Nothing to See or Fear: Light War and the Boring Visual Rhetoric of U.S. Drone Imagery

This essay theorizes a transformation in twenty-first-century war rhetoric in which obstructions in public sensation insulate war from opposition. In contrast to overt persuasive appeals for the mass mobilization of society characteristic of “total war,” “light war” is a mode of violence that operates more freely by placing fewer demands on public reception, participation, and approval. Through an analysis of U.S. drone imagery between 2008 and 2011, I argue that light war cultivates social acquiescence to violence through boring visual rhetoric that subverts the capacity to sense the material consequences of war. In the process of theorizing the anesthetizing force of boring rhetoric, this essay assesses the prospects of peace and outlines future directions for rhetorical scholarship in a post-9/11 landscape.     

Optical Solutions: Reception of an NSF-Funded Science Comic Book on the Biology of the Eye

This article traces the reception of a “science comic book” by various audiences including readers and reviewers after publication as well as grant application review committees vetting the proposed project in its conceptual stage. Specifically, the work is a biology textbook containing comics-style visual explanations couched in the form of an imaginative story interwoven with and supplementing traditional text-based explanations of the same ideas. The analysis uses Genette’s concept of “paratexts” (i.e., a class of speech genres comprising those supplementary texts that contextualize and inform readers’ interpretations of the primary text that they accompany) to examine the rhetoric of the visual in the discourse of science education. This analysis observes that the stigmatization of comics as a medium played some role in how readers, critics, and reviewers responded to the text. The implications of this stigma for cultural conceptions of science and their relationships to other knowledge domains, including the arts and humanities, raise a concern for the mediation of public impressions of science as an institution.     

Unruly Bodies: The Rhetorical Domestication of Twenty-First-Century Veterans of War

Veterans of wars in Afghanistan and Iraq with visually identifiable injuries possess “unruly” bodies that render the story of war in efficient, emotional terms. The injured veteran's explicit connection of war with injury motivates state and mainstream news discourse that domesticates veterans’ bodies, managing representations of injured veterans through three dominant strategies. First, dominant discourses invoke veterans’ bodies as metonymy of the nation-state at war—bodily well-being operates as a metonym for both the nation's health and for the condition of the war. Second, veterans are domesticated by strategic placement in contexts that regulate their range of movement, especially amputees, who are often framed as having already overcome any limitations imposed by their war injuries. Third, dominant visual discourse domesticates veterans’ bodies by ascribing a strategic telos to them, shifting the meaning of the injuries away from their origins in state policy and toward wholeness and “normalcy.” Representations of whole-bodied and injured veterans tame the harshness of war and erode the argumentative grounds for questioning it.     

A Rhetoric of Traumatic Nationalism in the Ground Zero Mosque Controversy

In the summer of 2010, a national controversy erupted suddenly as a majority of Americans protested the building of an Islamic community center near Ground Zero. In this essay, I suggest the so-called “Ground Zero mosque” controversy makes visible the emergence of a rhetoric of traumatic nationalism that articulates suffering to citizenship and reproduces national crisis through a motif of consecration whose upshot is a conservative, bipartisan moralism. An anti-political discourse of victimization masquerading as a memory discourse of righteous sacrifice, traumatic nationalism serves as an alibi that excuses the United States from answering responsibly for the war on terror and prevents critical examination of the state of the union.     

Just the Facts? The Separation of Sex Education from Moral Education

In this essay Sharon Lamb considers how progressives have begun to win the longstanding battle to shape sex education and what they have had to give up in the process. After framing the battle in historical context, Lamb uses discourse analysis to explore the hidden values in the “evidence‐based” (EB) curricula that progressives currently favor and that pass for neutral today. As her analysis reveals, EB curricula privilege three discourses — a discourse of science, a discourse of healthy choices (with an emphasis on individuals), and a discourse of efficacy — all of which are grounded in ideology and serve to legitimize certain kinds of knowledge while undermining other kinds. Lamb concludes by proposing eight tenets for the future of sexuality education, which are intended to displace the eight tenets codified by proponents of abstinence‐only‐until‐marriage sexuality education.     

