Making broadcast television participative: Eliciting mathematical behavior throughSquare One TV

The current reform movement in mathematics education has called for new ways of teaching that encourage children to become active participants in mathematical problem solving. In this article, the potential of educational television to elicit such behavior is investigated by reviewing research on theSquare One TV television series. A sizable body of evidence indicates that, through viewer participation,Square One TV can promote mathematical behavior directly among its target audience of 8- to 12-year-olds. Described in the article are the types of viewer participation that have been observed, threeSquare One TV formats that have consistently been found to elicit participative behavior, and several characteristics of these formats that may have been responsible for increased viewer participation. If these characteristics are incorporated into future television-based materials, they may increase the potential of the materials to elicit active participation among viewers. The production ofSquare One TV and the research described here were supported by the National Science Foundation, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the Carnegie Corporation, and the U.S. Department of Education. Production of the first season was also supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and by the IBM Corporation. Additional funding for the fourth and fifth seasons was provided by the Intel Corporation. This article is based on a paper presented at the 1993 meeting of the American Educational Research Association in Atlanta, Georgia.     

Books received

Frederick Wiseman's film Primate is a rhetorical documentary about the implications of human curiosity in an institutional setting—a primate research center. Wiseman uses comparison, sequence, and sound‐image relations to employ and transcend filmic and rhetorical genres, enabling him to engage the viewer in a reflective exploration of human being. Primate demonstrates how facts can be recontextualized into complex meanings, and how audiences can be actively involved in the process of constructing meanings.     

Development of “down the road”: An interactive toolkit about driving cessation for dementia caregivers

Concerns about safe driving practices in individuals with dementia often fall to caregivers, who are frequently faced with the difficult task of initiating the conversation about driving and driving cessation with their loved ones. This is a topic that can be a very emotional and sensitive for older adults. Several print-based resources are currently available to caregivers; however, emerging research suggests that disseminating information through applied theater, a genre of theater typically based on research that addresses a social issue, may be more effective in changing attitudes than these traditional print-based methods. Applied theater touches upon the emotional complexities involved in decision-making about driving, deepening a viewer’s experience with the content. This work used research obtained from focus groups and individual interviews with 17 (eight informal and nine formal) dementia caregivers as a foundation for the development of a toolkit called Down the Road, which consists of an applied theater production about driving safety called No Particular Place to Go (in DVD-format), an accompanying viewer guidebook, and supplemental information cards. The content of Down the Road centers around eight main themes identified by dementia caregivers, including (1) the importance of driving, (2) the assessment process, (3) information about refresher courses and driving schools, (4) risk factors and warning signs, (5) starting the conversation, (6) dealing with resistance, (7) the need for support, and (8) alternative transportation options. Down the Road incorporates the expressed needs of dementia caregivers to translate knowledge into an effective, research-based toolkit that can provide caregivers with an interactive resource for use individually or in facilitated groups.     

Hubert H. Humphrey's 1948 civil rights speech

Samuel Beckett rejects conventional forms because they are predictable and a reader or viewer of his plays may consider them formless. However, Beckett's plays have strong and clear internal relationships that invite the observer to participate in the making of them. But if the reader or viewer of Beckett's works expects to grapple with his art, he must alter his conceptions and expectations of the form of plays.     

“Won’t You Be My Neighbor?”: Intergenerational Dialogics in Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood Viewer Mail

From the opening of each Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood (MRN) program, Fred Rogers invites his viewers to converse with him. MRN viewer letters demonstrate the efficacy of this call in the familiar and conversational manner in which viewers address the program’s host. This article examines a sample of these letters from the perspective of Mikhail Bakhtin’s dialogical theorization of the conversational moment—a moment that “provokes an answer, anticipates it, and structures itself in the answer’s direction.” Along with Bakhtin, the dialogical perspectives of Roger Burggraeve, Paulo Freire, and Martin Buber are examined and applied to further elucidate the communication ethics at work in the lettered correspondence and on the television program. MRN viewer letters reveal a remarkable consistency in their thematic quality and constitute a field of study about the dialogical relationship between Rogers and his audience.     

The Making of Citizens: pedagogy and address in children's television news

This paper offers a comparative analysis of three television news programmes aimed at children: the BBC's Newsround Nickelodeon's Nick News and Channel One News. It focuses on the programmes’ implicit assumptions about the child viewer, and on the ways in which these are manifested both in the selection and framing of content and in their formal strategies and modes of address. It also raises questions about the extent to which such programmes can be seen to ‘give children a voice’ or to ‘empower’ them as active citizens.     

