“That was my radio show!” narrator David Goldman exclaimed, looking at copies of classified ads placed in the University of Chicago’s student newspaper during the late 1960s and early 1970s, when he was an undergraduate student. Goldman, a retired math teacher and one of the founders of the gay liberation movement at the University of Chicago, recently contributed his story to the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality (CSGS) research project Closeted/Out in the Quadrangles: A History of LGBTQ Life at the University of Chicago. During his interview, Goldman spoke at length about coming out in the late 1960s and gay student organizing at the University in the early 1970s. His interview is just the first of many we at CSGS hope to collect from LGBT alumni, faculty, and staff over the next two years.

Chicago Maroon newspaper (ca. 1970), University of Chicago Library.

Building on the success of a previous oral history and exhibition project documenting the experiences of women at the University of Chicago, Closeted/Out in the Quadrangles speaks to a vibrant and growing partnership between the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality and the University Archives at Special Collections Research Center, one aimed at building archival collections in gender and sexuality studies. With support from CSGS’s undergraduate oral history internship program and archives-based undergraduate seminars (created specifically for the Closeted/Out project), we expect to deposit more than one hundred oral histories to the University Archives by 2015.

While scholars have documented the University of Chicago’s rich and numerous contributions to the academic study of homosexuality, we actually know very little about the experiences of LGBTQ individuals and communities who have passed through the campus gates. Filling that knowledge gap is our team of undergraduate student interns, who bring an important dose of energy, enthusiasm, and insider knowledge about campus life to the Closeted/Out interviews. Molly Liu, a fourth-year Biology major who first trained in oral history methods for an African history course, notes:

The loose, undirected format of oral history means that I get to hear people’s stories without needing to dig for any particular piece of information, and in doing so I’ve felt like I’ve understood these people in some way. Their words about gay identity, the University, and Chicago in particular have given me a lot think about. Plus, it’s very fulfilling on a personal level to talk to LGBTQ alumni who are happy and successful.

Kelsey Ganser, a fourth-year History major who is completing an internship with the project while working on her senior thesis in Russian history, reflected on both the academic and personal value of her work:

Working [on the project] has given me the skills to conduct oral history interviews, which are frequently overlooked in my history courses. As a young queer person, through the project I have been able to connect to my history in a way that was never available to me before. The pleasant and easygoing interviews help me feel how strong and welcoming the gay community is, and the difficult ones help me appreciate how far we have come. I had never met an adult gay person until I came to college, so discovering our history through the life stories of other LGBTQ people has been hugely important for the development of my identity. In this regard, I don’t think I can overstate how much this project has influenced my personal understanding of queer identity and history.

Molly, Kelsey, and our other student interns have also found themselves working on the front lines of gathering new archival donations for Special Collections Research Center. As Cal State scholar David A. Reichard has discussed in the Oral History Review article “Animating Ephemera through Oral History: Interpreting Visual Traces of California Gay College Student Organizing from the 1970s,” oral histories not only help us interpret student ephemera, they also help us collect it. Our interns have returned from their interviews with photos, event flyers, stickers, zines, and promises of future loans and donations to the Closeted/Out project. Their friends and classmates have offered to save materials documenting current feminist and queer organizing on campus. And the courses we offer in conjunction with the Closeted/Out project have also brought new undergraduate users to Special Collections Research Center, where they find archivists and librarians eager to help them explore an activist and social history of LGBT life.

University of Chicago students marching at Chicago Pride (1991), Chicago Maroon collection, University of Chicago Photographic Archive, Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library.

As our students continue to interview, we also begin work on plans for a campus exhibition showcasing our findings, scheduled for the Spring of 2015. Shortly thereafter, the LGBTQ oral history collection will be available to researchers at Special Collections Research Center.

Monica L. Mercado is a Ph.D. Candidate in U.S. History at the University of Chicago and a dissertation fellow at the University’s Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality, where she is a coordinator of the Center’s public history initiatives. Before coming to Chicago, Monica worked in exhibitions and programs at the Museum of the City of New York. You can find her musings on women’s and LGBT history, teaching, and Chicago’s unpredictable weather at @monicalmercado.

The Oral History Review, published by the Oral History Association, is the U.S. journal of record for the theory and practice of oral history. Its primary mission is to explore the nature and significance of oral history and advance understanding of the field among scholars, educators, practitioners, and the general public. Follow them on Twitter at @oralhistreview, like them on Facebook, or follow the latest OUPblog posts to preview, learn, connect, discover, and study oral history.

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By Gary Thomas

Frank Spencer’s famous assertion to Betty that ‘Every day in every way, I am getting better and better!’ is true. We are indeed getting better and better all the time.

Click here to view the embedded video.

At the primary schools athletics championships for New South Wales in December 2012, a 12-year-old boy, James Gallaugher, ran the 100m sprint in 11.72 seconds. This is a time that would comfortably have won him the gold medal in the 100m at the Olympic Games in Athens in 1896.

The phenomenon of continual improvement extends to IQ. Amongst psychologists the Flynn effect (so-called because it has been extensively studied by the New Zealand psychologist James Flynn) is well known: it refers to the large increases in IQ that have occurred over one hundred years of intelligence testing. Intelligence tests have an average of 100, and they do so unfailingly. You would be wrong, however, to conclude from this that intelligence remains constant in the population. The consistent average IQ of 100 is the result of the work of the psychometricians, who toil to maintain the figure of 100. The tests and their marking regimes have to be continually reconstructed to bring the average to 100 and to make the distribution of scores conform to shape of the bell-shaped normal distribution curve.

The reconstruction is needed because our performance is improving all the time. When people are asked to take intelligence tests from a previous generation their scores are consistently above those of the earlier cohort.

Which brings me to GCSEs and A levels. The results keep improving there as well. They keep improving because, unlike with IQs, no one was working (until now) to hold them at a consistent figure. If the kids answer the questions well, they get an ‘A’.

It’s all part of the narrative that rubbishes schools that says that the steady improvements in examination results are down to ‘grade inflation’. There may be an element of grade inflation, but my guess is that most of the improvement is down to a variant of the Flynn effect, which also explains James Gallaugher’s extraordinary sprint speed. You can imagine why this happens: with IQ, it’s because so much more information and so many more tools for thinking and learning are about now — kids have access to machines and experiences that previous generations couldn’t even dream of.

Instead of watching Crackerjack on the TV, as I used to do when I got home from school, today’s generation are straight onto their computers. Scattered amongst the games and the music will be the occasional Internet search, which will lead to something else … and something else — they interact with their machines. Kids are encouraged to think, to find things out, to write and communicate in a dozen different ways. They go places, see things and have access to knowledge to which once upon a time only the most privileged had access. It’s no wonder they are getting cannier.

And James Gallaugher’s extraordinary 100m sprint is just as easy to explain. Children are better fed, taller, healthier, have access to better facilities and coaching, which in turn benefits from a hundred years of research into ways of improving running. Running shoes are marvellously improved and tracks are made of high-grip material rather than ashes. Why are we surprised  that things continually improve?

So, today’s kids are not only healthier, they are also more articulate and more knowledgeable than those of previous generations. Schools are better: not only are classes smaller, but children and young people are encouraged to think where once they would have been drilled in handwriting, Latin, and the names of national heroes from history. Teaching is improving all the time: today’s teachers are better educated and better trained, understanding the ways in which children learn. The differences between schools of today and those of my generation, forty years ago, are huge. This is why IQs, exam results — and sprinting speeds — continually improve.

Gary Thomas, Professor in Education, University of Birmingham. He has spent his career working in education, first as a primary school teacher, then as an educational psychologist, then as an academic in five universities. He is the author of Education: A Very Short Introduction.

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(1) Be aware that people with autism can usually understand more than they can express.

Autism doesn’t change the fact that everyone understands more than they can express. When we learn a new language, we can understand what someone is saying long before we can create sentences that demonstrate the depth of our knowledge. Babies can understand a great deal of language before they begin to speak their first words.

People with autism often communicate differently to express what they know and want to share. Some will write thoughts on paper, or draw a picture demonstrating intent. They may use sign language, or a stack of picture cards to convey wants and needs. Many people with autism use shorter sentences with simplified language. This does not mean they are not thinking and comprehending full sentences with higher-level vocabulary. Being willing to communicate in a different way will allow you to be aware that communication comes in many forms. Autism Community provides resources and strategies to assist with communication and children with autism.

(2) Be aware that people with autism can be sensitive.

We learn our senses in first or second grade and can name ‘the five senses’ as tasting, touching, hearing, smelling, and seeing. In addition, we have two other senses that can let us know whether we are upside down or right side up and whether we are being squeezed or free to move. Almost all persons with autism have sensitivities that include one or more of these seven areas. In fact, most people in general have sensitivities in these areas as well. The difference is in the severity of the sensitivities. Some people with autism are hypersensitive to some of these areas and some are hyposensitive to some areas. Every person with autism is different; in fact, every person is different (whether they have autism or not)!

When near someone with autism, pay close attention to the way she reacts to sounds and lights, or how close she wants to stand to others. An awareness of these sensitivities can make a big difference in the way a person with autism engages in social events and activities. The Sensory World of Autism shows the sensory perspective of children with autism spectrum disorder that also struggle with sensory challenges.

(3) Be aware that people with autism think differently.

Someone who has autism often thinks differently. Different is not better or less than — it is just different. Someone with autism may need a longer period of time to process a question or statement. It is also common for a person with autism to think visually (or in pictures) and to be able to express thoughts easier using visual cues or images. An awareness of cognitive differences can go a long way toward being aware of the individual personhood of those with autism.

(4) Be aware that people with autism probably have a specific interest or topic that may help with communication.

Many of us have a specific area of interest that we enjoy discussing. Persons with autism often have an area of interest as well. It can be difficult for someone with autism to stop talking about or communicating this interest; therefore, it can be a great way to get to know someone by asking about this topic.

This awareness can be a terrific ‘ice breaker’ or a way to deepen a relationship with someone who has autism. The Indiana Resource Center for Autism at Indiana University offers unique strategies for parents and teachers in regarding to teaching and motivating children with autism.

(5) Be aware that people with autism tend to focus on the trees rather than the forest.

It can be difficult for someone with autism to think critically without focusing on minute details. If the discussion is about clothing, it may be necessary for the person with autism to discuss the stitching style used by the designer or seamstress. This often leads to the area of interest a person with autism may have, and is part of the cognitive patterning unique, yet familiar, to him. Be aware that the repetition or consistent use of minutiae rather than broad thinking is part of cognitive processing for a person with autism.

(6) Be aware that a child (or adult) with autism may be having a moment in public that seems confusing to you.

Because of sensory, cognitive, communication, and social differences, people with autism (and/or their family members) may sometimes have moments in public that can appear to be very different than they are. Because some people do not understand the differences and challenges that surround a family living with autism, they sometimes offer comments they feel may be helpful, or worse, judging glances and verbal recriminations to a family already in the middle of a negative moment or meltdown.

Being aware of the frustrations and challenges inherent within a family, and remembering to walk a mile in their shoes before coming to a conclusion, can be an excellent start in developing an awareness of autism. Moreover, what family doesn’t have its moments?

(7) Be aware that people with autism may need help with social circumstances.

Social situations can be beyond awkward for someone who has autism. The combination of sensitivities, communication differences, and expectations others have can be overwhelming. Having a friend to help guide a person with autism through the event, or a set of cards with conversation starters, etc. can be very helpful.

Be aware of the possible confusion and uncomfortable feelings someone with autism can have when placed in a social situation. Planning ahead with the needs of the person in mind can lead to a successful and less stressful social encounter. Social stories can be used to help facilitate positive, appropriate social skills.

(8) Be aware that a family that includes a person with autism may be tired and stressed.

It can be exhausting to be part of a family that includes one or more persons with autism. The daily challenges can mount and become overwhelming. Knowing that families who have members with autism (or other challenges) are often under a great deal of stress is a first step toward an empathic view. Families may honestly be too tired to set up play dates, go out to eat, or meet at the park, because the planning and implementation of these seemingly ordinary events can be overshadowed by the demands of daily life (cognition, communication, sensitivities, social challenges).