鲁迅《风筝》与朱自清《给亡妇》之比较

鲁迅的《风筝》和朱自清的《给亡妇》作为现代文学的回忆散文名篇,都体现出对于男性中心话语的主动接受心理。人们在回忆时的主动坦白心理构成了这种话语心理得以被呈现的前提,而中国长期封建礼教文明的影响则是一个无需争辩的因素,精神观念和意识上的成功内化则成为了这种特殊心理的内在原因,那个年代知识分子中普遍存在的精英意识亦在创作观念上自然地物化为这种隐含的写作话语权力。     

Reasons for giving reasons: an expert‐expert clinical analysis of science teaching for non‐academic students 1

This paper concerns the importance of providing reasons and evidence when making claims as a teacher. Two teaching contexts are explored: a nonacademic science classroom and a clinical supervision setting. An expert teacher is seen at work in a nonacademic science classroom. This is an especially significant context in which to find “task‐reasons” and “science‐reasons” since students rarely appear to have access to reasons for what they do or say in such classrooms. The teacher and a colleague, both experts at clinical analysis of teaching, are observed examining and analysing the teaching. This is the setting for developing “interpretation‐reasons” regarding the conduct and events of teaching. The expert‐expert clinical supervision situation is seen as sharpening the requirement for sound, credible interpretation‐reasons beyond that of the more common expert‐novice interaction.

     

The historicity of the physics class: enactments,mimes and imitation

This essay discusses Anna Danielsson’s article “In the physics class: university physics students’ enactments of class and gender in the context of laboratory work”. The situated co-construction of knowledge and identity forms the crucial vantage point and I argue that it is a point of intersection between the history of science and research in science education. The former can provide a valuable understanding of the historicity of learning science. I thus highlight the importance of knowledge as situated in time and space, for instance the importance of the historical division between “head and hand” clearly visible in the discourse of Danielsson’s informants. Moreover, the article discusses how identity is produced in specific knowledge contexts through repeated performances. The article closes by briefly suggesting analytical alternatives, in particular “belonging” and “imitation”. Both draw on post-structuralist ideas about the citational nature of identity. Belonging is created by citing and reinstating norms. Imitating knowledge, identity and norms is an issue that should be brought to the fore when we speak of education and training.     

The impact of technology on the enactment of “inquiry” in a technology enthusiast's sixth grade science classroom

This study investigated the impact of the use of computer technology on the enactment of “inquiry” in a sixth grade science classroom. Participants were 42 students (38% female) enrolled in two sections of the classroom and taught by a technology‐enthusiast instructor. Data were collected over the course of 4 months during which several “inquiry” activities were completed, some of which were supported with the use of technology. Non‐participant observation, classroom videotaping, and semi‐structured and critical‐incident interviews were used to collect data. The results indicated that the technology in use worked to restrict rather than promote “inquiry” in the participant classroom. In the presence of computers, group activities became more structured with a focus on sharing tasks and accounting for individual responsibility, and less time was dedicated to group discourse with a marked decrease in critical, meaning‐making discourse. The views and beliefs of teachers and students in relation to their specific contexts moderate the potential of technology in supporting inquiry teaching and learning and should be factored both in teacher training and attempts to integrate technology in science teaching. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach     

The Crime of Onan and the Laws of Nature. Religious and medical discourses on masturbation in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries

