Disciplinary Identification Research Articles

Asset-based Approaches to Multilingual Students’ Computer Science Identity Development

While computer science identity development has been examined in several studies, there is much to learn about the development of multilingual students’ computer science (CS) identities. To develop strong CS identities, multilingual students must engage in culturally and linguistically sustaining curriculum, pedagogy, and interaction that draws from their rich and varied resources. This theoretical paper is grounded in a justice-centered, asset-based framework that views the traditions and practices in students’ cultures and communities as strong contributors to knowledge construction in STEM. We draw on multiple studies exploring multilingual student CS identity development to better understand how their personal, familial, community-based, and intersectional experiences can be leveraged to promote equitable CS participation. Based on a synthesis of these studies, we find that educators should engage in the following practices: 1) leveraging multilingual students’ multiple meaning-making resources, 2) connecting classroom learning to informal learning spaces, 3) providing broader contexts for disciplinary practices, 4) offering multiple opportunities for self-expression, and 5) drawing on multilingual students’ strong intersectional identities. Through these practices, we discuss how researchers, practitioners, and policymakers can strengthen multilingual students’ disciplinary identification and overall persistence in CS.

Engineering climate for marginalized groups: Connections to peer relations and engineering identity

AbstractBackgroundA better understanding of departmental climate and its relationship to engineering identity is needed to diversify engineering and improve marginalized students' experiences.Purpose/HypothesisWe investigated whether undergraduate engineering students from 16 social identity groups perceived departmental climate differently from one another and examined psychological and behavioral factors contributing to these perceptions and their relationship to engineering identification.Design/MethodWe surveyed 398 undergraduate engineering students about departmental climate and engineering identity, testing structural models across race and gender. Qualitative analysis of open‐ended items complemented quantitative results.ResultsStudents rated climate for dominant identities (White, male, and/or US‐born) as more welcoming than for 14 nondominant identities, broadening the notion of “nondominant” identities in engineering. In structural models, invariant across race and gender, students' perceptions of bias, safety, and faculty support predicted climate ratings; peer relations and microaggressions predicted engineering identity. There were mean differences in perceptions across intersections of race and gender, but students in all groups perceived a climate gap favoring dominant identities. Open‐ended responses highlighted students' desire for a more diverse, inclusive program and the importance of peer relations.ConclusionsDepartmental climate can be less welcoming for engineering students with many different nondominant identities. Attending to both students' own social positioning and their perceptions of climate for other students can open opportunities for change in engineering departments. Results suggest that efforts to improve peer relations in group work could be important in promoting disciplinary identification in historically marginalized groups.

‘What’s in a name?’: the case for ‘Study of Religions’

ABSTRACTThis article makes the case for adopting ‘Study of Religions’ as a single common disciplinary name for cross-cultural, comparative and theoretical studies of ‘religion/s’. I argue that the grammatical and substantive format of this name adequately addresses disciplinary requirements and resolves a longstanding debate in the field. It also supplies a distinctive, recognizable international brand. While poststructuralist and deconstructionist work in the field has been stimulating, it has not fostered positive disciplinary identification. Adoption of a single name will promote centripetal drive and theoretical coherence which is where the most effective work in the Study of Religions has been done since the 1960s – and continues.

ДИСЦИПЛИНАРНАЯ ИДЕНТИФИКАЦИЯ СОВРЕМЕННОЙ ЭПИСТЕМОЛОГИИ ИСКУССТВА В УСЛОВИЯХ ТРАНСДИСЦИПЛИНАРНОСТИ

The article attempts to show how the post-non-classical transformation of the disciplinary areas of scientific knowledge has changed the institutional image of the artistic and cognitive sphere of modern culture. For this purpose, the work identifies the specific parameters of the disciplinary identification of epistemology of art within the framework of such symbolic post-non-classical cultural phenomena as Science art, as well as research in the field of social and cultural neuroscience. The paper substantiates the status of epistemology of art as an essential and full-fledged component of the professional community of epistemologists and philosophers of science, carrying out the fundamental revision of the social and communicative norms of the entire body of disciplinary communities, which is conditioned by the principle of the fundamental responsibility of philosophy in the situation of crucial transformations in modern culture.