Awareness of and compassion for the needs of a family is sometimes demonstrated by planning events that take the needs of the entire family into consideration, or even, letting a family ‘off the hook’ knowing they may be exhausted from the demands of their daily lives. Support groups such as the Autism Society of America and Autism Speaks can help families connect with other families to share their stories and obtain services.

(9) Be aware that a child with autism may have siblings that get less attention than they do.

Siblings of those with autism may sometimes feel ignored or set aside because the needs of a brother or sister with autism overshadow the needs of the sibling at times. Developing an awareness of the specific feelings a sibling may have, and responding to that sibling in a way that conveys understanding can make a big difference in the life of that child or adult. Sibshops is a national organization that assists and provides programming for siblings of children with disabilities.

(10) Be aware that a person with autism is a person and not a label.

Autism is a label. Cans, cars, clothing, and technology have labels. People are not labels. A person with autism is a person. Be aware at all times that labels define and limit — real understanding comes with knowing the individual and responding to her needs.

Alice M. Hammel and Ryan M. Hourigan are the authors of Teaching Music to Students with Special Needs: A Label-Free Approach and the forthcoming Teaching Music to Students with Autism. Alice Hammel teaches for James Madison and Virginia Commonwealth Universities, and has years of experience teaching instrumental and choral music. Ryan Hourigan is Assistant Professor of Music Education at Ball State University and a recipient of the Outstanding University Music Educator Award from the Indiana Music Educators Association. The companion website to Teaching Music to Students with Special Needs provides more resources.

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Image credit: (1) via iStockphoto. (2) Having fun in a music class. Photo by SolStock, iStockphoto.

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“You can’t help respecting anybody who can spell TUESDAY, even if he doesn’t spell it right; but spelling isn’t everything. There are days when spelling Tuesday simply doesn’t count.”
- Rabbit of Owl in A.A. Milne, The House at Pooh Corner, chapter 5

As part of his agenda to improve primary school education, Michael Gove plans to invest more teaching time in driving up standards of spelling; his proposals include a list of 162 words which all eleven-year old children will be expected to spell correctly. As his critics were quick to point out, Gove’s belief in the importance of accurate spelling was somewhat undermined by a number of misspellings in the White Paper itself; Tristram Hunt gleefully suggested that Gove, “of all people,” should be able to spell bureaucracy. This highlights one of the golden rules of orthography: before you criticise someone else’s spelling, be sure your own is up to scratch.

This clamp down on spelling standards raises a question which has been debated for centuries. Should we be investing so much school time in teaching children to acquire a spelling system which is bedevilled by idiosyncrasies and inconsistencies?  Wouldn’t it be simpler to reform English spelling to make it easier to learn? Calls for spelling reform have been voiced since the sixteenth century, although the proposers often had conflicting agendas. Where some reformers wished to restore a closer link between spelling and pronunciation, proposing phonetic spellings like niit “knight,” others sought to restore the link between spelling and etymology, introducing silent letters into doubt, scissors, language, thereby driving speech and writing further apart.

While spelling may pose many hurdles for unwary learners, it is by no means clear that it is the reason for comparatively low levels of literacy. Calls for reform today often draw on exaggerated and alarmist claims about the difficulties of English spelling, making unfounded links between English spelling and youth illiteracy and unemployment, and other social ills.   Claims that more transparent spelling systems have resulted in higher levels of literacy in countries like Finland and Spain, where there is a closer relationship between spelling and pronunciation, are based on intuition rather than evidence, and ignore the wide range of social and educational factors that inevitably impact upon early literacy.

The English Spelling Society continues to fly the flag for spelling reform today, lobbying for wholesale simplification of the system. In September 2008 its president, John Wells, proposed relaxing spelling rules, accepting variants such as thru and lite, and ceasing to distinguish between they’re, their and there. In his speech to the Conservative Party conference in October 2008 David Cameron attacked Wells’s proposals, reformulating them as a direct assault upon educational standards:  “He’s the President of the Spelling Society. Well, he’s wrong. And by the way, that’s spelt with a ‘W’.”

There is, however, an important question that gets lost in the politicisation of this debate. Is it necessary to have a standard spelling system? Why do we all need to spell the same way?  It’s easy to imagine that a single spelling system is a necessity rather than a choice, but it is a comparatively recent phenomenon.  In the Middle Ages there were literally hundreds of spellings of common words like through, including drowgh, yhurght, trghug, trowffe.  By comparison, the proposed tolerance of thru seems positively mild.  The proposal to tolerate variant spellings is not new; Mark Twain expressed a disdain for people who were only capable of spelling a word one way, while H.G. Wells viewed unusual spellings as an expression of character and personality. George Bernard Shaw left money in his will to fund an entirely new, “Shavian,” alphabet to replace the current system, whose surplus letters led to the waste of so much time and money: “Shakespeare might have written two or three more plays in the time it took him to spell his name with eleven letters instead of seven.”

Proposals to tolerate spelling variation are not merely evidence of recent liberal attitudes and slipping standards; a similar proposition to that of John Wells was made in a letter to the Times Educational Supplement in 1960, in which the writer questioned the need for a common orthography, suggesting that variants such as sieze, seize and seeze should be deemed equally acceptable.  Who is responsible for these trendy, permissive suggestions? C.S. Lewis. Such a policy would also encourage a more phonetic system, since alternative spellings could accommodate the different accents spoken in Britain and throughout the world.  For instance, speakers of English differ in their pronunciation of words like car and card, depending on their accent.  For Scots, Irish and most North American speakers, who pronounce the r in such words, these are logical spellings.  But for southern English speakers, for whom the r is silent, it would make more sense to spell such words without it.

Standardised spelling is a development closely linked with the introduction of printing; it is the role of copyeditors and proofreaders to ensure that an author’s spelling conforms to the standard. The recent publication of the manuscripts of Jane Austen and Charles Dickens provoked outrage in the media at their poor spelling. But their relaxed attitude to spelling is entirely unremarkable, given that correct spelling was imposed during the printing process. While printing has led to the establishment of a standard spelling system, the private spelling practices of diaries, letters and journals have continued to show considerable diversity up to the present day. The role of publishing houses as the gatekeepers of the standard is coming under increasing pressure today, as private spellings are now diffused more widely via websites, blogs, tweets, emails and other forms of unmediated online communication. There is a tacit acceptance that variant spellings are acceptable in such contexts and consequently the grip of the standard has begun to be loosened. Definitions in the online Urban Dictionary often view such misspellings as superior to conventional spellings; Teusday is labelled an “alternate spelling for Tuesday that better people use.”  C.S. Lewis regularly used this spelling in his private letters; perhaps his extensive reading in medieval literature meant he was reviving an earlier form, or perhaps he agreed with Rabbit that there are some days when spelling Tuesday correctly just doesn’t matter.

Simon Horobin is Professor of English at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Magdalen College. His book, Does Spelling Matter?, examines the role of spelling today, considering why English spelling is so difficult to master, whether it should be reformed, and whether the electronic age signals the demise of correct spelling. He also writes a blog about English spelling.

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Image credit: Rykneld School Spelling Certificate by Lindosland (Own work), shared under Creative Commons CC-BY-SA-3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

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In the 1960s, about the same time that Albert Ellis was developing his original cognitive-behavioral therapy approach and William Glasser was developing his reality therapy (a cognitive behavior approach that evolved into Choice Theory), an educator named Louis Raths was developing a new affective-cognitive-behavioral counseling approach that eventually came to be called “values clarification.”

Raths noticed that young people who seemed apathetic, flighty, over-conforming, or over-dissenting in their behavior could become more purposeful, consistent, and zestful in their lives if they were asked to reflect upon their goals, purposes, and behaviors. He and his students Sidney Simon and Merrill Harmin refined and developed many ways that teachers and counselors could ask students “value-clarifying questions” and “values clarification strategies” to encourage them to reflect on what they prized and cherished, affirm their values with others, consider alternatives and their consequences, make freer choices about their lives, and act on their goals and beliefs in a consistent manner.

While developments and research on cognitive-behavioral therapies proceeded steadily over the decades, in the 1970s and 80s the focus of the values clarification movement stayed mostly on teaching, values education, and character education with youth. Although many of the methods and strategies of values clarification—such as voting, ranking, continuums, inventories, unfinished sentences, and the like—became staples in the repertoire of counselors and therapists, the utility of values clarification as a distinctive counseling approach was lost to one or two generations of new helping professionals.

In the 1980s and 90s, newer counseling and therapy approaches began to emerge on the scene, many of them utilizing concepts and methods of values clarification. Solution-focused therapy relies heavily on questions to help clients identify preferred goals, view their situation from an alternative perspective, consider alternative solutions, and evaluate coping strategies and solutions. Motivational interviewing, which has proven especially effective in alcohol and substance abuse counseling, uses clarifying questions and strategies to build on the client’s intrinsic motivation to change. Appreciative inquiry relies primarily on clarifying questions to help the client identify and capitalize on their strengths, vitalities, aspirations, possibilities, and core values as they set and achieve life and career goals. Acceptance and commitment therapy explicitly includes values clarification as a major component in their research-tested integration of western and eastern “behavior technologies.” Positive psychology recognizes that living according to one’s values is an essential element of life satisfaction.

I can’t help but be pleased that the importance of values clarification seems increasingly to be recognized as an important component in many different therapeutic approaches. Helping clients identify goals and priorities, make good decisions among competing choices, and take positive actions to achieve their goals and priorities—in a word, values clarification—is inevitably an important part of recovery, marriage and family therapy, career counseling, school counseling, pastoral counseling, financial counseling, and many other counseling and therapy foci. While values clarification is not a mental health counseling approach per se, it can be an important tool in psychotherapy when clients are ready to work on their recovery, set goals, and move forward in their lives.

So the question arises for me: Is it sufficient that values clarification seems frequently to be incorporated into many different therapy approaches and venues, or does it deserve its own renewed attention as a distinct counseling modality?

A partial answer to this question came to me in 2000, when I became chair of the Counseling Program at the Warner Graduate School of Education at the University of Rochester. I included the values clarification approach in my methods courses with both Masters students who were new to counseling and doctoral students who often had more counseling experience in certain areas than I did. Many or most of them loved values clarification: “It’s so practical.” “It’s so applicable to my work.” “Whether in individual or group settings, values clarification questions and activities make it so easy for individuals to respond and participate, even the quiet ones.”

So I became convinced that counselors, psychotherapists, psychologists, social workers, and similar helping professionals could benefit by being introduced or re-introduced to values clarification theory and practice, including:

• the focus on prizing (affective), choosing (cognitive), and acting (behavior)
• the seven criteria or valuing processes that fall within those three realms
• the difference between value indicators and values
• how to ask good clarifying questions
• using the “clarifying interview” in individual counseling
• the scores of practical values clarification strategies for individual and group work
• specific applications of values clarification to different counseling topics and settings
• the overall values clarification hypothesis and research
• the appropriateness of values clarification for multicultural populations and issues
• handling value and moral conflicts with clients

In the end, values clarification can be, and often is, used by itself or integrated with almost any other counseling or therapeutic modality. Better that helping professionals use it awarely and to its greatest effectiveness.

Howard Kirschenbaum, Ed.D., is Professor Emeritus and former chair of the Department of Counseling and Human Development, Warner Graduate School of Education and Human Development, University of Rochester. He is the author of Values Clarification in Counseling and Psychotherapy: Practical Strategies for Individual and Group Settings by Oxford University Press and is the author or co-author of additional books on psychology, education, and history, including Values Clarification: A Handbook of Practical Strategies, Readings in Values Clarification, and Advanced Value Clarification. He has given workshops and presentations on the values clarification approach to counseling, psychotherapy and education throughout North America and around the world.

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Two contrasting experiences stick in mind from my first year at university.

First, I spent a lot of time in lectures that I did not understand. I don’t mean lectures in which I got the general gist but didn’t quite follow the technical details. I mean lectures in which I understood not one thing from the beginning to the end. I still went to all the lectures and wrote everything down – I was a dutiful sort of student – but this was hardly the ideal learning experience.

Second, at the end of the year, I was awarded first class marks. The best thing about this was that later that evening, a friend came up to me in the bar and said, “Hey Lara, I hear you got a first!” and I was rapidly surrounded by other friends offering enthusiastic congratulations. This was a revelation. I had attended the kind of school at which students who did well were derided rather than congratulated. I was delighted to find myself in a place where success was celebrated.

