Employability as a New Mission?

The purpose of this study is to analyze the recent development of Chinese vocational colleges from two perspectives: the adoption of employability as a new institutional mission and organizational changes in six areas. The analysis is based on a multiple-case study. The analytical frameworks are developed from sociological theory and organizational theory. This study argues that vocational colleges in China are experiencing substantial transformations. At the macro level, they are transforming from a social institution to industry under the neoliberal argument for globalization. Colleges adopt employability as their new mission. At the micro level, there are considerable changes under the influence of the new mission, in terms of program goal, program development, curriculum development, dominant pedagogy, faculty development, and internal management. The changes fit the rhetoric of employability as a core competency. There is a tendency that Chinese vocational higher education institutions will degenerate into training organizations for employment.     

Using Films as a Learning Tool

Most people would agree that watching movies is one of their favorite free-time activities. We often think of movies as fun entertainment, but     

Take every day as a bonus

在我们的生活当中,总会遇到这样那样的问题,困难.面对这些问题你会怎么办?读完这篇文章你或许会从一个全新的角度看待生活。     

A Wonderful experience as a Hostess

Maybe most of our daily life is like a gear which is running along the same track day after day--there isn＇t anything special, nor exciting, nor surprising. But have you got someday that makes you become the sparkling star in the sky？     

Using Films as a Learning Tool

<正>Most people would agree that watching movies is one of their favorite free-time activities. We often think of movies as fun entertainment, but have you ever considered that movies can also be used to help us     

Online Learning as a Learner-Centered Affair

Online learning, which is based on computer, is a social, collaborative, interactive and learner-centered affair for both tutors and students. It is sure that online education will be one of the most important alternative ways to conventional classroom teaching and learning. Learning online is like taking part in long-running and stimulating discussion with a group of sympathetic and like-motivated colleagues. The optimized learning site can teach students in accordance of their aptitude and help students learn according to their needs.     

Teachers as ‘reform-doers’: developing a participatory curriculum to teach English as a foreign language

Action research concerns action, and transforming people’s practices (as well as their understandings of their practices and the conditions under which they practise). Sometimes we may feel that action research works best when it contributes to our understandings. In this paper, by contrast, I want to explore the ‘happening‐ness’ of action and practice, as they are lived and changed by action research. I want to explore the place of action research in shaping and making history by changing what is done. The central argument of this paper is that, while action research certainly does contribute to theory, it also, and perhaps more importantly, contributes to history.     

Inquiry as a Members’ Phenomenon: Young Children as Competent Inquirers

Understanding children’s inquiry often draws on exogenous understanding (i.e., scientists’ inquiry, classroom expectations) without first understanding inquiry in children’s everyday lives. In contrast, we examine young children’s inquiry in their families to better understand their competent engagement in inquiry. Specifically, we develop an endogenous representation of inquiry as a members’ phenomenon (IMP)—a representation formulated by participants in the course of their own activity. IMP highlights key moments in inquiry—beginning by orienting to inquiry, making progress by drawing on sensemaking resources, and orienting to ending inquiry. This representation also allows us to recognize evidence of young children’s competence in managing interactional, affective, and epistemic challenges inherent in these key moments of inquiry; the diverse array of sensemaking resources through which children address those challenges; and a range of children’s interests and concerns addressed within their inquiry. Furthermore, IMP provides a prism for reconceptualizing learning from learners’ perspective: attending to how participants orient to a moment of inquiry, inquire together, and come to what counts to them as a satisfactory end to their inquiry. This representation of inquiry is an important step in basic learning sciences research and informative for the design of science and other domain learning environments.     

The Art of English as a Classroom Language

<正>Trying to teach English well gives many teachers a headache even though they try very hard.One of the major reasons is that these teachers lack the art of English as a classroom language,which they stillhaven’t realized.Here,the writer would like to discuss the problem with readers from four points of view.     

Financial Planning‐Chemistry as a Special Case

Although many women now hold qualifications that in the past guaranteed an academic appointment, few jobs are available in universities. In an unrestrained labour market, the sex ratio of academics in Australian universities is unlikely to change much over the next 10 to 15 years. The likely impact of affirmative action policies and practices is discussed.     

Logo as a Strategy for Developing Thinking?

