Of Violence and Rhetoric: An Ethical Aporia

The concluding scenes of Sean O'Casey's play epitomize the central dialectic between actuality and illusion. The scenic juxtaposition emphasizes Juno's creative acceptance of life and the paycock's sterile evasion of reality.     

Higher Education Policy and Legitimacy Building: the Making of a New Academic Credential in Ontario

Canada's province of Ontario introduced a new policy in 2000 allowing community colleges to offer a new type of undergraduate degree. This decision was a significant policy change for the government considering the nature of Ontario's binary system, where a rigid separation has historically prevailed between the university and college sectors. Drawing on multiple sources of data, this study indicates that the decision to create a new type of applied bachelor's degree generated a series of uncertainties and challenges for higher education institutions, students and government agencies. The paper highlights the need for policy makers to consider the socio‐cultural aspects of higher education systems in policy design, particularly the role of legitimacy.     

‘It's the end of the university as we know it (and I feel fine)’: the Generation Y student in higher education discourse

This paper examines discussions of Generation Y within higher education discourse, arguing the sector's use of the term to describe students is misguided for three reasons. First, portraying students as belonging to Generation Y homogenises people undertaking higher education as young, middle-class and technologically literate. Second, speaking of Generation Y students allows constructivism to be reinvented as a ‘new’ learning and teaching philosophy. Third, the Generation Y university student has become a central figure in concerns about technology's role in learning and teaching. While the notion of the ‘Generation Y student’ creates the illusion that higher education institutions understand their constituents, ultimately, it is of little value in explaining young adults' educational experiences.     

The “good professor” as perceived by university instructors

The purpose of this study is to answer the question: What is the Israeli instructor's conception of a “good university professor?” The study deals with the instructor's conception of the characteristics of the “good professor” with regard to the department in which he is teaching. A sample of 51 instructors from two departments were asked to select the three most important characteristics of a “good university professor” from a list of fifteen. It was shown that instructors attached primary importance to the professor's ability to spark intellectual growth. Of secondary importance was his method of instruction. The professor's traits connected to his academic status and his personality were of relatively little concern. There was unanimity among instructors from the two departments in their conception of what a “good professor” should be. They singled out characteristics that fall under the heading of delivery. A disparity exists between the instructor's conception of the “good professor” and the students' conception.     

Futuristic Metropolis or Second-rate Port? Adult education in Hong Kong before and after 1997

Despite China's assurances about 'one country, two systems', adult education in Hong Kong is in for some big changes. This paper maps the present adult education landscape, reviews research, posits four scenarios concerning the future and identifies challenges to be faced by adult educators in Hong Kong after 1997. Returning Hong Kong to the bosom of a Maoist, MarxistLeninist state is not necessarily good news for Marxist adult educators. Functionalist orthodoxy will be permitted but those committed to Marxist (critical, emancipatory) approaches to adult education will be in jeopardy because of laws about subversion. Adult education is shaped by the context in which it occurs and what happens to critical adult educators in Hong Kong after 1997 will signal the extent to which ''one country, two systems'' is reality or illusion.     

The Illusion of Inclusion

Abstract

CSWE standards pertaining to diversity have been criticized for being vague and impotent (Hooyman,1995). A pattern in social work education of “diversity by numbers” has emerged in which the emphasis is placed on the representation of certain groups on the faculty, the staff, the student body, and the curriculum. There exists an illusion of inclusion, in which the curriculum, personnel and students are desegregated. However, the school's culture has yet to be transformed to the stage of institutional development in which equitable treatment for all members is a primary goal and diversity is a driving force which permeates organizational life. This analysis explores the challenges associated with conceptualizing and infusing diversity, specifically as it relates to race and ethnicity, throughout social work programs. The symbolic interactionism theoretical perspective is used to interpret the experiences of African American faculty in predominately white schools of social work. An African-centered perspective of organizational functioning is suggested as a strategy to transform the illusion of diversity into a reality in social work education.     

