial imperative of national defense, as well as the concomitant tasks of economic modernization and reform of the country's administrative command structure (86–90). Many of Stalin's policies were reminiscent of those of his predecessor, Peter the Great, as was his oftentimes brutal relationship with his followers (88). Ultimately, however, even his most cruel means were justified by their ends, inasmuch as "their goal was the mobilization of the administrative apparatus in order to ensure its effectiveness both in the process of industrialization and, after the war, in the restoration of the economy" (87–88). Accordingly, Stalin and the system he created deserve credit not only for reuniting the lands of the former empire but for transforming the country into an industrial superpower and winning a war of epic proportions (93). Filippov's approach to the Stalin years has been criticized in the Russian press for its tendency to frame even the worst excesses of the period in exculpatory terms. Particularly slighted is the plight of ordinary people sacrificed in the name of state and empire. As one particularly scathing review puts it, the "book, dedicated to Soviet history, virtually avoids the mass repressions. Very little is [End...

El fracaso escolar como exclusión educativa: comprensión, políticas y prácticas

El artículo ofrece una lectura del fracaso escolar desde la perspectiva de la exclusión social y educativa. Tras poner de relieve determinadas ambigüedades, problemas y paradojas ligados al término borroso de «fracaso escolar», recurre a algunas de las contribuciones conceptuales y teóricas que vienen elaborándose en los estudios sobre la exclusión social. Aunque el concepto mismo de exclusión es elástico, hay amplias coincidencias en lo que se refiere a diversas privaciones a las que son sometidas las personas que son apartadas de bienes, recursos y derechos esenciales.Para precisar significados y discursos, políticas y prácticas implicadas en la exclusión educativa se argumenta acerca de la necesidad de clarificar, con la precisión conveniente, qué es aquello de lo que son privados algunos estudiantes y colectivos (aprendizajes esenciales imprescindibles), y se explica por qué el fracaso o la exclusión merecen ser entendidos como fenómenos procesuales, pues representan trayectorias y no acontecimientos aislados. Se presta una atención singular al carácter relacional del fracaso escolar que no es compresible sin atender a su relación con un determinado orden escolar que no solo lo constata y certifica, sino que también lo construye y justifica. La lógica dominante que lleva a culpar a las víctimas de sus fracasos –mecanismo que utiliza el orden vigente para protegerse a sí mismo–, está en la base de la exclusión educativa; se manifiesta en determinadas políticas que, incluso cuando pretendenincluir, solo lo hacen de forma insuficiente. El Programa de Diversificación Curricular, que se desarrolla en el sistema educativo español como una medida de respuesta a alumnos con serias dificultades es valorado desde la perspectiva de la exclusión educativa.

Intercultural education and curricular diversification: the case of the Ecuadorian Intercultural Bilingual Education Model (MOSEIB)

Thirteen Ecuadorian indigenous nationalities follow the Intercultural Bilingual Education Model in Ecuador (MOSEIB). This paper analyses the present situation of MOSEIB, the challenges to it and future prospects. First, in order to understand how MOSEIB today has relieved the intercultural tensions of the past it is necessary to look at the history of Ecuadorian education. Second, in order to explore the particular characteristics of the MOSEIB model and the challenges of implementing intercultural education in non‐intercultural societies we ask how and to what extent the intercultural education policies and practices in Ecuador differ from those developed in other Latin‐American countries. Third, we consider curricular diversity, seeking to clarify how the MOSEIB curricula relate to the reality of the Kichwa indigenous nationality and its communal environment, rituals and agricultural schedules. We conclude with comments on future prospects and remaining challenges to the establishment of a truly intercultural society inside a multicultural country.

La incorporación de ejes transversales en la educación superior: el marco institucional y el acompañamiento como condiciones para el éxito

La Universidad Nacional acordó incluir cinco ejes transversales institucionales en los planes de estudio. Para tener éxito, organizó un proceso que consideró dos componentes fundamentales: el marco institucional y el acompañamiento a docentes y unidades académicas, y así ayudar a reducir las barreras que podrían interferir en la incorporación de género, desarrollo sostenible, ambiente y cultura ambiental, equidad y diversidad cultural.
 En este trabajo se presentan el marco institucional y los aspectos que se atendieron en el acompañamiento y las actualizaciones que se brindaron al personal docente y administrativo-académico.