This article takes a closer look at the arguments and intellectual context of theological and medical discourse on masturbation in the early stages of the anti‐masturbation campaign, from about 1680 to 1730. It identifies a first stage, during which moralist and religious writing dominated the campaign. The authors used medical arguments on the fatal health hazards of masturbation in support of their message. But the crucial shift in religious discourse on masturbation compared to previous times was the emphatic association of masturbation with the sin of Onan. This shift is linked, in particular, to the rise of traducianist accounts of human conception among Protestant theologians of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. While traditional Aristotelian and Thomistic philosophy claimed that the rational human soul was created and infused by God only weeks after conception, traducianists saw the parental semen itself as the decisive vehicle for the transmission of the immortal human soul. Within this framework, the ontological and theological status of semen changed markedly. Traducianism remained far from being universally accepted, but it created a growing readiness to accept that the immortal soul was at least potentialiter in the semen. Masturbation came much closer to murder, or was even explicitly condemned as such. The deadly punishment which God had inflicted on Onan for having spilled his semen was fully justified. During a second stage, from about 1710, medical arguments increasingly took the forefront. A group of London venereal specialists elaborated on occasional earlier claims that masturbation damaged the genital vessels and fibres, bringing forth impotence, seminal efflux and gleets with devastating long‐term effects on the whole body. John Marten, the anonymous author of “Onania” and various members of the venereal trade published extensively on the topic and popularised the issue of masturbation and its health effects on an unprecedented scale. At the same time, they further strengthened the link between masturbation and the sin of Onan. Like Onan (and his brother Er), every “onanian” would bring death upon himself. In parallel development, some academic physicians began to question the validity of traditional fears of “seminal retention” and with it the traditional idea that according to the laws of nature seminal emissions sometimes might also have a beneficial effect on physical health. Rather than putrefying in the body, the semen was said to recirculate into the body after its preparation in the seminal vessels and served an indispensable re‐invigorating function. It was responsible for the typical masculine traits of the male body. Divine law and natural law now fully coincided.     

Relational Analysis of College Science‐Major Students’ Epistemological Beliefs Toward Science and Conceptions of Learning Science

In recent years, there has been an increasing interest among educational researchers in exploring the relationships between learners’ epistemological beliefs and their conceptions of learning. This study was conducted to investigate these relationships particularly in the domain of science. The participants in this study included 407 Taiwanese college science‐major students. All of them responded to two major questionnaires, one assessing their scientific epistemological beliefs (SEBs) and the other one probing their conceptions of learning science (COLS). The SEB questionnaire included four factors: “certainty,” “source,” “development,” and “justification” of science knowledge. The COLS survey consisted of six factors in a hierarchical order, that is, learning science as “memorizing,” “preparing for tests,” “calculating and practicing,” “increasing one’s knowledge,” “application,” and “understanding and seeing in a new way.” The students’ confidence and interest toward learning science were also assessed by additional questionnaire items. Stepwise regression analyses, in general, showed coherence between students’ SEBs and their COLS, indicating that the sophistication of SEBs was consistent with less agreement with lower‐level COLS (such as “memorizing” and “preparing for tests”) as well as more agreement with higher‐level COLS (such as “understanding and seeing in a new way”). However, the SEB’s “justification” factor was positively related to almost all of COLS factors from the lower‐level to higher‐level. This study finally found that among all of the SEB and COLS factors, the “preparing for tests” factor in COLS was the solely significant variable for predicting students’ interest in science and confidence toward learning science.     

Clever girls’ stories: the girl they call a nerd

In this paper, we explore the issue of gender and mathematics participation, focusing on the ways in which “clever girls” self-author within the discourse order of a high ability group, which has particular significance in the Norwegian context in which this study took place. Contrasting the cases of three girls, only one of whom (Anna) chooses to continue with a higher level of mathematics (mathematics for science), we consider the ways in which they manage being members of the “smart group”. We analyse in particular the storying of Anna as a “nerd” and the social cost of being a “clever girl” against the backdrop of a public discourse of equality of opportunity in Norway.     

中西方文论话语的文化规则比较

中西方文论的具体社会存在形态是话语。由于其社会文化语境的差异,中西方文论话语有着不同的话语方式和话语规则。中国古代文论的话语以中国传统的整体思维为基础,遵循“无中生有”的文化规则,形成了深幽渺远的话语空间;西方文论的话语则是以逻辑思维为基础,遵循“有中生有”的文化规则,突出体现其密实精准的特性。认识两种文论话语的差异性,可以弘扬中国传统文论的精髓。在“以我为主”的基础上,融汇西方文论来深化和拓展中国文论的内涵和话语,对中国当代文论的建设具有助益意义。     

Narrative authority vs. perjured testimony: Courage,vulnerability and truth

This paper outlines a method for describing and analysing discursive practices in education. Discourse analysis exposes and clarifies the discursive practices by which and through which all aspects of education are carried out. An analysis of representative “classic” texts of radical educational theory was undertaken in order to study the discursive construction of knowledge. The case‐studies reveal a discursive operation of recontextualization,where a paradigm‐shift away from the functionalist discourse of education is effected. This operation involves “translating” the categories of “education” and “schooling” from their familiar discursive contexts to a new context where they enter into new relations with unfamiliar terms and categories. The radical education critique and the knowledge organized around and through it fall into a pattern which echoes the sermon genre of the jeremiad, which facilitates the construction of knowledge in terms of the gap between “full humanity” [Freire] or the Jeffersonian ideal [Bowles and Gintis] and the actual present state of alienation. Radical discourse in effect both constructs that gap and determines the means by which it can be closed.     

