Analysis of the Boiler and Heat Exchanger Manufacturing Industry in the US Using Porter's Five Forces Framework

As global trade expands and technological progress is being made in developing countries, manufacturers of boilers and heat exchangers in the United States (US) are facing increasing import competition while industry profitability is competed away from industry rivals, market entrants, as well as by the growing number of available choices for buyers, and by suppliers with larger clientele and differentiated products and services. The forces that influence profitability in this industry is an essential part of strategic planning for any boiler and heat exchanger manufacturer that aims to control competition risk and optimize profitability. This research aims to break down and analyze the influences that industry manufacturers, market entrants, purchasers, component and raw material suppliers, foreign imports, technological advances, government policies, industry organizations, and future trends have on the profitability of industry players. While it was found that the level of competition in the industry is moderate, rapid advances in technology, increasingly stringent government policies on emission standards and boiler and heat exchanger efficiencies, as well as growing import competition may catalyze industry competition in the near future. The use of Porter’s five forces in this analysis suggests the need to consider the significance of technology and the challenges posed by imports through increasing globalization, as these factors could substantially change and disrupt the industry by reducing barriers to entry and by raising the threat of substitutes. As a result, the boiler and heat exchanger manufacturing landscape in the US could become much more competitive, which in turn, could diminish returns for industry operators. This could also change the structure of the industry with the inception of industry players that offer differentiated products and services. The question for industry groups and policy-makers is to what extent should these five forces be influenced, since the degree of support for or of counteraction to these forces will guide the future competitiveness and marketization of the boiler and heat exchanger manufacturing industry in the US.

Conceptualizing Meaningful Physical Education

Background and purpose: The research literature in physical education (PE) is placing a growing emphasis on Meaningful PE (Beni et al, 2017) to transform PE to meet the needs of all students. The purpose of this research was to 1) identify the concepts of Meaningful PE that students found to be important and 2) distinguish which concepts have the most potential to provide students with Meaningful PE experiences. The study: The project was conducted in three PE classes among grade 7 to 9 students in an urban secondary sports academy school in collaboration with their PE teachers. Data was collected using the GroupWisdomⓇ Concept Mapping (2021) platform and group interviews with the objective to have PE students and teachers conceptualize Meaningful PE. Findings: The study found that students’ and teachers’ context specific conceptualizations of Meaningful PE can be identified using GCM. The major tenet of Meaningful PE found was relationships. Student and teacher participants identified important concepts for Meaningful PE as a combination of statements within the clusters of kindness, physical activity, fun, and quality education. The findings call for a broad understanding of students within each school context in order to conceptualize meaningful physical education experiences. Conclusions: It is my conclusion that involving students in the conceptualization of Meaningful PE by focusing on autonomous and inclusive relationships is of great importance to co-create Meaningful PE experiences. Secondary students were able to identify what is important for meaningful experiences in PE and how inclusive relationships can facilitate Meaningful PE experiences.

Editorial Introduction

The 13th Annual Graduate Research Showcase was held by the Department of Secondary and Elementary Education Graduate Students’ Associations on May 1, 2021. As our first virtual research showcase, graduate student presenters and participants gathered in virtual spaces to celebrate and share our research, and engage in conversation with colleagues. We appreciate and are grateful for the opportunity provided by the Alberta Academic Review to publish a special issue to present the conference proceedings.

The Twisting and (Re)Connecting of Conducting Research During COVID-19

This presentation is driven from my on-going doctoral research on examining the use of children’s literature in English-Chinese bilingual education in the Canadian context. However, instead of demonstrating some potential findings and implications, it more focused on my experience of the twisting and (re)connecting in the process of conducting the research during the pandemic of COVID-19. Underpinned by sociocultural perspectives on literacy (Kress 2000; New London Group 1996; Perry 2012; Unrau and Alvermann 2013), and the continua of biliteracy (Hornberger and Skilton-Sylvester 2003), my research first examined what type of children’s literature that teachers and parents often or prefer to use with bilingual children. Secondly, it investigated what role children’s literature plays in bilingual children’s language and literacy development. Finally, it explored how teachers’ and parents’ experiences and perspectives with children’s literature may impact their pedagogical practices in bilingual education.

