Social science,social relevance and the politics of educational developmentLes sciences sociales,leur rapport avec la societe et la politique de l'evolution pedagogique

This article raises some broad questions about the relevance of the current content and teaching methods in undergraduate social science generally. First, it examines critically the general teaching patterns which often stress the teaching of concepts, theory, history and techniques in isolation from current or historical problems. It next argues that our major methods of teaching—notably the lecture—contribute little to achieving the widely advertised pedagogic objectives of independent, critical thinking by students. Thirdly, it argues that we need to inject more relevance into the content of social science courses by shifting the emphasis towards a greater use of contemporary or historical problems or incidents as the starting point for the appreciation of theory and methods. It suggests that the teaching methods best suited to this are the various versions of the ‘case’ or ‘enquiry’ or ‘problem’ approach, which involve a more active participation by students in the process of learning, rather than their current passive role as consumers of teaching. Some illustrations of how this can be done are given. The article concludes by indicating some of the problems which are likely to be encountered in educational development of this kind. These problems are considered to be ‘political’ ones in that they involve a changed use and distribution of resources (of staff, students, times and buildings), which are likely to run counter to current systems of academic and institutional power, social organization, culture and ideology.     

Secular and Koranic literacies in South Asia: From colonisation to contemporary practice

This paper explores the distinction between ‘secular’ and ‘Koranic’ schooling and literacy in South Asia. It begins by tracing an archaeology of the distinction between secular ‘literacy’ and religious ‘illiteracy’. It locates the emergence of the distinction in the colonial census of the 19th century, in the development of ‘English’ education, and the responses within madrasa schools. The second part locates these debates and their on-going importance within a contemporary ethnographic setting. It examines the relevance of the distinction in relation to women's literacy practices. The paper argues that both secular and religious literacy practices are significant for women's status and well-being, and illustrates the centrality of religious reading and learning in Bangladesh. The paper challenges the conventional distinction between religious and secular schooling and literacy, noting their complementary and overlapping nature.     

The Holmes reports: perils and possibilities

There has not yet been an attempt to categorize or critique the substantial body of literature that has arisen around the Holmes Group’s three reports regarding the treatment of teaching and teacher education: Tomorrow’s Teachers (1986), Tomorrow’s Schools (1990) and Tomorrow’s Schools of Education (1995). This article represents an initial attempt to do so, as well as to discuss what impact, if any, the Holmes suggestions have had on current practice. This literature revolves around the themes of gender, professionalism, and epistemology—themes which have dominated discussions of American teacher education for at least 150 years. Criticism of the reports accuses the Holmes Group of covering over and even perpetuating dilemmas related to thee issues with politically calculating pseudo-solutions. Favorable responses to the Holmes reports generally claim that they ‘professionally’ empower teachers by showing increased respect for teachers’ ways of knowing and doing in the classroom.     

Are there any questions? one teacher’s view of students and their questions in a fourth-grade classroom

While many teachers agree that the questions students ask are valuable, researchers have found that student questions are notably absent from most classrooms. We know almost nothing about the exceptions to this—classrooms where teachers manage to elicit and use student questions effectively in instruction. One fourth grade teacher, known for her use of student questions, was selected for this study. Classroom observations and interviews were used to gather data; qualitative methods were utilized to analyze the teacher interviews and the interactions surrounding 260 questions students asked during observations. This paper highlights the teacher’s stance toward her students and their questions. 1) The teacher viewed her students as learners who asked questions to increase their understanding. 2) The teacher viewed the assumptions revealed by student questions, as ‘steps’ to the curriculum. 3) The teacher viewed her students’ questions through the lens of potential; that is, she responded to questions based on how they might promote the understanding of her students.     

The dilemmas of teaching for creativity: Insights from expert specialist dance teachers

This paper offers part of the findings of a qualitative, interpretive Ph.D. study, which used a case study approach to explore and illustrate the conceptions of and approaches to creativity of three expert specialist dance teachers working with late primary age children. The specialists had extensive expertise as dance educators in different educational settings together with experience as dance artists. One way of framing their conceptions and practice was in terms of the pedagogical puzzles or dilemmas that they encountered. This paper focuses on the dilemma of ‘balancing personal/collective voice and craft/compositional knowledge’ when teaching for creativity. The findings articulate the foundations of embodied knowing (intrinsic to aesthetic understanding) and the processes fundamental to their teaching for creativity. This is followed by details of the key pedagogical spectra which emerged when responding to the dilemma: prioritisation of creative source—inside out or outside in; degrees of proximity and intervention—distanced reactivity or close proactivity; and spectrum of task structures—purposeful play to tight apprenticeship; and their use in action by the teachers in their different situations. The paper relates these findings to two current questions within education: that of the relationship between knowledge and creativity, and the ways in which adults/experts might engage in teaching for creativity. The paper concludes that this research supports calls for a re-evaluation of aesthetic understanding's role in creativity, grounded in embodiment, within dance pedagogy, which might also be fruitfully heeded within wider educational contexts. It also provides the findings as ‘images of possible’ approaches to inter-relating knowledge and creativity both within dance, and other disciplines, and argues for the use of dilemmas and their solutions as one way of acknowledging complexity and encouraging reflective practice in teaching for creativity, both within teacher training and continuing professional development. Finally, the paper highlights the unique perspective of a group of hybrid education professionals at the arts/education interface, and suggests future areas of research which might develop from this investigation of their practice.     

