Embracing the Risk of Teaching Literature

Contemporary Western educational systems have been described as a landscape of control and assessment meant to make education, in Gert J. J. Biesta's words, “strong, secure, and predictable,” and ultimately “risk-free.” Against this desire for strength, Biesta argues for weakness, focusing on the risks of the unpredictable and the unknown as primary features of an education worthy of the name. In this article, Ingrid Lindell promotes this weaker attitude specifically in the context of teaching literature. Guiding her analysis is the question, How might we create a practical approach to make the unmeasurable more accessible and assessible? In applying some of Biesta's concepts to the practical considerations of teaching literature and assessing student outcomes, Lindell identifies a tension that arises when demands for educational transparency and measurable outcomes are imposed on teachers of literature: in literary education, it is very often not desirable to know outcomes in advance. Against this background, Lindell introduces the methodological idea of teaching in the gap, an attempt to apply some of Biesta's concepts and ideas in the literature classroom in order to explore how we might embrace and teach “The Risk.” Lindell aims to strengthen the case for reading and assessing literature as a metacognitive activity rather than submitting to a ratio-based approach to literary education that focuses narrowly on reproductive knowledge that is measurable.     

The Four Marks of Holistic Kinesiology

What, to borrow a theological phrase, are the marks of a truly holistic kinesiology department? In Kinesis and the Nature of the Human Person (2010), I examined the theoretical impact of Aristotle's definition of kinesis and Polanyi's theory of tacit knowledge on kinesiology. The intention here, however, is practical rather than theoretical. How would a holistic philosophy impact the day-to-day activities within the discipline of kinesiology? What tenets would a holistic department of kinesiology hold? What direction and aims would such a department have? Four areas of impact and reform are offered. First, kinesiologists should engage the humanities. A vibrant humanistic presence in the field will not only make kinesiology more holistic; it will give kinesiologists the tools to articulate a holistic understanding of the nature of the human person. Second, kinesiologists should recognize the importance of experience, practice, and apprenticeship within the field. Third, departments should embrace rather than shun specificity. Finally, kinesiologists are encouraged to acknowledge that a field dedicated to “physical activity” must require, engage in, and passionately profess the actual practice of “moving well.”     

Boundary-Work and Discipline Construction: Boundary Strategies to Institutionalize Guoxue as a Discipline and Its Failure

Abstract

The construction of knowledge boundaries is an important mechanism in the formation of disciplines. This article examines and analyzes boundary strategies and difficulties in the institutionalization of guoxue (“national studies” or “Chinese classics”) as a discipline in recent years from the perspective of boundary-work. To establish guoxue as a discipline, proponents of the discipline have proposed the knowledge strategies of “new guoxue” and “broad guoxue,” so as to dispel potential conflict between guoxue and the external political environment. In addition, in the construction of the discipline, proponents have emphasized the differences between Chinese and Western scholarship, and also made analogy to Western Sinology, to highlight the necessity of constructing a holistic “discipline of guoxue.” However, these strategies and efforts have not achieved the objective of building guoxue as a discipline. One important reason is that guoxue studies are, to a very great extent, embedded in Chinese literature, Chinese history, Chinese philosophy and other related disciplines. The knowledge boundaries between guoxue and these disciplines are fuzzy, and the construction of the discipline lacks driving force from daily research practices. The process of to build a guoxue discipline can contribute to reflect on the existing discipline governance system in mainland China.     

PAINTING WITH IMPASTO: METAPHORS,MIRRORS, AND REFLECTIVE REGRESSION IN MONTAIGNE'S “OF THE EDUCATION OF CHILDREN”

Analyzing Montaigne's triptych painting, “Of the Education of Children,” reveals a series of ever‐morphing, Dorian Gray–like canvases that depict metaphor mutations through which Montaigne defined education by distinguishing between schooling a child into a learned man and educating him into an able, active, and gentle person. Montaigne used metaphor and metaphor clusters to image key points in his educational philosophy, advanced his argument by intertwining, transmuting, and inverting metaphors, and thereby drew and vividly painted his philosophy of how to educate a person from cradle to coffin. Because the etymology and pronunciation of “essay” (from the French essai) support Montaigne's imaging and exploiting of this genre's creative potential, Virginia Worley begins by considering the term's etymology before positioning her analysis of Montaigne's work within metaphor research. She then examines the metaphors Montaigne used to paint the triptych word painting that embodies his philosophy of education: the meaning and value of educating in and for the art of living well.     