Looking back, I think that the interesting thing about these two experiences is the relationship between the two. How could I have done so well when I understood so little of so many lectures?

I don’t think that there was a problem with me. I didn’t come out at the very top, but obviously I had the ability and dedication to get to grips with the mathematics. Nor do I think that there was a problem with the lecturers. Like the vast majority of the mathematicians I have met since, my lecturers cared about their courses and put considerable effort into giving a logically coherent presentation. Not all were natural entertainers, but there was nothing fundamentally wrong with their teaching.

I now think that the problems were more subtle, and related to two issues in particular.

First, there was a communication gap: the lecturers and I did not understand mathematics in the same way. Mathematicians understand mathematics as a network of axioms, definitions, examples, algorithms, theorems, proofs, and applications.  They present and explain these, hoping that students will appreciate the logic of the ideas and will think about the ways in which they can be combined. I didn’t really know how to learn effectively from lectures on abstract material, and research indicates that I was pretty typical in this respect.

Students arrive at university with a set of expectations about what it means to ‘do mathematics’ – about what kind of information teachers will provide and about what students are supposed to do with it. Some of these expectations work well at school but not at university. Many students need to learn, for instance, to treat definitions as stipulative rather than descriptive, to generate and check their own examples, to interpret logical language in a strict, mathematical way rather than a more flexible, context-influenced way, and to infer logical relationships within and across mathematical proofs. These things are expected, but often they are not explicitly taught.

My second problem was that I didn’t have very good study skills. I wasn’t terrible – I wasn’t lazy, or arrogant, or easily distracted, or unwilling to put in the hours. But I wasn’t very effective in deciding how to spend my study time. In fact, I don’t remember making many conscious decisions about it at all. I would try a question, find it difficult, stare out of the window, become worried, attempt to study some section of my lecture notes instead, fail at that too, and end up discouraged. Again, many students are like this. I have met a few who probably should have postponed university until they were ready to exercise some self-discipline, but most do want to learn.

What they lack is a set of strategies for managing their learning – for deciding how to distribute their time when no-one is checking what they’ve done from one class to the next, and for maintaining momentum when things get difficult. Many could improve their effectiveness by doing simple things like systematically prioritizing study tasks, and developing a routine in which they study particular subjects in particular gaps between lectures.  Again, the responsibility for learning these skills lies primarily with the student.

Personally, I never got to a point where I understood every lecture. But I learned how to make sense of abstract material, I developed strategies for studying effectively, and I maintained my first class marks. What I would now say to current students is this: take charge. Find out what lecturers and tutors are expecting, and take opportunities to learn about good study habits. Students who do that should find, like I did, that undergraduate mathematics is challenging, but a pleasure to learn.

Lara Alcock is a Senior Lecturer in the Mathematics Education Centre at Loughborough University. She has taught both mathematics and mathematics education to undergraduates and postgraduates in the UK and the US. She conducts research on the ways in which undergraduates and mathematicians learn and think about mathematics, and she was recently awarded the Selden Prize for Research in Undergraduate Mathematics Education. She is the author of How to Study for a Mathematics Degree (2012, UK) and How to Study as a Mathematics Major (2013, US).

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In the past ten years, there has been growing interest in applying our knowledge of the human brain to the field of education, including reading, learning, language, and mathematics. Teachers themselves have embraced the neuro revolution enthusiastically. A recent investigation in the US-based journal Mind, Brain, and Education showed that almost 90% of teachers consider knowledge about brain functioning relevant for the planning of education programmes.

This has resulted in the development of a number of new practices in education: some good, some bad, and some just crazy. Too often, people with the clout to make decisions about which practice is potentially profitable in the classroom setting, ignore evidence in favour of gut feelings, the authority of ‘gurus’, or unwarranted convictions. In short, opinions rather than data too often inform implementations in schools. Hence we have had theories suggesting that listening to Mozart can boost intelligence, foot massages can help unruly pupils, fish oil can boost brain power, and even the idea that breathing through your left nostril can enhance creativity! Sadly, it is often scientists themselves who promulgate unsubstantiated procedures.

We shouldn’t ignore the good practices and innovations in education thanks to the developing neuro revolution. A popular example might be the neuroscience data suggesting a strong neural link between fingers and numbers. This is testified by the observation that 6 year old children who are good in recognizing their fingers when touched will later also be better at arithmetical performances. However, more often than not “the good” classroom developments are actually centered around more mainstream cognitive findings. One such finding, named spaced practice, has been replicated many times; it shows that distributing learning over time is more efficient than massing it all together. For example, if students stockpile learning just before an exam, they may do well enough, but if they want to retain the material in the long term, then retrieving it via multiple tests is much better.

Inevitably, we are drawn to discussing “the bad” developments: one of our favourite examples is the use of ineffective coloured lenses to aid reading. This and several other unproven “aids” are potentially damaging the whole idea that knowledge of the mind-brain may contribute to efficacious educational practice. And of course much of current enthusiasm for neuroeducation involves ugly mistranslations of excellent research into an educational arena. Take for instance the misapplication of the well developed theory of reading  (the so called dual-route theory) which has been caricatured and wrongly applied in education to justify an ideological stance from teachers preferring a whole-reading (or holistic) approach at the expense of phonics-based teaching. Briefly, the dual-route theory says that single-word reading can be accomplished through a route of letter to sound conversion (phonics) or through a route of direct visual recognition (whole word reading). It does not say that both are equally effective in teaching children to read. Indeed, several studies have demonstrated that phonics is a more effective method; yet the holistic approach to learning to read rages in the classrooms.

The neuro- prefix is very fashionable nowadays, and neuroeducation is just one of the myriad offsprings. Neuroscience offers an invaluable contribution to assess, diagnose, and perhaps manage pathologies, including pathologies of learning in children and adolescents. However, neuroscience as such has so far proved to have little to offer to everyday, normal education. The discipline which has most to offer is instead cognitive psychology, and from this comes some of the “good” that scientists could endow education with. Some of the findings from cognition are solid and counter-intuitive; for example, retrieval practice that, though receiving little support by pedagogists, has proved effective in improving pupils’ learning. This practice is based on the finding that retrieving material through several testing enhances learning of that material more than studying it over and over again.

The psychology of learning could prove efficacious in an educational context.  However, science should never be prescriptive; it offers possible windows of knowledge which may or may not be applicable or relevant in specific contexts such as the classroom. There are no ready-made recipes when it comes to mastering the relevance of brain functioning to teaching today. The last thing teachers need is to be superficially trained in neuroscience, but they should certainly watch this space.

Sergio Della Sala is a Clinical Neurologist, Professor of Human Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Edinburgh, UK. He is co-editor with Mike Anderson of Neuroscience in Education: the good, the bad, and the ugly, and editor of Cortex. His research focuses on the cognitive deficits associated with brain damage.

Mike Anderson is a Professor of Psychology and Director of the Neurocognitive Development Unit at the University of Western Australia. His research focuses on the influence of the developing brain on intellectual functions in children.

Image credit: Photograph of boy studying by Lewis Wickes Hine, ca. 1924, via Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, National Child Labor Committee Collection, [image number nclc.05276].

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In the wake of another national tragedy, it is more apparent than ever that our schools must embrace a stronger role in supporting the mental health of our youth by developing trauma-sensitive schools. The mass shooting in Newtown, Connecticut that killed several staff and 20 elementary school students came less than two months after Hurricane Sandy, a storm that brought devastation and displacement to tens of thousands of people in the Northeast. Both events offer stark reminders of the acute stress our students may face when experiencing cataclysmic events. However, even in the absence of such tragedies, many of our nation’s children are in chronic distress.

Despite our collective efforts, youth continue to have adverse and traumatic experiences, such as chronic child maltreatment, domestic and community violence, homelessness, natural disasters, parental substance abuse, death of a loved one, and the list goes on. These experiences can significantly undermine the ability to learn, form relationships, and manage emotions and behavior; all critical components of succeeding in school and in life. To improve our country’s education system, we must first address these barriers to progress; and schools remain the most logical place to do it.

As a school psychologist, I have had the privilege of working with students, parents, and fellow educators to help students learn, develop, and grow in a healthy environment. I have also had the challenge of identifying the mental health problems that impede learning where all too often, the initial question is, “What’s wrong with you?” rather than “What happened to you?” or “How can we help?” Some believe that schools are in the business of educating, not mental health. On the contrary, supporting student mental health is a pre-requisite to learning, not an afterthought.

Interestingly, while only a fraction of kids who need mental health care actually receive it, 70-80% of those that do receive it get it at school. Schools often have a cadre of health and mental health supports available. For example, in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, the NYC Department of Education mobilized their staff with an all hands on deck approach. However, even with the most talented and ambitious group of mental health professionals in a school system, it’s unlikely that they can provide the full range of mental health supports to every student in need. A main challenge is first identifying students in need when a stressor is not as obvious as a hurricane or a school shooting. Moreover, some symptoms of childhood trauma may not fully manifest until adolescence, at a time where some may view that behavior as an unrelated outcome of that early experience.

Trauma-sensitive classrooms and schools provide an environment where all adults in the building have an awareness and sensitivity to the potential impact of trauma and adverse experiences on students’ lives. The initial thinking behind low academic performance or bad behavior is not automatically that the student is willfully disobedient, unmotivated, and unintelligent. Trauma-sensitive schools are places where all youth feel safe, connected, and supported — not just the youth who don’t need mental health care or those that need it most. Trauma-sensitive schools augment and supplement the herculean efforts of the school-based mental health professionals and in a sense, provide a continuous and universal mental health intervention system.

Creating trauma-sensitive schools requires a great deal of commitment. First, we know that most, if not all, teacher preparation programs don’t include training to prepare teachers to identify, teach, and support traumatized students. This is a problem, particularly given the demands on teacher preparation programs, and teachers themselves. The duties of a teacher are added on with regularity, and rarely removed. Therefore, we must infuse some content on the impacts of trauma and mental health on learning throughout teacher preparation and professional development programs.

Second, we must leverage the existing mental health professionals that exist in schools, including school psychologists, school counselors, school social workers, school nurses, and other school-based mental health providers. Utilizing them more effectively could include more regular consultation with teachers and administrators on developing trauma-sensitive strategies and perspectives. These individuals can also provide in-services to staff at no additional cost. Meeting this demand also means properly funding enough positions to provide these services along with the intensive direct services to students in need.

Finally, this requires a culture change — often more easily said than done. Luckily, some groups have emerged as leaders in creating trauma-sensitive schools, including the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education and the State of Washington Office of the Superintendant of Public Education. Much can be learned from the efforts of these pioneer systems.

Many of our kids are in distress, and our schools remain our frontline opportunity to support them.

Eric Rossen is the co-editor of Supporting and Educating Traumatized Students: A Guide for School-Based Professionals with Robert Hull. Eric Rossen, Ph.D., is a nationally certified school psychologist and licensed psychologist in Maryland. He currently serves as Director of Professional Development and Standards at the National Association of School Psychologists. Robert Hull, Ed.S., MHS, is a school psychologist in Prince George’s County Public Schools, Maryland, serves on the faculty at the University of Missouri, and holds a position as adjunct faculty at Goucher College.

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Probably like most librarians, I went to library school because I loved books and associated libraries with some of my fondest book-related memories. In my childhood, and through college, I used libraries to find books. Occasionally I used periodicals or even microfiche, but the library, to me, was all about the books. I learned in library school that library collections were becoming increasingly digital, and that most of the things libraries purchased were journals; already, in the mid-1990s, the collection was much more than an aggregation of monographs, and had been for a long time. But students coming to use the library had no choice but to encounter books, and it would have been very difficult to complete any research assignment without using some print publications.

Penrose Library, University of Denver (11-19-12). Creative Commons License.

Overall, electronic resources are a good thing — an amazing thing. They can be used by students wherever they happen to be; they can be searched in ways that would have been unimaginable a decade ago; they free up valuable shelf space; and they make available incredible content that would have required focused research trips when I was in college. Resources like Early English Books Online or London Low Life — just two of hundreds available to University of Denver students — make it possible to conduct primary research at levels impossible at most universities not too long ago.

But we have done such an amazing job building digital collections that students can attend the University of Denver without ever needing to touch paper publications, without ever having to encounter physical books — and that’s a shame. There is value to the book as a physical object, and libraries need to find ways to emphasize that value to digital natives.