Unsettling intimacies:Re-cognizing ecological relations with the work of Jean Clandinin

For Jean Clandinin, narrative inquiry is not about being but becoming and as such posits knowledge as a continuous, non-teleological process rather than a static object. Experiential knowledge, for Clandinin, then, is intimately bound up with the vicissitudes of lived experience. If stories make meaning from experience, they open up an imaginative space through which researchers can come to understand experience as well as the knowledge that emerges from it or re-cognize such. Inquiring into experiential knowledge through narratives is valuable for research, and particularly for research that engages ecological crises, because it enables a more robust, nuanced view of life—both human and nonhuman—to emerge. Further, as Clandinin’s work reconfigures the role of the researcher, it unsettles hierarchical assumptions within the research space, allowing for collaboration, polyphonic texts, and reconfigured understandings to emerge. Clandinin’s work troubles dominant narratives about knowledge that presuppose conceptual reification and mastery. As such, narrative inquiry has the potential to support research that is interested in reconfiguring relationships between human and non-human “nature” in ways that do not necessarily fit into dominant narratives about knowledge in education. Using a framework informed by contemporary eco-criticism and trauma theory, I consider how narrative inquiry might offer reparative methods for educational research that engages ecological crises. As narrative inquiry aims to honour the particularity of experience and promote growth without assimilating plurality into an objective singularity, its methods have the capacity to provide insights into ecological relations that are critical, self-reflexive, and ethically responsive.

The Nimbleness of Neoliberalism in Queerness and EDI policy

This paper seeks to explore how queerness has been mobilized in this current historical context of neoliberal Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) policies. First, I will briefly overview the historical materialism of queerness under racial colonial capitalism. I will discuss what the lenses of surplus populations and social reproduction can and cannot help us see about queerness. Then, I will discuss how the mechanisms of neoliberalism both mobilize and repress queerness, as convenient. Finally, I will interrogate how (queer) EDI policy is implemented and negotiated in educational institutions, and situate it specifically within K-12 schools in Alberta.

Every pandemic has a silver lining

“They (pandemics) are the original social and political disruptors, and sometimes that can be really positive” Brown (2020) in University of Hawai'i News. Most active teachers, in the past year, have taught both in-person and on-line. Using the Cynefin Framework, a decision-making framework which is based in complexity science (Snowden & Boone, 2007, p.70), I examine the pedagogical changes made by teachers in the emergency teaching situation brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic. When using the Cynefin Framework, issues facing an organization can be categorized in one of five possible contexts, simple, complicated, complex, chaotic and disorder, depending upon the severity of the disruption. In a regular classroom most disruptions would be in the simple or complicated context and teachers will solve those problems by making decisions based on prior practice. In the complicated contexts, the same teachers may seek advice from senior teachers, or experts, to solve situations. A problem in the complex context would require the teacher or administrator to find an emerging path through the situation. The disruption I am examining is, according to Brown, the original disruptor—a pandemic, namely COVID-19 which caused school instruction to move from face-to-face to emergency on-line teaching. While much of the beginning on-line teaching began in a chaotic context, that is not the only category that is identified by use of the Cynefin Framework. With data drawn from three interviews given by teachers or administrators recorded on YouTube for the Global Teacher Prize dating from March 2020 forward, I examine how both teachers and schools are changing their use of technology. I look at changes and modifications to pedagogy that the teacher has instituted and have determined work. I will then determine if the change is primarily beneficial for the teacher, student, or another party—uncovering the silver linings and innovations in the ways that teachers have changed their use of technology and their pedagogy during the emergency on-line teaching of COVID-19. Reference Snowden, D. J., & Boone, M. E. (2007). A Leader’s Framework for Decision Making. Harvard Business Review, 1–25. University of Hawai'i News. https://www.hawaii.edu/news/2020/04/07/covid19-vs-spanish-flu/