关注教师作为“人”的存在：论教师教育研究的人文主义取向--第二届全球教师教育峰会综述

文章基于第二届全球教师教育峰会,对教师教育领域关注外在标准与关注教师内在主体性之争进行讨论。本届峰会关注教师作为“人”的存在,在内容上通过关注教师作为主体性存在与教师作为社会建构存在两个方面呈现,在研究方法上更多采用质性研究,体现出教师教育研究人文主义取向。人文主义取向教师教育研究对我国教师教育的启示在于：教师教育需要首先关注并理解教师作为“人”的存在;教师教育研究应基于一定的历史、文化与社会发展的脉络,体现教师的主体性,实现教师教育研究的全球视角与本土情境的融合。     

《庄子》的劳动教育哲学及其当代价值

《庄子》的劳动者本质上是“真人”,即把劳动融于生命经验的人。《庄子》通过记述劳动者的劳动故事阐明了它的劳动教育哲学,主要论及了劳动与道德、劳动与知识、劳动与身体、劳动与审美等几个基本范畴。《庄子》的劳动观为解读劳动思想史的流变提供了历史镜像。透过这种镜像,可以反观我国近70年劳动教育的变迁。《庄子》的劳动教育哲学的当代价值在于:劳动教育需要复归劳动本身、尊重儿童的劳动本性,才能使学生在劳动过程中享有“自由意志”与“精神解放”,最终达成身心和谐的全面发展的人。     

Reflective practice or poetic mindfulness: a role for social poetics in constructing and performing futures

Reflective Practice has been dominated for the last 25 years by an experiential school as typified by Kolb (1984. Experiential Learning. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall). This paper suggests that there are significant problems with an approach to considering futures that is based on ‘knowledge’ of the past, identification of ongoing cause–effect relations and individual agency. Alternative, Social Constructionist premises are discussed and a ‘Social Poetics’ (Shotter, 1996. “Social Construction as social poetics: Oliver Sacks and the case of Dr P.” In Reconstructing the Psychological Subject, edited by B. Bayer and J. Shotter. London: Sage) is offered as a mindfulness that foregrounds moment-by-moment relations in which new realities are improvised. The use of different poetic forms to shape a poetic mindfulness is proposed and three advantages of such a practice are suggested. First, that a poetic mindfulness can interrupt limiting ‘thinking habits’. Secondly, it foregrounds the creativity of ongoing relations and, thirdly, it provides an alternative to simple cause–effect relations by foregrounding social improvisation.     

“It’s sweeter where the bruise is”: making sense of the experience of family homelessness in a community–campus partnership

Individual and family stories of homelessness that focus on the transition out of homelessness remain comparatively unexplored. Using hermeneutic inquiry and microstoria analysis to orient the inquiry and design the narrative, this case study involves the story of a woman overcoming homelessness with her family, and her participation in, and contribution to, a community–campus partnership during this period of time. “Delilah” describes aspects of the day-to-day experience of her transition to permanent housing as well as her understanding of “expert-driven” vs. collaboratively designed programming within community–campus partnerships. The author reflects on her relationship with this brilliant person and the complexity of participating in a respectful relationship with her, and outlines some policy recommendations for families facing similar circumstances. She posits that by appropriately partnering with grassroots individuals with deep knowledge of homelessness and other social conditions, education institutions participate in enriching communities and help improve practice to ameliorate social problems.     

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.     

Points of Vulnerability and Presence: Knowing and learning in globally networked communities

This is a paper about knowledge, learning and the idea of community in what we call “hybrid workspaces”. Hybrid workspaces “bring together physical place and cyber place” in communication networks (Castells, 2001, p. 131). Many people work in various kinds of hybrid workspaces. A person working on a production line might have real-time co-workers in their own town, just as a colleague might work in a hybrid workspace and rely upon others who communicate asynchronously via a website to help them solve problems. Hybrid workspaces, like most workspaces, are centrally concerned with the global production and diffusion of certain kinds of routine and innovative working knowledge. In this paper we think about knowledge as social action that is generated, mediated, negotiated and traded among people in the politically charged dynamic of hybrid workspace communities. We consider the ways people adopt, modify and are changed by the technologies they implement in these workspaces. We are especially interested in what people have to learn to know, and to be, to operate effectively in these hybrid communities, and what role formal, informal and non-formal education has to play in negotiating what counts as knowledge, and who can say so, in virtual workspaces.     

