Liminal practice and reflection in professional education: police education and medical education

ABSTRACT

This paper reports on a study of how liminality relates to the facilitation of reflective practice in professional education. Liminality refers to sites and positions that exhibit 'in-betweenness', or bordering positions, that might draw together different institutional conditions. The present project aims to examine the role of liminality in professional educational practice with a specific focus upon how liminality may support student reflection. Using a qualitative and comparative research approach, we analysed interview and observational data from police education and a medical programme. Observations and interviews explore practices of collective interactional (and hence observable) reflection at sites that are characterised by ‘betweenness’ of work and education. Findings indicate that situations that afford reflection are characterised by a sense of undeterminedness in terms of either the subject, space or activity. Thus, we conclude that there is some evidence that liminality affords reflection, but also that liminality and underminedness are fragile states that are not easily organised in a professional education curriculum.     

A Dangerous Benefit: Dialogue, Discourse, and Michel Foucault's Critique of Representation

Dialogue has been analyzed by educational theorists mainly from a perspective of representation. However, social theory on language has long questioned whether representation is the primary function of language. Thus, educational debates over the uses and abuses of dialogue entail a blind spot. What if dialogue works in ways that are not representational? What if dialogue is, rather, to be understood as both representation and discourse? In this article, the author argues that dialogue must be understood in both ways. As such, dialogue may be a representational benefit, but it is also a discursive danger.     

Reclaiming nostalgia in educational politics and practice: counter-memory,aporetic mourning,and critical pedagogy

In this essay, the author attempts to complicate the reading of nostalgia in the cultural politics of education, arguing that the blind rhetoric of nostalgia for an idealized past can and should be critiqued in productive ways. Despite some literature addressing the consequences of nostalgia in the context of teaching, little has been done towards the direction of critically examining nostalgia in relation to the controversial issues of national memory and historical trauma and how those influence educational politics and practice. Central to the author's argument is that nostalgia has multiple meanings, some of which promote nationalist agendas while others offer opportunities for transformation. One way to begin the process of reclaiming nostalgia in education is to shift the discourse from restorative nostalgia to reflective nostalgia. The constructs of counter-memory and aporetic mourning provide useful theoretical lenses through which reflective nostalgia can promote productive ways of addressing national memory and historical trauma.     

A Traumatic Reading of Twentieth-Century Rhetorical Theory: The Belgian Holocaust,Malines, Perelman,and de Man

In this essay, I seek to read the rhetorical theories set forth by Belgians Chaïm Perelman and Paul de Man as responses to the Holocaust. To accomplish this aspiration, I draw from Dominick LaCapra's framework for the analysis of trauma and its expression in historical and theoretical texts. Reading the rhetorical theories of Perelman and de Man, two of the most prominent of the twentieth century, through a lens of trauma theory allows critics to see them as post-war efforts to deal with the implications of the absence of meaning, the murder and loss of 25,257 Belgian Jews, Fascism, genocide, and de Man's collaboration with the Nazis. I argue that Perelman's rhetoric theory better “works-through” the Belgian Holocaust than the one offered by de Man because it offers a vision of reason that can yield justice and places collaborators in the “grey zone” of totalitarian societies and logical positivism, thereby offering de Man partial absolution for his endorsement of the German occupation and anti-Semitism. De Man's rhetorical theory appears to act out the Belgian Holocaust, for it rehearses the act of deconstruction, does not name its traumatic exigence, lacks the theoretical resources to deal with the material past, fails to offer better choices for the present, or provide a vision of the future. Reading rhetorical theories as responses to the exigences of trauma calls for a reconsideration of the contexts and motives driving the creation of the major rhetorical theories of the twentieth century, including those of Heidegger and Grassi.     

战争电影中的英雄主义、集体记忆与国家认同

英雄主义和集体记忆是战争电影建构国家认同的重要方式,但是,国家认同有双重理路,英雄主义有多元表征,集体记忆有代际变化,文章试图说明,"英雄主义"和"集体记忆"如何在这个充满张力的过程中建构不同的国家认同。     

族谱、民俗生活与村民的记忆--对安徽T村的考察

对普通村民而言,族谱不仅是宗族的象征和宗族组织的组成要素,而且是一种记忆的载体。它承载着个人及家庭的记忆,以及对远祖、对宗族和村落的集体记忆。这种集体记忆通过族谱在民俗生活中的使用得以维系传承,并提供村落社会认同的深层基础。族谱对记忆的承载与维系功能受到民俗生活的制约,其功能的发挥离不开民俗生活为之提供的社会环境。     

Symbolic Storytelling,Freedom Movements,and Church Education: Cesar Chavez as Virtuoso of Identity

Freedom movements historically have shown power to transform social and personal identity. Absorbing the narrative of a movement can lead to something not unlike conversion. Accepting the truth of a movement's story implies change in who one believes oneself to be and may reorient one's life story. Movements like Cesar Chavez's National Farm Workers Association of the 1960s offer a distinctive reading of history that refocuses individual and collective memory around a cause. In this article, I explore one movement's holistic approach and urge that church education should be re-imagined as comprehensive storytelling.     