Text dynamics: Renewing challenges for semiotics of literature

The paper examines the problem of textual/cultural dynamics linked to the issue of semiotic literariness, to be further investigated by the authors in later papers on literary semiotics. This scientific project aims to get closer to reaching an adequate disciplinary identification for semiotics of literature and a relatively precise definition of the status of this field in relation to semiotics of culture. The first step for the project is to reveal the interrelationhip between text and culture using the notion of dynamics that can be reconstructed from a historical perspective through some essential components of Formalist and Structuralist theory (Tynyanov’s ‘function’, Jakobson’s ‘dominant’) and also works by Lotman (the ‘text–culture’ relationship) and Bakhtin (‘dialogue’). The notions of inclusiveness/integration, distancing and hierarchization, leading to transformation, are interpreted in some detail in the context of these theories. On these grounds, three basic categories of the analysability of textual/cultural dynamics are set up with the indication of further aspects of the dynamic function: (1) mediation; (2) transposition; (3) temporality–spatiality. The suggested classification and the implied conceptual segmentation are expected to contribute to a synthesis between “Structuralist” and Peircean theoretical and methodological orientations in semiotic literary studies. This also reveals the need for a coexistence of approaches (a) moving from particular cultural fields (literary culture tradition) towards general semiotics of culture, and (b) returning from universal transfield concepts to literary culture, including the historical traditions both in art (object-level) and its scientific interpretation (meta-level).

Youth Disciplinary Identification During Participation in Contemporary Project-Based Science Investigations in School

Recent science educational policy reform efforts call for a shift toward practice-focused instruction in kindergarten–Grade 12 science education. We argue that this focus on engaging students in epistemic practices of science opens up new possibilities for the design of learning environments that support the stabilization of learners’ science-linked identities. Learning environments often assume that youth come to them without relevant identity resources to contribute or that the learning environment has no bearing on the disciplinary identification of individuals. We conducted this research while developing a year-long course to teach high school biology by engaging youth in interest-driven projects focused on contemporary topics. We explored how engaging youth in the epistemic practices of science in culturally expansive ways supported their science-linked identification. We propose a model grounded in social practice theory that describes aspects of students’ stabilization of disciplinary identities. We found that (a) deepening participation in scientific practices is linked to whether or not youth have opportunities to coordinate their engagement with their existing identities; and (b) material, relational, and ideational identity resources and qualities of the learning environment mediate how youth stabilize disciplinary identities in interactional moments.

Special Issue: Designing Learning Environments for Equitable Disciplinary Identification

This special issue is focused on investigating the role of learners’ self-identification with disciplinary endeavors (e.g., science-related investigations, interpretations of historical events) in ...

Digital Youth Divas: Exploring Narrative-Driven Curriculum to Spark Middle School Girls’ Interest in Computational Activities

Women use technology to mediate numerous aspects of their professional and personal lives. Yet, few design and create these technologies given that women, especially women of color, are grossly underrepresented in computer science and engineering courses. Decisions about participation in STEM are frequently made prior to high school, and these decisions are impacted by prior experience, interest, and sense of fit with community. Digital Youth Divas is an out-of-school program that uses narrative stories to launch the creation of digital artifacts and support non-dominant middle school girls’ STEM interests and identities through virtual and real-world community. In this article, we discuss the framework of the Digital Youth Divas environment, including our approach to blending narratives into project-based design challenges through on- and offline mechanisms. Results from our pilot year, including the co-design process with the middle school participants, suggest that our narrative-centered, blended learning program design sparks non-dominant girls’ interests in STEM activities and disciplinary identification, and has the potential to mediate girls’ sense of STEM agency, identities, and interests.

