The Scandinavian Folk High School: A Model For the Education and Integration of Handicapped Youth

For almost 150 years the Scandinavian folk high school has served as an important institution in helping young people in their transition from adolescence to adulthood. In recent decades it has also become an avenue for the education and integration of young adults with special needs. At present, there are in the Scandinavian countries of Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and Finland almost 400 folk high schools, each with an enrolment of about 100 students. Some of these schools are sponsored by handicap organizations and are primarily designed for handicapped students, but include a smaller number of nonhandicapped students. The present article describes in detail some of these schools. Several developing countries in Africa and Asia have initiated educational projects based on the Nordic folk high school concept.     

Envisioning the Future: the challenge for environmental educators

One of the main concerns of environmental education is the need to create a more ecologically sustainable future, yet environmental educators often lack the expertise needed to explore alternative futures in this way. However, there is much of value that can be learnt from futures studies and from the work of futurists. In particular futures studies is interested in how people view the future and ways of cultivating clearer images of preferred futures. One established strategy for this is the futures workshop and examples are given of work by Robert Jungk, Warren Ziegler and Elise Boulding in this field. It is suggested that a valuable cross‐fertilisation of ideas could thus occur between environmental educators and such futurists.     

Teacher educators’ expertise: what do novice teachers and teacher educators say?

Expertise of teachers has been the topic of many studies in the field of teacher education published in recent years. Less attention is, however, given to expertise of teacher educators; the focus of this study. The study examines the issue by discussing some of the literature on the subject, and by asking novice teachers and teacher educators about the characteristics of good teacher educators, the professional knowledge of teacher educators and the difference between the expertise of teacher educators and teachers. Findings indicate that even though there is much overlapping in the expertise of the two groups of professionals, there are also distinct differences of importance to the current discussion on standards and education for teacher educators.     

Learning and unlearning: the education of teacher educators

Despite the many expectations that US and other teacher educators around the world are striving to meet, there has been little attention to development of a curriculum for educating teacher educators, or to local and larger policies that might support the development of what teacher educators need to know and do in order to meet the complex demands of preparing teachers for the 21st century. In this article, Cochran-Smith analyzes four teacher educator communities in different contexts and entry points across the career lifespan. She makes the case that the education of teacher educators is substantially enriched when inquiry is a stance on the overall enterprise of teaching, schooling, and teacher education.     

Teacher educators as researchers: multiple perspectives

This article suggests that part of the task of the teacher educator is functioning simultaneously as both researcher and practitioner. However, there are sharply diverging viewpoints about the worth of this kind of research. On the one hand, there is now more research about teacher education being conducted by teacher educators themselves than at any previous time. On the other hand, in certain contexts, this research is discounted because it is judged not rigorous or because it does not generalize across contexts. The article considers the deliberations about practitioner research by the AERA Panel on Research and Teacher Education as an illustration of how these competing viewpoints can play out.     

Teacher educators mediating curricular reform: anticipating the Australian curriculum

Many education systems are experiencing a re-scaling and consolidation of governance through rolling national agendas of standardisation and centralisation. The present article considers the case of Australia as it moves towards implementing its first national curriculum, to explore how teacher educators plan to retain pedagogical space for debate, diversity and contestation of such systemic curricular reform. The present article reports on an interview study conducted with nine teacher educators across the four curriculum areas included in the first wave of the Australian curriculum: English, science, mathematics and history. The analysis reveals how teacher educators reported professional dilemmas around curricular design, and planned to resolve such dilemmas between the anticipated changes and their preferences for what might have been. While different curricular areas displayed different patterns of professional dilemma, the teacher educators are shown to construe their role as one of active curriculum mediators, who, in recontextualising curricular reforms, will use the opportunity to reinsert both residualised and emergent alternatives in their students’ professional value sets. The study also identifies a new set of dilemmas emerging around the politicisation and standardisation of curriculum, and its impact on the teaching profession and teacher educators.     

Umbilical cord blood: information for childbirth educators

Umbilical cord blood was once thought of as a waste product. Now, years after the first successful umbilical cord blood transplant, more families seek information about whether or not to save their newborn's cord blood. Childbirth educators may be one of the main sources that an expectant family depends on to gain more knowledge about cord blood banking in order to make an informed decision. Preserving umbilical cord blood in public banks is advisable for any family; however, it is recommended that expectant families only consider private cord blood banking when they have a relative with a known disorder that is treatable by stem cell transplants. The childbirth educator is encouraged to be well versed on the topic of cord blood banking, so that as questions from class participants arise, the topic can be explored and addressed appropriately.     

Urgently needed: Autonomous early childhood teacher educators

Abstract

This article is a call for early childhood teacher educators to take action against increasing national mandates with the potential for negatively impacting young children and early childhood teachers. Voices of teachers, teacher educators, and administrators presented in this article reflect the struggles of being autonomous professionals in a heteronymous educational environment. The authors conclude with several suggestions for early childhood teacher educators to become more involved in advocacy and policy by engaging students in campaigns for important issues, sharing information with policy makers, and networking with other professionals.     

Science and religion: implications for science educators

A religious perspective on life shapes how and what those with such a perspective learn in science; for some students a religious perspective can hinder learning in science. For such reasons Staver’s article is to be welcomed as it proposes a new way of resolving the widely perceived discord between science and religion. Staver notes that Western thinking has traditionally postulated the existence and comprehensibility of a world that is external to and independent of human consciousness. This has led to a conception of truth, truth as correspondence, in which our knowledge corresponds to the facts in this external world. Staver rejects such a conception, preferring the conception of truth as coherence in which the links are between and among independent knowledge claims themselves rather than between a knowledge claim and reality. Staver then proposes constructivism as a vehicle potentially capable of resolving the tension between religion and science. My contention is that the resolution between science and religion that Staver proposes comes at too great a cost—both to science and to religion. Instead I defend a different version of constructivism where humans are seen as capable of generating models of reality that do provide richer and more meaningful understandings of reality, over time and with respect both to science and to religion. I argue that scientific knowledge is a subset of religious knowledge and explore the implications of this for science education in general and when teaching about evolution in particular.     

Tracing heterotopias: writing women educators in Greece

Over the last 15 years, feminist theorists have sought to redefine female subjectivity. Amongst a wide range of critical notions of the female self, this paper focuses on what Foucault has defined as heterotopias, ‘different places’ which disrupt the dominance of the one single ‘real’ social place, offering shelter to subjects in crisis. I will argue that this Foucauldian notion is a useful tool for the exploration of the multifarious ways that some women educators attempted to define and describe themselves at the turn of the nineteenth century in Greece, particularly focusing on the writings of Alexandra Papadopoulou.