What teachers need to know about the struggle for self-determination (conscientization) and self-regulation: adults with disabilities speak about their education experiences

The purpose of this paper is to help teachers better understand the struggles that people with disabilities experience in attaining their educational goals and to encourage the development of teaching and learning strategies that help to respect and facilitate the struggle itself. The authors share the generative themes that emerged using a critical pedagogy approach (dialogic interviews) to elicit the voices of adults with disabilities speaking about their public school experiences. In discussing the implications for teachers, the authors show the intersections of educational psychology's concept self-regulation and critical pedagogy's concept conscientization and special education’ s concept self-determination. Why the ‘struggle’ itself is important (from the perspectives provided by conscientization, self-regulation, and self determination) is discussed.The major question is whether or not teachers can structure the awareness process that results in learners becoming aware enough to verbalize, “I have difficulties”. What do teachers do to stimulate the metacognitive thinking processes that makes it possible for students with disabilities to think, “I can monitor myself!”? How can teachers capture the power of the conscientization experience that leads students with disabilities to experience the generative will power “to use the powers that I have to make a difference in my life's situation?” How do adults with disabilities come to these kinds of awareness and how can teachers help facilitate the awareness?     

A Process Approach to Community-Based Education: The People’s Free University of Saskatchewan

On the basis of insights provided by Whitehead and John Cobb, I show how the People’s Free University of Saskatchewan (PFU) is a working model of free, open, community-based education that embodies several characteristics of Whitehead’s philosophy of education. Formed in opposition to the growing commercialization at the original “people’s university,” (the University of Saskatchewan) the PFU has spawned distinctive ideals of its own. The PFU reflects Whitehead’s belief in the importance of shared knowledge fostered by community-based education, the value of abstract and practical knowledge, and the power of the imagination to establish a community of learners capable of acting freely together.     

‘Scaffolding’ through talk in groupwork learning

In the present study, we develop and deploy a conceptual framework of “scaffolding” in groupwork learning, through the analysis of the pursuit of a learning goal over time. The analysis follows individuals’ different experiences of an interaction as well as collective experiences, considering individual attainment as a result of a bi-directional contextualized conversation and action. We detect, describe and evaluate two (2) types of interaction that can be characterized as “scaffolding process”: the first concerns “Scaffolding individual thinking” and the second “Scaffolding collective thinking”. The latter, apart from presenting the educational advantages of collective thinking through peer discussion (D) and curriculum-focused evaluation context of Teacher Initiation – Student Response – Teacher Follow up (IRF), also presents the advantage of ‘spiral’ verbal exchanges in which the teacher “tunes in” to the students’ present state of ability or understanding (spiral IDRF).     

Teachers’ emotions in educational reforms: Self-understanding, vulnerable commitment and micropolitical literacy

Based on narrative-biographical work with teachers, the author argues that teachers’ emotions have to be understood in relation to the vulnerability that constitutes a structural condition of the teaching job. Closely linked to this condition is the central role played by teachers’ “self-understanding”—their dynamic sense of identity—in teachers’ actions and their dealing with, for example, the challenges posed by reform agendas. The (emotional) impact of those agendas is mediated by the professional context, that encompasses dimensions of time (age, generation, biography) and of space (the structural and cultural working conditions). Finally, it is argued that the professional and meaningful interactions of teachers with their professional context contains a fundamental political dimension. Emotions reflect the fact that deeply held beliefs on good education are part of teachers’ self-understanding. Reform agendas that impose different normative beliefs may not only trigger intense feelings, but also elicit micropolitical actions of resistance or proactive attempts to influence and change one's working conditions.     

The Importance of Forgetting ‘Perishing’ in Whitehead’s Cosmology and Epistemology

In this paper, I will address a constructive criticism of the papers that appeared as a Symposium on Whitehead’s Process Philosophy of Education (Interchange, 26(4), pp. 341–415, 1995). In his criticism of those papers, George Allan (1998) claimed that the contributors to the Symposium were not as Whiteheadian as they thought they were because they failed to contextualize their papers in the harmony and holism of Whitehead’s organic philosophy. Allan thought, in essence, that we had committed a fallacy of misplaced concreteness. Ironically, this is exactly what we had been trying to avoid. With regards to my paper, Allan felt that I had failed to explain the importance of perishing for Whitehead in the becoming and objective immortality of the superject of experience. Hopefully, I have done a better job of this in what follows. I would also like to begin exploring the implications of Whitehead’s cosmology and epistemology for the advance of theory in psychology. On a pleasant afternoon in Oulu, Finland I was discussing the ideas presented here with my friend Hannu Soini who said to me, “when one is learning it is important to forget certain things so they do not impede our creativity.” Hence, the title of this paper and a further exploration of the concepts that Hannu and I feel are impeding the advance of psychology. I would like to preface with a reminder that when I try to explain Whitehead’s philosophy succinctly I sometimes fail to explain things well. His is a truly organic conception of reality so please forgive me.     

