Members Of Professional Community Research Articles

Voices of the Stacks: A Multifaceted Inquiry into Academic Librarians' Tweets

ABSTRACTTwitter has emerged as an important forum for discussion among academic librarians. In this research, we take a mixed‐methods approach to study the thematic content and sentiment of tweets authored by academic librarians in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. We found differences in the semantic content and themes present in the data from each country that point to differences in how librarians in each country engage on Twitter. While more work remains to be done, we cast new light on how members of professional communities use social media. Our qualitative analysis identified 11 thematic categories in academic librarians' Twitter discussions, focusing on professional topics. UK librarians exhibited a higher frequency of labor‐ and employment‐related terms compared to their US and Canadian counterparts. Sentiment ratios for US and Canadian tweets were similar, while the UK displayed nearly double the positive‐to‐negative tweet ratio. We also present a methodological intervention comparing two different sentiment analysis methods, VADER, and Zero‐Shot Learning (ZSL), to classify posts by academic librarians. ZSL significantly outperformed the off‐the‐shelf classifier, highlighting how accurate prediction is possible without annotated training data.

What do students in human resource management know about accent bias?

For many second language (L2) speakers, including immigrants, speaking with an L2 accent can be a source of unfair or biased treatment in many workplace contexts. However, apart from research on language learners, there is currently little knowledge as to what the general public, and especially members of professional communities, know about accent and accent bias. Our goal in this study was to examine the intuitive understanding of accent and accent bias by university students in human resource (HR) management as future gatekeepers to gainful employment. We interviewed 14 students across two four-year university HR programs in Canada asking the students about their prior experience with accent bias and exploring their understanding of the broader construct of accent through thematic interview coding. The students reported multiple examples of accent bias, demonstrating a nuanced understanding of accent, where they characterized accent bias as an unconscious phenomenon, highlighted its experiential component, expressed sensitivity to different linguistic sources of accent, emphasized the role of a listener in L2 communication, and generally showed flexibility and tolerance toward accented L2 speech. We discuss these findings in light of prior work on accent awareness and highlight the importance of dedicated accent-focused training for HR professionals.

Urban Improvement: The Making And Using Of Green Spaces In St. Petersburg (1870s-1910s)

With intensive industrialization process St. Petersburg faced with urbanization by the second half of the 19th century. Due to the transformation of the city green spaces became part of this process, so environmental as well as health care issues occurred at the center of public debates. It was then that issues related to urban green spaces occurred in the focus of public attention. They became the main topics in periodicals, as well as in special brochures and publications on urbandevelopment. Gardens and parks were perceived as an important element of the urban environment, as a significant public good, and they were crucial due to the recreational and sanitary point of view, as places necessary for residents to relax and to improve their health while walking there. As a result, green spaces have become part of the process of forming the public sphere in St. Petersburg. Ceasing to be private, they gradually offered more leisure activities for all residents of the city. However, the (re)making of green spaces in St. Petersburg was a result of a clash of interests of different actors involved – gardeners and architects, who were members of professional communities, and representatives of the city municipality. The same interest was paid by citizens whose voices are explicitly seen in periodicals. Each interest group had different vision of how urban gardens and parks should have been organized and functioned. Examining extensive body of sources that included journal and wallpaper publications and official documents of the office of city authorities I would like to analyze how different communities of experts that were involved in these transformations worked with nature in the urban environment and to focus on contested character of the emerging green public spaces.

Becoming an English Teacher: Voices from Nepal

Motivations for choosing English teacher as a career have attracted considerable attention in recent years, and a number of research studies have been conducted to gain insights into pre-service and in-service teachers’ reasons for entering teacher education programmes. This study aimed at investigating motivating factors to choose English language teaching as a career. It also aimed at exploring the job satisfaction level of the participants, and the professional development activities they adopt to develop their professional competence. Five teachers of English who have been teaching English at different levels of education in Nepal for ten years now participated in this study. The narrative inquiry approach was adopted as a research design for this study. Interview was used as a tool for data collection. The study contains qualitative data only. The data were described and analyzed descriptively. The study revealed that the participants chose English teacher as career due to the influence of their role model English teachers; the love for the subject, the social prestige the English teachers deserved and the passion for teaching. The participants are satisfied with positions they hold as they have been able to help the adults to learn. Their motives for selecting job are guided by intrinsic motives such as interest, personal experience, intellectual fulfillment, and altruistic ones. The findings also indicated that they adopt different activities to develop their professional competence such as taking part in workshops, seminars, becoming members of professional community, attending ELT and applied linguistics conferences

Axiological, goal and substantial aspects of lifelong learning of teacher of higher school in context of informatization of his professional activity

Issues, related to insufficient competence of higher school teachers in the sphere of usingmodern informational resources and technologies in their professional activities are discussed in this paper. The suggestion offered in the paper is optimization of higher school teachers’lifelong learning. This optimization is possible due to the axiological approach to formation of substantial and procedural aspect of leaning. The support on axiological approach allows to consider the multidimensional nature of vocational and life experience, character of his base of values. The analysis of necessary content of lifelonglearning of a teacher for development of his information competence as expert, subject of activity, member of professional community and carrier of professional consciousness is presented in the paper. These aspects of professionalizing of a teacher are analyzed in the context of his learning, training and research activity.

Community health workers as critical building blocks to strengthen health systems: a two-case study of innovative CHWs in Zambia and Japan

Background: This work focuses on assessing the role of professional community health workers (CHWs) in strengthening the health system.Methods: This cross-national case study draws from two different sources, a program in Zambia and a program in Japan. For both programs, we examine CHWs, who were trained in education and health, as the link between community and health systems to explore issues related to identification and to task.Results: We conclude that there is a need to reconsider the conventional scientific and bureaucratic frames that CHWs have to navigate. Further, we identify the potential for professional community members to take on various tasks of CHWs and the subsequent necessities and opportunities for building competence in communicating with and representing community. Finally, we present the perceived challenges facing CHWs in terms of community governance as well as their contributions to strengthening the health systems in their areas.

Cultural Orientations of Sport Managers

Various interpretations of sport management are cultural constructs underpinned by core assumptions and values held by members of professional communities. Sport managers world wide share common problems, but differ in how they resolve them. These universal differences emerge from the relationships they form with other people, and their attitudes to time, activities and the natural environment. This paper examines the role of cultural orientations of sport managers in the interpretation and practice of management. Using a multiple dimension model it presents the cultural profiles of 15 sport managers from 7 countries. A combination of methods was employed including questionnaires and ethnography. It is contended that sport management concerns a social process by which managers get involved in reconciling seven fundamental cultural dilemmas in order to perform tasks and achieve certain ends. Thus, a knowledge of the cultural meaning of sport management in a particular country would equip sport managers with a valuable tool in managing both the cultural diversity of their own work forces and in developing appropriate cross-cultural skills needed for running international events, marketing campaigns, sponsorship deals and joint ventures.