"Tell Us What You Know:" Exploring the Nature of Knowledge About Aesthetic Experience

The role of art museum educators is to facilitate the viewer's aesthetic experience and to support the integration of new concepts into the viewer's pre-existing cognitive structure. Ideally, art museum educators teach viewers how to participate actively in the aesthetic experience. This seemingly straightforward task is difficult to accomplish. The modernist structures of the art world tend to cast the viewer in a passive role. Research into aesthetic experience conducted within Modernist paradigms tends to perpetuate the passive interaction of viewer and artwork. In this paper, I examine the work of researchers and artists who stretch or redefine the modern paradigm of art and identify ways in which active viewer participation can be supported. I propose that researchers of aesthetic experience can no longer approach viewers as subjects for their studies. I demonstrate that viewers are involved in research when their voices are heard in the discourse and they have the opportunity to see themselves reflected in the work of art. Within this new paradigm, viewers and researchers become co-creators of knowledge about aesthetic experience. Knowledge generated in this way enables art museum educators to support active participation in aesthetic experience.     

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.     

Media’s moral messages: assessing perceptions of moral content in television programming

This study extends the examination of moral content in the media by exploring moral messages in television programming and viewer characteristics predictive of the ability to perceive such messages. Generalisability analyses confirmed the reliability of the Media’s Moral Messages (MMM) rating form for analysing programme content and the existence of 10 moral themes prevalent in television media. Standard regression analyses yielded evidence indicating viewers’ moral expertise, as measured by the Defining Issues Test (DIT), familiarity with the programme and level of education predicted their ability to perceive moral messages in a television drama popular in the USA at the time of data collection. Identification of patterns in moral content represented in television programming, as well as knowledge of how viewer characteristics relate to their ability to perceive such content, can provide parents and educators with a means for better comprehending messages regarding human interaction to which they or their children are exposed.     

Logics of business education for sustainability

This paper explores various kinds of logics of ‘business education for sustainability’ and how these ‘logics’ position the subject business person, based on eight teachers’ reasoning of their own practices. The concept of logics developed within a discourse theoretical framework is employed to analyse the teachers’ reasoning. The analysis takes its starting point in different approaches to how a business ought to or could take responsibility for sustainable development. Different approaches to business ethical responsibilities, in combination with assumptions about how educational content is legitimised and presupposed purposes of education, are used to construct logics of business education for sustainability. In the paper, the results of this analysis are presented as: the logic of profit-, social- or radical-oriented business education. Our results also show how the different logics position the subject business person differently, as one who adapts to, adds or creates ethical values. The results are first discussed in terms of how environmental and social challenges could be dealt with in the future and secondly, considering the risk of de-subjectification with regard to profit-oriented business education, the implications this may have for the educational quality itself.     

Accessions: researching,designing higher education

This brief viewpoint piece depicts educational (dis)engagements apparent in researching and (re)designing higher education in and through Accessions. Accessions, a collaborative research-design project, probed at how cultures, climates and conditions of higher education may be reproducing or reshaping social inequalities and divisions. Here, questions are asked about how these might be challenged within and potentially beyond the specific locale of one university campus. This research-design project hopes to enable a critical perspective on issues of ‘participation’, ‘impact’, ‘engagement’ and ‘internationalisation’, where regulations and measures may be resisted and disrupted.     

Young Children's Depiction of Contrast in Human Figure Drawing: standing and walking

Children aged 4 to 10 years old were asked to draw a person standing absolutely still and a person walking very fast so that someone not present would know from the pictures alone what had been depicted. Even at four some children were able to convey the difference to a viewer and there was increasing success with age. The number of differentiating cues increased with age and there was an age‐related trend in the order in which specific cues appeared in the drawings. The ability of the children to respond flexibly to the task gives no support to notions of rigid mental representations determining what young children can draw. It is argued that contrast tasks are a useful tool for investigating problem solving skills in the domain of drawing and could be used to extend children's skill by providing an occasion for explicit dialogue about how representational information is conveyed to a viewer.     