Envisioning Possibility: Schooling and Student Agency in Children’s and Young Adult Literature

This article provides a rationale for using literature in the classroom to explore conceptions of curriculum and teaching. We discuss a number of exemplars from children’s and young adult fiction, both mainstream and less well known; offer a taxonomy for categorizing the range of visions of curriculum and teaching in the literature; and describe the responses of a group of middle school students to a unit that examined schooling in literature. We argue that reading literature which addresses student experiences in school can help students make sense of those experiences and, more importantly, open their minds to ideas about teaching and schooling that they otherwise might never have considered.John Kornfeld is Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the School of Education at Sonoma State University. His research in curriculum, children’s literature, school/ university collaboration, and the politics of schooling has been published in such journals as Theory into Practice, Social Education, and Theory and Research in Social Education.Laurie Prothro is a school library consultant and children’s librarian in Sonoma County, California. She specializes in collection development and young adult literature. Her most recent publication with John Kornfeld, entitled “Comedy, Conflict, and Community: Home and Family in Harry Potter,” appears in Elizabeth Heilman’s Harry Potter’s World: Multidisciplinary Critical Perspectives.     

Watching the Detectives: Mark Haddon’s <Emphasis Type="Italic">The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time</Emphasis> and Kevin Brooks’ <Emphasis Type="Italic">Martyn Pig</Emphasis>

Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time was the cross-over publishing sensation of 2003. It has been the subject of widespread critical and commercial acclaim and has won prestigious UK prizes including the Whitbread Book of the Year and the Guardian’s Children’s Fiction Prize. It is still enjoying considerable commercial success in the best-seller lists. This essay reads Haddon’s novel alongside Kevin Brooks’ Martyn Pig (2002), winner of the Branford Boase Award and short-listed for the Clip Carnegie Medal. Brooks’ hero, Martyn has a troubled teenage life, and like Haddon’s Christopher, he turns to detective fiction in order to shape his own experience. The essay develops the idea that “every life is in search of a narrative” (Richard Kearney, On Stories, p. 4) and argues that detective fiction, in particular, provides structures that allow Brooks’ and Haddon’s first person narrators to make sense of their confusing worlds.Ruth Gilbert is senior lecturer in English at University College, Winchester, England. She has published on gender and sexuality in early modern literature. Recent research has focused on memory and identity in contemporary British Jewish fiction. This article stems from an ongoing interest in teenage and “cross-over” fiction and creative writing. She is currently writing a novel for teenagers.     

Education and the Religious Thinker

This paper is concerned with the process of religious thinking as a linguistic form of investigating the world of values, which stands in contrast to theology and religious studies. It hinges around Wittgenstein’s comment, “I am not a religious man but I cannot help but see every question from a religious point of view.” It argues that scientific modes of thought are now so dominant that values education of all types are distorted as science itself was once distorted in an age when theological language held sway. The result today is the worrying growth of what is usually termed fundamentalism or literalism. The paper introduces the thinking on this issue from the curriculum theories of the Danish thinker Søren Kierkegaard, which have been ignored for nearly two centuries, before examining the work of a modern scholar, Christopher Arthur. Finally Whitehead’s insights arising from his later works are brought into play to conclude the argument.     

Dangerous liaisons: Reflections on a pilot project for state-mandated outcomes assessment of written communication

This study details the development and results of a campus-based writing assessment plan that was mandated by a state-wide university system in order to explore the “value-added” from a writing program curriculum to undergraduate students’ competence with written expression. Four writing samples (two timed essays and two conventional essays) that are produced before, during and at the close of enrollment in the writing program are scored for critical thinking, genre knowledge, rhetorical skills, and mechanics. The results indicate that local campus student achievement related to writing is comparable with performance captured by nationally normed technologies and larger assessment projects at similar state universities. The data also suggest significant performance difference related to the institutional position of students’ instructors as well as students’ own enrollment status. The article concludes that while the data produced by this research project are compelling, the policy and political implications of the undertaking suggest greater sensitivity to the institution's culture and program direction as well as its impact on instructor morale, student learning environment and the place of composition studies in the university.     