Teaching methods for inventive problem-solving in junior high school

Fostering pupils’ competencies in inventive thinking and problem-solving has remained a rather unresolved issue in traditional schooling, mainly because many people regard creative thinking as a God-given ability, something an individual either possesses or does not possess, but can only be slightly learned or improved. The current study is aimed at evaluating the impact of teaching pupils problem-solving principles based on the ‘idea focusing’ concept, rather than the ‘idea generating’ approach through random search or brainstorming. Data included pre- and post-course quizzes, interviews and observations of class activities. The finding indicated that the participants significantly improved their achievements in suggesting original solutions to problems in comparison to a control group, and successfully utilized the method they had learned in their final project. Some pupils reported that they used the thinking patterns they had procured during the course in other contexts as well, for example, in school or at home. These results suggest that there is benefit in teaching pupils methods for focused thinking in problem-solving; these methods, however, should be regarded as a kind of heuristics that can help guide the thinking process rather than being used as strict algorithms. The important point is to provide pupils with opportunities to develop their own thinking methods and explain their ideas.     

Towards a strategy for increasing student mobility between less developed countries in the ‘commonwealth’ through third country training

The paper discusses the policy of third country training, i.e. the efforts by the economically more developed countries to provide, through their aid programmes, the opportunity for students from the less developed countries to study at educational institutions outside the donor's country. The current practices in this area of the major aid-granting Commonwealth countries—Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Great Britain—are examined along with the advantages and limitations of such training and suggestions are put forward for overcoming some of the problems which arise from efforts to implement this policy. One of these is for the development of ‘centres of excellence’ of a type somewhat different from the ones normally proposed. The paper discusses what should be the nature and purpose of such institutions if one of their aims is to permit them to make a significant contribution to increasing our understanding of the problems of the less developed countries and facilitate further the flow of students between them.     

The British response of higher education to changing educational perspectives

The primary purpose of this paper is to examine the objectives of higher education provision in Britain. The perspective of ‘educationists’ are compared with those of ‘economists’. In particular, the paper argues that the Department of Education and Science (DES) has moved substantially in the direction of the economists' approach to educational resource allocation. The paper also argues that the partticular characteristics of higher education (HE), where it is state-provided and free at the point of consumption, imbue it with the properties of a Niskanen-type bureau. This paper suggests that the current DES policy with its considerable implications for HE resource allocation can be rationalised in terms of the human capital approach and the problems of managing a bureau.“A professor was supposed to be a venerable kind of person, with snow-white whiskers reaching to his stomach. He was expected to moon around the campus oblivious of the world around him. If you nodded to him he failed to see you. Of money he knew nothing; of business far less. He was, as his trustees were proud to say of him, ‘a child’.On the other hand, he contained within him a reservoir of learning of such depth as to be practically bottomless. None of this learning was supposed to be of any material or commercial benefit to anybody. Its use was in saving the soul and enlarging the mind” (Leacock, 1922).     

Historical Fiction and the Classroom: History and Myth in Elizabeth George Speare's The Witch of Blackbird Pond

First published in 1958, Elizabeth George Speare's Newbery award-winning novel The Witch of Blackbird Pond remains an immensely popular teaching tool in U.S. social studies classrooms today. Speare's story—which describes the challenges an orphaned daughter of wealthy Barbadian planters faces when she begins life anew in the Puritan colony of Connecticut in 1687—continues to capture educators' attention because it emphasizes themes such as tolerance of difference, abhorrence of slavery, support of heterodoxy, and a commitment to liberty, justice, and freedom that bolster contemporary American values. But while literary critics have praised the book's historical accuracy, The Witch of Blackbird Pond, like all works of historical fiction, reinterprets the past. In reinterpreting the events of 1680s Connecticut, Speare reveals much about the McCarthy-era 1950s in which she wrote, and indeed, much about the issues and concerns capturing 21st-century educators' attention. As this article argues, both teachers and students would benefit from examining the ways in which history and myth interact in the novel, creating a rich commentary on the 17th-century past, the 1950s in which Speare wrote, and today's 21st-century present.     