Sketching,not representational competence,predicts improved science learning

Representational competence is a target of novel learning environments given the assumption that improved representational competence improves learning in science. There exists little evidence, however, that improving representational competence is positively correlated with learning outcomes across science disciplines. In this report, we argue that the previously reported weak relationships between representational competence and science learning outcomes have resulted from designs that do not explicitly analyze the discipline‐specific skills related to the representational competence construct. Here, we demonstrate through a detailed analysis of students' representation use that at least two demonstrated skills comprising representational competence (e.g., construction and selection) are not strongly related to improved conceptual understanding in the domain. We discuss the implications of these results for the design of future learning environments that aim to improve learning through improved representational competence.     

Knowledge relations and epistemic infrastructures as mediators of teachers' collective autonomy

This paper examines how teachers' knowledge relations and the profession's epistemic infrastructure shape collective autonomy. Professionals' autonomy derives partially from their responsibility for a specific knowledge base. This responsibility is currently challenged by educational policies and complex knowledge landscapes. Existing research has shown how epistemic policy instruments impact teachers' autonomy. However, less attention has been paid to how professional autonomy is informed by teachers' knowledge relations, and to collective, rather than individual, aspects of teachers' autonomy. Implications include how teachers can define the role of knowledge resources in professional work, and how the profession can navigate epistemic and political landscapes.     

Emerging childhoods and immanent becomings: considering difference in one child's encounters with popular culture

ABSTRACT

Ongoing debates over children's encounters with popular culture are grounded in representational images of what childhood is and what childhood should be. As such, the tendency to overcode and regulate children's behaviors, relationships, and desires are often part of a greater effort to prepare the child to fit fixed and essentialized notions of what she should be as she grows into a person, capable of contributing to a globalized society. These efforts toward molding the child for adulthood disparage the moments that she is already a part of and the most important thing then becomes preparing her to participate in a world that we can neither foresee nor predict. In this paper, I consider the research encounters with an 11-year-old girl, who participated in a university-sponsored weekend art school, where she created seemingly subversive drawings and comics as she engaged with popular culture related to Justin Bieber. Employing Deleuzoguattarian concepts, I describe the ways in which the girl transcended representational images of childhood. In doing so, I reconceptualize childhood itself as affective, emergent, and always in processes of difference.     

我国农村集体经济组织法律制度的缺陷及其成因探析

集体经济组织的演变可以划分为三个历史阶段,即初级合作社时期、高级合作社时期及家庭联产承包责任制时期。从规范层面看,三个阶段的集体经济组织分别存在于现实层面、政策层面及法律层面。通过历史分析,可以清楚地看到在法律层面集体经济组织的真正缺陷所在。另外,从法律文化、改革成本、制度知识等不同角度对集体经济组织缺陷的成因进行深入分析和探讨,有助于我们从制度上完善集体经济组织寻求可靠的理论依据。     

永远不能忘记历史——纪念圆明园罹难153周年简

每一个国家,每一个民族,都有自己的历史。她是这个国家或民族曾经走过的历史印迹,是整个国家和全民族共同的集体记忆,是维系国家存在的根基与纽带,是维系民族向心力的文化魂魄与血脉。无论是曾经的历史成就与辉煌,还是历史上曾经的失败与耻辱,都是无比珍贵的精神财富,我们都不应该忘记.尽管英法对华发动第二次鸦片战争的硝烟早已散尽,但是我们不能忘记那段屈辱的历史。值此圆明园罹难153周年之际,深切缅怀英勇抵抗英法联军的民族战士与英雄,进行历史的回忆与深思,是我们义不容辞的历史责任。     

Using representational tools to support historical reasoning in computer-supported collaborative learning

Abstract

In this article the authors focus on how features of a computersupported collaborative learning (CSCL) environment can elicit and support domain-specific reasoning and more specifically historical reasoning. The CSCL environment enables students to collaborate on a historical inquiry task and in writing an argumentative essay. In order to support historical reasoning the authors compared two representational tools: a graphical representation (argumentative diagram) and a linear representation (argument list). As it is assumed that an argumentative diagram can support both cognitive and interaction processes, it was expected that using this tool would result in more qualitative historical reasoning, in the chat as well as in the essay. However, the results of this study did not show a significant difference in the amount of historical reasoning between the two conditions. A possible explanation can be found in the way the students make use of the representational tool while executing the task. The tool does not only function as a cognitive tool that can elicit elaborate activities, but also as a tool through which students communicate.     

Making Payton's Rocket: Heterotopia and Lines of Flight

This article explores the potential of heterotopia as a way to prompt us to think differently about children's art‐making. Foucault uses the term to describe a space of difference. As something that is not easily located within a system of representation, a heterotopia is not amenable to interpretation. It is this resistance to interpretation that can ‘force us to confront the limits of our understanding’. Linking Foucault's idea of the heterogeneous with Deleuze & Guttari's concept of ‘smooth space’ allows me to think differently about representational intent. As a teacher of young children, I have habitually valued and encouraged ‘purposeful’ play. In terms of artwork this has often meant that I have assumed an overriding and usually representational ‘purpose’ that underlies the work and gives it meaning. However, in many of the junk models produced by children during my fieldwork, I glimpsed a quality of the smooth space evoked by Deleuze & Guttari's patchwork quilt where, although ‘they may display equivalents to themes [and] symmetries … there is no centre; its basic motif (“block”) is composed of the single element; the recurrence of this element frees uniquely the rhythmic values’.     