Disciplinary Identification of Educational Ideas II

Disciplinary Identification of Educational Ideas II

Disciplinary Identification of Educational Ideas

Disciplinary Identification of Educational Ideas

Why Do I Have to Read Like That?

IN 2007, STEPHEN SLEMON ORGANIZED A PANEL for the ACCUTE conference around the question Why do I have to like that? (ESC 32.2-3: 1-37). The question generated a range of responses engaging with the limitations of academic writing as a form of expression, instruction, and communication, and interrogating the institutional directives of the discipline encoded in the writing practices that also function, perversely perhaps, as a location for the formation--albeit problematically--of a community. This year (2008), Esc organized an ACCUTE panel around what might appear to be a related question: Why do I have to read like that? The responses, however, and the discussion they provoked suggest otherwise: that is, we--the shifting community formed around practices of writing--all understand to some extent the imperative to with reference to a discourse of disciplinary identification, using a language specific to English studies and addressing a constituency of like readers, who will recognize themselves as the subjects interpellated in and by academic discourse. We don't have to write like that, but in many cases we do, as a function of training and what is constructed as an apparent necessity in disciplinary communication pertaining to a specialized field and mode of analysis. Although, then, reading might seem to be the obvious counterpart of writing on these terms (we to readers and as readers), the fact is that the reiterative practices of academic writing at this time, while they may once have been matched by comparable practices of reading, aren't anymore. There may be some continued consciousness of what Frank Lentricchia has described as the imposing and repressive father-figure of the New Criticism and its gestures of close reading (xiii), but that regulative and identificatory disciplinary practice has been largely abandoned in classrooms and in academic analysis. We don't read that way anymore; indeed, as Patricia Demers observes here, we don't demonstrably read in any unitary way, with reference to any coherent body of texts, or within a discipline united in its objectives in research or teaching. Although there is a growing nostalgia in English studies for some kind of return to close reading, with critics from a surprising range of postcolonial, feminist, and Marxist categories (notably, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Jane Gallop, and Terry Eagleton) recently making cases for revisiting New Critical or formalist analysis of one kind or another, the turn in English to a cultural and historical critique over the past few decades, while it has demonstrably effected some disciplinary ambiguity, has also significantly interfered with problematic structures of canon, pedagogy, and, at a foundational level, power and identity--who determines what and how we read; who establishes the criteria for inclusion in the discipline itself, for scholars, teachers, texts, and critique. …

The Cult of Happiness: Nianhua, Art, and History in Rural North China (review)