Issues of relevance in Kenyan mathematics and science curricula

Are ‘Mathematics’ and ‘Science’ such universal notions that one curriculum can serve equally well in all societies, subject only to exemplification from local circumstances? Or do different human cultures construct and use ‘Mathematics’ and ‘Science’ so differently that each culture needs to construct its own curriculum to teach its own children? At issue is whether curricula developed in industrialised states can be readily transferred or adapted to developing countries.Taking as its starting point the fates of the Scools Mathematics and the Schools Science Projects in Kenya, — both adaptations of British models, — this paper reviews the research addressed to these questions. Its conclusion is that definitive answers are not yet possible. Nevertheless, what evidence there is seems to question the possibilities of transferability or even of simple adaptation.     

Socio-Cultural Analysis of Two Cases of Distance Learning in Secondary Education

Virtual Schooling for primary and secondary students is becoming increasingly common across the United States. Although distance education has typically been used to address the needs of adult U.S. learners, its use with schoolchildren has been limited. The rapid development and diffusion of ICT has prompted advances in the use of distance education to serve these students educational needs—particularly those in remote rural settings. In this paper we analyse and contrast two case-studies that were gathered to inform researchers and practitioners of online schooling—a case in which two rural schools ‘coordinated’ the use of two-way interactive video to provide live synchronous learning, and a school ‘replacement’ model that provided an interactive online course for dispersed students with periodic live interactive synchronous learning sessions. Analysis drew on Cobb and his colleagues’ (2003) techniques to delineate communities of practice and Wenger’s (1998) work on boundary encounters, brokers, and boundary objects.     

Teachers’ Discussions Of Students’ Thinking: Meeting The Challenge Of Attending To Students’ Thinking

The purpose of this article is to describe findings from a study of teachers’ social interaction during discussions about students’ thinking. The goal of the discussions was for the teachers to interpret their students’ thinking as revealed from work on non-routine, thought-revealing mathematical tasks, known as model-eliciting activities. The research reported in this article focuses on instances during the discussions when the teachers engaged in what the researcher termed ‘mini-inquiries’, occasions during which the teachers inquired into why their students thought about the associated model-eliciting activities as they did or when the teachers inquired into the underlying mathematical complexities associated with the model-eliciting activities. During these mini-inquiries, the teachers typically engaged in one of four types of interaction patterns that enabled them to meet some of the challenges of attending to students’ thinking that are described in United States reform documents.     

Teachers’ emotions in educational reforms: Self-understanding, vulnerable commitment and micropolitical literacy

Based on narrative-biographical work with teachers, the author argues that teachers’ emotions have to be understood in relation to the vulnerability that constitutes a structural condition of the teaching job. Closely linked to this condition is the central role played by teachers’ “self-understanding”—their dynamic sense of identity—in teachers’ actions and their dealing with, for example, the challenges posed by reform agendas. The (emotional) impact of those agendas is mediated by the professional context, that encompasses dimensions of time (age, generation, biography) and of space (the structural and cultural working conditions). Finally, it is argued that the professional and meaningful interactions of teachers with their professional context contains a fundamental political dimension. Emotions reflect the fact that deeply held beliefs on good education are part of teachers’ self-understanding. Reform agendas that impose different normative beliefs may not only trigger intense feelings, but also elicit micropolitical actions of resistance or proactive attempts to influence and change one's working conditions.     

A Hundred Years of Peter Pan

The centenary of the first performance of J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan was celebrated in December 2004. Taking account of the various events in Britain to mark the occasion—newspaper articles, radio and television programmes, retrospects in the original theatre—this article examines the status and popularity of Peter Pan after a hundred years. The article traces the double story of Peter Pan—the play itself, and the biographical narrative of those events in Barrie’s life that led to and succeeded its creation—and examines the two recent films, Peter Pan (2003) and Finding Neverland (2004) as examples of fresh approaches to both life and work in the centenary year.Peter Hollindale retired in 1999 as Reader in English at the University of York. He edited ‘Peter Pan and Other Plays’, and an edition of ‘Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens’ and ‘Peter and Wendy’, both for the Oxford University Press World’s Classics series He is author of the critical study ’Signs of Childness in Children’s Books’.     