Computer screen designs: Viewer judgments

This study examined viewer judgments about the readability and studyability of two sets of computer screens: a set of model displays and a set of real screens copied from CAI programs. The purpose was to identify constructs that could guide the design of computer screens used to display information in computer-assisted instruction, hypermedia, or on-line help applications. It also searched for any relationships among viewer preference and viewer field articulation (field-dependence/independence), conceptual style (relational/analytical), and gender. Findings based on multidimensional scaling techniques confirmed and further defined the existence of evaluative constructs based on visual complexity and organization. No generalizable effects for field articulation, conceptual style, or gender differences were found. Special thanks are due to Barbara Grabowski and Larry Ragan at Pennsylvania State University for aiding in the administration of the studies, and to Ernest Rakow at Memphis State University for providing helpful advice on statistical analyses.     

Crash: Using a Popular Film as an Experiential Learning Activity in a Multicultural Counseling Course

Crash (P. Haggis, 2004) depicts the intersection of race, ethnicity, religion, and social class in a culturally and politically charged environment. The result is a film that places the viewer in situations that are void of simple right and wrong solutions. The authors describe an experiential learning activity that is based on using Crash to stimulate student awareness and reflection as a part of their affective development. Reactions from students to the use of Crash as a teaching tool are shared. Implications for counselor educators and supervisors electing to use this film to address multicultural counseling competence are presented.     

Methodologies for problem solving: An engineering approach

Learning how to approach and solve problems which relate to real world situations is an integral part of the education of many higher and further education students and is particularly relevant to students studying for a professional or vocational degree. This paper outlines the nature of problems experienced by engineers and indicates how engineering students are taught to approach the identification and solution of the types of problems which they will experience as practicing professionals. Methodologies used are of general interest and may be applicable in other, unrelated, disciplines.     

Discrediting the Past,Rubbishing the Future‐‐a critical comparison of The Flintstones and The Jetsons

It can be argued that television is responsible in some part for the socialization of children. In The Flintstones and The Jetsons cartoons is the young viewer encouraged to disregard the past as primitive and fear the over‐technologicalization of the future? Is the here (small town America) and now (mid‐20th century) best? In support of this argument the nature and history of cartooning are reviewed with particular reference to the work of Hanna‐Barbera productions. Analysis of the case studies throws a further political light on the intentions of the creators of Fred Flintstone and George Jetson.     

A simple,low‐cost stereographic video capture and viewing solution for teaching psychomotor skills using online delivery

It is recognised that the teaching of complex psychomotor skills using online delivery is difficult without the support of either face‐to‐face coaching and tuition or a stereoscopic viewing system that provides users with a feel for the spatial nature of the skills being taught. To date, the limitations of bandwidth, and the high cost and sophistication of existing three‐dimensional video production and viewing technologies have limited the use of stereoscopic video imaging to highly funded fields, such as sports and medical research or military applications. The advent of desktop video editing software, along with personal video players (such as the Apple iPod and iPhone) with small screens utilising efficient video codecs, means that high‐quality video podcasts can now be effectively created and delivered via the Internet. Combining these new video technologies with a conventional analogue stereo viewing and capture system makes the production of stereoscopic video potentially much more accessible to educators as a practical teaching tool. This paper seeks to alert educational designers to an exploratory study into a potentially useful methodology for the capture, production, dissemination and viewing of stereoscopic video images using existing, low‐cost technologies. Aside from the production of a simple viewer, the process is straightforward and requires only basic and readily available equipment. Applications in education as well as vocational and sports training are self‐evident.     

TV Violence in Prison Break

TV violence is the violence mediated through TV.Nowadays,there is an extensive coverage of violence on television.Many of the violent actions in the popular series Prison Break,are glamorized,sanitized or trivialized.In addition,TV violence may bring more risks based on the way it is portrayed.As a viewer,we need to take a critical eye to Prison Break.     

数字图像技术的视觉伦理挑战与建构

数字技术建构起来的电子图像与算法图像打破了世界“原本”与“摹本”的区别与对立,使得镜像、幻象与实存一体化,由此带来了远距临场与沉浸式观看、双向建构与圈层化认知等新的视觉化特征。这些新特征对传统的以“观者主体性”为核心的视觉伦理提出了挑战。这种挑战具化为:数字图像对观者的理性认知能力的挑战、对观者的对象性意识的挑战及对观者的多元文化视角的挑战。数字图像技术时代的视觉伦理建构应该走向基于实践基础之上的可行性能力增强的“主体之善”和与现存多元文化同在同构、交融互动的“结构之善”。