DNA as a Work of Art: Processes of Semiosis between Contemporary Art and Biology

When A Genomic Portrait – Sir John Sulston by Mark Quinn appeared in the London National Portrait Gallery's exhibition in 2001/2, the ensuing public controversy over its portrayal raised a number of questions about the representation of a publicly known figure. Because the portrait was the Gallery's first contemporary commission using specialised, scientific procedures in its creation, a number of issues arose surrounding its authenticity. How questions of authenticity are answered depends upon how the viewer reads aspects of scientific coding as it functions within the artistic domain. This is a form of visual literacy that depends on the viewer's ability to lift the veil that operates between coding systems and the context of their use. Literacy in this case is built upon the relationship between visual interpretation and ascribed systems of meaning within the context of their recontextualisations. By playing with the intersections between artistic and scientific discourses, the authors investigate how the representation of identity functions as a polysemy across different semiotic domains. Using visual semiotics to examine the intersections between sign systems across these domains, some of the communication aspects of how new modes of art function in present‐day communities are provoked. By illustrating the complexity of this process as a part of transforming expert knowing into pedagogical practice, support is given for improving teacher education in the arts and cultural domain.     

Detecting Nonadditivity in Single‐Facet Generalizability Theory Applications: Tukey's Test

Under the generalizability‐theory (G‐theory) framework, the estimation precision of variance components (VCs) is of significant importance in that they serve as the foundation of estimating reliability. Zhang and Lin advanced the discussion of nonadditivity in data from a theoretical perspective and showed the adverse effects of nonadditivity on the estimation precision of VCs in 2016. Contributing to this line of research, the current article directs the discussion of nonadditivity from a theoretical perspective to a practical application and highlights the importance of detecting nonadditivity in G‐theory applications. To this end, Tukey's test for nonadditivity is the only method to date that is appropriate for the typical single‐facet G‐theory design, in which a single observation is made per element within a facet. The current article evaluates the Type I and Type II error rates of Tukey's test. Results show that Tukey's test is satisfactory in controlling for falsely detecting nonadditivity when the data are actually additive and that it is generally powerful in detecting nonadditivity when it exists. Finally, the article demonstrates an application of Tukey's test in detecting nonadditivity in a judgmental study of educational standards and shows how Tukey's test results can be used to correct imprecision in the estimated VC in the presence of nonadditivity.     

Critically reflective dialogues in learning communities of professionals

Communities in which professionals share and create knowledge potentially support their continued learning. To realise this potential more fully, members are required to reflect critically. For learning at work such behaviour has been described as critically reflective work behaviour, consisting of six aspects: challenging groupthink, critical opinion sharing, an openness about mistakes, asking for and giving feedback, experimentation and research utilisation. We studied whether and how these aspects can be distinguished in dialogues of seven different communities of veterinary professionals (critically reflective dialogues). Our exploration of the nature of critically reflective dialogues resulted in an analytical framework. Within each aspect four different modes of communication were identified: interactive, on an individual basis, non-reflective and restricted. We assume that professionals use learning opportunities most in the interactive mode of communication. The framework was employed to study the extent to which dialogues showed these modes of critically reflective dialogues. The results demonstrate that in these communities the modes of communication within aspects were largely non-interactive (i.e., individual, non-reflective). The developed framework discriminates between communities in terms of their critically reflective dialogues. Interventions to improve the effectiveness of learning communities should focus on enhancement of members addressing each other's reasons and reflections.     

The Relationship Between Security of Attachment and the Development of a Personal Premise System of Relationships and Expectations for Peer Interaction

Block (1984) postulated that children develop a personal premise system concerning the nature of relationships from the kind of responsiveness, balance, and control they experience when interacting with the caregiver and the caregiver's degree of accessibility during caregiver–child interactions. Block's theory was used in this review to discuss how children's personal premise systems or models of relationships develop through the process of attachment to the caregiver, and how, as children establish more extensive social relationships, this premise system becomes a more generalized model of self and others which shapes all interactions with others including peer relationships during early and middle childhood. The review also suggests continuity in the organization of behavior, for just as the nature of the early personal premise system is shaped by caregiver responsiveness, control, consistency, and availability, so the quality of ties youngsters form with their peers seems also to be shaped by the tone of children's responsiveness to peers, the degree and kind of control youngsters exert in peer interactions, the consistency of behaviors with peers, and children's emotional and physical availability to peers.     