以心观心:中国传统道德教育思想的内在理路

中国“修身”的道德教育思想有注重外在规范与行为养成的传统,同时内在蕴含“修心”的思路。中国文化中的“心”概念与西方哲学对认知与理性的强调相对,表现出明显的情感取向,是人之为人的本质所在。心作为内在意义世界,标画出人的道德意义系统,该意义世界和意义系统具有在世品格与开放自主性。从这一心概念出发,中国传统道德教育思想的内在理路可以被概括为“以心观心”。“以心观心”的内在理路是:首先引导人从心的角度观照道心和他心,从而进入道德意义系统;以前者为前提,指引人从我心走向道心和他心,并在这一行动过程中进一步体认道德意义,如此循环往复,不断充实意义世界,共创和谐美善的人间。     

Education for future-oriented citizenship: implications for the education of twenty-first century competencies

Globalization and the knowledge economy have opened up worldwide agendas for national development. Following this is the emphasis on the social dimension, otherwise known as social capital. Much of social capital includes “soft skills” and “twenty-first century skills”, which broadly cover critical, creative and inventive thinking; information, interactive and communication skills; civic literacy, global awareness and cross-cultural skills. Proactively, the Singapore government is preparing for Curriculum 2015, a new curriculum that would develop student attributes, embedded in the “confident person”, “self-directed learner”, “active contributor”, and “concerned citizen”. Significantly, a new curricular initiative, Character and Citizenship Education, emphasizes the integrative nature of citizenship and twenty-first century competencies and has been implemented in all schools in Singapore from 2011. This future-oriented approach to citizenship education emphasizes the significance of individual initiatives and the intellectual capital of citizens. This paper analyses features of this particular approach to citizenship education, and its strengths and significance, which may be viewed as an integrative “total curriculum approach” with a “whole-society” perspective. In addition, the challenges of teaching twenty-first century skills will also be highlighted. This departs from the conventional paradigm of socialization, but to help students develop attributes for a future society to come.     

Democratizing Children's Computation: Learning Computational Science as Aesthetic Experience

In this essay, Amy Voss Farris and Pratim Sengupta argue that a democratic approach to children's computing education in a science class must focus on the aesthetics of children's experience. In Democracy and Education, Dewey links “democracy” with a distinctive understanding of “experience.” For Dewey, the value of educational experiences lies in “the unity or integrity of experience.” In Art as Experience, Dewey presents aesthetic experience as the fundamental form of human experience that undergirds all other forms of experiences and that can bring together multiple forms of experiences, locating this form of experience in the work of artists. Particularly relevant to the focus of this essay, computational literacy, Dewey calls the process through which a person transforms a material into an expressive medium an aesthetic experience. Farris and Sengupta argue that the kind of experience that is appropriate for a democratic education in the context of children's computational science is essentially aesthetic in nature. Given that aesthetics has received relatively little attention in STEM education research, the authors' purpose here is to highlight the power of Deweyan aesthetic experience in making computational thinking available and attractive to all children, including those who are disinterested in computing, and especially those who are likely to be discounted by virtue of location, gender, or race.     

Book Review

Handbook on Quality of Life for Human Service Practitioners Robert L. Schalock &Miguel Angel Verdugo-Alonso, 2002 Washington, DC: American Association on Mental Retardation ISBN 0-940898-77-2 The concept of quality of life (QOL) or the “good life,” as the authors point out in their introduction, dates back to antiquity. In recent years, however, it has emerged as an outcome variable in research and policy development across the major fields of human services. It is timely, therefore, that this Handbook has been published as it provides one of the most comprehensive overviews of published research on this important topic. Its major contribution lies in the way the authors have analysed the voluminous literature on the conceptualisation, measurement, and application of the concept of QOL from 1985 onwards. In this process they have covered the focus areas of education (regular and special), physical health, mental and behavioural health, intellectual disabilities, ageing, and families. Readers will find the multi-dimensional heuristic quality of life model that integrates QOL domains, social systems, and the issues of measurement, application, and evaluation particularly useful. Much of the research on QOL is not based upon sound models or conceptualisations of the construct and that weakens subsequent measurement instruments. Throughout the book the paradigmatic shifts that have occurred in the way disability has been defined and conceptualised; the way evaluation theory and strategies have undergone significant development; and the recognition of the critical importance of reflecting the person's subjective perception of his/her life quality, have been strongly emphasised. The book has been organised into four parts. Two introductory chapters provide an overview of the Handbook and the concept of QOL. Part 2 integrates the research on QOL across the six focus areas and concludes with a synthesis of core QOL domains and indicators. The measurement of the concept is presented in Part 3 with a useful systems approach embodying the core QOL domains of emotional wellbeing, interpersonal development, physical well-being, self-determination, social inclusion, and rights. Part 4 discusses the application of the concept at the individual, organisational, and societal levels. A concluding chapter “Putting it altogether and moving ahead” provides a useful synthesis of the major themes. A particularly interesting observation is the relative lack of emphasis in the QOL literature surveyed on the rights domain, education (including special education), and familycentred research.     

