Search Results (539)

In recent decades, there has been a growing awareness of the importance and desirability of fostering the involvement of more actors, and in particular local communities, in the protection of cultural heritage. Since universities have long been asked to become promoters of actions aimed at increasing society’s general level of well-being through interventions with cultural, social, and educational implications via technology transfer and knowledge sharing, a mutual collaboration between different researchers of the Politecnico di Torino, public administrations, and local communities has been consolidated over the last few years to provide a proactive contribution to both the preservation of cultural heritage and the social and economic development of the territories. A new educational methodology with direct and mutual collaboration between teachers and students, local communities, and policymakers was tested. The experiences conducted so far testify to the university’s ability to fulfil its training, research, and “Third Mission” tasks, both by responding to the needs of the territory and by transmitting up-to-date work methodologies, disciplinary skills, attention to context, and dialogue with local communities. The work carried out, appreciated by citizens and municipal administration representatives, was able to provide hints and stimuli for new opportunities and actions to be undertaken, foreshadowing possible development trajectories of the contexts investigated. Full article

In the realm of middle level education, advocacy is an integral aspect of school culture and community. Advocacy helps to foster a school environment characterized by a sense of respect and value for young adolescents and should take up an awareness of the social and cognitive characteristics of young adolescents. Advocacy competency is also a necessary teacher disposition to foster socially just and successful middle school cultures and climates. We conducted a systematic review of the literature guided by the following driving question: What does the research say about middle level teacher development and advocacy? Our review yielded 38 relevant sources and key thematic ideas across four thematic categories. We anticipate this review of the literature will be of interest to and inform middle level educators and researchers around equity- and justice-oriented middle level teacher development. Full article

The primary aim of this study is to assess the knowledge, attitudes, and skills of primary school teachers regarding the management of musculoskeletal trauma through first aid interventions and to determine the effectiveness of a sustainable training program. The preparedness of 138 teachers who received first aid training for trauma intervention and the impact of these trainings on health practices were examined by pre- and post-tests. It was determined that 87% of the teachers participating in the study had not received emergency trauma training before. Pre-training test results showed that the participants had a low level of awareness. However, the increase in mean scores from 6 to 16 and the decrease in standard deviation after the training revealed a significant increase in teachers’ knowledge, attitudes, and skills. These results suggest that emergency trauma training programs significantly increase teachers’ ability to respond to emergencies and emphasize the importance of sustainable first aid training. Analyses based on gender and branch revealed that post-training test scores were similar and all teachers showed high performance. The findings emphasize the need for systematic and comprehensive emergency trauma training programs for all teachers and the importance of these programs for sustainable health and safety practices. Full article

Metaphors can help student teachers to express what is essential in teachers’ work and the process of learning to teach. This study reports on two types of metaphors generated and narrated by student teachers as part of their professional identity development during their internships. One type was about teaching their students (inside-classroom metaphor) and the other was about the student teachers’ (broader) work context (out-of-classroom metaphor). In small groups, supervised by five teacher educators in total, they discussed each other’s metaphors and accompanying narratives in order to gain (deeper) insight into their own and others’ underlying beliefs and experiences. Metaphors and accompanying narratives of different cohorts of student teachers (n = 67 in total) were analyzed. The teacher educators were interviewed about their experiences with discussing the metaphors in small student teacher groups. The findings suggest that the student teachers confidently formulated metaphors and wrote accompanying narratives. They formulated quite a few standard metaphors that seemed very similar at first glance, but their underlying experiences and beliefs, conversely, showed many differences in nuance. Interviews with the teacher educators revealed that the discussions about the metaphors certainly led to new insights among the student teachers, such as thinking about their role as teachers, but the depth of the discussions was often limited. It can be concluded that engaging student teachers in using metaphors is certainly one way to become aware of, reflect on, and talk about one’s (developing) professional identity, but it is important that adequate conditions are met, such as specific competencies teacher educators need for guiding this kind of identity work. Full article

Event argument extraction is a crucial subtask of event extraction, which aims at extracting arguments that correspond to argument roles when given event types. The majority of current document-level event argument extraction works focus on extracting information for only one event at a time without considering the association among events; this is known as document-level single-event extraction. However, the interrelationship among arguments can yield mutual gains in their extraction. Therefore, in this paper, we propose AssocKD, an Association-aware Knowledge Distillation Method for Document-level Event Argument Extraction, which enables the enhancement of document-level multi-event extraction with event association knowledge. Firstly, we introduce an association-aware training task to extract unknown arguments with the given privileged knowledge of relevant arguments, obtaining an association-aware model that can construct both intra-event and inter-event relationships. Secondly, we adopt multi-teacher knowledge distillation to transfer such event association knowledge from the association-aware teacher models to the event argument extraction student model. Our proposed method, AssocKD, is capable of explicitly modeling and efficiently leveraging event association to enhance the extraction of multi-event arguments at the document level. We conduct experiments on RAMS and WIKIEVENTS datasets and observe a significant improvement, thus demonstrating the effectiveness of our method. Full article

