The Rub Between Fact and Fiction: Ideology in Lois Lenski’s Regional Maps

From the early 1940s until the late 1960s, Lois Lenski embarked on an exploration of American regions through children’s books. This body of work, which has become known as Lenski’s Regional Series, began by exploring the regions Lenski herself experienced each year as she traveled from Connecticut to Florida for her health. As Lenski realized the importance and success of these books, demonstrated by a Newberry Medal award for Strawberry Girl in 1946, she broadened her reach to include more geographical areas of the United States including such states as California and South Dakota. Through her books, Lenski emphasizes the importance of community and shared nationhood even across regional lines. This paper examines Lenski’s regional series first from her own purpose in aiming for objectivity and fact that she could communicate to children of other regions, instructing and exposing them to new ways of life. Second, this paper considers the paratextual elements of the Regional series, the forewords and the maps that accompany each book, to reveal the ideology that Lenski unconsciously incorporates into her stories. A product of her time, Lenski may have been influenced by the government’s American Guide Series, created by the Federal Writers’ Project, which demonstrates the same successes and flaws. Lenski’s maps in particular demonstrate the influence of a particular time, the layering of fact and fiction, and the reflection of Lenski’s personal values of certain regional characteristics. Recognition of the ideology incorporated into Lenski’s series remains important as child readers receive not objective fact, but one perspective of their nation.     

Winfield High’s Homeroom Project in International Understanding

Advanced Placement (AP) Chemistry and the National AP Chemistry Examination are both critical to secondary level institutions nationwide. The use of a national embossing stamp to attest to successful completion of an AP Chemistry course and exam to ensure college credit is a novel idea worth consideration. Moreover, the concept could be expanded to all AP science disciplines conducting laboratory exercises.     

Understanding Students’ Reasoning: Argumentation Schemes as an Interpretation Method in Science Education

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the argumentative structure of students’ arguments using argumentation schemes as an instrument for reconstructing the missing premises underlying their reasoning. Building on the recent literature in science education, in order for an explanation to be persuasive and achieve a conceptual change it needs to proceed from the interlocutor’s background knowledge to the analysis of the unknown or wrongly interpreted phenomena. Argumentation schemes represent the abstract forms of the most used and common forms of human reasoning, combining logical principles with semantic concepts. By identifying the argument structure it is possible to retrieve the missing premises and the crucial concepts and definition on which the conclusion is based. This method of analysis will be shown to provide the teacher with an instrument to improve his or her explanations by taking into consideration the students’ intuitions and deep background knowledge on a specific issue. In this fashion the teacher can advance counterarguments or propose new perspectives on the subject matter in order to persuade the students to accept new scientific concepts.     

Understanding prosody and morphology in school-age children’s reading

Reading and Writing - We examined the unique contributions of prosodic awareness and morphological awareness to school-aged children’s word reading and reading comprehension. A total of 110...     

Children’s Memory: A Primer for Understanding Behavior

This paper provides the opportunity to understand children’s behavior from a memory viewpoint. For the last three decades, cognitive developmentalists have been asking the question, “what develops in children’s memory?” Four answers to this question are presented, complete with explanations, examples, and possible applications where appropriate. The purpose of the paper is to provide early childhood educators and other practitioners who work with children a different lens through which to view children’s behavior. The memory view is compatible with current best practices in early childhood education, and may provide practitioners an additional viewpoint from which to draw when implementing developmentally appropriate practice.     

Deaf Children’s Understanding of Other People’s Thought Processes

This study focuses on the ability of deaf children to predict the behaviours of other people, based on an understanding of their beliefs. An unexpected transfer task and a deceptive box task were used with a group of 55 severely/profoundly deaf children. Results reiterate the findings of other studies that many deaf children are grossly delayed in this important area of social functioning compared to their hearing counterparts. Deaf children of deaf parents/carers fared better than deaf children with hearing parents/carers. Implications for early intervention and education programmes are discussed.     

My Understanding of Wordsworth’s‘Immortality’in His“Ode:Intimation of Immortality”

William Wordsworth was the representative of the British Lake poets In his poems he aimed at simplicity and purity of the language,fighting against the conventional forms of the 18th century poetry.He transformed his observation of the landscape into the revelation of the beauty of nature in poetry,and thus expressed his nature philosophy.In this article the author briefly analyses the organization of his poem: Ode: Intimation of Immortality and mainly elaborates her understanding of the poet’s na-ture-philosophy in four points:(a) Man is sensitive to all natural influences in childhood.(b) Nature has a moral and spiritual sig-nificance and helps the poet understand the mystery of human life.(c) Life is but a stage.(d) All good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings;it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.     

Turbulence in Bolivia’s normales: Teacher education as a socio-political battlefield

In line with broader politics of change at the national level, the Morales government aims at a radical restructuring of the governance mechanisms for the teacher education sector and a socio-political redirection of its curriculum, as teachers are perceived to be potential agents for decolonization and for developing social justice—or vivir bien (to live well). Morales’ policies are not uncontested, and the tense socio-political state of affairs and political power plays are reflected in Bolivia’s normales, teacher education colleges. They have become a socio-political battlefield where political affiliations, union strategies, and historically embedded institutional cultures all influence the way new generations of teachers are trained, and the way former and current policy initiatives are mediated and adopted. Given the complex and historically embedded socio-political context of struggles and tensions at and around the institutional level, the government still has a long way to go to change the continuing habits of the normales and to put its government’s new ideals of transformation and decolonization into practice.     