Social understanding in the first years of school

This study focused on the nature of interpersonal understanding in 4- and 5-year-olds. Early childhood constitutes a critical transition period during which children become able to understand their own and others’ “inner world” as it relates to actions. A neo-Piagetian theoretical and analytic framework was used to study children’s understandings of interpersonal dynamics in the classroom context and their conceptions of roles and intentions of peers and teachers. Forty-two children responded to eight tasks that were designed to elicit their conceptions of peer and teacher intentions. These tasks were in the form of picture stories focused on nurturance, care, protection, and teaching events, followed by a semi-structured interview. Children also engaged in the “classroom model activity”; this activity focused on children’s understandings of their own and others’ social relationships and activities in the classroom. Hierarchical regression analyses showed level of understanding of others’ intentions to be a significant predictor of ability to analyze classroom experiences, and increased prediction with the addition of an interaction term for intentional understanding and use of verbs of intention.     

The Development of Children’s Concept of a Substance: A Longitudinal Study of Interaction Between Curriculum and Learning

This paper is a reflection on a three-year longitudinal study that explored the development of children’s concept of a substance, for which detailed results concerning children’s understandings have been reported elsewhere. The attention in this paper is on the methodological features related to the longitudinal nature of the study and the insights into pupils’ learning that were afforded by its design. There is, of course, an extensive literature on children’s understandings of scientific ideas, and the nature of conceptual change involved in learning is a contested area. I argue in the paper that longitudinal studies are uniquely placed to inform the debate, and by focusing on this particular study the aim is to demonstrate the kind of contribution that can be made.     

Family background, financial constraints and higher education attendance in China

Using data from the 2004 China College Student Survey, conducted by the author, this paper finds that long-term factors such as scholastic ability and parental education are significantly correlated with higher education attendance. By contrast, short-term financial constraints are also significantly associated with higher education access, but to a lesser degree. Furthermore, in recent years China's higher education expansion has provided broader access to students from lower income families. However, the tuition fees and “net prices” of elite universities are lower than those of medium quality universities, while the tuition fees and “net prices” of medium quality universities are lower than those of relatively low quality universities and colleges. This has led to a reverse relationship between family income and attendance costs, such that lower income families now shoulder a much higher burden for their childrens’ university education than higher income families.     

University entrepreneurship in a developing country: The case of the P. Universidad Católica de Chile, 1985–2000

Privatization in higher education is usually understood either as the surge of private institutions or as universities’ growing reliance on private sources of funding or otherwise operating more like firms. Joining the growing literature on university entrepreneurship, this is a case study on the less examined problem of entrepreneurial universities in developing countries. In a period of roughly 15 years, the Pontificia Universidad Católica of Chile, founded in 1888, turned itself from a mostly teaching institution to a research-oriented university, responsible for one-fourth of the Chile’s mainstream scientific output and 40% of all Ph.D.s awarded nationally. Yet, public funding represents today only 17% of its revenues, down from almost 90% in 1972. How such academic development could have occurred as the State withdrew and the market took hold of Chilean higher education after the reforms introduced by the military rule of Augusto Pinochet (1973–1990) is the theme of this work. Universidad Católica’s policies and strategies are described, and the factors contributing to its success, together with their limitations, identified. The case suggests that orientation to the market can be more a means for survival and growth under the pressure of privatization, than a result of a ‘Triple Helix’ strategy of universities, government and industry to generate innovation out of academic knowledge. Secondly, while in the industrialized world, higher education entrepreneurship is associated with knowledge production for economic development (‘Mode 2’), entrepreneurial universities in the context of developing countries may just be finding their way to the academic, disciplinary mode of research.     

Teachers’ career ladder policy in Ethiopia: an opportunity for professional growth or “a stick disguised as a carrot?”

In response to the ever-declining status of the teaching profession, and its adverse effects on the country's educational system, the Federal Ministry of Education in Ethiopia introduced a policy of the teachers’ career ladder in 1994. While reformers believe that the introduction of the policy has improved the condition of the teaching profession, the net gains of the policy remain deceptive and even, in part, reduce some of the benefits teachers used to enjoy in the single salary scheme in the past. Among other things, central to the claims of the policy's advocates stands an improved salary scale for teachers. While this was admittedly true by the time the policy was introduced, the gain in salary raise has gradually been lost to the bureaucratic hurdles and watchdog structures erected to screen teachers’ eligibility at each stage of the career ladder. After critically assessing the major aspects of the policy, along with the voices of Ethiopian teachers, the current study argues that the policy of the teachers’ career ladder in Ethiopia is another prototypical case of a failed experiment both in terms of improving the lives of teachers and maintaining their professional rights.     