Assessment as learning: Enhancing discourse,understanding, and achievement in innovative science curricula

An assessment‐oriented design‐based research model was applied to existing inquiry‐oriented multimedia programs in astronomy, biology, and ecology. Building on emerging situative theories of assessment, the model extends prevailing views of formative assessment for learning by embedding “discursive” formative assessment more directly into the curriculum. Three twenty‐hour curricula were designed and aligned to content standards, and three levels of assessments were developed and used to assess and enhance learning for each curriculum. These assessments included three or four informal “activity‐oriented” quizzes and discursive formative feedback rubrics supporting collective discourse, a “curriculum‐oriented” examination of individual conceptual understanding, and a “standards‐oriented” test measuring aggregated achievement of targeted standards. After two design‐research cycles, worthwhile scientific argumentation and statistically significant gains were attained for two of the three packages on the exam and test. Achievement gains were comparable to or larger than those of students in comparison classrooms. Many existing innovations could be enhanced and evaluated in this fashion; designing these strategies directly into innovations could have an even greater impact on discourse, understanding, and achievement. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 49: 1240–1270, 2012     

Factors Influencing Entering Teacher Candidates’ Preferences for Instructional Activities: A glimpse into their orientations towards teaching

The present study was designed to identify and characterize the major factors that influence entering science teacher candidates’ preferences for different types of instructional activities, and to analyze what these factors suggest about teacher candidates’ orientations towards science teaching. The study involved prospective teachers enrolled in the introductory science teaching course in an undergraduate science teacher preparation program. Our analysis was based on data collected using a teaching and learning beliefs questionnaire, together with structured interviews. Our results indicate that entering science teacher candidates have strong preferences for a few activity types. The most influential factors driving entering science teacher candidates’ selections were the potential of the instructional activities to motivate students, be relevant to students’ personal lives, result in transfer of skills to non‐science situations, actively involve students in goal‐directed learning, and implement curriculum that represents what students need to know. This set of influencing factors suggests that entering science teacher candidates’ orientations towards teaching are likely driven by one or more of these three central teaching goals: (1) motivating students, (2) developing science process skills, and (3) engaging students in structured science activities. These goals, and the associated beliefs about students, teaching, and learning, can be expected to favor the development or enactment of three major orientations towards teaching in this population of future science teachers: “motivating students,” “process,” and “activity‐driven.”     

The discourse of German Geisteswissenschaftliche Pädagogik – A contextual reconstruction