Reviewed by: The Cult of Happiness: Nianhua, Art, and History in Rural North China Craig Clunas (bio) James A. Flath . The Cult of Happiness: Nianhua, Art, and History in Rural North China. Contemporary Chinese Studies Series. Vancouver and Toronto: University of British Columbia Press, 2004. xii, 195 pp. Hardcover Can. $80.00, ISBN 0-7748-1034-3. Paperback Can. $29.95, ISBN 0-7748-1035-1. This engagingly written and rigorously argued book on the nianhua, literally "New Year pictures," produced in Shandong, Hebei, and Henan Provinces from about 1880 to 1950, is a welcome and important contribution to the study of China's visual culture. With chapters on "The Production of Print Culture in North China," "Home and Domesticity," "State and Society," "Retelling History through the Narrative Print," "Rural Print and the Cosmopolitan Mystique," "The Politics of the Popular," and "Exorcising Modernity," plus an excellent Introduction, which situates the project methodologically in terms of recent debates on "popular culture," it is a comprehensive and incisive look at this material, images that on grounds of the quantity produced and the audience reached would alone qualify them for a claim on the attention of all scholars of the period. The author's principal disciplinary identification is as a historian, and it is as historical texts that he engages with the seventy-four nianhua reproduced here (forty-three of them in good-quality color). However, his diligence in searching them out in collections in China and Europe, and the scrupulous attention paid to them also as material objects in their own right, with histories of production, [End Page 97] distribution, and consumption practices all given their due weight, is moreover a model of practice to art historians interested in addressing this material. An example would be the discussion of the ways in which the mechanization of the production of nianhua after about 1909 (when lithography began to replace xylo-graphy, or woodblock printing) had a major impact on the social context of production by putting thousands of woodblock printers out of work, but also on the visual culture, more broadly, by promoting a narrower and less diverse visual culture that stuck more rigidly to a set series of themes. The implications of this for an evolving Chinese visual culture as it encountered the shocks of war and then a highly politicized reordering in the middle decades of the twentieth century are profound and will take some working out in further studies. If there are points on which I would wish to suggest modifications of Flath's theses, it is often to stress the longer continuities of some of the visual practices he describes so well. Part of the problem in researching nianhua prior to the late Qing, when this book takes up the story, is that practically nothing survives— these were ephemeral objects that were never subject to the kinds of elite connoisseurship and collecting practices that might have ensured their survival, even if we know from written sources of the Ming and Qing that elites participated in their display and use. But the iconography of the nianhua does survive in other, more durable forms. Thus, for example, the figure of Dou Yujun, an ancient paragon whose five sons all achieved the heights of the jinshi degree, appears in the decoration of porcelain as early as about 1500, while "official and semi-official publications dealing with the subject of moral and customary standards," texts which were often also illustrated with pictures of right and wrong conduct, similarly go back some way before the early Qing period. One of the most widely-discussed sections of the book may well be chapter 5, with its valuable contribution to the vexed question of "modernity" in late Qing Republican history. It directs our attention away from such phenomena as urbanization and the culture of centers such as Shanghai, stereotypically seen as the beating heart of modernity in the period, and directs it firmly back to the inland and the rural. New periodicals of the late nineteenth century, such as the lithographically illustrated Dianshizhai huabao, have been the object of considerable recent study as carriers of an imagery and an imaginary of modernity to new urban audiences...

What Is Philosophy of Music Education and Do We Really Need It

The article deals with the problem of the disciplinary identification of thephilosophy of music education. It explores alternative approaches to thephilosophy of music education and its relation to musical pedagogy. On thebasis of this analysis an account of the philosophy of music education as aphilosophical discipline is suggested and its specific function identified.

