Abstract: When a teacher started her teaching career, never did she think one community building read aloud would contribute to a life-long friendship with her students. But Harry Potter afforded her the opportunity to create a sense of community within her 4th grade classroom that has endured into the students’ adulthood. Because of that experience, she continued to select read alouds by both students’ interests and how the content of the literature could forge connections amongst students.

Abstract: The Environmental Scan Model for School Counselors provides school counselors and school counseling programs a structure to examine internal and external factors that play a role in responsive and effective programming. This article includes a brief history of environmental scanning in educational settings, outlines The Environmental Scan Model for School Counselors, provides examples for practical implementation by school counselors, and shares how the Colorado Department of Education has used the model since 2013 as a requirement of districts and schools participating in the Colorado School Counseling Corp Grant Program.

Abstract: This paper investigates the reasons behind Kuwait’s failure to promote small and medium size enterprises (SMEs) as a source of employment and national income. The outcome of this research is based on two-stage data collection and analysis. In the first stage, data was obtained from Kuwaiti entrepreneurs’ responses on a scaled questionnaire adopting the fourteen-pillars of Global Entrepreneurship Index (GEI) on SMEs healthiness. To examine causality, exploratory data reduction as well as structural equation modeling (SEM) techniques were applied. In the second stage, data was acquired from interviewing entrepreneurs, relevant regulators, legislators, and economists. The results reveal that the country has failed to promote SMEs as a source of national employment and income. Corruption among public officials and weak public policy are the main reasons, implying no foreseeable alternatives to either the subsidized national employment programs or the shaky single-sourced national income. To remedy the problem, drastic actions must be taken at the highest level to, sincerely, fight corruption, fix employment regulations including the country’s constitution, and encourage clean energy projects to mitigate the risks of lower demand for fossil energy: the only source of our national income.

Abstract: This study examined themes of transition from pre-professional to professional status for six National Science Foundation Robert Noyce Scholars enrolled in a Master of Arts in Teaching in Secondary Education Program. An instrumental deductive coding framework was utilized to analyze study data pertaining to Scholar professional self-efficacy. Professional transition themes were observed to varying degrees in the pre and post essays for all the Noyce Scholars engaged in this study. Findings from this study included confirmation of the perception of professional growth among the Scholars, particularly themes pertaining to teacher self-confidence and professional knowledge. In addition to documenting the effects of the program on Scholars’ perceptions, the study serves as a potential gateway to more extensive research on teacher self-efficacy of STEM preservice teacher development.

Abstract: Biotika® is simultaneously a double teaching module of the ISIFC engineering school and a non-profit company performing social–solidarity actions within the University. Via this innovative teaching module, which was founded in 2006, the students work in a biomedical company in quasi-real conditions and therefore with highly restrictive quality and regulatory demands. This article will focus on the quality management system in order to show how the ISIFC students develop their know-how and thus increase their skills just before they leave for internships at the end of their studies. Lambotika is one of the many projects developed at Biotika®. It consists of the design and creation of a system enabling the collection of signals from an apparatus monitoring the oxygen pressure of flaps of skin after reconstructive surgery, in order to make them accessible to the surgeon via smartphone and to generate alerts in the event of problems.

Abstract: The study explores data of a larger ethnographic-style research that followed three children in Windhoek urban pre-and primary schools and at home in Namibia to examine their early encounters with literacy and the implications of these encounters for their later development as readers and writers in schools, at home and in their communities. As parents and older siblings occupy home as a social space, they engage each other in literacy events, during which literacy learning is encouraged as a culturally valued activity. This paper presents a ‘slice’ of that larger study that followed three pre-and primary school home literacy encounters over a period of one year, focusing on the primary school phase. The writer suggests that the reading and writing practices of literacy are only one part of what children are learning at home in order to be literate. Home creates other literacy practices that cut across reading, writing and other forms of semiotic forms of communication. I want to suggest that Namibia endorse the sociocultural approach to literacy learning by way of a paradigm shift in order to create room for other literacy practices outside of school, in homes and in communities, to become recognized and made legitimate as they already are broadening what counts as literacy.

Abstract: The development of a corpus of international/universal human rights and subsequent international(public) law and international humanitarian and human rights law has been so impressive in creating the mechanisms to protect and facilitate the said human rights, and corollary create an assumed world of justice and equality. It has created the inference of a high moral consciousness in the international community, a morality which confirms the collective aspirations of the human community: to give dignity to each human being. From the foregoing, this paper sought to examine the relationship between Foreign Policy actions and human rights. The paper concludes that foreign policy actions, especially those that involve the use of force, taken by especially powerful states, do not make consideration of the human rights of citizens of target states.

Abstract: Malawi’s HIV prevalence is one of the highest in the world. This disparity is especially prominent among 15 – 29 years of age. If they are not HIV positive themselves, they have lost many friends and relatives to this disease. My hypothesis was: Attendance at the four trauma-informed educational support groups will have a positive effect on the new general self-efficacy mean post-test scores on adolescents who experience chronic trauma. While trauma is more broadly defined as an experience that is emotionally painful or shocking and often results in a decrease in self-efficacy. The current study incorporated a mixed method approach to evaluate the impact of the Johns Hopkins trauma-informed educational program, Standing Together for Health, on self-efficacy. The results and findings presented in this study suggest that both the quantitative and qualitative results support the positive impact the trauma-informed educational support groups had in the self-reported improved mean self-efficacy scores. The statistical results were significant at the p .001 level thus rejecting the null hypothesis.