At the University of Denver, we decided to emphasize books — while still committing strongly to our digital collections — by increasing funding for special collections. Within that context, we began collecting artists’ books heavily about five years ago and now have a collection of almost 900 titles, many of them unique. There are larger and more important collections at many libraries, but our collection is quickly becoming significant.

Artists’ books are works of art, books where the container is as important as the content, and books that call out to be handled. When done well, artists’ books can impact all of our senses. Direction of the Road, by Ursula K. Le Guin, produced in an elaborate edition by Foolscap Press, uses the texture of the paper to mimic the rustling of leaves. And this book’s use of anamorphic art always surprises readers. But artists’ books can also be quite simple. A Diction, a small but powerful book, shaped like a pint glass, uses simple text and white space to capture the experience of addiction.

As students become less and less used to physical books, this collection gives them a chance to immerse themselves in the book. It is a reminder that libraries have always been about books, and will continue to be about books even when most of our collections become digital.

There are some terrific resources for learning more about artists’ books. Vamp & Tramp Booksellers — besides having a wonderful name and being run by wonderful people — has a great website that makes it easy to get a sense of the books they carry. Joshua Heller Rare Books and Priscilla Juvelis have great selections as well. And the Guild of Book Workers maintains a useful list of Book Arts Links.

Michael Levine-Clark is the Associate Dean for Scholarly Communication and Collections Services at the University of Denver’s Penrose Library. He is co-editor of the journal Collaborative Librarianship, co-editor of The ALA Glossary of Library and Information Science, 4th edition, and co-editor of the Encyclopedia of Library and Information Science, 4th edition. He has been a member or chair of many committees within library organizations, and has served on a variety of national and international publisher and vendor library advisory boards. He writes and speaks regularly on strategies for improving academic library collection development practices, including the use of e-books in academic libraries and the development of demand-driven acquisition (DDA) models. Read his previous blog posts: “An academic librarian without a library” and “Replacing ILL with temporary leases of ebooks.”

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Image credit: Photograph of Steacie Science and Engineering Library at York University by Raysonho@Open Grid Scheduler. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

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DRM and the new Thought Police

The answer is snooping. And it’s not just electronic textbooks that monitor reading habits. Kindles and iPads track what we read and when, record our bookmarks and annotations, remind us what we searched for last, and suggest other titles we may like. They collect our personal reading data in the name of improving, not our grade, but our digital reading experience, and along the way they may sell the metric of how and what and when we read and use it to improve the company’s bottom line as well.

It’s uncomfortable enough to sense a reader over your shoulder on your morning commute, but every time we fire up an iBook, Kindle, or Nook, there’s an e-reader over our shoulder as well. CCTV may monitor our comings and goings from the outside, but e-readers have spyware that actually looks inside our heads. And e-books provide the ultimate interactive experience: they read us while we are reading them.

Most people don’t seem to mind: they insist it’s no Faustian bargain to trade a little bit of personal data for the convenience of a digital download. Besides, ebooks cost less than printed ones, and didn’t Mark Zuckerberg say that privacy is dead?

And yet we still expect our reading to be private. Librarians will risk jail rather than tell government snoops what their patrons are reading, because the right to read unobserved is a fundamental component of the right to privacy. But when a vendor like Apple or Amazon tracks our reading matter, we don’t invoke Big Brother. Instead, we’re more complacent, accepting this intrusion on our literary solitude because that’s how capitalism is supposed to work.

Another thing that’s different about ebooks besides their lower price is that most of them, including electronic textbooks, are covered by a digital rights management agreement, or DRM. That means we’re actually renting ebooks, not buying them, and that has implications for our reading privacy as well. DRM gives the ebook’s real owners the right to manage their property and to check up on readers to make sure we’re not violating the terms of our lease.

Typically that means we can’t copy passages from an ebook, resell it, lend it to a friend, or give it away. Kindle’s DRM says it all: “You may not sell, rent, lease, distribute, broadcast, sublicense, or otherwise assign any rights to the Kindle Content or any portion of it to any third party.” And even though Amazon invites you to “buy” a Kindle ebook, it’s the language of the DRM, not the button that we click, that governs the transaction: “Kindle Content is licensed, not sold, to you by the Content Provider.” [Kindle Content is what we used to call books, and content providers are what we used to call bookstores.]

Content providers are free to control their property even after we’ve downloaded it to our personal e-readers. That’s how Amazon justified secretly removing copies of George Orwell’s 1984 from readers’ Kindles when the company discovered it had been selling a bootleg edition of the work. When news of this peremptory take-back came out, though, there was a public outcry. Amazon apologized for not notifying customers in advance, but not for seizing the books — the DRM gives Amazon the right to reach into customers’ digital devices and remove company property. Moreover, in cases where it thinks that customers have violated the terms of service agreement, Amazon, like any responsible landlord, may lock them out of their account and delete the contents of their library. The DRM agreement may not say so explicitly, but it allows Amazon, Apple, or any other “content provider” to revoke your right to read.

And what about a student’s right to read? Or not to read? Enrolling in a class shouldn’t require students to surrender their privacy to the Thought Police any more than it requires them to surrender their freedom of speech at the schoolhouse gate. It’s not even clear that ebook spyware will improve student performance. It may tell instructors if their students are hitting the books, and how much time it takes them to plow through chapter seven. But that may not really correlate with success in a course. Many students insist they learn the course material not from the textbook, but from lectures and discussions, by working problem sets, or by reading SparkNotes.

Digital technology gives us access to information, to content, if you will, on a scale never before possible. But it works two ways, giving content, or content providers, access to us as well. Our keystrokes, our browsing history, our likes and dislikes, all of that becomes the property, not of the reader, but of the digital rights manager. As George Orwell put it so succinctly in 1984, “BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU.”

Ebook analytics, or, the watcher watched: While you read 1984 on your digital device, 1984 reads you.

Dennis Baron is Professor of English and Linguistics at the University of Illinois. His book, A Better Pencil: Readers, Writers, and the Digital Revolution, looks at the evolution of communication technology, from pencils to pixels. You can view his previous OUPblog posts here or read more on his personal site, The Web of Language, where this article originally appeared. Until next time, keep up with Professor Baron on Twitter: @DrGrammar.

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Like Doug Henwood, I’ve spent the last few days trying to figure out why people — particularly liberals and pseudo-liberals in the chattering classes — hate teachers unions. One could of course take these people at their word — they care about the kids, they worry that strikes hurt the kids, and so on — but since we never hear a peep out of them about the fact that students have to swelter through 98-degree weather in jam-packed classes without air conditioning, I’m not so inclined.

Forgive me then if I essay an admittedly more impressionistic analysis drawn from my own experience.

Like many of these journalists, I hail from an upper middle class background. I grew up in Chappaqua, an affluent suburb of New York. My parents moved there in 1975 for the schools, which were — and I believe still are — terrific. From elementary school through senior year, I had some of the best teachers I’ve ever encountered.

Two of my social studies teachers — Allan Damon and Tom Corwin — had more of an impact on me than any professor I ever had in college or grad school. In their classes, I read Richard Hofstadter’s Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, E.H. Carr’s What Is History?, Michael Kammen’s People of Paradox, Hobbes, Locke, Richard Hakluyt, Albert Thayer Mahan, and more. When I got to college, I found that I was considerably better prepared than my classmates, many of whom had gone to elite private schools in Manhattan and elsewhere. It’s safe to say I would never have become an academic were it not for these two men.

We also had a terrific performing arts program. Phil Stewart, Chappaqua’s legendary acting teacher, trained Vanessa Williams, Roxanne Hart, Dar Williams, and more. We put on obscure musicals and  destabilizing plays like The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. Ronald Dunn, our choral teacher, had us singing Leonard Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms, Vivaldi’s Gloria, and the works of Fauré. So inspiring were these teachers that many of us went onto organize our own plays, musicals, and a cappella groups, while we were still in high school.

Despite this, many kids and their parents held teachers in contempt. Teachers were not figures of respect or gratitude; they were incompetents and buffoons. Don’t get me wrong: like most people, I had some terrible teachers. Incompetents and worse. But like most people I’ve also had some terrible friends, some terrible co-workers, some terrible neighbors, some terrible doctors, some terrible editors, and some terrible professors. Mediocrity, I’d venture, is a more or less universal feature of the human condition. But among the upper classes it’s treated as the exclusive preserve of teachers.

It’s odd. Even if you’re the most toolish striver — i.e., many of the people I grew up with — teachers are your ticket to the Ivy League. And if you’re an intellectually ambitious academic type like me, they’re even more critical. Like I said, people move to Chappaqua for the schools, and if the graduation and post-graduate statistics are any indication — in my graduating class of 270, I’d guess about 50 of us went onto an Ivy League school — they’re getting their money’s worth. Yet many people I grew up with treated teachers as bumptious figures of ridicule — and not in your anarchist-critique-of-all-social-institutions kind of way.

It’s clear where the kids got it from: the parents. Every year there’d be a fight in the town over the school budget, and every year a vocal contingent would scream that the town was wasting money (and raising needless taxes) on its schools. Especially on the teachers (I never heard anyone criticize the sports teams). People hate paying taxes for any number of reasons — though financial hardship, in this case, was hardly one of them — but there was a special pique reserved for what the taxes were mostly going to: the teachers.

In my childhood world, grown ups basically saw teachers as failures and fuck-ups. “Those who can’t do, teach” goes the old saw. But where that traditionally bespoke a suspicion of fancy ideas that didn’t produce anything concrete, in my fancy suburb, it meant something else. Teachers had opted out of the capitalist game; they weren’t in this world for money. There could be only one reason for that: they were losers. They were dimwitted, unambitious, complacent, unimaginative, and risk-averse. They were middle class.

No one, we were sure, became a teacher because she loved history or literature and wanted to pass that on to the next generation. All of them simply had no other choice. How did we know that? Because they weren’t lawyers or doctors or “businessmen” — one of those words, even in the post-Madmen era, still spoken with veneration and awe. It was a circular argument, to be sure, but its circularity merely reflected the closed universe of assumption in which we operated.

Like my teachers, I have chosen a career in education and don’t make a lot of money. Unlike them, I’m a professor. I’m continuously astonished at the pass that gets me among the people I grew up with. Had I chosen to be a high-school teacher, I’d be just another loser. But tenured professors are different. Especially if we teach in elite schools (which I don’t.) We’re more talented, more refined, more ambitious—more like them. We’re capitalist tools, too.

So that’s where and how I grew up. And when I hear journalists and commentators, many of them fresh out of the Ivy League, talking to teachers as if they were servants trying to steal the family silver, that’s what I hear. It’s an ugly tone from ugly people.

Every so often I want to ask them, “Didn’t your parents teach you better manners?” Then I remember whom I’m dealing with.

Corey Robin teaches political science at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center, and is the author of The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin. He blogs at coreyrobin.com, where this post originally appeared.

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This fall about ten million undergraduate students will be heading back to America’s 2500 four-year colleges and universities, and they will be attending schools that are significantly more attuned to religion than they were ten or twenty or thirty years ago. Today’s students encounter religion in a wide variety of forms and settings, both on campus and off. They participate in traditional religious activities, they take classes about the history and sociology of culture wars and religious extremism, they interact with friends from diverse religious backgrounds, and they experiment with different forms of personal spirituality. Religion has “returned” to higher education, and the scope and nature of the learning taking place on campuses today is being enriched by this development.

We use the word “return” in quotes when referring to religion because the religion that is returning to higher education is a new kind of religion. In the past, religion usually meant historic religion or what is sometimes called “organized” religion. Many of the Ivies and older universities had been founded for the purpose of training students as ministers, and Christian or Judeo-Christian values and beliefs retained their strong influence on many colleges and universities until well into the twentieth century. But by the last half of the 20th century, secularization had become the academic norm, and religion was intentionally shunted aside, relegated to the private worlds of individuals.

In the last two or three decades religion in America has changed. Religion in America is now pluriform, a term we use to refer to the fact that American religion is now both pluralistic (because it includes all of the world’s historic religions) and spiritually brackish (meaning the boundary line between what is religious or spiritual and what is not religious has been thoroughly blurred). Some atheists may describe themselves as spiritual, and those who are non-religious (about 30% of the traditional-college-age population) often actively seek a religious-like sense of grounding, purpose, and meaning in their lives. As for trying to restrict religion to some kind of purely private or personal dimension of life, the terrorist attacks of 9/11 halted that myth once and for all.