The effects of prior information upon perceptions of exceptional children

Students in a university special education course were shown three identical videotapes of children in a school setting. The subjects were randomly divided into three groups, each receiving different written background information (“positive,” “neutral,” or “negative”) prior to viewing the videotapes. It was found that the variations in written information had significant effects upon the subjects' perceptions of the children's behavior, and upon the degree to which the children were regarded as able to function successfully in a regular classroom. These findings suggest that attitudes toward exceptional children are influenced by the way in which prior information, such as that contained in a child's educational records, is presented. Teacher and peer acceptance of exceptional children can be increased if information is presented in a realistic and positive manner.     

Educational development in East Timor

This paper examines educational development in East Timor. It is particularly concerned with the period between October 1999 and May 2002 when the country was governed by the United Nations Transitional Administration in East Timor (UNTAET). The paper argues that UNTAET missed an important opportunity to implement the transformation in education that was called for by Timorese leaders. This was in part due to the extensive damage to East Timor’s education system as a result of Indonesia’s violent withdrawal in 1999. It was also due to the UNTAET period being the latest phase of a long history of external actors seeking to govern East Timor. As another (albeit far more benign) external actor, UNTAET’s efforts in the educational sector lacked legitimacy and thus popular acceptance from the people of East Timor.     

Blocking student performance in high school?

Block schedules have been used in several different high schools in various areas of the United States. Reasons for their use vary from better preparing students for college work to fewer disruptions of the school day. Several studies have examined the impact of changing from a semester system to a block system on the academic performance in specific areas with varying results. This paper examines the impact of a change of schedule on overall academic performance as measured by a student’s Grade Point Average. This study indicates that for the specific case studied, the change in systems did have a positive effect on performance.     

Windows into the mind

As faculty, our goals for students are often tacit, hidden not only from students but from ourselves as well. We present a conceptual framework for considering teaching goals – what we want our students to achieve – that encourages us to think more broadly about what we mean by achieving in our knowledge domains. This framework includes declarative knowledge (“knowing that”), procedural knowledge (“knowing how”), schematic knowledge (“knowing why”) and strategic knowledge (“knowing when, where and how our knowledge applies”). We link the framework to a variety of assessment methods and focus on assessing the structure of declarative knowledge – knowledge structure. From prior research, we know that experts and knowledgeable students have extensive, well-structured, declarative knowledge; not so novices. We then present two different techniques for assessing knowledge structure – cognitive and concept maps, and a combination of the two – and provide evidence on their technical quality. We show that these maps provide a window into the structure of students declarative knowledge not otherwise tapped by typical pencil-and-paper tests. These maps provide us with new teaching goals and new evidence on student learning.Based on an invited address, Facoltá di Ingegneria dell’Universitá degli Studi di Ancona, June 27, 2000. This research was supported, in part, by the Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards, and Student Testing (Grant R117G10027), and by the National Science Foundation (Nos. ESI 95-96080). The opinions expressed here represent those of the authors and not necessarily those of the funding agency.     

The Use and Misuse of Standardized Testing: A Whiteheadian Point of View

First an overview is given about the actual national and international situation concerning standardized testing. Then two major reasons are presented why accountability systems based on standardized testing have become so widespread: (a) the missing validity and reliability of teachers’ assessment of students’ achievement, and (b) the important role standardized testing plays for out-put management in educational systems.On the basis of these considerations Alfred North Whitehead’s critical remarks on external standardized testing are presented. Whitehead’s main point is that external standardized testing limits the freedom of teachers to adapt to the complex, situation specific circumstances in order to obtain a maximum of the creative learning process for students who are conceived as specialists. Instead external testings lead to “teaching to the test.” As a consequence, the attitude of creative, adventurous exploration is undermined and substituted by simple pattern recognition, narrow visions, and even boredom. Finally, the question is raised whether there is any possibility of developing a measurement tool which on the one side meets scientific test criteria, and on the other side is still flexible enough to do justice to needs of individual schools – which according to Whitehead are the essential educational unit – and not vice versa, as it is the case at present with external standardized testing. That such a flexible approach to evaluation is possible is demonstrated by the presentation of the basic ideas of the MSS (Module Approach to Self-Evaluation of School Development Projects) which has been developed and examined in ten schools by the author and his collaborators.