Instruction in the Logo programming language proceeds amid increasing concern about its educational value. Proponents claim that Logo-based instruction increases intelligence, whereas critics contend that children learn little about Logo or about anything else during such instruction. Reasoned argument about the pitfalls and prospects of Logo in the classroom requires a common interpretive framework, which is often obscured by the distinct conceptions of intelligence held by proponents and critics. Accordingly, the implications of two different root metaphors of intelligence for the study of Logo-based learning are traced. Development of ideal educational practices and outcomes for Logo learning within each framework follows, with a selected review of research to support some conjectures and refute others. This presentation includes discussion of weak versus strong problem-solving methods, transfer, "powerful ideas," and discovery-based learning. The article concludes with a partition of cognition into cognitive, metacognitive, and epistemic levels, and it relates these to Logo as a strategy for developing thinking.     

The Self‐concept as a Moral Control

Abstract:

Groups of twenty children, aged between 6 years, 7 months and 11 years, 3 months, attending either a traditional Catholic school or a Freinet school were compared on judgments involving moral concepts. Subjects in the two groups were matched for age, IQ, sex, school grade, religious affiliation, fathers’ occupational level, number of siblings and birth order. Moral conflict stories differed in the presence or absence of authority figures and peers, and were set either in the home or the school. Children attending the Freinet school exhibited the more advanced moral judgments for all stories combined. Stories involving peers only elicited more mature judgments than those involving authority figures. Freinet schools encourage democratic group self‐discipline and provide many and varied role‐taking opportunities. The results suggest that such practices accelerate moral development.     

Mathematics education as a ‘design science’

Mathematics education (didactics of mathematics) cannot grow without close relationships to mathematics, psychology, pedagogy and other areas. However, there is the risk that by adopting standards, methods and research contexts from other well-established disciplines, the applied nature of mathematics education may be undermined. In order to preserve the specific status and the relative autonomy of mathematics education, the suggestion to conceive of mathematics education as a design science is made.Revised and extended version of the paper Mathematikdidaktik als design science, published inJournal für Mathematikdidaktik 13 (1992), 55–70. I am indebted to Jerry P. Becker, P. Bender, H. Besuden, W. Blum, E. Cohors-Fresenborg, Th.J. Cooney, L. Führer, H.N. Jahnke, A. Kirsch, G.N. Müller, H._Chr. Reichel, H. Schupp, Ch. Selter, H.-J. Vollrath, J. Voigt, G. Walther and H. Winter for critical remarks to earlier drafts.     

Action research as a practice‐based practice

Action research changes people’s practices, their understandings of their practices, and the conditions under which they practice. It changes people’s patterns of ‘saying’, ‘doing’ and ‘relating’ to form new patterns – new ways of life. It is a meta‐practice: a practice that changes other practices. It transforms the sayings, doings and relating that compose those other practices. Action research is also a practice, composed of sayings, doing and relating. Different kinds of action research – technical, practical and critical – are composed in different patterns of saying, doing and relating, as different ways of life. This paper suggests that ‘Education for Sustainability’, as an educational movement within the worldwide social movement responding to global warming, may be a paradigm example of critical action research.     

Higher education as a self‐guiding society

Abstract

Over the last two decades, there has been a significant change in the financing of higher education in the United States. A decrease in student and institutional support in real terms, tuition increases at all types of institutions, along with the view that students are the primary beneficiaries of higher education has resulted in policies that reduce the proportion of higher education costs borne by the federal and state governments. This paper will describe this financing shift in the United States, and analyse its impact on college participation with a particular focus on equity and opportunity. It will also provide an analysis of some questions that European countries should address as they implement their own policies that shift the burden of paying for college from the government to individuals, and as they consider various forms of financial assistance to help students pay for college.     

Teachers as learners – with a little help from a critical friend

Professional learning is intended to improve teaching, benefit student learning and in the longer term improve achievement of targets in schools. When teachers take responsibility not only for their own learning but also for their colleagues’, it can lead to a shift in attitudes towards collaborative learning. This study presents an example of a professional learning community (PLC) based on teachers’ engagement in systematic inquiries. The aim of the study was to explore crucial factors during the process of critical friendship that could be related to a PLC. The research context was a series of shadowing sessions where teachers were expected to document teaching and provide feedback. The analyses are mainly based on documentation, in the form of shadowing logs produced when teachers study each other in action. Findings indicate that the role of critical friend was hard to internalise and that most of the teachers did not use it to its full potential for learning, according to the Vygotskian concept of the zone of proximal development. Three crucial factors for learning in a PLC are addressed: active choices related to teachers’ and students’ learning during different phases in the inquiry; the complexity of mastering several skills in action research at the same time; and the teachers’ attitudes to professional learning.