Almost everyone now agrees that religion plays a major role in just about every aspect of American and global culture. For the past five years we have studied the ways colleges and universities are responding to religion’s return. At Harvard, it meant debating the inclusion of religion in general education requirements, while MIT appointed the first-ever Chaplain to the Institute. At the University of North Dakota, “spiritual wellness” was added to the list of major educational goals, and on dozens of campuses space was set aside for Muslim prayer rooms.

Based on conversations with hundreds of faculty, students, and administrators at colleges and universities as varied as Penn State, Vassar, and Brigham Young University, we have isolated six religious questions that are central to higher education. The first two questions deal with “historic religion” (i.e. traditional organized religion), the next two questions focus on “public religion,” and the last two are related to “personal religion” (i.e. spirituality):

• What should an educated person know about the world’s religions?
• What are appropriate ways to interact with those of other faiths?
• What assumptions and rationalities — secular or religious — shape the way we think?
• What values and practices — religious or secular — shape civic engagement?
• In what ways do the personal convictions of students and faculty enter into the teaching and learning process?
• How might colleges and universities point students toward lives of meaning and purpose?

These questions capture a mix of knowledge-based items (like religious literacy) and more reflective concerns about how religion functions in the world and in individual lives. Devoting time and energy to answering these questions will strike some critics as a luxury that simply can’t be afforded when college costs are soaring, student debt is mounting, and graduates are not getting jobs. But higher education in America has always been about more than jobs and about more than the merely practical. It has also been about understanding oneself and the world. In today’s religiously pluriform era, it may be that these “softer” competencies are precisely the ones that colleges and universities cannot afford to ignore.

Douglas “Jake” Jacobsen (Ph.D., History of Christianity, University of Chicago) and Rhonda Hustedt Jacobsen (Ed.D., Social Foundations of Education, Temple University), members of the faculty at Messiah College, are co-directors of the Religion in the Academy Project and co-authors of No Longer Invisible: Religion in University Education (Oxford, 2012).

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Image credit: This building is Stuart Hall, in the main quadrangle of the University of Chicago campus. Photo by peterspiro, iStockphoto.

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While standing at the local superstore watching my children choose their colorful binders and pencils for the upcoming school year, I saw another family at the end of the aisle. Their two sons had great difficulty accessing the space because of the crowd and they were clearly over-stimulated by the sights and sounds of this tax-free weekend shopping day. One boy began crying and the other soon curled into a ball next to the packets of college-lined paper. My daughter, empathic to a fault, leaned down and offered her Blues Clues notebook in an effort to make the boy happier. When we finally walked away, I saw the same pain and embarrassment in the eyes of the parents that I have often seen at parent-teacher conferences and IEP meetings.

For many families, the start of a new school year is exciting and refreshing. The opportunity to see old friends, meet new ones, and the ease of settling into a fall routine can be comforting. For families of students with special needs, however, the start of a school year can be anxious, frustrating, and filled with reminders of the deficits (social and academic) of their children. This dichotomy is clear and present as some children bound off the school bus with their shiny new backpacks hanging from their shoulders, while others are assisted off different buses as their eyes and bodies prepare for what sometimes feels like an assault on their very personhood.

These differences are apparent to parents as well as teachers and administrators at schools. Professionals often ask: “What can we do to be the best teachers for these students?”

Consider what school can mean for students who are different and how to create ways to welcome everyone, according to their needs. Before the school year begins, these longstanding suggestions still resonate as best practices for parents and students:

(1) Contact the student before the school year begins to be sure the student and family are aware that you are genuinely looking forward to working with them and have exciting plans for the school year! Everyone learns differently and wants to be honored for their ability to contribute. In the Eye Illusion not everyone is able to see the changes in the dots as they move around the circle. What you see isn’t better or worse — just different. When we think of students and children in the same way, by removing the stigma of labels and considering the needs of all, we become more of a community and less of a hierarchy.

(2) Be aware of all students in the classes you teach. Know their areas of strength and challenge, and be prepared to adapt teaching strategies to include them. We cannot expect students and children all to be the same. Use a fable to illustrate that everyone has strengths and can become an integral part of the learning experience.

(3) Review teaching practices: modalities, colors, sizes, and pacing. All students enjoy learning through various modalities (visual, aural, kinesthetic), love colors in their classroom, appreciate sizing differences to assist with visual concepts, and can benefit from pacing that is more applicable to them. Find ways to include these practices in an overall approach. Universal design (applied to the classroom) means that all students receive adaptations to enhance their learning experience, and no one is singled out as being different because of the adaptations applied.

(4) Create partnerships with all professionals who work with special needs students. A team approach is a powerful way to include everyone effectively. When we work as a team, everyone benefits and the workload is shared by all. This community of professionals creates a culture of shared responsibility and joy.

(5) Provide a clear line of communication with parents of students with disabilities. Often children cannot come home and tell their parents about events, assignments, announcements, and other important parts of their school day. Parents may not be able to gauge whether their child had a good day or if there are concerns. A journal between teacher and parent(s) can be a comforting and useful tool. This communication may also be done electronically through a secure Google or Yahoo group. Reading Rockets provides other useful tips in this area.

(6) Leave labels out of the conversation when communicating with parents. Parents can be sensitive to their child being known only by their diagnosis. In addition, some parents may be still processing the life change that comes with raising a child with special needs. When entering into a conversation with a parent, focus on your classroom and the needs of the student. If there is a concern, try to put the concern in the most positive light as possible. The Parent-Provider network at Purdue University offers some great tips as well for communicating with parents.

(7) Let parents know of student accomplishments even if they are small. Students with special needs often encounter failure. Parents attend countless meetings that remind them of all the challenges their children face. A note home when something goes well can make all the difference.

(8) Allow the parent and the child to visit prior to the start of school if the child is new. Students who are enrolling in a new program or a new school may have difficulty with this transition. Often this transition can cause anxiety that will hinder a child from seeing school as a comfortable, safe place. Walk them through the routines: where they sit, where materials are, etc. Social stories (short stories written in third person to illustrate an everyday situation) can also be useful in this circumstance. When read prior to beginning school, these stories help them move through their transition.

A culture of acceptance and compassion must permeate our educational institutions. By categorizing, labeling, and noting differences, we are often putting children in boxes that can then, unfortunately, define them for the rest of their lives. Every child wants to be part of the school experience and seeks to participate to the best of his ability. When the class and school culture are created to honor the personhood of every child, and each child is considered valuable to the success of every school experience, all children begin to enjoy the same childhood experiences.

Alice M. Hammel and Ryan M. Hourigan are the authors of Teaching Music to Students with Special Needs: A Label-Free Approach. Alice Hammel teaches for James Madison and Virginia Commonwealth Universities, and has years of experience teaching instrumental and choral music. Ryan Hourigan is Assistant Professor of Music Education at Ball State University and a recipient of the Outstanding University Music Educator Award from the Indiana Music Educators Association. The companion website to Teaching Music to Students with Special Needs provides more resources.

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Image credit: Having fun in a music class. Photo by SolStock, iStockphoto.

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For this back-to-school season, I would like to offer some advice about one of the most frequent problems presented to me in over 30 years of clinical practice: battles over homework. I have half-jokingly told many parents that if the schools of New York State no longer required homework, our children’s education would suffer, but as a child psychologist I would be out of business.

Many parents accept this conflict with their children as an unavoidable consequence of responsible parenting. These battles, however, rarely result in improved learning or performance in school. More often than not, battles over homework lead to vicious cycles of nagging by parents, and avoidance or refusal by children. This cycle doesn’t improve a child’s school performance and certainly doesn’t make progress toward what should be our ultimate goal. We want to help children enjoy learning, and develop age-appropriate discipline and independence with respect to their schoolwork.

Remember that the solution to the homework problem always begins with an accurate diagnosis and a recognition of the demands placed on your child. Parents should never assume that a child who resists doing homework is “lazy.”

Every child whose parents or teachers report ongoing resistance to completing schoolwork or homework, whose performance in school is below expectations based on his parents’ or teachers’ intuitive assessment of his intellectual potential, and who complains that he “hates school” or “hates reading” over an extended period of time, should be evaluated for the presence of an attention or learning disorder.

These children are not lazy. Your child may be anxious, frustrated, discouraged, distracted or angry, but this is not laziness. I frequently explain to parents that, as a psychologist, the word lazy is not in my dictionary. Lazy, at best, is a description, not an explanation.

For children with learning difficulties, doing their homework is like running with a sprained ankle. It is possible, although painful, and he will look for ways to avoid or postpone this painful and discouraging task.

A Homework Plan

Homework, like any constructive activity, involves moments of frustration, discouragement, and anxiety. If you begin with some appreciation of your child’s frustration and discouragement, you will be better able to put in place a structure that helps him learn to work through his frustration, and to develop increments of frustration tolerance and self-discipline.

• Set aside a specified and limited time for homework. Establish, early in the evening, a homework hour.
• For most children, immediately after school is not the best time for homework. This is a time for sports, music, drama, and free play.
• During the homework hour, all electronics are turned off for the entire family.
• Work is done in a communal place, such as at the kitchen or dining room table. Contrary to older conventional wisdom, most elementary school children are able to work more much effectively in a common area, with an adult and even other children present, than in the “quiet” of their rooms.
• Parents may do their own “homework” during this time, but they are present and continually available to help, to offer encouragement, and to answer children’s questions. Your goal is to create, to the extent possible, a library atmosphere in your home for a specified and limited period of time. Ideally, parents shouldn’t make or receive telephone calls during this hour. When homework is done, there is time for play.
• Begin with a reasonable amount of time set aside for homework. If your child is unable to work for 20 minutes, begin with 10 minutes. Then try 15 minutes the next week. Acknowledge every increment of effort, however small.
• Be positive and give frequent encouragement. Make note of every improvement, not every mistake.
• Be generous with your praise. Praise their effort, not their innate ability.
• Anticipate setbacks. After a difficult day, reset for the following day.
• Give them time. A child’s difficulty completing homework begins as a problem of frustration and discouragement, but it is then complicated by defiant attitudes and feelings of unfairness. A homework plan will begin to reduce these defiant attitudes, but this will not happen overnight.

Most families have found these suggestions helpful, especially for elementary school children. Establishing a homework hour allows parents to move away from a language of threats (“If you don’t… you won’t be able to…”) to a language of opportunities (“As soon as” you have finished… we’ll have a chance to…”).

Of course, for many hurried families, there are complications and potential glitches in implementing any homework plan. It is often difficult, with children’s many activities, to find a consistent time for homework. Some flexibility and amendments may be required. But we shouldn’t use the complications of scheduling or other competing demands as an excuse or a reason not to establish the structure of a reasonable homework routine.

Kenneth Barish is the author of Pride and Joy: A Guide to Understanding Your Child’s Emotions and Solving Family Problems and Clinical Associate Professor of Psychology at Weill Medical College, Cornell University. He is also on the faculty of the Westchester Center for the Study of Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy and the William Alanson White Institute Child and Adolescent Psychotherapy Training Program. Read his previous blog posts “Helping children learn to accept defeat gracefully” and “Emotion, interest, and motivation in children.”

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Leading British gay rights charity, Stonewall, have produced a new report into the extent of homophobia in British schools. Surveying 1,600 sexual minority youth, it finds that 55% of lesbian, gay and bisexual (LGB) students experience homophobic bullying, 96% hear “homophobic remarks” and that homophobia frequently goes unchallenged. This builds on their 2007 report, which argued that homophobia was “endemic” and “almost epidemic” in British schools. These are harrowing findings, but they obscure rather than reveal the social dynamics of many British schools today.

It is important to recognize that no peer-reviewed, academic research has ever documented such high levels of homophobia in the UK. Indeed, while scholars found schools to be homophobic in the 1980s and early 1990s, more recent research, including my own, has argued that there has been an erosion of homophobia in school settings. I suggest this difference in findings is the result of methodological and analytical flaws in Stonewall’s survey.

