How do you teach learning?

The question ‘How do you teach ‘learning'?’ is located within the domain of professional adult education practice and is dealt with through a series of ‘stock‐taking’ moves through the field of practice. First, we offer a high‐level overview of standard answers to the question imbedded in contemporary educational practice. Second, we examine the adult education case in particular, focussing on the peculiarly idealised role the ‘adult learner’ has come to assume in international practitioner discourse. Third, we narrow the focus sharply to present a brief case‐study of our own attempts to teach ‘learning’ within the Advanced Diploma Course for Educators of Adults at the University of Cape Town. Finally, we attempt to clarify our present assumptions about the requirements of a ‘curriculum for learning’. (1) 1. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Kenton Educational Conference, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa, in November 1992.

     

The Implications of a Communicative Approach for Language Teacher Education: preliminary projects carried out in Norwegian teachers’ colleges

New syllabuses for the teaching of English in Norway based on a communicative approach have necessitated rethinking the training given to teachers of English. Experiments are being carried out at some colleges of education with theme‐based teaching, in which traditional divisions into phonetics, language, culture, literature, etc. are replaced by studying thematic units in which the trainees are obliged to use English and are more actively engaged in the learning process.     

On the crest of a wave: transforming the archival future

The profession of digital archivist is crystallising, fundamentally challenging traditional archival roles. The very nature of digital records also challenges the sustainability of archival systems and collections. Records that used to stay stable for decades in an analogue world now risk being lost or damaged within moments of creation. How should archivists react to these changes? Archivists have to lift ourselves out of our analogue environment and focus more effort on forging a new path, to reposition archives, archival institutions and archival practitioners more strategically for the future. To do this, archivists must resist the temptation to think that we and we alone – as people, as archivists or as today’s archivists as opposed to yesterday’s archivists – can come up with the ultimate solution to the world’s recordkeeping problems. Archivists must keep innovating, absolutely. But we also need to be agile and flexible, remembering that anything we come up with today will be superseded at some point in the future – increasingly, in the very near future. Archivists need to forge links with archives, systems and people in order to come up with approaches to records and archives care that remain usable now and flexible well into the future.     

Subject or object? Shaping and reshaping the intersections between aboriginal and non-aboriginal records

This paper considers the shaping and reshaping of, and intersections between, aboriginal and non-aboriginal communication, information, and documentation processes in British Columbia, from the mid 1800s to the 21st century. It suggests that when two cultures come into contact with each other, the relationship between them is inevitably transformed, along with each culture’s traditional methods of communication, information management, and memory making. While it is often assumed that one technology might dominate the other, more often the different technologies and methods blend together to create a new hybrid approach, a cross-cultural integration, though the less powerful culture often does most of the accommodating. By considering the relationship between aboriginal people and European settlers in British Columbia, on the west coast of Canada, particularly over the ownership of and rights to land, this paper suggests that the two societies have intertwined their communities, their cultures, and their documentary systems to the point that today neither society exists in isolation. Each culture is inextricably linked with the other, a fact that calls into question the idea that aboriginal oral traditions are “pure” or separate from non-aboriginal methods of documentation, as well as the notion that written forms of record keeping about aboriginal–non-aboriginal relationships are not influenced by oral evidence from aboriginal sources.     

Epistemological understanding in science learning: the consistency of representations across contexts

This article addresses the extent to which written diagnostic questions can be used to assess science students' representations of the nature of science. The responses of 731 European science students in upper secondary school and undergraduate programmes to two written diagnostic questions are analysed for consistency. The written questions yielded some insights into students' views. There is evidence that the majority of students in this sample draw upon different epistemological representations in different contexts. The paper concludes with a discussion of the use of data from such questions in science education, and the significance of models of students' epistemological knowledge.     

Exploring the subcultural norms of the response to violence in hockey

This study explores the question of how hockey players construct a response to violence in hockey. Law enforcement and the judiciary have been reluctant to apply legal norms witnessed outside of the hockey arena leaving a very small body of case law and a great deal of uncertainty as to where and when courts should intervene. Cultural theorists suggest that law is derived by institutionalizing norms that have already been developed and institutionalized by culture. We use a sample of elite hockey players in developmental leagues to better understand when they think a legal intervention is justified. We argue that their views can provide guidance to legal actors as to when the law should become involved in hockey violence.     

The Influence of Perinatal Risk Status on Contingency Learning in Six-to Thirteen-Month-Old Infants

Learning of a manipulative response was examined in 6-13-month-old well babies and in risk infants who, in the perinatal period, had experienced a range of respiratory interventions (low- and high-risk). 2 contingency conditions (contingent and yoked) were crossed with 2 locations of feedback (local and remote). Both well-baby and low-risk groups reliably discriminated between contingent and noncontingent feedback when it was presented locally, whereas high-risk babies failed to make this distinction in the conditioning phase. Risk status reliably predicted the learning performance. No response acquisition was obtained in the remote feedback condition. In extinction, the well-baby and low-risk groups decreased their responding, but the high-risk group showed an initial response burst. The findings are discussed in the context of risk-related differences in contingency awareness and frustrative nonreward. Overall, the results confirm that the effects of perinatal compromise involving respiratory complications influence infants' processing of contingency information during the first year of life.     

What “ideas‐about‐science” should be taught in school science? A Delphi study of the expert community

Recent arguments in science education have proposed that school science should pay more attention to teaching the nature of science and its social practices. However, unlike the content of science, for which there is well‐established consensus, there would appear to be much less unanimity within the academic community about which “ideas‐about‐science” are essential elements that should be included in the contemporary school science curriculum. Hence, this study sought to determine empirically the extent of any consensus using a three stage Delphi questionnaire with 23 participants drawn from the communities of leading and acknowledged international experts of science educators; scientists; historians, philosophers, and sociologists of science; experts engaged in work to improve the public understanding of science; and expert science teachers. The outcome of the research was a set of nine themes encapsulating key ideas about the nature of science for which there was consensus and which were considered to be an essential component of school science curriculum. Together with extensive comments provided by the participants, these data give some measure of the existing level of agreement in the community engaged in science education and science communication about the salient features of a vulgarized account of the nature of science. Although some of the themes are already a feature of existing school science curricula, many others are not. The findings of this research, therefore, challenge (a) whether the picture of science represented in the school science curriculum is sufficiently comprehensive, and (b) whether there balance in the curriculum between teaching about the content of science and the nature of science is appropriate. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 40: 692–720, 2003     

The effect of delayed feedback on infant learning reexamined.

The study reexamines the effect of delayed reinforcement upon contingency behavior in 6- to 8-month-old infants and attempts to account for the temporal discrepancy between span of integration and contingency memory. A modified delayed-reinforcement scheduling procedure enabled a previous methodological criticism to be discounted. The findings confirmed that whereas infants revealed reliable acquisition under immediate reinforcement, a 3-sec delay (whether reset or nonreset) precluded response acquisition, as did 6-sec and 10-sec delay of reinforcement. The findings are interpreted in terms of an informational-load hypothesis which relates short-term memory to the integration and/or segregation of multimodal input.