Describes "community meetings" in early childhood classrooms, designed to create an intentional community devoted to learning to live with and consider the perspectives of others. Discusses how meetings work, community meeting and the topic of exclusion, students' learning about themselves, awareness as a kind of solution, airing a…

Addresses ways to reexamine the world of information from small world perspectives and suggests implications for public libraries. Highlights include a conceptual scheme to examine small world lives, including social norms, world views, social types, and information behavior; and ethnographic inquiries to illustrate how qualitative methodology can…

Presents four group experiential activities, primarily for adults and adolescents, focusing on diversity issues. Includes target group, group size, time and space needs, activity level, overview, goals, props, instructions, and suggestions for framing and debriefing the experience. Activities promote perspective taking, honest dialogue between…

An assessment task was devised to explore the attributional style and role-taking ability of 22 aggressive and 22 nonaggressive adults with moderate to mild mental retardation. Aggressive participants showed a hostile bias in their interpretation of others' intentions within ambiguous interpersonal situations and were superior in role-taking…

A study investigated the relations between various measures of social understanding and social interaction competence in verbally able children with autism (n=20). Initiating joint attention and empathy were strongly related measures of social interaction competence. No understanding-behavioral links were identified for 20 language-age matched…

Comparison of 16 children (ages 9 to 12) with visual impairment to 16 sighted children found visually impaired children had a poorer understanding than did sighted children of characters in stories, as shown by fewer correct justifications based on mental states. Some subgroup patterns concerning congenital impairments and cognitive style were…

We compared male and female psychology majors to psychology minors and nonmajors to understand the trends in a growing major in which women outnumber men. A total of 451 psychology majors, minors, and nonmajors from 4 institutions completed a questionnaire measuring empathy, career goals, and perceptions of the importance of empathy for therapy.…

In this article, the authors--the teacher educators who obtained a grant from the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations (AVD)--explore what it meant for teachers and teacher educators involved in the PorTRAIT (Practitioner or Teacher Researchers As Inquiring Travelers) program to enlarge their views of teacher research and their own classrooms by being…

This article is a digital video design ethnography describing the first phase of introducing a perspectivity meme into a classroom. A meme is an idea that spreads throughout a system. A perspectivity meme is the idea that people who share their viewpoints and interpretations will gradually affect role changes in the learning environment. They will…

In this article the author proposes some thoughts for working toward academic hospitality that would enable the recognition of Indigenous epistemologies in an appropriate manner. These suggestions will always remain partial and are by no means intended to be taken as a comprehensive, exhaustive consideration of possible measures. To suggest…

This article argues that school administrators can learn about themselves through fictionalizing their real world experience. Examples of this writing form are offered in the text to illustrate the form and possible function of this type of work. The author presents this alternate writing form as a reflective tool that can assist professionals in…

In this article, the author talks about the Critical Friends Group, which she and her colleagues at Souhegan High School created. They hold monthly meetings in order to help everyone with their work. Here, she discusses her experiences of CFG, as well as that of her colleagues' experiences and what they had to say about the CFG. Among other…

Inaccurate and incomplete presentations of American education history in teacher education programs play a central role in the poor preparation of pre-service teachers. This article exemplifies how the praxis of late 19th and 20th century African descent educators--who viewed education as a vehicle for freedom and an affirmation of…

Results compiled from several studies indicate that college students place significant personal emphasis on matters related to spirituality. Compiling students' responses from the author's 2003 pilot study, subsequent focus group interviews, and the 2004 national survey, along with faculty's responses from the 2004-2005 Higher Education Research…

Action research includes a variety of methods engaged in by practitioners who wish to learn more about their work and the possibility of constructively changing it. This paper describes an action research dissertation project that focused on the work of a group of community activists to construct new understandings of their work and, as a result,…