The first issue is one that always besets quantitative research on sexual minority youth — participant recruitment. Although the report itself does not document the methods of recruiting sexual minority youth, one of the authors wrote that it involved contact with “LGB groups, school and college portals, FB, a few tweets” (personal correspondence). It is well-known that the young people who attend LGB groups, and are known by teachers as LGB in schools, tend to be those who have had bad experiences, oftentimes because of their gender non-conformity. By recruiting participants from these groups, the report is biased toward hearing the horror stories — from those who have had bad experiences — and likely has more to say about gender non-conformity than sexual minorities. While bullying based on gender non-conformity is as horrific a problem as bullying for any other reason, it skews the results to be about a particular type of LGB youth.

The second problem is one of attrition. Although Stonewall have not made the survey questions available, I read through them when the survey was live. It took 15 minutes to read all of the questions, which were repetitive and asked if the participant had experienced a wide range of events (from positive acts to extreme homophobia). The long survey biases the report towards those who have had bad experiences; young people who have suffered homophobia will be far motivated to complete the survey than those whose sexuality has not been a significant issue. Highlighting this, a gay male academic colleague of mine took the survey, and reported to me that he quit half way through; it was just too long. This, of course, brings up another issue; anyone can fill the survey out and there is no method of controlling for actual school-attending youth.

None of these issues would be significant if Stonewall had tempered their claims of generalizability. The School Report 2012 is an important document to the extent that it helps illuminate the troubled lives of students who do suffer sustained homophobic harassment. In other words, it demonstrates how students who have a bad time have a bad time. What it does not and cannot do, however, is provide generalizable statistics on the experiences of LGB youth in schools. The great shame, then, is that the report consistently makes claims about the experiences of all LGB students, never recognizing the limitations of its sample.

This overstating is evident in other ways. For example, the quotes given to support statements in the report frequently appear to be exemplars of the worst case. So when the report claims that “more than half” of LGB students “experience homophobic bullying,” the accompanying quote refers to a death threat where someone would “shove a knife up my arse and in my throat.” This is sensationalist reporting and not representative research, and it serves to obscure the reality of many LGB people’s lives. Furthermore, Stonewall’s continued insistence that ‘that’s so gay’ is homophobic (discussing it in a section on bullying) demonstrates a lack of willingness to engage with contemporary debates on homophobia in school settings. And while it finds that many LGB students dislike ‘that’s so gay’, it does not account for whether the youth interpret this phrase as bullying.

The overwhelming emphasis on the negative aspects of homophobia in Stonewall’s School Reports is somewhat perplexing. After all, they have a range of publications examining changing attitudes to homosexuality in the United Kingdom, most of which document significant improvements with some negative issues. For example, in Living Together, Cowan (2007) found that 87% of British citizens report they would be comfortable with their MP being gay, and 86% would be comfortable if a close friend was gay. Yet when it comes to schools, Stonewall’s presentation of the data is unremittingly negative. It may be that Stonewall staff are unaware of the methodological and analytical flaws, or that they are influenced by their own experiences at school. Or maybe they have found an area that receives great media attention and loosens the pockets of financial donors. Whatever the reason, it is significant that The School Reports are so very negative despite seemingly positive findings located in its latter half.

It is not my argument that homophobia is no longer present in school settings. Rather, my argument is that what is needed is high quality, methodologically rigorous research to examine when and why this occurs. This would involve researchers going into schools and surveying a range of students. It would require time, money and effort on recruiting the full panoply of sexual minority youth to ensure that all their voices are heard. This takes a great deal more work than simply posting a survey online and recruiting through existing networks who are likely to have had a particular school experience. The School Report 2012 is a missed opportunity to inform the debate on homophobia in British schools, but the greater concern is that its overwhelmingly negative tone may encourage kids to stay in the closet.

Mark McCormack is a qualitative sociologist at Brunel University in England. His research focuses on the changing nature of masculinities among British youth. In The Declining Significance of Homophobia: How Teenage Boys are Redefining Masculinity and Heterosexuality, he examines how decreased homophobia has positively influenced the way in which young men bond emotionally and interact in school settings. You can follow him on Twitter @_markmccormack.

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Image credit: Gay Men Hands Clasped. Photo by Lisa-Blue, iStockphoto.

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“My child will be starting school in two weeks. I can’t believe summer is almost over. I’m beginning to worry. Ellie still has trouble reading simple words and she does not like to read. I had problems with reading at her age. I wonder if I should wait till December to have her assessed or do it right now.”

“Katie’s teacher raised a flag last year. Katie will be in the third grade in a few weeks. I think she has a problem with reading and attention.”

Getting ready to go back to school can be a challenge. It is even more of a challenge when you suspect something is not quite right with your child. As parents, we do not want our child to have problems. We deeply want our child to be o.k. in everyday life. When our child suffers, we suffer as well.

What Ellie and Katie’s parents do not know is that their children are at risk for dyslexia. Dyslexia refers to “unexpected” difficulty in learning to read. In other words, reading fails to develop in the child despite their intelligence, education, motivation, and exposure to reading instruction in school. By the end of kindergarten, a child should be naming the letters of the alphabet, writing letters of the alphabet, learning that letters are associated with sounds, and even decoding simple sight words. A child should be reading and spelling words correctly at their grade level in first grade. Unfortunately, many parents tell me that their child will grow out of the problem. In fact, Katie’s father also acknowledged he had problems with reading. Ellie is voicing much frustration because reading words is difficult. Reading clearly isn’t fun. At the same time, Ellie’s mother thinks it is the lack of structure in the classroom that is causing the problem.

As parents, we need to trust our gut when things are a little off. The keys to recognizing a possible disorder could exist are the frequency, intensity, and pervasiveness of the behaviors:

• Frequency: How often is your child exhibiting these behaviors?
• Intensity: How severe are the behaviors compared to that of other children their age?
• Pervasiveness: Are the behavior(s) occurring in many situations? For example, are the behaviors exhibited during classroom instruction, tests, and homework time?

What are some of the warning signs when a child is exhibiting troubles with reading in kindergarten? You may notice the following challenges:

• Pronouncing words
• Reciting popular nursery rhymes
• Recalling the names of letters
• Recognizing the names of letters
• Recognizing common sight words
• Voicing frustration when sounding out simple words
• Sustaining attention and concentration when reading a story or when you are reading a story

You and the teachers may also recognize the following warning signs in elementary school:

• Relies on memorizing words
• Rushes and substitutes words when reading
• Problems spelling words
• No problems understanding text when read to orally
• Voices frustration and complains of fatigue when reading
• Complains about rereading material
• Problems remembering what was read
• Difficulty completing tests and in-class work on time
• Dreads reading in front of the class
• Stumbles over words and has trouble thinking of the right word when conversing with others

Early intervention is the key to unlocking the reading process for the child before frustration and anger sets in. A child’s reading problem must be addressed as soon as possible because the research indicates the younger child will react more positively to the reading intervention. Kindergarten and first grade are critical points as most long-term problems with reading can be prevented. We know that approximately 95 percent of children who have difficulties in reading can reach grade level if they are helped within the first two years of elementary school. Unfortunately, the gap between struggling readers and typical readers widens after the second grade. As a result, it is more difficult to remediate a reading problem once a child falls behind.

Ellie and Katie’s parents initially sought help from their pediatrician. Their physical, vision, and hearing examinations were normal. Their second step was to consult with me, a neuropsychologist. I told Ellie’s parents that their daughter lacked the ability to distinguish sounds within words and syllables. Ellie had trouble processing the sounds of speech, called phonemes. Katie’s father was told his daughter struggled when blending sounds together and she had problems sounding out unfamiliar words. She also exhibited problems with attention, which made reading even more difficult. I suggested help from a reading specialist. The parents learned there were many reading programs that were evidence-based (programs that work) and explicit and systematic in their approach. We know that both students will benefit from early intervention.

We can truly help our children if we intervene at an early age. Trust your gut if you think something is “a little off.” You know your child best of all. Voice your concerns to your child’s teacher and pediatrician. Remember: helping your child at a young age will save you and your child much frustration in the years to come.

Karen Schiltz is the co-author of Beyond The Label: A Guide to Unlocking a Child’s Educational Potential and Associate Clinical Professor (volunteer) at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Behavior at the University of California, Los Angeles. She has over 26 years of experience assessing children and young adults with developmental, medical, and emotional disorders and maintains a private practice in Calabasas, California. She blogs for Psychology Today at “Beyond the Label.”

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Recently the second year-medical students (Class of 2014) at the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine honored me with the L.D.H. Wood Pre-Clinical Teaching Award. This occasion prompted me to reflect on what made the Medical Neurobiology class that I taught in the fall of 2011 so successful. I believe that the following were key to the class’s success:

Give every lecture yourself. Reducing the number of instructors (particularly to one) is a sure-fire way to increase continuity, decrease redundancy, and generally improve the reception of any course. My single-authored textbook written specifically for medical students, Medical Neurobiology, was published by OUP in May 2011. I wanted to figure out if the book ‘worked,’ so I needed to teach the whole course.

Make certain students always know where they are and where they are going. My lectures went in the same order as the chapters of the book and virtually everything in my lectures was in the book. This allowed students to listen and try to understand in real time rather than focus on taking notes.

Address clinical issues at the first moment students could possibly understand a disease, disorder, or therapeutic approach. I opened the class with a discussion of locked-in syndrome and closed it with a comparison between locked-in syndrome and global amnesia, touching on several clinical issues in every class in between.

Focus on topics that any physician, regardless of specialty, needs to learn and remember in 25 years. Hammer home important points repeatedly. At least some of the students felt prepared enough for the midterm that they spent the preceding days studying for their other class’s midterm to be held several days later.

Explain everything simply. Anything, even very complex topics, can be explained simply. Peppering my lectures with metaphors, I wanted the material to make sense to the students, obviating the need for memorization beyond the bare minimum (viz. vocabulary).

Emphasize links between neurobiology and diseases that are not under the traditional purview of neurology. Building on lecture examples, students were asked to try their own hand at it in an extra credit assignment. The resulting essays discussing how neurobiology relates to internal medicine, surgery, pediatrics, geriatrics, oncology, rehabilitation medicine, and so on were gratifying.

Quiz the students early and often. The class was intense, covering all of neurobiology in six short weeks. As I planned for the course, I worried a great deal about the potential for students to fall behind. Every laboratory was followed immediately by a short practical quiz. Every week there was a quiz on the lecture material. Consequently students were tested 2-3 times each week. Whether because of these draconian measures or just because the students were outstanding, I don’t know, but no one in the class fell behind. And everyone passed with plenty of room to spare.

Get students to ask questions. Students asked many questions, every class, and these were great questions — not a single one was of the “will this be on the test?” variety. Questions of clarification allowed me to know when I was losing some portion of the students so that I could find another way to convey the material. Questions of interest revealed the personalities of the students, which in turn rendered the class more personal and actually, quite fun.

Make the class as good for you as it is for the students. As Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi argues in Flow (Harper & Row Publishers, 1990), optimal experience is not just about being successful; optimal experience also requires accomplishing something that is difficult. The students learned a ton — enough to render the neurology portion of their Clinical Pathophysiology and Therapeutics class simply a matter of conceptual review (plus a bit more vocabulary). The fact that the students succeeded paired with the challenging material is what made this class satisfying for the students. The class was just as satisfying for me because not only did I find out that my book ‘worked’ (which was gratifying) but I successfully communicated a great deal of material in a short time.

In the end, my experience tells me that teaching is about far more than a transfer of knowledge. Such a transfer can be accomplished by reading a book or even an internet site. However, when a teacher and students occupy the same physical space, something mysterious, magical and wonderful can happen: communication and learning! The students will learn readily if they feel like the teacher is a full partner. Students respond to energy with energy. And teachers are in turn energized by engaged students. In the fall of 2011, the students and I were mutually and actively engaged in a collective effort. They worked hard. I worked hard. It paid off. And we had fun. The outstanding students, the Pritzker class of 2014, were my invaluable partners and I treasure my experience with them.

Peggy Mason was educated at Harvard (BA ’83, PhD ’87) and did postdoctoral work at the University of California-San Francisco. Since 1992, she has been on the faculty of the University of Chicago and has taught neurobiology to medical students. She is now Professor of Neurobiology and the author of Medical Neurobiology.