The framework of German educational discourse of the twentieth century is so‐called geisteswissenschaftliche Pädagogik, or education as one of the humanities or arts rather than as a science. It triumphed around 1925 in the second half of the Weimar Republic. This article outlines in three steps the core elements of this educational discourse. First, it shows that the mode of thinking of the exponents of geisteswissenschaftliche Pädagogik was dualistic in a traditional Protestant manner. They juxtaposed empiry and Geist, plurality and unity, and outward and inward, and they favoured the inward unity and coherency of Geist. The contextual analysis shows, however, that the dualistic thought schema was virulent not only among German educationalists and philosophers, but also found strong expression in novelists and essayists like Thomas Mann, or the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Rudolf Eucken. Mainstream thinkers criticised the plural systems of Western democracy and capitalism – first and foremost, however, American democracy and capitalism – which were seen to epitomise both of these “un‐German” movements. The true German nature was thought to be an inner spiritual life, which was originally religious and through the course of history came to characterise the whole of German life and thought. It was believed that this spiritual inner life was revealed best by German art, particularly German music. This resistance to empiricism led, and this is the second step, to two analogous notions of the totality or wholeness of the individual and the nation. Man is not understood to be merely an individual, but more importantly a “personhood” (Persönlichkeit), which was described as an inward spiritual life that arose through effort and self‐cultivation, or Bildung. In addition to this inward personhood, however, the conception of “nationhood,” a national spiritual life as Volksstaat, or the ethnocultural nation as detached and distinguished from the political sphere, is seen as important. The individual person can perfect himself only in the framework of the typical characteristics of his Volk – the German Volk. Western democracy and plurality are seen as an atomistic “aggregate of individuals” and juxtaposed against the German concept of the ethnocultural Nation, the Volk community composing an organic unity that transcends the individual. Bildung is the spiritual formation of integrated, cultivated personalities who would orient themselves to the Volk community. In the curriculum of true education, along with the German language the study of Heimat becomes the fundamental element. In contrast to specialised subjects, the contents of Heimat would reflect the organic in the world, the totality of life: in the Volk and in the spiritual‐mental unity within the Persönlichkeit. The two constructions – deepest roots in the tradition of the Volk on one side, and highest inner spirituality in the personality on the other – resulted in education that had to oscillate between lowest and highest and, through this, had to lose sight of empirical, that is, social and political, dimensions. This is the third step that the present article wants to address. The true understanding of education, according to the exponents of geisteswissenschaftliche Pädagogik, puts social and political issues in their only proper place: inside the inner 760 Daniel Tröhler personality. Politicisation of the German person had to take place in the context of Volksstaat, not in democracy. To be free meant the embedding of the individual into the harmonious beauty of the whole. This notion created a social and political vacuum between the lowest denominator or totality of the Germanic people and the highest whole or totality of the Germanic personality, so that education had to be given the attribution – one that continues to be variously described and affirmed in education research in the German‐language realm up to the present day – that education is autonomous, independent of social or political context. This was based on the term Bildung – the inner ideology set against a pluralistic world. Autonomy means insisting on the inner freedom of man, on his inner coherency, and his will. In the midst of the confusing simultaneous demands of society on youth, educational autonomy is believed to be a means of assuring human unity and wholeness; it serves a protective dam to contain the danger of persons being ripped apart or pulled hither and yon. With its goal of awakening a unified spiritual life against the modern plural democratic world, the true educational community becomes crucial.     

The Boundlessness of Performativity in Elite Australian Schools

This paper examines how prominent private schools in Australia are performing in a market context according to the tenets of performativity. From a discourse analysis of promotional materials that include prospectuses, advertisements, and school publications, it considers the “value‐addedness” that these schools purport to offer. In this regard, ideas such as building self‐esteem and emotional intelligence are not only being used for market advantage but are also being nicely conflated with religious principles to produce the “whole” child with market edge. This paper draws on a recent research study of 30 elite Australian schools. As new practices of identity formation and self‐presentation are investigated, questions are raised about issues of fabrication in performativity‐inspired practices of marketisation.     

Assessing equity beyond knowledge‐ and skills‐based outcomes: A comparative ethnography of two fourth‐grade reform‐based science classrooms

When evaluating equity, researchers often look at the “achievement gap.” Privileging knowledge and skills as primary outcomes of science education misses other, more subtle, but critical, outcomes indexing inequitable science education. In this comparative ethnography, we examined what it meant to “be scientific” in two fourth‐grade classes taught by teachers similarly committed to reform‐based science (RBS) practices in the service of equity. In both classrooms, students developed similar levels of scientific understanding and expressed positive attitudes about learning science. However, in one classroom, a group of African American and Latina girls expressed outright disaffiliation with promoted meanings of “smart science person” (“They are the science people. We aren't like them”), despite the fact that most of them knew the science equally well or, in one case, better than, their classmates. To make sense of these findings, we examine the normative practice of “sharing scientific ideas” in each classroom, a comparison that provided a robust account of the differently accessible meanings of scientific knowledge, scientific investigation, and scientific person in each setting. The findings illustrate that research with equity aims demands attention to culture (everyday classroom practices that promote particular meanings of “science”) and normative identities (culturally produced meanings of “science person” and the accessibility of those meanings). The study: (1) encourages researchers to question taken‐for‐granted assumptions and complexities of RBS and (2) demonstrates to practitioners that enacting what might look like RBS and producing students who know and can do science are but pieces of what it takes to achieve equitable science education. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc., Inc. J Res Sci Teach 48: 459–485, 2011