Centering the Discipline

As we approach a new century and millennium, we are naturally concerned with the future and what it holds for our discipline. It behooves us, of course, to keep things in perspective. Germanics in North America is a very young discipline, numbering scarcely 100 years. The worries, laments, and aspirations which mark much of our public and private comments about the current state and future prospects of Germanics or German Studies were a hallmark of public declarations at the end of the 19th century, ranging from Philadelphia (Marion Dexter Learned) to Madison (Alexander Hohlfeld) and Palo Alto (Julius Goebel). Even as those early founders of our discipline in North America were concerned with defining the distinctive contributions of Germanics as an intellectual enterprise within American colleges and the emergent research-university system, so too are we concerned with explaining how Germanics fits into the larger scheme of humanistic endeavors at the undergraduate and graduate levels. Even as our founding fathers recognized the need to cultivate open lines of communication between secondary and postsecondary institutions while simultaneously reaching out to a larger, non-academic audience, we too have realized that Germanists cannot survive in splendid isolation from the realities of the marketplace or of the academic communities we co-inhabit. Even as Marion Dexter Learned, Henry Wood, Kuno Francke, A. B. Faust, Frederick J. W Heuser, etc., endeavored to play the role of public intellectuals without neglecting the rigors of serious scholarship or ignoring the value of ef fective language instruction, so too must we ask, not simply what sense does it make to pursue Germanics, but more importantly, what is the role of humanities generally in a post-postmodern, mediadominated era? Not long ago Ulrich Greiner proclaimed that the crisis in Germanics (Germanistik) was over because Germanics had ceased to be a literaturwissenschaftliche enterprise.l His prognosis ignores the history of Germanics, at least its history in North America, which had been forced to engage in more than literary discourse. In the following I wish to define the center of our discipline in two ways by appealing to that history and the changes it has witnessed. From the outset the discipline of Germanics has been marked by change. Change is inevitable. Change is good. Change is unnerving. Change provides opportunities, while posing challenges and causing conundrums. Change-or movement-is at the heart of the literary enterprise we seek to fathom and explain. Theodor Mundt, an early Germanist and himself a writer, remarked shortly after Goethe's death: Es [ist] die Wahrheit in den Dingen, die sick bewegt. He further explained: Die Wahrheit ist wesentlich productiv, and die Productivitat ist das Prinzip der Bewegung. One of my recommendations for the future is to embrace this kinetic energy, to make it a centerpiece of our interdisciplinary endeavors. Doing so will tend to reduce the danger of canonizing any individual theoretical approach in one-sided fashion. Change is so multiple in its individual phenomena that we run little risk of becoming a monotone or monotonous discipline. Indeed, the resultant blurring of disciplinary boundaries, as Michael Holquist discerns, may be-and within a given discipline often is-perceived as a crisis.' That perception of a crisis is endemic to the humanities today and is not restricted to Germanics.3 What Holquist describes is different from the crisis resultant of declining enrollment figures and job opportunities in higher education, although not unrelated to it. Thus by embracing change, by advocating crossdisciplinarity, even interdisciplinarity, we are not just seeking a solution to the first kind of crisis, but are also unwittingly contributing to the crisis of legitimacy and disciplinary identification within our ranks and outside them. To be sure, we enhance the risk of decentering, defocusing, defusing, and ultimately weakening our discipline, if we lose sight of the literary enterprise which historically has been at the center of our endeavors. …

Family assessment: Instrument dimensionality and correspondence across family reporters.

Based on the contention that clarifying the psychometric foundations of family instruments is essential to the field's future progress, the current study pursued 3 major aims: examining issues of instrument dimensionality; determining the generalizability of dimensional structures across whole-family, marital, and parent-child forms; and assessing the degree to which there is correspondenc e across different members' reports. Drawing on a community sample of intact families (N = 192) and making use of a latent-variable approach, results provided support for a 3dimensional framework (Affect, Activities, and Control) in accounting for score variance on whole-family, marital, and parent-child forms. Results indicated a significant degree of correspondenc e across different members' reports of these constructs for each family subsystem. Implications of these findings are discussed, and topics in need of further research attention are identified. The field of family studies includes a range of research activities conducted by behavioral and social scientists from basic, applied, and interdisciplinary programs of study. Regardless of disciplinary identification, theoretical orientation, or substantive focus, however, all such researchers must ultimately select, revise, or develop measurement procedures in order to operationalize key family constructs they wish to investigate. It is for this reason that clarifying the psychometric foundations of family instruments is an essential prerequisite for the field's future progress.

The Psychiatric Nurse's Role Identity

role performance one may not be able to distinguish one professional type from another, for roles tend to be defined by the job function rather than by disciplinary identification. Although this process has brought about salutary changes in effective use of personnel, it has also evoked jealousies, rivalries, competitive conflict, a confusing ambiguity about role expectations, role status, and role performance(2).

Two Social Psychologies: Is Segregation Inevitable or Acceptable?

Many social psychologists have delineated two distinguish- able branches of social psychology, usually called "psychological" and "sociological." These two types differ in focus; they tend to differ in methods, theories, and areas of interest as well. This segregation of the two has its basis in many aspects of disciplinary identification, but it greatly limits the potential of both social psychologies, as the example of social psychology of aging illus- trates. However, bridges can be built and integration fostered; indeed, prominent social psychologists of both types often do cross the boundaries. More conscious bridge-building can enhance the social psychological enterprise.