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Multiracial medical students wearing lab coats studying in classroom. Photo by goldenKB, iStockphoto.

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One of the things that I love about being a librarian is that as a profession, we work together to share ideas and resources. Perhaps the most remarkable example of this collaborative spirit is interlibrary loan (ILL). We send each other books, DVDs, CDs, articles — whatever we can reasonably share. And we do this at considerable expense to our own institutions because we see a mutual benefit. When we lend something, we know that other libraries will lend things to us, for our students and faculty to use. ILL is amazing, a wonderful service, but as I’ve argued before, it doesn’t make much sense in a world of digital collections.

With physical objects (typically books), ILL is often the only way for my library to provide our users with the research material they need. For books that aren’t in our collection and are often out of print, the only place we can go is to another library. But ILL is a time-consuming and expensive practice. Consider the steps:

1. A student identifies a book that she needs for a research project.
2. She searches her library catalog and discovers that it’s not available locally.
3. She fills out a web form to request that her ILL department borrow that book from some other library.
4. The ILL staff do some searching, find another library that owns that book, and request it.
5. The other library receives that request.
6. Staff at the other library identify a location for that book, pull it from the shelf, check it out, pack it up, and mail it to my library.
7. Staff at the borrowing library unpack the book, check it in to the ILL system, and generate a notice to the student that her book has arrived.
8. The student comes to the library and checks the book out.
9. When she is done, she returns it.
10. The local ILL staff check it back in, pack it back up, and mail it.
11. The other library receives it.
12. Staff at that library unpack it, check it back in, and return it to the shelf.

All of those steps have costs involved — some of which are sunk into salary. In a recent study, Lars Leon and Nancy Kress estimated that it costs a library $9.62 on average to borrow a book and $3.93 to lend a book (and every transaction involves both sets of costs).

Imagine the same set of steps for an e-book:

1. A student identifies an e-book that she needs for a research project.
2. She searches her library catalog and discovers that it’s not available locally.
3. She fills out a web form to request that her ILL department borrow that e-book from some other library.
4. The ILL staff do some searching, find another library that owns that e-book, and request it.
5. The other library receives that request.
6. Staff at the other library check to make sure they have the right to loan that e-book.
7. They either send a PDF or a link (probably turning off access to the e-book locally).
8. Staff at the borrowing library receive the PDF or the URL, check it in to the ILL system, and generate a notice to the student that her e-book has arrived.
9. The student logs in to access the e-book.

There are fewer steps, but this is still an expensive and inefficient process, particularly when you consider that the student has to wait for something that could be available immediately in digital format.

Librarians need to stop trying to recreate ILL for e-books. Instead, we should work with publishers to develop a model to lease e-books temporarily. Imagine these steps:

1. A student identifies an e-book that she needs for a research project.
2. She searches her library catalog and discovers a link to a version that can be leased by the library temporarily.
3. She clicks the link to that e-book and begins reading, while behind the scenes her library is billed for that use.

If we could do this for less than the cost of a typical ILL transaction, we could save money and time, getting that book to the student instantly. The major e-book aggregators (EBL, ebrary, MyiLibrary) for academic libraries already do this, but they only have a small portion of the books we need. Publishers need to collaborate with libraries and the aggregators to make it possible for libraries to gain immediate and temporary access to e-books at the point of need.

Michael Levine-Clark is the Associate Dean for Scholarly Communication and Collections Services at the University of Denver’s Penrose Library. He is co-editor of the journal Collaborative Librarianship, co-editor of The ALA Glossary of Library and Information Science, 4th edition, and co-editor of the Encyclopedia of Library and Information Science, 4th edition. He has been a member or chair of many committees within library organizations, and has served on a variety of national and international publisher and vendor library advisory boards. He writes and speaks regularly on strategies for improving academic library collection development practices, including the use of e-books in academic libraries and the development of demand-driven acquisition (DDA) models. Read his previous blog post: “An academic librarian without a library.”

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If you’re interested in library topics, you may also be interested in The Oxford Guide to Library Research. With all of the new developments in information storage and retrieval, researchers today need a clear and comprehensive overview of the full range of their options, both online and offline, for finding the best information quickly. Thomas Mann, Ph.D., a former private investigator, is currently a Reference Librarian in the Main Reading Room of the Library of Congress.

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Photograph of Steacie Science and Engineering Library at York University by Raysonho@Open Grid Scheduler. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

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If you ask many people, “How long does it take to train as a doctor?”, the response would probably be five years. And many people joke that it takes longer to train as a vet than a medic! However the simple answer is that a doctor is always training in one form or another, and that as medical professionals, we should always be striving to be the best.

A new, common training structure brought in in 2007 sees doctors completing an arduous five to six years at medical school, before starting their careers on the wards proper. This entails a series of placements spread across two years designed to introduce them to the different fields or specialties within a medical career.

Next follows a period of up to eight years of training within their chosen specialty. During that time, doctors are faced with attaining membership of their chosen Royal College. For example, paediatricians must become members of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health by completing a succession of written and practical exams.  Only then do they become a consultant.

These exams are extremely challenging and test the candidate’s medical and scientific knowledge. The pass mark is set so that less than 50% of candidates sitting the exam pass and only the best prepared and the brightest ones will get through. Over the years, I have met many excellent doctors who have failed to progress into their chosen careers because they stumbled at this hurdle too many times and eventually gave up.

Each exam can cost several hundred pounds to sit, and most candidates will need to take three exams across this stage of training. Coupled with the very real chance they’ll need to resit their exams, the investment can run into several thousand pounds, on top of the debt they accrued whilst at medical school.

However you could argue that whilst these doctors are cash rich, they are definitely time poor. Alongside their studies, doctors are still juggling their 48-hours per week work commitments. Draw the short straw on your rota, and you could face an exam at 9 a.m. at the other end of the country, in the middle of a week of night shifts.

Given these challenges, it’s not uncommon for candidates to revise for up to four months in the lead up to their exams. Approaching exams in the same professional manner in which they deal with patients on the wards is critical. Everyone has a preferred learning style, but practising suturing skills with your partner may not be entirely practical! So in the lead-up to the exams, many candidates will prepare by answering hundreds, if not thousands of questions, using books and online materials.

The exams themselves are timed and long! Depending on the specialty, candidates can be expected to answer in excess of 100 questions in four hours — tough going when you need to carefully read, assimilate, and then make a clinical judgement on the information you’re presented with.

We expect our doctors to be just as competent at the ‘softer’ skills too. The patient-focused exams test candidates’ abilities to ask the right questions, give the right answers, but most importantly offer the patient a treatment and management plan that is bespoke to them. We focus a lot on ‘outcomes’ in healthcare, but we should always remember that the outcome is what the patient wants, and not necessarily what we feel best.

The UK has one of the most rigorous approaches to medical training and I’m pleased that that’s the case. We are clear in our expectations of doctors, and we do expect a lot of them, but it means that we get only the best working in the NHS.

Iqbal Khan is a Consultant Gastroenterologist and General Physician at Northampton General Hospital. He is also an Honorary Lecturer with the Universities of Leicester and Oxford. He has written two textbooks for candidates preparing towards the MRCP(UK) exam and is a Moderator for the PASSit online revision website, from Oxford University Press.

Pass your Royal College exams first time with PASSit, the new revision service from Oxford University Press. PASSit provides high quality questions with clear, detailed answers and explanations, to make sure the knowledge sinks in. There are tools to track your progress and target your revision, designed to make revision work for you. Give yourself the best chance, and revise with PASSit. Start revising today!

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We at OUP are no strangers to the changes in publishing and all the different forms a ‘book’ can take. One of our recent medical titles has been adapted as an iPad application (or ‘app’) — Cardiac Imaging Cases: Cases in Radiology for iPad — so we asked the co-author what it’s like to practice and learn medicine in this new form.

By Charles White

For those of us who have been in the radiology business for a while, technology is always changing things for the better. Innovations such as PET scanning, multidetector CT, PACS, and voice recognition software have changed the way we practice.

Education has also been favorable affected. Teaching using PACS is far easier than using sheets of CT film as we once did. Even the way we learn from books is different. Previously this was done in a linear sequential fashion.


• Cardiac Imaging Cases

   

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• Home

   

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• Case 37

   

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• Index

   

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• Case 44: Coronary Artery Calcification

   

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• Photograph and Illustration

   

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Now, apps focused on radiology allow us to personalize our learning in a manner that best suits us. We can review an area comprehensively or quickly jump to a particular topic that is of interest at the moment, perhaps because we have encountered it in our daily work. We can evaluate ourselves using unknown cases. Apps allow us to link to literature for further detail and consult with others using social media. It permits real time display and discussion of difficult or interesting cases with colleagues at remote sites.

This capability has transformed our previously linear approach to practice and learning to a truly multidimensional strategy.

Charles White is Professor of Radiology and Medicine, Chief of Thoracic Radiology, Department of Diagnostic Radiology and Nuclear Medicine, University of Maryland Medical Center, Baltimore, Maryland. Joseph Chen is a Clinical Assistant Professor in the Department of Diagnostic Radiology and Nuclear Medicine, University of Maryland Medical Center, Baltimore, Maryland. Together, they are the authors of Cardiac Imaging Cases, on which the Cardiac Imaging Cases: Cases in Radiology for iPad application is based. Learn more about the Cardiac Imaging Cases iPad application on this dedicated microsite. Marteau is a digital strategy agency specializing in mobile and emerging platforms.

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(1) Ignore the bullying complaints, or deny or minimize them.

It’s very difficult for a child or young person to come forward with complaints of being bullied in the first place. The negative acts involved in bullying like name-calling, taunting, mocking, spreading rumors, social exclusion, or throwing things at the victim are humiliating. No child or young person wants to be disliked by peers and to have to disclose to an adult that they are targets of bullying can be a source of further shame. Additionally, kids frequently internalize the humiliation to which they have been subjected and begin to wonder whether they, in fact, deserve it. Kids believe that telling an adult won’t make the bullying stop or will actually make it worse by subjecting them to further retaliation. They question whether teachers and school administrators are really committed to stopping bullying.

(2) Justify doing nothing about a bullying complaint because the kid making the complaint is troubled, has family problems, or has been labeled as a whiner.

Bullying is a public health problem and requires a community-based response to reduce and prevent it. Kids who already have emotional or psychological problems, family problems, or who are new to the neighborhood or school are more vulnerable to the effects of bullying. For these kids immediate and effective intervention may be life-saving. In a sad and ironic twist, kids who entrust information about their psychological or psychiatric problems to their peers and who end up being bullied may find that the very information they shared with their “friends” is now used to humiliate them. For example, kids diagnosed with ADHD who are on Ritalin or those diagnosed with depression who are on anti-depressants and who share that information in an act of trust can find it coming back to haunt them in the form of taunts and belittling if they are bullied. Pre-existing personal or family problems don’t negate the impact of bullying; they amplify it.

(3) Blame the victim or make the victim responsible for stopping the bullying.

Telling kids who are victims of bullying to work it out between themselves, to toughen up and get stronger, to ignore it, to be more friendly, or to reconcile with the bullies are all versions of either blaming the victim or putting the responsibility for solving the bullying problem on the shoulders of the victim. None of these so-called solutions are likely to work and recommending them will serve only to cause further injury and suffering to the victim. To solve the problem of bullying, kids need the leadership and support of knowledgeable and compassionate teachers and parents who are willing to talk about bullying and its effects and who are willing to intervene actively to stop it.

(4) Believe that bullying is an isolated problem.

In 2009, the National Center for Educational Statistics reported that 28% of students between the ages of 12 and 18 acknowledged being bullied during the school year. However, when the question posed is whether kids have ever experienced bullying or have ever been the target of verbal abuse or public humiliation, the percentage of kids who say that they have been the target of such abuse at some point in time goes as high as 75%, depending on the study. Bullying occurs in multiple locations in the school, including in teacher-supervised classrooms, as well as in off-school locations, in homes where parents are present, in school buses, in car pools under the noses of parents, and on the internet.

(5) For schools, fail to have a clear anti-bullying policy that is enforced.

