An individual learning journey: learning as becoming a vocational teacher

In this paper, I address a perceived gap in the lifelong learning literature. There is very little research which addresses how learning should be construed, when individuals transition across a longitudinal span of their working life. This transition which could be viewed as a process of ‘becoming somebody’, often oversimplifies the full complexity of individuals’ learning experiences. Using a sociocultural perspective, the paper explores the lived experiences of individuals in the process of becoming a vocational teacher, in order to help conceptualise the individuals’ learning through their working life. The study draws upon data from a completed research on a group of vocational education trainee teachers learning to teach. This paper argues that learning varies significantly from individual to individual, time to time, context to context and also in different stages of individuals’ lives. This transition could be viewed as an individual learning journey, through understanding the interrelationship between individuals and the contexts, across the individuals’ lives. Drawing from this understanding, the individual’s agency is presented as a way that individuals construct their own lifecourse through the actions and choices they made within the opportunities and constraints of the context. The findings of the study also contribute to the understanding of changes, from the individual learner’s perspective, which could be useful for policy and practice relating to lifelong learning.     

CONSUMING THE PUBLIC SCHOOL

In this essay David Labaree examines the tension between two competing visions of the purposes of education that have shaped American public schools. From one perspective, we have seen schooling as a way to preserve and promote public aims, such as keeping the faith, shoring up the republic, or promoting economic growth. From the other perspective, we have seen schooling as a way to advance the interests of individual educational consumers in the pursuit of social access and social advantage. In the first half of the essay Labaree shows the evolution of the public vision over time, from an emphasis on religious aims to political ones to economic ones and, finally, to an embrace of individual opportunity. In the second half, he shows how the consumerist vision of schooling has not only come to dominate in the rhetoric of school reform but also in shaping the structure of the school system.     

Meaning Orientation and Reproducing Orientation: a typology of approaches to studying in higher education?

Interview‐based research has suggested that individual students exhibit either a deep approach or a surface approach to learning in higher education. Questionnaire‐based research has subsumed this notion within a distinction between a meaning orientation and a reproducing orientation to studying, but these are typically conceptualised as separate dimensions along which groups of students might vary. This study demonstrates that responses to questionnaires on studying can be analysed in such a way as to recover the distinction between a meaning orientation and a reproducing orientation in the form of a coherent, robust and reliable classification of the approaches to learning that are exhibited by individual students.     

Understanding Regulated Learning in Situative and Contextual Frameworks

Research on self-regulated learning has focused predominantly on a static individual level to explain various strengths and weaknesses of learners. However, much learning today is highly interactive and technologically enhanced, which an individually oriented perspective to regulated learning does not consider. In this article we discuss regulation by bringing situational and contextual variation of regulated learning into focus. We introduce a situative perspective on regulation of learning and give arguments and examples on how it can offer a way to conceptually and empirically grasp multiple layers of regulated learning in social contexts. We also compare the given perspective with sociocognitive and sociocultural perspectives to regulated learning. We conclude that the situative perspective can significantly enrich understanding about individual and group learning as a regulated activity, because it offers a way to examine regulation beyond the individual while not losing sight of learners as individual subjects.     

Cultural, Discursive Psychology: A Sociocultural Approach to Studying the Teaching and Learning of Mathematics

From a sociocultural perspective an object of research on mathematics teaching and learning can be seen as a particular moment in the zoom of a lens. Researchers focus on a specific part of a complex process whilst taking account of the other views that would be obtained by pulling back or zooming in. Researching teaching and learning mathematics must be seen in the same way. Thus in zooming out researchers address the practices and meanings within which students become school-mathematical actors, whilst zooming in enables a study of mediation and of individual trajectories within the classroom. In each choice of object of research the range of other settings have to be incorporated into the analysis. Such analyses aim to embrace the complexity of the teaching-learning process. This article will present a cultural, discursive psychology for mathematics education that takes language and discursive practices as central in that meanings precede us and we are constituted within language and the associated practices, in the multiple settings within which we grow up and participate.     

德莱塞早期作品中的女性形象

文章通过分析德莱塞最早的两部作品《嘉莉妹妹》和《珍妮姑娘》中的几位主要女性形象,从而指出德莱塞对女性人物的刻画和他对男性人物的刻画是一致的,即运用现实主义的笔调、力求真实,从而超脱了“天使”与“妖妇”的传统套式。但是,其作品中的女性人物仍是经过了男性目光的照射,没能超越作者的男性价值观和审美观。     

论郭沫若的文化哲学观

郭沫若关于文化的基本观点和主张是独具特色的。从纵向的角度 ,郭沫若把文化内部的矛盾和斗争看成是文化变迁的动力 ,认为文化的变迁类似于生物细胞的分裂 ,是呈波浪起伏的状态向前发展的。从横向的角度 ,他把文化看成是民族性和时代性的统一。他主张文化的综合创造 ,企图超越古今中外的对立 ,强调民族精神对于文化建构的重要意义 ,强调生活实践对于文化创造的本体作用     

Training and Mastery of Techniques in Wittgenstein's Later Philosophy: A response to Michael Luntley

Responding to Michael Luntley's article, ‘Learning, Empowerment and Judgement’, the author shows he cannot successfully make the following three moves: (1) dissolve the analytic distinction between learning by training and learning by reasoning, while advocating the latter; (2) diminish the role of training in Wittgenstein's philosophy, nor attribute to him a rationalist model of learning; and (3) turn to empirical research as a way of solving the philosophical problems he addresses through Wittgenstein. Drawing on José Medina's analysis of the fundamental role of training in Wittgenstein's later philosophy, the paper offers a tour of key passages in the Investigations and other works to develop an understanding of what Wittgenstein meant by ‘mastery of techniques’. In opposition to Luntley's liberal‐individual, or his subject as rational agent, the author explores Wittgenstein's non‐foundationalist, forms of life approach to how we act with agreement. More effort must be given to differentiating Wittgenstein's view from that of the analytic school, which Luntley appears to echo despite his criticism of the analytic divide.     