LDPC based differential unitary space-frequency coding for MIMO-OFDM systems

INTRODUCTION Unitary space-time modulation (USTM) (Hochwald and Marzetta, 2000) has been shown to be ideally suited for Rayleigh flat fading channels when there is no CSI. And for continuously changing fading channels, differential unitary space-time modulation (DUSTM) was proposed in Hochwald and Sweldens (2000). However, the performance of DUSTM de-grades considerably in frequency-selective fading channels often encountered in broadband wireless communications. Hence concatena…     

The Illusion of Freedom: Tyranny,Whiteness, and the State of US Society

Despite boasting its self-characterization as the “land of the free,” US American “freedom” is, at times, tainted with historical amnesia, hypocrisy, and inhumanity. This article examines today's socio-political climate by drawing from de Tocqueville's (2003) prediction that American democracy is a tyranny of the majority. Because tyranny relies on gaslighting and dismissing facts, no definitive portraiture of freedom is made; therefore, the tyrannized wonder whether they are truly living within freedom or, instead, in collective submission to its illusion. This article examines this phenomenon in order to investigate how whiteness (re)produces conditions of disillusionment and tyranny. By employing hermeneutics of whiteness as a methodology, the authors investigate how whiteness infiltrates thoughts/epistemology, speech/rhetoric, emotions/emotionality, and nationalistic symbols/semiotics. The authors analyze implications for US education and offer a plea for all to consider.     

Measuring Complex Features of Science Instruction: Developing Tools to Investigate the Link Between Teaching and Learning

There is a growing national recognition that teachers and teaching are at the heart of successful educational reform. However, few tools exist for measuring classroom instruction. The primary purpose of this article is to describe methods we developed to measure and study teaching, specifically while teachers were using a multimedia intervention for promoting scientific problem solving. Lessons were videotaped, and coding schemes were developed to measure 2 aspects of teaching: (a) the lesson's organization, particularly whole-class instruction used to introduce problems and share students' work; and (b) the nature of tasks and questions given to students. Results showed that the coding schemes were reliable and that they detected differences in instruction across teachers. Qualitative analyses were consistent with the quantitative findings. The codes also captured features of teaching that would have been difficult to detect or verify with qualitative observations alone. Finally, we explored how these measures could be used with student outcome data to examine the relationship between teaching and learning in future studies. We argue that quantitative measures of instruction serve many purposes, not the least of which is allowing researchers to explore the relationship between teaching and student learning at a high degree of granularity.     

TradeSmith: An Exercise to Demonstrate the Illusion of Control in Decision Making

Resource allocation decisions are a fundamental class of problems common throughout a business and therefore are found throughout business school curricula. Entrepreneurs must allocate capital, financiers must allocation cash, and production managers must create the best mix of multiple‐use resources. Within this context, a business school's curriculum, instructional materials, and learning processes must consider the implications of individual decision making. Our traditional instructional content and delivery methods may effectively teach how to set up a decision “problem” and how to obtain an optimal answer. Yet, we may not be teaching a key underlying factor: that entrepreneurs, managers, and future leaders appear to have implicit cognitive biases, which discount information and skew individual decision making. The results of this study demonstrate that a phenomenon known as the “illusion of control” presents a fundamental challenge to the efficacy of formalized educational programs on decision making. TradeSmith was designed as a problem‐based learning exercise to elicit for the illusion of control in a basic, resource allocation, decision environment. The subjects in this study demonstrate a decision‐making pattern consistent with the “illusion of control” phenomenon. Finally, by revealing individuals' implicit design‐making paradigms, TradeSmith helps them experience key issues for managerial decision making.     