Kids, parents, and school personnel are often unclear about what kinds of behaviors are bullying behaviors. To help raise awareness about bullying and, for the sake of fairness, a clear definition of what bullying is and the kinds of negative acts involved in bullying, together with a description of its harmful effects, should be included in anti-bullying policies. Within a particular school or school district it’s important that a shared understanding of what constitutes bullying be developed. Additionally, a clear description of the consequences for participating in bullying should be spelled out. Finally, anti-bullying policies in place must be enforced because a policy not enforced is often worse than no policy at all.

(6) Fail to teach children about kindness and compassion.

Bullying is intended to hurt others and cause them suffering and pain. Developing empathy, the ability to appreciate what another is feeling and experiencing, reduces aggression. Empathy, kindness, and compassion are emotional competencies that children need to learn in order to becoming caring people who can participate non-abusively in relationships. Parents who are willing to share their own emotions with their children and talk about the importance of understanding another person’s perspective and feelings are raising emotionally fluent children and, in the process, working to prevent bullying. Teachers and schools can also help by teaching empathy and tolerance and by modeling attentive and caring practices of conflict resolution.

(7) Don’t provide training or learn about how to respond to bullying.

There is no question that responding to complaints of bullying can be difficult and demanding. Teachers, school counselors, school administrators, and parents are all potential first responders in incidents of bullying. First responders have to be trained. Not enough teachers and school personnel have been provided with adequate training about how to respond to claims of bullying and how to protect victims. Whole school and whole community programs to address and prevent bullying from the ground up rather than the top down are needed. Communities like South Hadley, Massachusetts that have been rocked by the suicides of young people who were bullied are demanding education and accountability. No community wants to get on the map because it mishandled bullying in its midst that led to grievous harm to its children.

Maureen Duffy is a family therapist, educator, and consultant about school and workplace issues, including mobbing and bullying, and is the co-author of Mobbing: Causes, Consequences, and Solutions. She maintains an active clinical and consulting practice that includes clients who have been injured as a result of mobbing and bullying.

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I’m sitting in a dorm room — complete with the uncontrollable blast heat I remember from college — the space that has been my office since June, when the library shut down for a major renovation. Besides having to get used to a somewhat uncomfortable and isolated space, my colleagues and I have had to learn to be librarians without a library building, and our students and faculty have had to learn to use physical collections that are entirely offsite. And the campus community has had to think about the question of what a library is and should be, particularly the question of how to find and use our physical monographs.

Library Bureau (1903). Source: New York Public Library.

Somewhat surprisingly perhaps, this arrangement is working out well. My office is uncomfortable, and I miss the daily contact with students that I had in the library, but it hasn’t been particularly disruptive to be working in a dormitory. The ballroom-library is always busy, and is probably too loud, but comments from faculty and students have been generally positive. There was a great deal of concern about the collections before the move (mostly about the fact that the university originally planned to bring only 25% of the monographs back to campus — now up to 50%), but every comment I’ve heard from faculty and students about the temporary dislocation has been positive. We are delivering books within two hours of their request, which makes it much easier not to have them available for instant access. In fact, I suspect that some of our students and faculty find the request and delivery of books to be easier than a visit to the stacks, and will continue to find it that way once we move into our renovated building. The only issue with which we have heard real concern since the move is the difficulty in finding study space.

Despite the fact that we are getting books to their users very quickly, I find it interesting that the most disruptive part of our temporary setup has not been the loss of onsite collections. This is surprising given the outcry we heard last spring about the damage a move to closed stacks offsite would do to the possibility of serendipitous discovery, a concern that is hardly unique to the University of Denver. But browsing the stacks has never been an ideal method for finding books—even books that you might only find if you happen to stumble upon them. Browsing library shelves requires books to be on those shelves, but for multiple reasons, not all books on a topic are on the shelf at the point that someone is conducting research:

(1) Many books are checked out to other users at any given time, so aren’t discoverable by browsing.
(2) Books can receive only one call number — and live on only one section of shelving — so catalogers have to decide where to place a book that covers multiple subjects.
(3) Libraries are increasingly purchasing or subscribing to e-books, which are not ever going to be found on the shelf.
(4) Libraries often work together to distribute collecting responsibilities across a state or region, so not all books are in the library.

Browsing, then, is not an ideal method for finding books. We should be able to build online tools that allow for serendipitous discovery across all of these categories of information, that allow users to browse for e-books and print books at the same time, and that allow multiple sets of call numbers to serve as subject markers within an online discovery tool rather than as a single shelf location. In the meantime, our students and faculty are getting used to requesting books through the catalog.

All of which raises the question of what exactly a library is — the study space? The services? The collections? All of the above, of course, but perhaps when we think about the library as a place, we need to put more emphasis on the first two than on the latter, while figuring out how best to provide access to print materials in the context of ever-growing digital collections.

Michael Levine-Clark is the Collections Librarian and Professor at the University of Denver’s Penrose Library. He is co-editor of the journal Collaborative Librarianship, co-editor of The ALA Glossary of Library and Information Science, 4th edition, and co-editor of the Encyclopedia of Library and Information Science, 4th edition. He has been a member or chair of many committees within library organizations, and has served on a variety of national and international publisher and vendor library advisory boards. He writes and speaks regularly on strategies for improving academic library collection development practices, including the use of e-books in academic libraries and the development of demand-driven acquisition (DDA) models.

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Italian panel depicting Charles Darwin, created ca. 1890, on display at the Turin Museum of Human Anatomy. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

By Karl S. Rosengren, Sarah K. Brem, E. Margaret Evans and Gale M. Sinatra

Today is Darwin’s birthday. It’s doubtful that any scientist would deny Darwin’s importance, that his work provides the field of biology with its core structure, by providing a beautiful, powerful mechanism to explain the diversity of form and function that we see all around us in the living world. But being of importance to one’s field is only one way we judge a scientist’s contributions. There is also the matter of how their work has changed lives all over the world, even of those who don’t know or necessarily care about their accomplishments. What has Darwin done for his fellow human beings? Why should they care about what he showed us, or want to learn what he had to teach?

Understanding evolution is challenging, for many reasons. We often point to the religious questions raised by his work as the cause of these difficulties, but there are many more. No creature decides to change their DNA, nor can a species foresee what they should become to survive, but it sure seems like they do. Evolution provides such elegant solutions to incredibly complex problems, it’s hard to see them as the product of random variation and selection. Even for people who lack religious convictions that make evolution discomforting, it’s hard to grasp the mechanisms of evolution. This difficulty arises out of developmental constraints that lead us to look for centralized, intentional agents when we make causal attributions. It comes out of the challenges inherent in altering our conceptions of the world and replacing one belief system with another, and out of the emotional reaction we have to facing the reality that we are not special or superior to our biological cousins, nor are we in control of the fate of our species in generations to come.

If we’re going to ask people to expend the time and effort it requires to wrap their heads around a idea like biological evolution, it seems as though there ought to be a really big payoff for all that work. So, what does learning about evolution get us?

We’ve asked this question to quite a few teachers, biologists, philosophers, and educational researchers along the course of several projects, the most extensive and recent being the one that led to the edited volume OUP will be putting out soon on teaching and learning about evolution. The reaction is almost always the same. First, there is the pause, as they blink, startled that anyone would be asking such a thing. Often they call upon evolution’s importance to science, and its beauty and elegance — who wouldn’t want to spend their time contemplating that? But if pushed back, and asked what practical value they could point to that would make the struggle of mastering these complex ideas worthwhile, they have a hard time coming up with an answer. The most common responses revolve around the (mis)use of antibiotics, and that people need to know that taking these drugs too often could cause real long-term harm. The second most popular argument is that people should understand the importance of biodiversity, how fragile species become when their gene pool dwindles and ecological balances are disrupted, and that being a part of nature — not above it — comes with responsibilities. Usually, though, the list stops about there.

It would be hard to argue against the idea that people in certain professions need to know about evolution. Certainly doctors do, not just because of the dangers in overusing antibiotics, but also because evolutionary theory allows us to understand many of the ways that the agents of disease and our defenses have co-evolved, giving us the insight to find better ways to fight illness. Research chemists who use animal models of human organ systems need to understand the foundation that gives these experiments meaning. Engineers often mimic the processes of evolution to find design solutions in complex problem spaces. Educators who teach science need to understand evolution so that they can pass on this knowledge to the students who are interested, and who will take a career path that requires this knowledge. But for the rest of us, should learning about evolution be an educational requirement, or an offering that those who are interested could elect to take, and others pass over?

The easiest argument, and perhaps one of the most compelling for us as academics is the argument behind all forms of liberal arts education—that being exposed to a broader set of ideas gives you a greater pool to draw upon when looking for the solution to some problem. But this could be made about any number of topics, so it isn’t very interesting here. What we’re looking for is practical gains that people could not achieve without a solid understanding of evolution. What’s your answer?

Karl S. Rosengren, Sarah K. Brem, E. Margaret Evans and Gale M. Sinatra are the editors of Evolution Challenges: Integrating Research and Practice in Teaching and Learning about Evolution. Karl S. Rosengren is a Professor of Psychology at Northwestern University. He has published widely in the fields of cognitive and motor development. In his current research he examines cultural influences in the development of causal reasoning and how children acquire different types of beliefs. He is a fellow of APS. Sarah K. Brem is an Associate Professor in the School of Social and Family Dynamics at Arizona State University. A cognitive scientist, her research focuses on public use and understanding of scientific and technical information. She is the recipient of a National Science Foundation Early Career Award. E. Margaret Evans is an Associate Research Scientist at the Center for Human Growth and Development at the University of Michigan. Her research, funded by NSF and the Spencer Foundation, focuses on the cognitive and cultural factors influencing the developmental of scientific and religious concepts. In her current studies she investigates the emergence of developmental learning progressions for evolution as children and their parents encounter museum exhibitions on evolution. Gale M. Sinatra is a Professor at the Rossier School of Education at the University of Southern California. She has served as an editor of Educational Psychologist and the Vice President of AERA’s Division C, Learning and Instruction. She is a fellow of APA and AERA. Her research focuses on the role of emotions and motivation in reasoning about socio-scientific issues.

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Despite your legal training, you’ve decided to pursue a career in business. This career change will immediately raise a red flag for business employers. Your answer can make or break your chance of employment.

Why do you want to work in business rather than law?

The question is especially vexing if your heart has been set on working as an attorney. That’s the reason you went to law school. Even today, if you a law firm offered you a job, you’d choose it over business. But, legal jobs are scarce in this economy.

If you voice those thoughts, the interviewer will politely thank you and usher you out the door.  You’ve touched a fear-arousing hot button.

To understand the interviewer’s concerns, consider the expenses of filling an important job. An employer’s costs of the full hiring process are roughly twice the amount of the position’s starting salary.

Employers count on recouping these expenses, so they must hire an individual who will stay long enough to justify their investment. Their greatest fear is that you’ll get bored and seek employment as an attorney.  They can’t afford the risk of hiring you if there’s the slightest suspicion you’ll bail out in a year or two.

Your answer to the key question must make them feel completely confident that you’re 100% committed to a long term career in business. How can you remove an interviewer’s doubts and still give an honest answer?

For several years your life has been centered exclusively on law school. Your education and your dreams have pointed to one goal–becoming a lawyer. As a result your current employment decision is conceived in terms of leaving the law and settling for a business job.  Try reframing the choice.

How would you like a job that: (1) utilizes your legal training; and that (2) involves you in exciting and complex business ventures? Realistically, you know that many attorneys get bored with the law after a few years and end up hating their work. Contrast that scenario with a career that will be filled with ever changing challenges and will provide financially rewards commensurate with your accomplishments.

From a long term perspective, life as an attorney isn’t necessarily more attractive than the alternative. If you reach a similar conclusion, then you have a forthright answer to the job interview question. Begin with a statement that affirms your commitment to business, such as, “I’ve realized business is the only career track that’s perfectly suited to my temperament and my drive to succeed.”

Explain that during law school you recognized you’d probably become bored with the detailed repetitiveness of legal practice.  You need to use your analytic skills and legal knowledge to real world decisions and results.  You then realized you could only find lasting fulfillment in the business world.

When phrased in your own language, your answer will remove any doubts about your commitment, and you’ll ace the interview.

Jerald Jellison, Ph.D., has been a Professor of Psychology at the University of Southern California for three decades. For fifteen years he taught a skills-based course on transitioning from the university to business. Jellison is the author of Life After Grad School: Getting From A to B.

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