The capacity of schools to address behavioral health concerns presents an emerging challenge, exacerbated by major shortages in the workforce. Schools across the U.S. are struggling to hire licensed behavioral health professionals, with additional barriers encountered when seeking to hire practitioners with experience in educational settings. In 2023, a school district in the suburbs of Columbus, Ohio, partnered with The Ohio State University to launch a “grow your own” policy pilot. The priorities focused on addressing workforce shortages and leveraging the experiences of current teachers/staff to support growing needs related to student mental health and well-being. More specifically, the district utilized COVID-19 relief funds to recruit, train, and transition 25 teachers/staff into school mental health positions by underwriting the costs of each professional’s Master of Social Work (MSW) degree. Here, we (a) describe the district–university partnership and the processes guiding the implementation of the “grow your own” model, (b) distill preliminary findings about district needs regarding behavioral health, and (c) explore facilitators, barriers, and outcomes associated with learning among participants in the program. The findings from a district-wide staff survey indicated a high level of need for individual counseling, crisis intervention, and small group interventions. Additionally, qualitative interviews revealed that learning among the program’s participants was facilitated by effective classroom strategies and specific learning experiences integral to the program’s design. These facilitators supported key learning outcomes, including general social work knowledge, self-awareness, and therapeutic skills that are foundational for engaging with students, parents/families, teachers/staff, and the broader school community. This innovative policy pilot and training model demonstrate how universities and local educational agencies can partner to address workforce development challenges at the intersection of behavioral health and education. Full article

The One Health approach often reaches classrooms through Environmental Education (EE), which aims to guide society’s response to current crises (environmental, health, economic, values). However, traditional EE teaching has focused on isolated ecological concepts and standardised solutions, ignoring the multidimensional nature of EE and failing to integrate the interdependence between environmental, animal, and human health. Moreover, teacher training often neglects didactic content knowledge, preventing students from acquiring the systemic vision needed to address eco-social problems and create sustainable solutions aligned with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This limits teachers’ ability to influence students’ concerns and behaviours. In this context, this study aims to reflect on the current state of the issue and propose strategies informed by Science Education research to improve EE teaching, enabling the integration of One Health dimensions through effective didactics to achieve Transformative Environmental Education (TEE). For this purpose, we begin by addressing the limitations identified in recent systematic reviews, shifting the paradigm towards a symbiosis of EE and Science Education through scientific practices. We then present practical examples showcasing successful EE initiatives that foster a deeper understanding of socio-environmental issues, encourage innovative solutions, and nurture engaged citizens from early education onwards. These proposals can support classroom practice and ongoing teacher self-development. Pedagogical strategies include tackling issues that require systemic and critical thinking by developing scientific and epistemic practices while raising awareness of Environmental Justice. Thus, this study advocates for a new vision of EE, integrating the One Health approach, which could be applied to develop new educational programs, including teacher training. This would lead to a new learning evaluation model and help identify key determinants that trigger pro-environmental behaviours. Full article

The focus of the present paper is twofold; the first objective is to examine how children with dyslexia (henceforward DYS children) and typically developing children (henceforward TD children) performed in Greek (first language; L1) compared to English (second language; L2) in reading, phonological awareness (PA), rapid automatized naming (RAN), working memory (WM), and short-term memory (STM) tasks. Our second goal is to investigate DYS children’s performance compared to that of TD children in the L1 and L2 domains mentioned above. Thirty-two (DYS = 16; TD = 16) school-aged children (9;7–11;9 years old; M_age = 130.41), basic users of English (level ranging from A1 to A2), carried out a battery test in L1 and L2, respectively, including reading, PA, STM, and WM tasks. More specifically, the tasks were the following: word and nonword decoding, reading accuracy and reading fluency, word and nonword reading per minute, PA, RAN, nonword repetition, as well as forward, backward, and digit span sequencing. This is a work-in-progress study, and preliminary results reveal that DYS students exhibit important reading and memory deficits in both languages. The data analysis indicated that DYS children have particular difficulties and statistically significant differences in L1 and L2 compared to TD in all tasks. In conclusion, this is the first study, at least in Greek, which assesses both reading and memory skills of DYS children in L2. The results reveal deficits in both languages, and the overall findings contribute to theories on the transfer of difficulties of linguistic skills between L1 and L2, while memory scores also underline this co-occurrence. Future implications of this study include a combination of reading and cognitive activities in the teaching methods of English teachers to improve DYS children’s overall performance in learning English as L2. Full article

