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Destination marketing organizations (DMOs) use Twitter to promote attractions and special events and to build brand awareness. Tweets of a DMO spread through a complex network of connected accounts. Some of these are more influential than others due to their position within the network. This paper aims to use a network analysis of 14 DMOs to identify the categories of influencers that have the greatest reach.

NodeXL was used to download and analyze network data from Twitter during July 2016 for a collection of DMOs promoting US cities. Accounts in the networks were ranked using several measures of relative influence such as the number of times the accounts mentioned/retweeted others or were mentioned in posts about the DMO. The most influential accounts in the network were identified and coded by category.

Media, promotional accounts and those of individuals were determined to be influential by each metric considered. Stakeholders such as hotels and restaurants occupy positions of low importance in the networks and generally do not capitalize on opportunities provided by the DMOs.

DMOs can seek out strategic partnerships with key influencers to maximize their effectiveness. Additionally, stakeholders can improve their Twitter presence by interacting with the DMOs and other influential accounts.

This paper identifies influencers that can aid in DMOs’ marketing campaigns. It also presents a methodology that can monitor the effectiveness of such campaigns, something absent in the current literature.

In Canada, integrated care pilot projects are often implemented as a local reform strategy to improve the quality of patient care and system efficiencies. In the qualitative study reported here, the authors explored the experiences of healthcare professionals when first implementing integrated care pilot projects, bringing together physical and mental health services, in a community hospital setting.

Engaging a qualitative descriptive study design, semi-structured interviews were conducted with 24 healthcare professionals who discussed their experiences with implementing three integrated care pilot projects one year following project launch. The thematic analysis captured early implementation issues and was informed by an institutional logics framework.

Three themes highlight disruptions to established logics reported by healthcare professionals during the early implementation phase: (1) integrated care practices increased workload and impacted clinical workflows; (2) integrating mental and physical health services altered patient and healthcare provider relationships; and (3) the introduction of integrated care practices disrupted healthcare team relations.

Study findings highlight the importance of considering existing logics in healthcare settings when planning integrated care initiatives. While integrated care pilot projects can contribute to organizational, team and individual practice changes, the priorities of healthcare stakeholders, relational work required and limited project resources can create significant implementation barriers.

This paper reports on the processes and outcomes of a collaborative self-study conducted by three beginning teacher educators who sought to examine the efficacy of their teaching practices while working with student teachers in the field. By systematically embracing opportunities to explore mutually pressing issues and concerns manifest across the student teaching semester, the authors found that collaborative self-study provided a useful framework for considering their pedagogical reasoning and decision making as they encouraged student teachers to engage in rationale-based practice. The understandings gleaned from this study provided the authors with a basis upon which to reexamine their developing teacher educator pedagogies, as well as to critique the nature and structure of their teacher education program.

In order to teach science effectively, teachers need a strong background in science content as well as an understanding of productive methods of teaching. This includes inquiry-based learning that will cultivate conceptual development of science concepts with their students. Furthermore, it is imperative to use student-focused activities in high-needs schools to engage all students, particularly students of color, in the learning process. As a result, faculty from the teachHOUSTON Program and the Department of Physics at the University of Houston produced a Physics by Inquiry course to engage middle school and high school preservice teachers in interactive, inquiry-based teaching pedagogies for physics. This chapter provides an overview of the course. It also highlights the benefits of including such a course in a STEM teacher education program.

Storytelling is one of many instructional strategies used in leadership education with the promise of providing transformative learning through individual and communal meaning-making. In this application manuscript, we offer examples and discussion of how learners identify storytelling in course design and approach, and their perception of its impact in classroom experiences. We present two undergraduate leadership courses at our former respective institutions and reflect on how learner insights about storytelling can inform future course design and delivery. Framing teaching and learning as a relational enterprise, storytelling can facilitate purposeful, inclusive, ethical, and process-oriented learning when used as an instructional strategy. Additionally, our reflection provides leadership educators with a broader view of the responsibilities incurred when using storytelling and offers strategies to build trust and community in classroom spaces.

This paper aims to argue for the curricular inclusion of youth-generated young adult literature (YAL) alongside canonical literature and adult-generated YAL. The authors support this argument with the results of a qualitative analysis of youth memoir published in The Best Teen Writing. They strive to inform the debate between educators who value memoir as part of the secondary curriculum and critics who question the ability of youth to write purposeful, meaningful narrative. Additionally, the authors also present memoir as a unique genre for youth to document and process adolescence, and for youth to speak to issues which they deem important.

Informed theoretically by the Youth Lens, which considers how texts reinforce and/or disrupt various figurations of adolescence and youth, this study uses a multistage qualitative analysis of 83 youth memoir published in nine volumes of the Best Teen Writing from 2010 to 2018. First, the authors conducted a Labovian plot analysis to consider what themes and topics were present as well as what this sample could teach us about youth. Next, they analyzed the sample for genre hallmarks specific to creative nonfiction and memoir to consider the question of quality of youth memoir.

The findings suggest that there is no typical adolescence and that youth are balancing complex, intersectional identities, which they write about skillfully through memoir. These findings directly contrast with critics of youth memoir. Rather than clichéd, the memoirs the authors analyzed show youth as intercultural, capable of thoughtful reflection, capturing the transitory state of their youth (knowing they are not children anymore and lightly speculating about their future), skillfully integrating memoir genre hallmarks, and recording important events and perspectives with appeal to a broader readership. Furthermore, these findings position youth memoir as worthy of curricular inclusion alongside adult-generated YAL.

If the critics of youth memoir are the loudest voices, youth memoir will be, at best, relegated as examples for writers rather than seen as valid additions to curricular canon. This work gives due credit to the quality of published youth memoir to showcase their potential for curricular and canonical addition. This study builds on smaller-scale case studies and personal accounts to make an argument for curricular inclusion of youth voices and youth memoir in the secondary canon.

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are a form of distance education courses. They have been celebrated as revolutionizing the way learners access education and the way colleges and universities could expand education on a global scale beyond their traditional campuses. The purpose of this study is to identify the pedagogical strategies used for instruction and assessment in leadership-oriented MOOCs and gain a more refined understanding of the current state of MOOCs in leadership education. This study examines 96 leadership MOOCs across the platforms of Coursera, EdX, FutureLearn, Canvas.net, and Standford Online through a content analysis research framework. The study concludes with a discussion of leadership MOOC pedagogy and presents the current state of MOOCS among leadership education and professional development.

This qualitative inquiry reports the ways in which three graduate-level preservice elementary teachers conceived of the relationship between diversity and democracy, and explores how their understandings of this relationship informed their planning for democratic citizenship education with young learners. Findings indicate while the participants exhibited a certain measure of variance in their thinking about diversity and democracy, all of them planned their lessons at a lower level of multicultural support than their views suggested they would. This primarily highlights the ongoing lack of understanding regarding what it might mean to teach democratic citizenship through its practice as well as its study.