Professional Matters
Role of Awards in Operationalizing Professional Values: Professional Self-regulation in Landscape Architecture
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Christina Ida Alida Breed
Landscape designers play an important role in urban green space quality in South Africa. The operationalization of their values could have a positive effect on social and ecological health and should form part of professional self-regulation. The study employs the dual methods of constructivist content analysis of design projects featured in prominent profession-focused magazines and interpretivist analysis of semi-structured interviews with experts in the industry. It identifies social practices that show potential for the operationalization of values in the profession. These are education, legislation, rating systems, and award systems. From these, award systems are selected because they provide both intrinsic and extrinsic incentives. The analysis of existing award systems reveals shortcomings in the awards criteria. The criteria for the Institute of Landscape Architecture in South Africa’s Merit Awards are subsequently reviewed to reflect more functional values, the four categories of Ecosystem Services and ethical Nature and Landscape Values found in the literature. Operationalization is explored through social rituals, alignment with existing values, and examples of best practice. The case study illustrates the ethical complexities in weighing up and distinguishing between value types and their relationships in the context of professional practice, and captures the local value nuances on urban nature.
Archive of Workplace Writing Experience: An Exploration of Written Communities of Professional Practice
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Jessica Mc Caughey, Brian Fitzpatrick
Authors discuss data from this exploratory study focused on workplace writing transfer, both in the social sciences and outside, and explore how individuals within communities of professional practice perceive and understand their own development as writers in specific disciplinary contexts. This project asks interviewees, working professionals in a variety of different industries, organizations, and roles, to discuss how and what they write, how they developed skills specific to their field, what “successful” writing looks like in their community of professional practice, and what knowledge students across disciplines need to develop in their writing as they look towards the future. In addition to issues of pedagogy and disciplinary communication practices in action, this research examines organizational knowledge—“rules” of communication that often go unspoken. Further, audio versions of interviews are available to students, professors, and the public in the form of the Archive of Workplace Writing Experiences, a learning tool and repository, as well as a crucial link between the university and the “working world.” Through it, students in the social sciences, but also writers in other fields, can hear and consider the voices of those creating real workplace writing within disciplinary communities of professional practice.
The Evolution of Disciplines
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Kenneth A Grant, Candace Grant
How do disciplines emerge? The world has seen many changes in how knowledge is viewed and used; yet, the academic world is slow to respond to these changes in its protected environment. While the subjects/content taught may evolve, the social structure of academic disciplines, particularly in the humanities and social sciences, has seen little change over the last sixty to eighty years. The strong duality of "the department and the discipline" influences research, hiring, and career advancement. Those involved in new fields vie for the endorsement of more established or core disciplines, well-established journals, and highly-reputed conferences. Work in interdisciplinary studies, while accepted, tends not to receive the same visibility and respect as that in the more “core” disciplines. There are many good and valid reasons for this rigorous approach to disciplines; however, a new perspective may be needed. This paper will examine the key characteristics of disciplines and their evolution, looking at two specific cases, the fields of “entrepreneurship,” with origins in the 1930s and “knowledge management” appearing in the 1990s, drawing on a number of perspectives, including the evolution of scientific paradigms and the perspective of institutional theory.
Pre-Service Language Teachers' Wellbeing: A Causal-Comparative Study
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Manuel Jesús Cardoso Pulido, Juan Ramón Guijarro-Ojeda
After delving into the literature about wellbeing and understanding the core of pre-service teachers’ emotions and human flourishing, we developed a casual-comparative study with students at the Faculty of Educational Sciences (University of Granada). Our research aims to identify the senior students’ beliefs about their teacher training programme in Foreign Languages (English) with reference to the following factors: teacher distress; emotional intelligence; teacher burnout; educational success; and perceived support from family, friends and society. Additionally, our purpose is to comprehend whether the attributes variables (independent variables) – such as gender, birthplace, parents’ profession, etc., are statistically significant or not when crossed with the dependent variables (previously mentioned). Significant results reveal that students who decided to join the teaching career with a vocational orientation perceived total support from their close social network. On the contrary, those with an instrumental justification and also those with a functional reason do not observe any assistance and hence, they are willing to leave the profession sooner. Annexing these replies with other ones like how pre-service teachers deal with different students in different contexts, may shed new light on improving the teaching experience (and students with similar variables) based on our research findings.