The Sensory Classroom Teacher Questionnaire (SCTQ) is a psycho-educational tool designed to empower teachers in creating sensory-rich, inclusive environments that promote diversity, equity, accessibility, and inclusivity through the application of sensory ergonomics. Unlike other tools that focus on isolated strategies, the SCTQ takes a holistic approach by optimizing the overall classroom environment to meet the sensory and ergonomic needs of learners, particularly those with ADHD and sensory integration/processing challenges. This makes the SCTQ especially vital in diverse and under-resourced quintile schools, where creating sensory-optimized, inclusive environments is essential for fostering equitable learning experiences. By addressing sensory needs through thoughtful classroom design, the SCTQ not only strengthens learners’ cognitive development and socio-emotional well-being but also improves behavior regulation, physical comfort, and overall functioning. This manuscript is part of a larger exploratory mixed-methods study that validated the SCTQ using both qualitative and quantitative approaches. Here, the focus is on the qualitative aspect, utilizing thematic analysis to explore data from 23 focus group interviews with 88 Grade 1, 2, and 3 teachers from various Quintile 1–5 schools in Gauteng, South Africa. Guided by the enactivism paradigm, the study emphasizes the crucial role teachers play in creating and adapting sensory environments. Their insights were key to refining the SCTQ, ensuring it is practical, developmentally appropriate, culturally, linguistically, contextually, and socio-economically relevant. Developed through collaboration among researchers, specialists, and teachers, the SCTQ supports sensory ergonomic practices, raises awareness of ADHD and sensory integration/processing challenges, and supports both learners’ potential and teachers’ well-being, contributing to a more sustainable and positive educational experience. Full article

The use of atropine is currently one of the most effective methods used to prevent myopia progression. The purpose of this study was to investigate atropine adherence in preschool children with myopia, to explain the context of treatment through caregivers, and to identify barriers and facilitators of using atropine. We conducted in-depth interviews with 60 caregivers of children (parents, kindergarten teachers and nurses) in four different areas ranging from large cities to rural areas in Taiwan. Based on the social ecological theory model, the recorded text was systematically analyzed, extracted, edited and indexed by NVivo 12 Plus. After interviewing caregivers, we determined the barriers and facilitators at the four levels of influence (children, parents, school, and hospital and society). Barriers included the side effects, parental neglect, lack of understanding of long-term drug use, lack of conducive environment, and lack of friendly medical services. Facilitators included overcoming side effects, parental responsibility, myopia progression on treatment adherence, teacher support, management by nurses, navigation by ophthalmologists, and model learning. Hence, establishing a social support network, discussing the experience of individualized drug use in preschool children, and establishing a friendly medical intervention strategy can raise awareness among parents regarding myopia, and improve atropine adherence in preschool children. Full article

Gratitude, defined by many as being thankful and appreciative of things that make life and relationships meaningful and purposeful, catalyzes holistic well-being. It is considered a manifestation of both inner and outer spirituality and develops spiritual growth. In this article, twenty-three students from a large public university in the U.S. representing various faith traditions explore the practice of gratitude as spirituality and its impact on well-being. The purpose of this article is to demonstrate how gratitude, also conceptualized and articulated by college students as spirituality, influences students’ well-being. By exploring common and unique themes based on students’ individual reflections and synthesis on their weekly journal entries on the topic of gratitude as spirituality toward well-being, students assert that first, practicing gratitude enables them to experience something of the essence of spirituality, which is about interconnectedness and bringing into focus the things in life that they must be contented with and happy about. Second, expressing gratitude helps shift students’ perspectives by looking at conflict more as an opportunity for growth and constructive change than anything else. It redirects their mindset to transforming conflict’s negative and destructive energies into something beneficial, although the process might seem difficult. Third, practicing gratitude improves students’ overall mental, physical, spiritual, and social well-being. It helps them develop a sense of empathy and understanding toward others and aids them with better communication, deeper connections, and awareness of the self and their surroundings. This article concludes that there is, indeed, a dynamic interplay between gratitude and spirituality regarding students’ well-being. The article recommends that academic institutions and teachers of higher education provide students with classroom and public spaces to integrate conversations around gratitude, spirituality, and well-being into their academic studies as this helps enrich students’ overall learning experiences. Full article