Issues of Power,Masculinity, and Gender Justice: Sally's story of teaching boys

Despite calls for a more nuanced approach to issues of gender and equity that recognizes how broader relations of gender and power continue to produce injustices for many females, essentialized accounts expressing concern about boys’ poor educational performance remain the most common refrain in dominant equity discourses across Western contexts. This common refrain characteristic of current large scale gender reforms, such as Australia's parliamentary inquiry into the education of boys, Boys: Getting it right, is driven by a standards rather than social justice focus and thus creates silences around issues of gender injustice, power, and constructions of hegemonic masculinity. In this paper, I present “Sally's” story as a disruption of these silences. Sally is a young English teacher at “Penfolds College”, an all boys Catholic school in a large urban centre in Queensland (Australia). Her story, in illustrating how particular boys draw on broader discourses of masculinity to sexually harass and intimidate her, highlights the inadequacies of dominant public and policy discourse in terms of its failure to locate boys’ educational issues within broader contexts of inequitable gender relations.     

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     

Educating World Teachers for Cosmopolitan Classrooms and Schools

This essay responds to the question of what it might mean to educate “world teachers” for cosmopolitan classrooms and schools through an examination of an ethnographic play entitled Satellite Kids. The author begins with the idea that teachers need to develop or build up “intercultural capital”, that is, knowledge and dispositions that will help them in intercultural exchanges of teaching and learning. The author then explores what such knowledge and dispositions might entail through an analysis of Satellite Kids. The play's focus on issues of power, identity, and intercultural conflict within a Canadian cosmopolitan school makes an interesting case study for exploring what intercultural knowledge and dispositions might look and sound like, and how the educational project of building intercultural capital is different from the project of multicultural education that has been dominant in Western teacher education throughout 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s.     

EDUCATIVE DECEIT: VLADIMIR NABOKOV AND THE [IM]POSSIBILITY OF EDUCATION

Herner Sæverot begins this article with an example: how Søren Kierkegaard used deceit as a means to educate. In one of his biographical texts, it turns out that Kierkegaard's objective was to deceive his readers into a totalized and universal truth. According to Sæverot, Kierkegaard's approach shows that he was a “demystifier,” someone who wants to save an other from delusion and bring this person into a better understanding of the world. Contrary to Kierkegaard, Sæverot argues that education is [im]possible—which, he further maintains, may open up the possibility of being “educated.” Sæverot couches his argument in the context of a novel, Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita. Through a phenomenological study, Sæverot demonstrates how Nabokov creates deceits and adverse forces in his writings so as to open up a space of education, wherein the reader can take active part. The education of Nabokov is thus unpredictable and transformative. The ways in which Nabokov deceives and “educates” can, Sæverot ultimately contends, open up new domains for the field of educational theory (and practice).     

高校公共体育教育供给优化分析——基于供给侧结构性改革视角

在对当前高校公共体育教育中存在的大学生体质健康问题凸显、教学质量下滑、资源分配不均、与社会体育融合不畅等问题进行分析的基础上,从供给侧结构性改革的视角,提出应通过优化“课程资源”供给,优化“人才资源”供给,探索“有偿体育服务”供给,优化“理论知识”供给,建立高校课外体育锻炼、竞赛活动长效管理机制,优化“制度”供给,突出“信息”供给来促进高校公共体育教育良性发展。     

Play Disabilities: A Reason for Physical Educators to Rethink the Boundaries of Special Education

Disabilities are commonly conceptualized in dualistic ways—specifically as mental or physical in nature and as located in the self rather than in the “other” or “out there.” In this essay I reflect on the consequences of a more holistic understanding of both handicaps and special education. This new approach, I suggest, would reveal something called a play disability. I review the nature of play before discussing the symptoms of this impairment. I discuss play handicaps on the side of human personality and attitude as well as on the side of the world or would be playgrounds. I speculate on what special education pedagogies for the play disabled might look like, cite the life experience of a handicapped pianist in arguing for the importance of play as a central component of good living, and then conclude with reflections on our unique opportunities and obligations in physical education to address any play deficit disorders we find among our students.