论"解蔽"意义上的"明于天人之分"

荀子的"明于天人之分",旨在彰显天、人之间的界际."解蔽"是"明于天人之分"的必然法则和理路,通过解天人关系之"蔽",所指向的则是"知天"和"敬已".但,由"解蔽"而"分",也内涵着"天功"和"人治"的沟通,故而成就和完善人治之功及天道相对于人的意义.     

从个体中心到关系视角:教学中的界限及其超越

在“关系”视角下,教学行为可以被视为以知识为中介,促进关系生成、发展和重构的社会行动。既往关系残基是教学活动的出发点,师生关系的构建是教学的活动内容,教学过程是关系的构建过程,而教学评价涉及多重关系的联结和嵌入成效。以“个体”为中心的传统教学,由于太过突出个人的主体性作用,容易导致师生关系走向疏离,并形成有界存在的文化传统,生成个体与个体、知识与知识、个体与知识之间的界限。要突破这一困境,我们应该超越教学过程中的个体界限、时间界限、知识界限、技术界限和空间界限,基于动态的关系生成、发展和重构来理解教学,将教学作为一种关系汇流的过程,超越以“个体”为中心的界限。     

Joining up the episodes of lifelong learning: A regional transition project

In this paper, we explore the rationale, process and outcomes of the Regional Interoperability Project on Progression for Lifelong Learning, a project that established a model of cross‐sector collaboration in personal development planning technology in the UK. With specific reference to the widening participation agenda, and grounded in the perspective of lifelong learners, the project tested an approach in which discrete nodes of an individual’s learning journey are joined up through technology services. The paper describes the development of conceptual and practical tools to assist transitions between various communities of learning. A set of scenarios was developed, involving study to study and study to employment, while practical tools included development of UK LeaP draft interoperability standard (BS8788)‐compliant links between ePortfolio software, and the actual test transfer of data. The results indicate that recognising the smallest individual elements in the process is important, both in a technical sense and as a means of personalising learning and assisting transition between sectors. Through developing connections between these elements, the project partners engaged in lifelong learning.     

Dropout from Secondary Education: all's well that begins well

Despite the increased attention to students leaving secondary education without a diploma numerous students still dropout yearly. This paper makes a distinction between the ‘individual perspective’ and the ‘institutional perspective’ of dropping out. The former is explored by multinominal logit models. We observe that particularly motivation of the student and interest in schooling of his/her parents are crucial predictors of the individual dropout decision. The institutional perspective is examined by ordered logit models. In particular, we discuss the influence of the first year of secondary education by analyzing the large differences in the number of dropouts in Dutch first year classes. We observe that, more than motivation, the first year of secondary education is crucial in shaping the dropping out decision.     

Lifelong learning and the limitations of economic determinism

The contemporary efflorescence of lifelong learning discourse in education and social planning is argued here to be, substantially, the product of economic determinism. That discourse is evaluated from the perspective of three progressive sentiments that have informed lifelong learning advocacy: the individual, the democratic and the adaptive. Each progressive sentiment is seen as expressing a central programmatic purpose for educational reform and as capturing its ethical thrust. Contemporary lifelong learning discourse is found to be only superficially expressive of these informing sentiments. The progressive, ethical, liberatory nature of each sentiment is marginalized or excluded from the discourse, which may best be seen, accordingly, as seriously regressive, counter-ethical and non-liberatory. It is substantially lacking in critical concern, social vision, and any commitment to social justice and equity. It constructs education as a commodified private good, for which individuals should pay. It focuses strongly on individual interests and on vocational skills development. That education which is funded by the state, is focused increasingly on the development of basic life and vocational skills in the interests of engagement in and service to the global economy. Educational engagement is increasingly seen as desirably embedded in the economically productive activities that are its desired outcomes, further limiting any opportunity for socially progressive learning. It is suggested that if the prevailing lifelong learning discourse is to be made more culturally progressive- in both its educational activities and its learning outcomes- it cannot be through a return to traditional progressive ideologies. Rather, it must accept prevailing epistemology in refocusing that discourse. Paradoxically, although non-compliant educationists are now largely marginalized and ineffectual in their influence on the nature of the contemporary lifelong learning agenda, their vocation and their increasing suffusion throughout contemporary cultural formations places them in a potentially strong position to lead cultural and educational change in directions that are more culturally progressive.     

Behaviorism,Cognitivism, Constructivism: Comparing Critical Features from an Instructional Design Perspective

The way we define learning and what we believe about the way learning occurs has important implications for situations in which we want to facilitate changes in what people know and/ or do. Learning theories provide instructional designers with verified instructional strategies and techniques for facilitating learning as well as a foundation for intelligent strategy selection. Yet many designers are operating under the constraints of a limited theoretical background. This paper is an attempt to familiarize designers with three relevant positions on learning (behavioral, cognitive, and constructivist) which provide structured foundations for planning and conducting instructional design activities. Each learning perspective is discussed in terms of its specific interpretation of the learning process and the resulting implications for instructional designers and educational practitioners. The information presented here provides the reader with a comparison of these three different viewpoints and illustrates how these differences might be translated into practical applications in instructional situations.