Working politically amongst professional knowledge landscapes to implement gender-sensitive physical education reform

Background: As the conversation regarding gender and physical education has evolved, a great many suggestions have been offered that reflect ways of designing more gender sensitive environments. The problem now turns the transformation of theoretical suggestions into real change in the practices of schools. Purpose: The purpose of this study was to use Clandinin and Connelly's theories of professional knowledge landscapes; and sacred, secret and cover stories to analyze one physical education teacher's political maneuvering through her patriarchal school culture in support of gender sensitive physical education. Participants and setting: One female physical educator teaching at an upper-middle class, primarily White, high school (ages 13–18) in the Southeastern United States. Research design: The study used interpretivist, non-participant observation to study this teacher's thinking and behaviors in her local context. Data collection: Data were collected during 20 school days over five months through interviews, conversations and observations of lessons and other areas of the school. Each day, one semi-structured formal interview was conducted, at least two class periods were observed and field notes were recorded, informal conversations took place before, during and after those lessons, and observations were conducted in other areas of the physical education program and school. Data analysis: Data in the interview and observation transcripts that reflected the teachers' efforts to stimulate change in the PE program or the elements of what she viewed as gender sensitive physical education were given initial codes that represented their content. Similarly coded data was merged through several iterations and eventually become macro-themes that represented this teachers' political tactics and her version of gender-sensitive PE. Findings: The teacher strategically understood the sacred gender story of the school and employed numerous cover stories to protect her secret story of gender that she was trying to advance. These were most evident in her efforts to secure permission and resources to conduct a new trial PE program and her attempts to spread it beyond her own teaching. Findings also indicate four elements of her gender-sensitive teaching, including: curricular diversity, safe spaces to learn physicality, social issues of health, and integrating community resources. Conclusions: The findings are situated in broader theory and literature on curriculum addressing social issue of the body, the possibilities and limits of coeducation, and the politics of school change.

Undergraduate Agriculture Curricula in Sustainability: An Evaluation Across Borders

ABSTRACT This paper focused on the evaluation of undergraduate study programs in agriculture for a selected group of universities from Louisiana and Texas in the US, and France and Italy. Eight samples of graduating students (n = 20) from each institution participated in a quantitative survey. Qualitative data were collected through interviews with sixteen respondents (one faculty member and one administrator of each university). A document analysis review provided more qualitative data on the foundations of agricultural curricula at these institutions and other schools around the world. Such a variety of data collection methodologies allowed for a triangulation of the results, which enhanced the validity of the study. Every university recognized the emergence of a sustainable agriculture model, despite the curricular diversity across national borders and the different levels of sensitivity toward the issue. Although more work is needed to incorporate sustainable agriculture principles in the agricultural curriculum, various recommendations are suggested. This work contributes to the promotion of an emerging sustainable agriculture philosophy.

New Adventures in the Politics of Literacy: an Introduction

In what ways are childhood and literacy political? The identification and categorization of the ‘child’ as a distinctive kind of human subject coincided with the formation of the European nation state, the proliferation of mercantile economies and calls for mass literacy and secular schooling (Luke, 1989). There is a longstanding and powerful connection between ‘childhood’ as an ontological and cultural category and what Benedict Anderson (1991) called ‘print capitalism’. Over several centuries, then, schools, churches, families and industries have been charged with the promotion of particular literate traditions and the construction of distinctive kinds of text practising children. It is precisely these very educational institutions and linguistic monocultures built around practices with the written word that appear to be teetering on some kind of an historical brink. For according to discussions of Canadian and Australian, UK and US schooling in this edition of JECL, the teaching of initial print literacy is struggling to adapt to heteroglossic, multilingual student bodies, new communications technologies and modalities of representation, and the tenacious forms of social inequality that run with globalized economies. The political formation of early childhood literacy follows discernable and durable patterns, detailed in these articles.We can speak of early childhood literacy education as ‘political’ across three connected strata: • AS IDEOLOGICAL REPRESENTATION – Literacy education is a mode of ideological representation. That is, it is an introduction to particular social and political ideologies, cultural values and beliefs which are selections from possible sociocultural positions and class interests. The first two articles here by Larson and Gatto and Comber and Nichols question how policy foci on basic skills narrow and constrain ideational and curricular diversity of early literacy instruction. Apart from these overt ideological implications, several recent discussions of No Child Left Behind have suggested this narrowing of literacy as curriculum sets the grounds for cross-curricular achievement slumps in mid and upper primary years (e.g. Calfee, 2002).