Edu-Crafting Teacher Identities

“Teacher identity” is a popular topic for discussion and reflection in teacher education. We ask pre-service teachers to consider cultural and personal images of teachers (as expert, caregiver, authoritarian, and so on) in order to accept or resist these images as they contribute to the construction of their own teacher identity. Discussed in theory and aspirational language, teacher identity appears to behave in a reasonably orderly fashion; however, once the novice teacher is introduced to the dynamic world of teaching, teacher identity can become an absolute mess to untangle. As an approach to research, posthumanism offers us a chance to see this mess as beautiful in its lively, evolving, and relational condition. This posthumanist project takes to heart that in order to understand concepts such as identity differently, we must also look differently. After Taylor (2018), who describes posthumanist research as “allowing oneself to be lured by curiosity, surprise, and wonder” (p. 377), I conduct a diffractive auto/ethnographic study of several teachers to find out what happens if I take seriously the value of play in research, wondering what can be gained, in terms of understandings of teacher identities, through cartomancy as a potential source of knowledge. Semetsky (2011) has introduced the use of tarot reading to education theory as a semiotic system that can be engaged with to transform education and heal the human psyche. In my own work, I have built a practice that takes cues from Semetsky and also departs from her work, in the spirit of research creation (Chapman and Sawchuk 2012), forging its own unique method and artistic path. Conducting interviews with five self-identified teachers through video conferencing, I host a dialogue between myself, the teacher, and the tarot cards; a combination of friendly discussion, formalized interview, and tarot reading take place. This unconventional approach to research allows me to give generous attention to these teachers’ identities by acknowledging their connections to other selves, other humans, and more-than-humans. I am particularly hoping to find an expanded sense of teachers' self-perception and an increased recognition of a teacher’s multiple, connected, changing, and changeable identities.

A Brief Review of Young Children’s Home Digital Literacy Practices

COVID-19 has created significant changes in the everyday lives of teachers, children and parents. Due to school lockdowns in the spring semester of 2020, teachers shifted from in-person classroom teaching into “emergent remote teaching” (Hodges et al. 2020, para. 5), where digital tools and software were used for instruction and teacher-student communications. Many children have also shifted their social lives from face-to-face to virtual interactions (Hutchins 2020); for example, engaging in online family story reading, social media participation, and joining after school activities digitally. This pandemic has highlighted the importance of being literate in digital environments for children. Digital literacy, that is, literacy practices undertaken across multi-media, involving “accessing, using and analysing digital texts and artefacts in addition to their production and dissemination” (Sefton-Green et al. 2016, p. 15). The importance of the digital world and digital tools for the post-COVID future where digital literacy could become more prominently featured for teachers, children, and parents must not be underemphasized. In this presentation, I reviewed the literature on young children’s digital literacy practices at home. Many studies have illustrated the benefits and various kinds of learning that children get from their digital play at home, including emergent literacy learning (Neumann 2016), digital citizenship (Bennett et al. 2016), etc. Moreover, I presented the complex trajectories of children playing with their digital devices and toys at home (Marsh 2017). In the 21st century children’s home play, the boundaries between the virtual and physical worlds are blurring (Marsh 2010; O’Mara and Laidlaw 2011; Carrington 2017). More importantly, this literature review suggests a gap and an opportunity for future researchers to explore home digital literacy of children, who are from minority backgrounds in Canada, as literacy practices are socially and culturally situated. This presentation illustrates the importance of my proposed doctoral research, as my research aims to explore Culturally and Linguistically Diverse (CLD) children’s digital home literacy practices in Canada.

Cultivating Ecological Imagination with a Web-Based Mythology

This generative, theoretical descriptive paper, presents a framework I have designed to help teachers create on-line lessons that weave science from the curriculum into mythology. By mythologizing the curriculum, the teacher broadens the mindset of their students by allowing them to see the living-Earth as interconnected. This framework is timely, as many students are reacting to the policy around climate change, or absence of it, with fear and anxiety. The culminating artistic project of the digital game provides an opportunity for expression. It calls on the player to create a work of art that connects what they have learned from the game with their own experiences. The artistic project values the perspective of each contributor so that their anxieties can be heard. A direction for future research is a study that is embedded in a workshop for teachers. The workshop gives teachers an opportunity to learn about the framework while the study aims to learn about the myth-building experiences of teachers. The study follows the arts-based-research paradigm so that primacy can be given to the myths created by the teachers. As an exemplar of this framework, I present an on-line game I have created that connects several domains pertinent to the education of climate change including the personal, the social, and the scientific. The Google Sites game includes an assessment with instructions.