A Cross-cultural Exploration of Children's Everyday Ideas: Implications for science teaching and learning

Children's everyday ideas form critical foundations for science learning yet little research has been conducted to understand and legitimize these ideas, particularly from an international perspective. This paper explores children's everyday ideas about the environment across the US, Singapore and China to understand what they reveal about children's relationship to the environment and discuss its implications for science teaching and learning. A social constructivist lens guides research, and a visual methodology is used to frame children's realities. Participants' ages range from elementary to middle school, and a total of 210 children comprized mainly of Asians and Asian Americans were sampled from urban settings. Drawings are used to elicit children's everyday ideas and analyzed inductively using open coding and categorizing of data. Several categories support existing literature about how children view the environment; however, novel categories such as affect also emerged and lend new insight into the role that language, socio-cultural norms and perhaps ethnicity play in shaping children's everyday ideas. The findings imply the need for (a) a change in the role of science teachers from knowledge providers to social developers, (b) a science curriculum that is specific to learners' experiences in different socio-cultural settings, and (c) a shift away from inter-country comparisons using international science test scores.     

Education,Illusions and Valuable Fictions

Saul Smilansky's Illusionism suggests that some false beliefs are important enough to warrant the indefinite perpetuation of illusions in order to protect the larger moral community from breaking down. In this article I suggest that this position actualises an old educational paradox where education is expected to protect the common moral community (even if this means maintaining some illusions), and at the same time promote the pursuit of truth. Taking Smilansky's position of Illusionism as a starting point, I argue that while Illusionism highlights and addresses an important problem—that sometimes false beliefs can function to maintain social stability where the truth threatens to unsettle it—relying on indefinite illusions is problematic from an educational point of view. It is difficult to justify that education, being at least in part motivated by truth-seeking, should (or even could) be grounded in illusion. Taking seriously the fact that a dimension of education concerns maintaining social stability, I suggest that Spinoza's notion of fiction can complement Smilansky's view in that it can be conceived in terms of an instrument for maintaining social stability and promoting truth-seeking without assuming that one end is pursued at the expense of the other.     

A Time and a Place for Everything: A Discrete Systems Perspective on the Role of Children's Rough-and-Tumble Play in Educational Settings

This paper emphasizes the following points regarding the appropriate role of rough-and-tumble play (R & T) in educational settings. (1) There has been an important secular trend toward an increasing importance of adult supervision of children's play. As a result, children's R & T must be considered in the context of social values regarding the expected developmental significance of children's play. (2) R & T is an aspect of evolved systems that propel the children into enthusiastic interaction with their environment and can be reasonably supposed to have several beneficial influences on children's cognitive and social development. (3) R & T can be distinguished from aggression, and adult supervised R & T is potentially an important arena for learning the limits of appropriate R & T. (4) It is suggested that supervised educational settings should be concerned with socializing several discrete systems that underlie children's development, including the present emphasis on socializing children to be able to focus attention, inhibit behavior, and be neat and orderly. However, the purpose of the present paper is to present a case for socializing the systems underlying stimulus seeking, extroversion, sociability, and intellectual creativity as well.     

Parent education vs. child psychotherapy

The author has charged in a previous article that child psychotherapy is essentially an expensive illusion with regard to the great majority of children referred to private therapists and to clinics. Educating the significant adults, manipulating the child's environment (especially school), and using medication where indicated, were held to be ecologically the best approach. Using this approach, the author did a two-year follow-up study of effects on children referred to a community mental health clinic; 86% showed sustained improvement. The majority of the remainder who showed no improvement manifested severe pathology in the child or a neurosis in the mother. An average of 2.1 hourly sessions (largely joint) sufficed for the parents and 1.8 (largely further exploratory) sessions for the child. Proper diagnosis is crucial for this approach. A psychogenic bias in psychological and psychiatric evaluation of children can doom parent and child to a confusing and sometimes interminable ordeal.     

Inferring a child's level of self-esteem from a knowledge of other personality factors

Two hundred and six school-age children completed Coopersmith's Self-Esteem Inventory (SEI) (Coopersmith, 1967, 1984) and the Children's Personality Questionnaire (CPQ) (Porter & Cattell, 1979). Correlation and regression analysis confirmed that there is a high degree of shared variance between these measures, suggesting that self-esteem may be more integrated within an individual's total personality functioning than has been discussed in the literature. The psychometric implications of this finding are discussed.