The Benefits of Diversity in Education for Democratic Citizenship

The social science statement in Brown v. Board of Education (1954) stressed that desegregation would benefit both African American and White children. Eventually, it was recognized that integration, rather than mere desegregation, was important for benefits to be realized. A parallel argument is made in the legal cases concerning affirmative action in higher education: educational benefits of diversity depend on curricular and co‐curricular experience with diverse peers, not merely on their co‐existence in the same institution (Gurin, P., 1999, Gurin, Dey, Hurtado, & Gurin, 2002). Positive benefits of diversity were demonstrated in a study comparing students in a curricular diversity program with students in a matched control group (n = 174), and in a longitudinal survey of University of Michigan students (n = 1670).

Educational Reform and School Choice in England and Wales

The paper examines the educational reforms relating to school choice that were introduced in England and Wales by Conservative governments during the 1980s and 1990s. The political background is outlined and the reforms themselves are examined. We evaluate the extent to which choice has increased, and for whom, and whether the Conservative goverments' stated intention of increasing standards of educational achievement has been met. We conclude that although the range of schools from which parents can choose has increased in some areas, the scope for curricular diversity is constrained by the national curriculum. Insofar as choice has increased, the beneficiaries are more likely to be from higher socio-economic groups. There has also been a fragmentation in the process of school admissions which appears to be exacerbating inequities. While performance at the end of compulsory and post-compulsory secondary education has improved, it is not clear to what extent this can be attributed to the reforms. The advent of a new Labour government in May 1997 is likely to result in a policy shift and reference is made to key areas of reform.

The American Family and the Little Red Schoolhouse: Historians, Class, and the Problem of Curricular Diversity

Though the development of “public history” as a professional practice and its arrival as an academic field date back only to the mid-1970s, an emphasis on the role of historians aspublicactors with unique societal responsibilities has punctuated the self-reflective literature issuing forth from the profession throughout much of the 20th Century. In his 1949 presidential address to the American Historical Association (AHA), Conyers Read advised that “history has to justify itself in social terms.” In a postwar world whose grand drama shifted from the defeat of fascism to the crusade against communism, Read instructed historians in their highest role, namely, “education for democracy.” “Total war, whether it be hot or cold,” Read observed, “enlists everyone and calls upon everyone to assume his part.” Read's prescription has remained a canon in the profession. In 1986, for example, AHA former president C. Vann Woodward owned that historians have “obligations to the present.” Recognizing the problematical nature of the “relationship of history to the public realm,” AHA president William E. Leuchtenburg in like manner nonetheless recently observed that “generation after generation, a substantial corps of scholars has insisted that historians should concentrate on contributing to the solution of contemporary problems.”

An Ethical Justification of Women's Studies; or What's a Nice Girl Like You Doing in a Place Like This?

The feminist in academe, says Paula Bennett, is like Procne married to Tereus, “inextricably wedded to the sources of her harm.” An ethical justification of academic feminism can be found, not in cooperation and affiliation, but in the strategies currently necessary to ensure curricular and cultural diversity. Historically contextualized and strategically politicized, this ethic is founded on the claim that universities are places where we may all learn to know what is other than ourselves.

CURRICULUM APPROVAL IN ILLINOIS COMMUNITY COLLEGES: LOCAL AND STATE PROCESSES

Following a discussion of the historical relationship between education and democracy, from which the concept of curriculum emerges as a legitimate field of research, this paper traces the development of curricular diversity in U.S. two‐year institutions and reviews the control and coordinating functions of curriculum governance in the community college systems of several states. The paper focuses on the system of curricular administration in Illinois, in which primary responsibility rests with the local two‐year school board and a coordinating function with a state agency, the Illinois Community College Board (ICCB). The state process is summarized and the local process of course and program approval from initiation to implementation in Illinois community colleges is identified. The data suggest that while the state role in curricular governance is formally defined as one of coordination, the local community college curriculum administrators may in fact view it as one of control.