Understanding: ‘Knowledge’, ‘Belief’ and ‘Understanding’

The following paper is intended as an exercise in friendly criticism of one of Harvey Siegel's and Mike Smith's (Knowing, Believing and Understanding, this volume). I'm in substantial sympathy with the general thrust of their paper and my remarks merely provide some criticism of their discussion's conceptual coherence and clarity and a correspondingly slightly adjusted version of what they have to say. My focus is limited to the conceptions of knowledge, belief and understanding and their inter-relationships in terms of which they offer suggestions to science educators.     

“It’s the X and Y Thing”: Cross-sectional and Longitudinal Changes in Children’s Understanding of Genes

Studies from different theoretical traditions investigating children’s inheritance and genetics concepts have adopted a cross-sectional method. This paper is the first to examine both cross-sectional and longitudinal changes in children’s basic genetic concepts. It forms part of a larger investigation into the development of intuitive inheritance and genetics concepts in childhood. Four age cohorts (4–5 years, 7–8 years, 10–11 years, 14–15 years) were interviewed individually at two measurement occasions (T1, N = 182; T2, N = 164) separated by a 1-year interval. Cross-sectional analyses revealed an increase in children’s knowledge of genetics by 10 years. Between 10 and 14 years, there were fewer changes in the content of children’s knowledge, especially at the level of scientific genetic understanding. There was little evidence of longitudinal changes over the 1-year period. Overall, children may hold an understanding of genetics that is tied to knowledge of inheritance within families. This may pose challenges for acquiring more abstract and formal concepts of genes.     

Understanding Differences in Academic Effectiveness: Practitioners’ Views∗

As part of a large‐scale study of the ability of 94 secondary schools to promote academic achievement, case studies of six outlier schools were conducted and headteachers (principals) and their deputies were questioned about the processes of effectiveness. The analysis of their responses ‐ grouped by the performance of their school (measured by value added analyses of three years of public examination results) as effective, ineffective or mixed ‐ reveals considerable support for previously cited characteristics of effective schooling. Despite the limitations imposed by a reliance on the use of retrospective accounts, the study takes forward the field of school effectiveness in its search for generalisable findings and coherent theory.

     

Urban Educators’ Voices: Understanding Culture in the Classroom

This article discusses urban educators’ views of their teaching experiences. The article is based upon survey research conducted with teachers in two poor, urban districts during the 2005–2006 academic year. The teachers reported a variety of positive and negative views regarding their classrooms, their students, and the students’ social worlds. The data illustrate the importance of classroom processes for the teachers, and how they believed that their students’ social locations, behaviors, and attitudes impede the delivery of educational content. We believe this research raises interesting challenges regarding the need for urban educators to incorporate students’ perspectives into both instructional processes and curriculum content. Furthermore, this research should contribute to the empirical foundation needed for the creation of better teacher preparation programs.     

What’s involved in ‘the work’? Understanding administrators’ roles in bringing trans-affirming policies into practice

ABSTRACT

Researchers have concluded that policy implementation is a process of mutual adaptation between policies and implementers. Our study draws attention to that relationship, especially with respect to policies that challenge assumptions about sex, gender, and sexuality. We focus on how six administrators in one United States school district understood ‘the work’ of bringing the district’s Guidelines for Supporting Transgender and Gender Nonconforming Students into practice. Our analysis of interview data focused these questions: How do administrators describe their motivation and commitment to engage in the work? What puzzles of practice do participants name? How do they talk about the work of implementation? What does that work mean/involve in everyday practice? What were their roles? We found that implementation was locally defined and enacted; participants’ sense-making, their roles in enacting the Guidelines, and the puzzles they negotiated were influenced by their unique contexts. We share examples of diverse cases in an effort to create policy knowledge.     

Accidents of Birth: Rawls’s Original Position as the Mother’s Womb

This paper examines the history of welfare policy discourse in the United States since the publication of the “Moynihan Report” (1967) and traces its implications for contemporary education policy research. The central thesis is that an overemphasis on “parents” historically invites unwarranted assumptions about autonomy and responsibility, which obfuscates fundamental questions of justice. Children are consequently punished for their parents’ perceived indiscretions. To militate against this tendency the author employs recent feminist critiques of Rawls’s methodology in A Theory of Justice (1999) to reconceptualize the “Original Position” as a mother’s womb in an effort to redirect focus from parents to children. Through this revision, policy discourse can potentially be shifted to more nearly mirror the reasoning applied in Plyler v Doe (1982), which emphasizes finally that children cannot be punished for their parents’ indiscretions.     

Learning Theory as Teaching Resource: Enhancing Students’ Understanding of Economic Concepts

A group of experienced secondary school teachers used a novel learning theory as a resource for planning and carrying out their teaching of a difficult economic concept. Their students mastery of this concept after a series of three lessons was compared with the mastery of the same concept by students who were taught by another group of teachers under the same conditions except for the use of the theory. The difference in learning outcomes was extreme. Observations of what was happening in the classrooms showed subtle but decisive differences correlated with the differences in outcome. These differences were interpreted in terms of the theory used by the first group, and the results seem to give support to the theoretical claim that for any specific object of learning there is a necessary pattern of variation and invariance that the learners must experience in order to appropriate the object of learning in question and thus by bringing out that pattern in the learning situation, the likelihood of that object of learning being appropriated is enhanced. Furthermore, this study shows how the understanding of the simultaneous change in the supply of and the demand for a certain good affects its market price can be brought about in a powerful way.     

Understanding Mark Twain’s Opinion of Anti-slavery-Analysis on Jim in Huckleberry Finn

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is one of the most famous works of Mark Twain. Huck has become the antihero in American literature. In addition, this kind of rebellion of spirit even has a realistic...