Massive waste generation linked to overconsumption is considered one of the most significant socio-ecological issues today, becoming a challenge for health and well-being and a barrier to achieving sustainability. Education is key to raising awareness and involving citizens in the adoption of responsible consumption habits, facilitating the recognition of the relationship between our daily activities and the production of waste. The aim of this exploratory study is to analyse the perceptions and commitments of future secondary school teachers (FTs) toward this issue and to explore the educational approaches they propose to address it in the classroom (n = 138). In this work, a mixed-methods approach was used based on quantitative and qualitative data collected through a questionnaire. The results show that FTs have difficulties in recognising the different factors involved in the problem of massive waste generation. However, they incorporate the health and ecological vision, which is close to the holistic vision of the One Health approach. The majority of them take personal responsibility for the problem, although they opt for low-effort options. Regarding the educational proposals they design, only a minority can do it following a commitment-oriented approach. Full article

This is a case study of a science professional development workshop in Nepal with 17 teacher participants from four public schools. These schools mainly served Indigenous students in elementary, middle, and high school (Grades 9 and 10). The workshop focused on educating and building science teacher leaders for culturally relevant teaching and antiracist pedagogy by valuing and integrating Indigenous leadership practices and local knowledge. The teachers participated in a 2-day workshop co-organized by the local district education office and the local high school and led by the high school principal and a U.S.-based university faculty. Data were collected during and after the workshop through field notes, audio/video recordings of some sections of the workshop, and focus group interviews with a select group of participating teachers. The analysis of the data showed (a) struggles and opportunities to prioritize Indigenous science knowledge and Tharu sociocultural connections, (b) teachers seeking affirmation from principals to be science teacher leaders modeled on Indigenous leadership values, and (c) greater willingness for culturally relevant pedagogy among female and Indigenous teachers. The hope is that this paper will contribute to the value of a science teacher leadership professional development program (PD) in building awareness among science teachers about the value of culturally appropriate antiracist pedagogy in science teacher leaders. In addition, the PD also shows that science teacher leaders in Indigenous schools would benefit from the Indigenous relational model of leadership in leading their peers and students in antiracist and culturally relevant science teaching and learning. Finally, the study seems to indicate that a successful science teacher leader always incorporates local Indigenous community values, knowledge, and practices. Full article

The Integration of Professional Education and Innovation and Entrepreneurship Education (IPEIEE) has been recognized as an important direction for the development of higher education in enhancing the innovation and entrepreneurship awareness and ability of college students. However, universities and teachers are facing challenges while promoting IPEIEE, namely, various stakeholders, the unreasonable design of the curriculum system, and the lack of relevant incentive policies. In addition, IPEIEE in many universities has been placed on hold. Few studies have examined the innovation regime in IPEIEE, despite it being a dilemma that the field confronts. Thus, taking into account the roles of universities, teachers, and students in the evolutionary game model, this paper firstly constructs an evolutionary game model for teachers and students, in which the costs and parameters affecting the benefit matrix, as well as the stability strategy, are refined. Secondly, the behavior of universities is introduced to examine the effects of universities on strategic choices of teachers and students. Finally, a mechanism analysis is conducted in combination with the principal–agent model to gain a deeper understanding of the evolutionary stability of stakeholder strategies in the IPEIEE. The findings emphasize potential Evolutionary Stable Strategies (ESS) that universities, as promoters and guides, should take as measures concerning both economic encouragement and management encouragement to promote IPEIEE, so as that the ‘ideal state’ can be achieved. Furthermore, if specific incentives for different stakeholders are proposed and set at an appropriate intensity, this will encourage active cooperation among these stakeholders. This paper explores the evolution mechanism of innovation strategies in IPEIEE from the perspective of stakeholders, offering a better comprehension of the dynamic evolution of these strategies. The key findings also offer support for policymakers to promote the mutual development of agents in the IPEIEE, thus enhancing the overall sustainable collaborative capability of the IPEIEE. Full article

The aim of this study is to examine the components of multicultural competence among pre-service teacher students in Thailand and to develop and assess the reliability of a model of multicultural competence for pre-service teacher students in Thailand. Multistage stratified random sampling was utilized to recruit 600 pre-service teacher students from undergraduate education programs at the Faculty of Education in Thailand. Data were collected through self-report questionnaires. The data analysis employed descriptive statistics and second-order confirmatory factor analysis (CFA). The findings indicate that multicultural competence among pre-service teacher students comprises three components: cultural awareness, cultural knowledge, and personal skills. Furthermore, this study identified that the model of multicultural competence among pre-service teacher students demonstrated good fit indices for the modified model (χ² = 30.902, df = 21, p-value = 0.0753, χ²/df = 1.472; root mean square error of approximation (RMSEA) = 0.028; standardized root means square residual (SRMR) = 0.013; Tucker–Lewis index (TLI) = 0.996; comparative fit index (CFI) = 0.999). Based on these findings, effective teaching in diverse environments necessitates a thorough understanding of multicultural competence. Full article