Nancy Akhavan. The Title I Teacher's Guide to Teaching Reading,K-3

Early childhood educators are increasingly being called upon to deal with emotionally charged topics, which include natural and manmade disasters, war, terror, death, and other traumatic events. At our teachers college, we prepare students to deal with a challenging issue, memory of the Holocaust, through a series of activities and workshops spread over 3 years. In this study, we examined the students' emerging pedagogical paradigms for dealing with the Holocaust in the early childhood classroom in Israel. The results of this research shed light on development of pedagogic content knowledge (PCK) related to emotionally laden topics among preservice teachers.     

Holocaust education in Austria: A (hi)story of complexity and ambivalence

In Austria, activities for teaching about and remembering the Holocaust have concentrated mainly on National Socialism and its atrocities. Austria’s history of political anti-Semitism goes back to the 19th century, however, and has been widely and publicly acknowledged. It has always been linked to nationalistic tendencies that are still present today and rarely reflected upon, including the anti-Slavic and anti-Turkish attitudes that right-wing parties use to gain supporters. Vienna’s special place of remembrance, the Heldenplatz, with its monuments and history, is a useful place to begin examining Austrian identities and the course of collective Austrian ways of thinking. Based on that examination, we then consider Austria’s daily politics and treatment of the past. We next turn to Holocaust education after the war, which has had an impressive impact after a late start, and mention some of its drawbacks and problems. We next discuss the lack of serious research about memorials in Austria, as compared with Germany, and present initial results from a project that started in spring 2009 to examine knowledge gains and attitude changes among students after they visit the Mauthausen concentration camp.     

Knowledge,Narrative and National Reconciliation: Storied reflections on the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission

This paper considers the educational work that narrative does. Against the context of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission that examined the crimes of apartheid, it discusses the narrative implications of South African poet Antjie Krog's multi-layered text of Truth Commission testimony, and autobiographical and philosophical musings. The paper argues that narrative points to education in four ways. The first involves research practices in which subjectivity and experience are acknowledged, celebrated and recognized to be powerful and compelling, allowing us to learn moral truths. Secondly, narrative can be utilised as part of a pedagogy of care, compassion and concern in which we ask questions regarding what it means to be taught by the lives of others, and how stories that are not our own speak to those we already have, enabling us to learn how to act morally through others' experiences. The third aspect of narrative is then the identity work it enables, offering the possibility for the reconstruction of the learning “I”, inflecting away from past perspectives to new ways of seeing. Through listening to others we might produce more accountable and more responsible knowledge. Fourthly, we explore how narratives might produce trustworthy accounts in which evidence is not endlessly plastic, but where the narrative form enlarges the scope for understanding. Throughout we show that individual and collective narratives are played out on a structural field, embedded in the political, social and historical conditions of a racial and gendered power, with real material effects.     

师范生师德教育的路径选择

教师要肩负起为国家和社会培养高素质人才的历史重任,必须要以具备良好的师德作保证。师德是教师在从事教育活动中所应当遵循的道德规范和应有的道德品质。基于社会发展的背景来考察社会经济的发展、网络科技的进步以及社会关系变迁背景,可以考虑将师范生师德教育分为起始阶段、发展阶段、升华阶段,通过考察每一阶段的教育内容分别选择不同的教育路径。     

Far away and nearby: Holocaust remembrance and human rights education in Switzerland

The article considers how young people in Swiss schools are taught about the history and background of the Holocaust within the wider perspective of human rights education, as an important basis for education concerning democratic citizenship. Given the country’s specific history, for decades the Holocaust was not a matter of great interest in Swiss schools, or a topic that pupils often learned about as a part of their own history. Recently, however, sensitivity about historical incidents and the processes of the Third Reich has increased. Holocaust education has also become more important in the context of Swiss state institutional policy and non-governmental initiatives and has also become an issue in schools. This article includes an overview of relevant Swiss history and the current political situation, and a review of Swiss educational policies and especially of activities related to Holocaust remembrance and human rights education.     

GROWING AS TEACHER EDUCATORS: Learning New Professional Development Practices

This article examines the ways that, in Holocaust education in Jewish schools in Melbourne and New York at the beginning of the 21st century, knowledge of the Holocaust is transferred to students in chronological form. It begins by asking: What work do chronological narratives do within the Holocaust historical narratives offered within Jewish high school classrooms? In order to explore this question, examples from curricula and interviews with the teachers are explored. It is argued that while the use of chronological narratives within the high-school classroom to narrate historical events is not unique to the teaching of the Holocaust, the work which this narrative form does is particular to the negotiation of the traumatic aftermath of the Holocaust.