Editor's Note, October 2008
Elizabeth Haller
PhD Candidate and Instructor, Kent State University
E-mail: editoraee@hotmail.com
We invite your continued perusal and encourage you to submit articles, poetry, and fiction for consideration in future issues of AEE. Please review our Call for Papers on this site for more details on submission requirements. If you are unsure whether your contribution would be suitable under the terms of our Call for Papers, please send along an inquiry, and I will be happy to respond forthwith. As always, do not forget to check out Grist for the Mill for possible submission ideas.
“The View from Here” columnist Lynne Fukuda provides the second of a two-part column titled “Education and Work Prep School: Entering a MAED Program and Thinking about an Elementary Education—Part II.” For Part I, refer to the September 2008 issue.
The first feature of this issue, “Teaching Speech Communication Using Physical Activity” comes to us from Joan E. Aitken. According to Aitken:
This article suggests five speech communication learning activities which use physical activity. The author suggests that simple movements that can increase brain activity, engage the student in the learning process, and increase physical activity. Teachers may find the use of physical activity in the learning process may be particularly helpful for students with special needs.
Authors Kathleen M. T. Colllins, Anthony J. Onwuegbuzie, and Qun G. Jiao bring us the second feature of this issue titled, “Relationship between Reading Ability and Achievement in a Graduate-Level Research Methodology Course”. The author’s state:
Although numerous studies have been undertaken in the area of reading comprehension and reading ability from pre-kindergarten through undergraduate students, very little is known about the reading ability of graduate students. Thus, the overall goal of the current inquiry was to examine reading ability among graduate students. Specifically, this study investigated the relationship between their reading ability, specifically their reading comprehension and reading vocabulary, and their understanding of research concepts, methodologies, and applications. Participants were 91 graduate students from various disciplines enrolled in five sections of an introductory-level educational research course at a southeastern university. A canonical correlation analysis revealed that both reading comprehension and reading vocabulary were moderately significant predictors of graduate students’ understanding of research concepts, methodologies, and applications, as measured by scores on the midterm and final examination. It is concluded that reading ability may, in part, be responsible for underachievement in research methodology courses.
The final feature of this issue is titled “Performative Student Writing in the Cultural Studies Classroom.” Author Linda S. Watts states:
Although most educators recognize the value of multivocal and nonlinear texts when assigned as student readings, discussions of classroom practice rarely take up in explicit ways the corresponding importance of students registering those encounters with experimental texts through their own performative writing acts. With all their claims to diversity, multiplicity, and inclusion, our celebrated new pedagogies for the study of culture seem infrequently to address the implications of these curricular transformations for educator paradigms of student writing-- whether in terms of rethinking our approaches to devising writing assignments, altering and opening our views of the forms student response might fittingly take, or complicating our notions of what it might now mean to assign, respond to, and evaluate student writing.
Vanessa Raney provides the final contribution to this issue in Poet’s Corner. Her poem titled “To Realize a Fantasy” stems from a stress management course taken at Frederick Community College in the spring of 2008:
Poetry has always allowed me to connected with my soul (in terms of speaking what I feel at a particular moment what otherwise lacks articulation). For our first set of journal entries in the course, we were asked to frame our experiences within our poems. As a fat-bodied feminist, I am often told to look a certain way: thin and professional. This poem answers those critics who cannot imagine that a body means nothing compared to the intelligence, heart and soul of a person.
READ, ENJOY, AND CONTRIBUTE!
You are invited to join AE Extra staff!
Send your ideas and/or writing sample
to the Editor-in-chief:
Elizabeth Haller
Kent State University (e-mail: editoraee@hotmail.com)
Academic Exchange Extra invites reader response to any writings in this issue--especially articles advancing the scholarly debate of issues raised.
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