Catherine F. Brooks

Toward ‘hybridised’ faculty development for the twenty‐first century: blending online communities of practice and face‐to‐face meetings in instructional and professional support programmes

This manuscript begins with a synthesis of research on communities, communities of practice (CoPs), and the potential for their development in online forums, while specifically discussing the value of virtual CoPs for educational professionals in higher education. Working within constructivist and sociocultural frameworks, this manuscript addresses how online forums for faculty support can be beneficial in ways distinct from face‐to‐face environments. Further, this paper presents an argument for the hybridisation of faculty development by suggesting that online forums for collegial interaction are viable and culturally sensitive complements to traditional face‐to‐face faculty support, socialisation, and mentoring programmes. In conclusion, resources that can assist in designing a hybrid model of faculty development are offered.

Talking about bodies online: Viagra, YouTube, and the politics of public(ized) sexualities

The development of Viagra in the late 1990s ushered in a new age of conversation about sex and sexuality, as mens bodily abilities were put on display for all to discuss. In 2005, the video-sharing technology YouTube was launched. Taken together, these technological innovations – both biomedical and representational – have produced debate around sex, sexualized and gendered bodies, and sexual health. This article interrogates Viagra-related representations posted on YouTube and analyzes sexuopharmaceuticals as a set of intertextualities that create space for both normative discourses and social critiques. Three analytic themes illustrate how Viagra-related YouTube videos (1) reinforce a regime of self-care within a wider context of individualized responsibility for ones sexual health, (2) highlight the values attached to the pharmasexed gendered body for men and women in the age of Viagra, and (3) provide disruptions, in the form of criticism, to the assumption that healthy bodies and relationships need pharmasexual enhancement. The article concludes by suggesting that social networking sites such as YouTube are managed public spaces through which one can interrogate the intertextualities that link discourses related to bodies and sexual health to the virtual and material spaces of everyday life.

Communication and identity management in a globally-connected classroom: An online international and intercultural learning experience

ABSTRACT Though global classrooms are designed to expose students to varied cultural knowledges and experiences, how students consider and display their own identities in cross-cultural exchange has yet to be fully interrogated. This study focuses on U.S. college students who participated in a series of online conversations with learners in Singapore. Grounded in Goffmans sociological work and based on Hechts communication theory of identity, this article focuses on students’ conceptions of themselves relative to others, and perceptions of identity work in cross-cultural conversations. Limitations tied to this project and avenues for future research on intercultural communication classroom practice are considered.

Performed Identity and Community Among College Student Interns Preparing for Work

Scholars have yet to gain a sense of how students perform their disparate identities of intellectual and worker as they navigate the potentially dueling aims of content learning and professional job training in internship courses. The author focuses on students in two internship courses in order to ascertain how they socially perform their roles and identities as they negotiate the potentially competing environments of college classrooms and professional organizations. In particular, this project uses discourse analysis to investigate how a professional internship experience can influence students’ concept of self, as well as their social performances across contexts and communities.

Student Identity and Aversions to Science: A Study of Translation in Higher Education

Biodiversity informatics (BDI) is a science focused on biodiversity data management, and BDI courses cast students’ attention to matters related to the physical environment, global change, translating data collections across multiple sciences, and also to the translation needed to bring BDI findings from the scholarly community to the public. Even as students learn about science communication in BDI courses, they struggle to translate their studies into their own identities and lives. Based on an examination of student talk in a course on BDI and Science Communication, this research illustrates how students linguistically frame science and their science identity. The data show that obstacles barring the taking up of a science identity are plentiful, and that those barriers often relate to issues of identity and language. Interventions for addressing this translational problem, the disruptions to sharing scientific information, are discussed.

Emotion in online college classrooms: examining the influence of perceived teacher communication behaviour on students’ emotional experiences

This research focused on teacher communication behaviour as an influential factor in students’ educational experiences. This study examined students’ perceptions of emotion (involving teachers’ emotional support, students’ emotional work and students’ positive emotional valence toward class and teacher) as influenced by a variety of predicting variables: perceptions of teacher affinity-seeking as well as teachers’ positive behaviour alteration techniques, verbal immediacy and teacher online presence (involving the three factors of instructional design, organisation facilitating discourse and direct instruction). Relying on survey data collected from undergraduate and graduate students across disciplines enrolled in course offerings at a large public university, quantitative analysis examined relationships among existing factors previously studied in educational and communication research. Although this study uncovered multiple significant relationships between variables in the data set, students’ perceptions of their teachers’ verbal immediacy and presence in their instructional design were found to be most predictive relative to students’ emotions in online classrooms. Ultimately this project addresses and emphasises the need to more fully examine students’ emotions and related social experiences with virtual teachers and course content in higher education.

Dialogue, inquiry, and encounter: Critical geographies of online higher education

The rapid expansion of online education compels debate over what accessible higher education should be, how it should be delivered, and whom it should serve. While geographers remain relatively marginal to this debate, they have engaged the question of the neoliberal university, where online education is sometimes characterized as another instantiation of the neoliberal turn. This paper draws geographies of education scholarship into productive conversation with online teaching and learning, critical pedagogy, and public geographies literatures to argue that geographers can reframe the debate over online education and reposition it as a productive space of critical dialogue, inquiry, and encounter.

Disciplinary convergence and interdisciplinary curricula for students in an information society

Abstract In this essay, disciplinary ‘convergence’ is offered as a construct that references the blurring of disciplinary walls, academic borders and institutional divisions, a construct that can frame conversations about the role of disciplines in addressing today’s student needs in higher education. Convergence as a construct allows for a consideration of converging academic structures as well as the obligation of scholars and practitioners in higher education to address the needs of contemporary students aiming for life and work in a converging and increasingly mediated world. Ultimately, this work suggests that contemporary problems in an information society can be best addressed with broadly trained experts who can think, imagine and solve problem across traditional academic boundaries.

Role, Power, Ritual, and Resistance: A Critical Discourse Analysis of College Classroom Talk

This project examines student–teacher talk, offering findings that show the participating teacher questioning and directing students in routinized ways, with students responding passively and participating in familiar discursive patterns. The study also shows subtle but important shifts in authority that function to unsettle normative teacher–student interaction. Ultimately, this research implies that classroom talk can be steeped in hegemonic practices while demonstrating that critical discourse analysis is an effective means for interrogating social relations and power structures in educational contexts.

Reasons for Student Engagement in Extra-Class Communication

This study extends instructional communication research on extra-class communication (ECC) by presenting an integrative analysis comparing the explanatory utility of student- and instructor-oriented reasons for student engagement in frequent ECC. Results from 495 college students suggested that student-oriented reasons, specifically the relational and functional student motives, were the only significant, positive predictors of students’ perceptions of frequent ECC engagement. Other student motives (excuse making, participation, sycophancy) and perceptions of instructor approachability did not significantly predict perceived frequency of ECC engagement.