Lynne Masel Walters

Learning globally, teaching locally: incorporating international exchange and intercultural learning into pre‐service teacher training

As the US student population becomes increasingly diverse, teacher education programs need to enable prospective teachers to meet the varied needs and expectations of students and families, while simultaneously creating viable classroom communities. Learning opportunities, such as travel and teaching abroad and the perceptions of ‘otherness’ this creates, lead to new perspectives regarding human differences. Such experiences, if wisely structured, can rectify misconceptions and reverse stereotypes. This paper explores the impact of teaching‐related travel on novice teachers’ cultural understanding and professional identity. The paper discusses how prospective teachers challenge their perceptions of their professional self through international field experiences. The goal is to begin a discussion that explores the internationalization of teacher training to the end of creating globally aware and culturally sensitive educators and students.

Environment of confidence: Daily newspaper use of press releases

Abstract This study tracks the placement in the daily newspapers of the press releases produced by the public information office of a major state agency. The offices efforts resulted in a significantly higher placement rate than that revealed in previous research, indicating that the staff had created an environment of confidence around its relationship with the media. Among the factors associated with successful placement were the timeliness of the material, targeted distribution of releases and wire service pick-up.

Understanding Why Students Drop Out of High School, According to Their Own Reports

Research on school dropout extends from early 20th-century pioneers until now, marking trends of causes and prevention. However, specific dropout causes reported by students from several nationally representative studies have never been examined together, which, if done, could lead to a better understanding of the dropout problem. Push, pull, and falling out factors provide a framework for understanding dropouts. Push factors include school-consequence on attendance or discipline. Pull factors include out-of-school enticements like jobs and family. Finally, falling out factors refer to disengagement in students not caused by school or outside pulling factors. Since 1966, most nationally representative studies depicted pull factors as ranking the highest. Also, administrators in one study corroborated pull out factors for younger dropouts, not older ones, while most recent research cites push factors as highest overall. One rationale for this change is a response to rising standards from No Child Left Behind (NCLB), which can be ultimately tested only by future dropout research.

After the highwayman: Syntax and successful placement of press releases in newspapers

Abstract This study proves once again that too many press releases are poorly written and over-written, with long sentences and paragraphs, and poor syntax as well as weak and passive construction. In their use of press releases, journalists almost always have to make them simpler, shorter, easier to read, and less passive. The authors conclude that success in writing of press releases requires brevity and simplicity, shorter paragraphs, sentences, and words, and the elimination of the passive voice. Timothy Walters is an assistant professor of communication at Stephen F. Austin State University in Nacogdoches, TX. Lynne Walters is associate professor of journalism and Douglas Starr professor of journalism, both at Texas A&M University, College Station. Lynne Walters is currently a Fulbright professor at the American Journalism Center in Budapest, where her husband Timothy is also on a one-year appointment as a visiting professor.

Profile: Faces in the news: Network television news coverage of Hurricane Hugo and the Loma Prieta earthquake

This study investigates the sourcing patterns characteristic of network television coverage of two natural disasters occurring within weeks of each other in the fall of 1989, Hurricane Hugo and the Loma Prieta earthquake. These results are compared to those from an earlier study of newspaper coverage of the same two events to make possible a cross‐disaster, cross‐media analysis of the way source utilization contributes to the social construction of disasters as news events.

The picture of health? Message standardization and recall of televised AIDS public service announcements

Abstract The results of The Picture of Health demonstrate that differences exist between African Americans and Non Hispanic Whites in recall of verbal and visual themes of televised AIDS public service announcements. These differences are anchored in a complex relationship among emotions, attitudes, and opinions about the place of science and technology in society, and the “how we say it” elements used to create an individual PSA. The data suggest that effective healthcare communication campaigns require a focused thematic strategy, tactically organized to different combinations of “how we say it” elements to communicate effectively with a diverse, active audience. T.N. Walters is Assistant Professor of Journalism, Northeast Louisiana University. Lynne M. Walters, Marilyn Kern-Foxworth, and Susanna Hornig Priest are Associate Professors of Journalism, Texas A & M University.

The Transitional Woman: A Case Study of Values in the Context of an Arabic/Islamic Society

The purpose of this paper is fourfold. It is first in a series of studies designed to examine: 1) Rokeachs Terminal and Instrumental Values typology in the context of non-Western culture, specifically Arab/Islam of the United Arab Emirates, 2) whether there are emerging (perhaps transitional) family and female typologies based on these value sets, 3) the relationship between outside forces (the economy and public policy for example) and the family, and 4) it is also meant to gather questions for future study.The paper is based on a survey of students at the all-female Zayed University in Dubai. The results suggested differences between groups of students with respect to Rokeachs Terminal and Instrumental Values. Environmental factors that seem to influence these differences included religion, education, urbanization, and the changing role of women in society.Findings suggest that Rokeachs values system must be rephrased, gathering terms bound to Arabic/Islamic Society to determine what terms are synonymous and what are not. Before the questions of whether a new value system is emerging in the modernizing Arab/Islamic world, where that value system is coming from, and how values are generated can be studied, the old value system must be known. Determining these benchmarks, then, is the next step in what could be a rich, rewarding stream of work adding to multi-cultural understanding.

Media life among Gen Zeds

The ‘Gen Zeds’ of the title are female Emirati students in their early 20s at Zayed University who oscillate between the traditional Islamic culture of their families and the high technology world they experience through the media. This article looks at when, where and how these students use media and what they are looking for when they use it. The research found that these women live a highly-mediated existence, spending more than 9.9 hours on average a day with the media - more time than they do sleeping. They spend as much time on the internet as they do in the combined activities of reading magazines, newspapers and books. They spend twice as much time on the internet as they do watching television. They use different media during different parts of the day and for different reasons. The internet and the telephone were the two most preferred media. The article concludes by looking at what these women’s highly mediated lives might mean for their future.

Rich Text, Rich Teach: Expanding Educational Horizons with Technology in Malaysia

The demand for modernization in educational programs, along with global challenges and competition, mandates an evolved educational system with more inventive managers, teachers, students, graduates, and researchers. Creating such a system calls for embedding modernization into learning and converting educational institutions into entrepreneurial organizations that are innovative in nature and operation. That entrepreneurial spirit involves expanding educational horizons beyond the main campus, to engage in outreach while improving service and quality.

The Examined Life

The term “reflection” has become one of the most important vocabulary words of teacher training (Hatton & Smith, 1995). One quality a good teacher should possess is the ability to reflect on what, why and how things are done and to adapt, develop and improve his or her practices within the context of lifelong learning.