Multi-point e-conferencing with initial teacher training students in England: Pitfalls and potential

This article reports on attempts to initiate multi-point e-conferencing between English teacher education students on school placements, their host teachers and their university tutors. A sociocultural perspective is adopted in analysing the project, using the metaphor of a ‘professional knowledge landscape’ [Clandinin, D. J., & Connelly, F. M. (1995). Teachers’ professional knowledge landscapes. New York: Teachers College Press] to make sense of participants’ experiences. Findings suggest that considerable difficulties exist not just in terms of technical challenges, but also in terms of ethics, values, complexity and communications in schools. A similar project undertaken in Singapore [Sharpe, L., Hu, C., Crawford, L., Gopinathan, S., Khine, M. S., Moo, S. N., et al. (2003). Enhancing multi-point desktop video conferencing (MDVC) with lesson video clips: Recent developments in pre-service teaching practice in Singapore. Teaching and Teacher Education, 19(5), 529–541] is used to highlight the contextual nature of these challenges. The paper concludes that the promotion of new technologies as a key part of current education planning in the UK is questionable with insufficient attention being given to the sociocultural implications of such change. Implications are drawn for universities, schools and for future policy development.     

Concepts of globalisation and their impact upon curriculum policy-making: Rhetoric and reality - A study of Australian reform

In last few years there has been an increasing amount of attention paid to the concept of ‘globalisation’. A precise definition has yet to emerge but there is some agreement that it involves a worldwide shift in economic operation which is feeding down into a number of social institutions — not least, education. In response, it is often noted that school systems are all following one path.This paper seeks to examine and challenge the ‘one path’. Current conceptualisations do not account for the variety of examples already seen. It is argued that there are four related phenomena which can go under the heading of globalisation: globalisation per se (as a form of colonialism); globalism (a sharing of mental constructs); convergence (following a similar path); and mimicry (joining in hoping to gain benefits).Leaving aside the impact this has on the organisation of education it is argued that it has immediate effect on our conceptualisations of curriculum; the language we use and the conceptions it takes with it can constrain our educational opportunities. This is illustrated with reference to curriculum reform and environmental education in Australia.     

School systems and social equity in western and communist countries: A historical-comparative appraisal

In outlining the problem of this article the author discusses the conceptual relationship between ‘equality’ and ‘equity’ with regard to educational opportunity and to their controversial interpretation in Western and Soviet sources. After a historical retrospective the analysis is focused on the clarification of ‘equality of educational opportunity’, its implementation in school systems and its differentiating definition by James S. Coleman. The recent development characterised by a turn from exaggerated optimism to disillusion is explained by actual events and trends as well as by reference to sociological and genetic works, published in Western and Communist countries.The outline of some essential obstacles to the realisation of equality of educational opportunity paves the way for concluding remarks in which possible ways of overcoming these obstacles (confined to the Western scene) are proposed. They are rooted in the thesis that ‘equality’ and ‘equity’ are less easy to define as objectives than reduction in unjustifiable deficiencies. Stress is laid on the thesis that the concept of equality of educational opportunity through education is in danger of being reduced to a programme of minimal knowledge and the tyranny of meritocratic examination systems, not of humane and individual personalities, potential good citizens. Admitting, therefore, that ‘equity’ deserves to be given priority over ‘equality’ the author concludes by emphasising that efforts to foster equity must not supersede the inclusion of reduction in inequality in educational programmes.     

What teachers need to know about the struggle for self-determination (conscientization) and self-regulation: adults with disabilities speak about their education experiences

The purpose of this paper is to help teachers better understand the struggles that people with disabilities experience in attaining their educational goals and to encourage the development of teaching and learning strategies that help to respect and facilitate the struggle itself. The authors share the generative themes that emerged using a critical pedagogy approach (dialogic interviews) to elicit the voices of adults with disabilities speaking about their public school experiences. In discussing the implications for teachers, the authors show the intersections of educational psychology's concept self-regulation and critical pedagogy's concept conscientization and special education’ s concept self-determination. Why the ‘struggle’ itself is important (from the perspectives provided by conscientization, self-regulation, and self determination) is discussed.The major question is whether or not teachers can structure the awareness process that results in learners becoming aware enough to verbalize, “I have difficulties”. What do teachers do to stimulate the metacognitive thinking processes that makes it possible for students with disabilities to think, “I can monitor myself!”? How can teachers capture the power of the conscientization experience that leads students with disabilities to experience the generative will power “to use the powers that I have to make a difference in my life's situation?” How do adults with disabilities come to these kinds of awareness and how can teachers help facilitate the awareness?     

Is procedure acquisition as unstable as it seems?

Are students’ mathematical procedures as unstable as they seem? Students often produce different errors in response to the same kind of problems on different testing occasions. This finding is puzzling. Past research has shown that students induce overly general procedures from worked-out examples during learning, which lead to a host of predictable errors on new problems. Do students create rule-based errors only to then switch between them at random? In this paper, we show that seemingly diverse errors on two different testing episodes may result from the same underlying stable procedure and are part of the same error category. These findings suggest that students’ errors are more stable on a category vs. on an individual level. The current study consists of teaching students addition in a new number system, called NewRoman, and analyzing students’ solution strategies in detail. Implications for teaching are discussed.