Response to “A design framework for enhancing engagement in student-centered learning: own it,learn it,and share it”: a design perspective

This essay is a response to the special issue call on the theme of Shifting to digital: Informing the rapid development, deployment, and future of teaching and learning. In this essay, the author first described the needs of student-centered learning that emerged from the current full-scale online teaching and learning practice due to the pandemic. With these needs, the author revisited the published article of A design framework for enhancing engagement in student-centered learning: own it, learn it, and share it (Lee and Hannafin, in Educ Technol Res Dev 64(4):707–734, 2016), discussed its value, application, and future development.

     

Schools and Industry: Some Organizational Considerations (Part 2)

In this article the author argues that the somewhat laissez‐faire attitude to curriculum reforms of the 1960s and 1970s led to their demise. The Bains Report (1972) marked recognition of the need for management techniques to promote corporate objectives successfully. A synthesis of the work of Schwab (1969), Everard (1982), Shipman (1983) and Dalin (1978) leads the author to suggest a simple ‘systems approach to management’ as a realistic framework for curriculum innovation. In conclusion, the author stresses that this model will not guarantee success, but provides a systematic approach for would‐be innovators.     

Style and effectiveness in education and training: A model for organising teaching and learning

In the fields of education and training, there is nowadays an increasing recognition of the need to be effective. In order to be effective it is necessary, however, to ensure that both the content of one's teaching and its style of presentation are suitably matched to the needs and interests and abilities of the persons being taught. This in turn calls for a broadly based ecological approach in which careful attention is paid to the social and psychological conditions under which teaching and learning occur. By drawing on the pertinent literature in business management and organisation theory, the author indicates how the ecological approach might be applied to problems of style and effectiveness in education and training. A conceptual framework is developed within which it is possible to identify 4 broadly distinguishable and commonly occurring styles of teaching. The framework is then applied to an experiment in which the styles of three teachers were compared and contrasted. The paper ends with a presentation of 4 detailed hypotheses concerning the conditions under which each of the 4 proposed teaching styles is most likely to prove effective.     

Looking at Teacher Practices Through the Lens of Parenting Style

In this article, the author used a parenting style framework to explain mixed evidence about the influence of teacher practices on student outcomes. Participants included 3 fifth-grade math teachers and 45 of their students. The author assessed teacher practices, teaching style (i.e., demandingness and responsiveness), student engagement, self-efficacy, and standardized achievement test scores. The most academically and socially competent students were those who experienced an authoritative teaching style (i.e., consistent classroom management, support of student autonomy, and personal interest in students). The author found disengagement and limited ability beliefs in the authoritarian context (i.e., consistent classroom management but limited autonomy support and limited personal interest in students). She found smaller academic gains in the permissive context (i.e., inconsistent management, autonomy support, and interest in students).     

Education as a global public good: the applicability and implications of a framework

This paper addresses a growing literature on global public goods theory, in particular the use of this framework to promote the equitable provision of goods and social services, such as basic education, on an international scale. Due to a lack of research into this theory’s applicability to education, the author aims to discern how such a framework might be applied, and its possible policy implications, focusing on universal access initiatives and the debate on private provision of schooling. The paper further questions the appropriateness of using global public goods theory given certain critiques.     

Navigating Worlds of “Trouble and Woe and Worse” in Children’s Literature: An Exploration into the Double Text of Tony Kushner and Maurice Sendak’s Brundibar

In this article, the author explores the richly layered double text of Kushner and Sendak’s picturebook, Brundibar (2003)—the historical context of Brundibár as a Holocaust-era children’s operetta by Hans Krása and Adolf Hoffmeister, and the present day manifestation of Brundibar as a children’s picturebook. In order to contextualize the discussion of Kushner and Sendak’s text, Brundibar’s historical origins in Nazi-annexed Czechoslovakia and its transition to the stage in the Nazi “model” concentration camp, Terezín, is presented. An extensive semiotic analysis of Kushner and Sendak’s illustrations and text is also provided within the framework of what Kushner (The art of Maurice Sendak: 1980 to the present, 2003) terms “a world of trouble and woe and worse” (p. 210). Furthermore, the author discusses the development of Sendak’s Hitlerian Brundibar and the struggles that both Kushner and Sendak faced as they considered how to portray the story’s antagonist, given their somewhat differing conceptions of which difficult themes and topics children should be exposed to during childhood. To round out this discussion, the author explores pedagogical implications for teachers as they read difficult texts, particularly Holocaust texts, with children.     

Quality Assessment Lessons from Australia and New Zealand

This article describes two recent efforts to rank the quality of higher education institutions in Australia and New Zealand. After a brief discussion of goals, methods, and results, the author evaluates each ranking using the following questions: Does this methodological approach achieve its objective? Can other countries use the methodology by extension? What can we learn about a country's higher education system using this approach? The aim is to provide readers with a framework for thinking critically about rankings, and about the role they might play in measuring and influencing higher education quality on a global scale.     

BOOK SYMPOSIUM

The author argues that adolescents are not only philosophers, as Kohlberg and Gilligan once claimed, but should also be viewed as theologians. This view corresponds to what has been called “lay theology” or “ordinary theology.” Moreover, the article takes up the double question what adolescents might benefit from theology and what theology might benefit from adolescents. On this background, a systematic understanding of adolescents as theologians is offered, distinguishing between theology of adolescents, with adolescents, and for adolescents. In a final section, theological views concerning adolescence as a stage in the human lifecycle are discussed.     

Participatory creativities: developing a research design for children’s pastoral encounters with the natural world

ABSTRACT

In this paper, the author discusses the interrelationship between creativity, children’s experiences of the natural world and pastoral education. Based on a research design developed whilst undertaking a professional doctorate in education (EdD), and grounded in a theoretical framework of children’s rights, the author explores the creative uncertainties of collaboratively researching children’s educational experiences with nature. The paper considers the ways in which the research design supports a pastoral care agenda, whilst encouraging the emergence of ‘creative artefacts’, alongside the extent to which the focus of the research, encounters with the natural world, might be deemed pastorally minded in its own right. The children who have participated in the research then draw the paper to a close, sharing what their involvement in the project has meant to them. Images and excerpts of children’s own creative reflections are offered as illustration of the powerful confluence of the Creative and the Pastoral.     

On the Dangers of Antiquarian Investigations: Nietzsche,the Excesses of History,and the Power of Forgetting

Drawing on Nietzsche’s insights as well as those of his critics, this article explores the dangers and limitations of the antiquarian type of historical investigations. The author begins his analysis by closely examining Nietzsche’s conception of antiquarian history and explaining why he finds this mode of historical investigation so troubling. Next he shows that the problem that Nietzsche associates with the antiquarian type of historicizing can be seen in a contemporary genealogical investigation: Daniel Mendelsohn’s book The Lost. Returning to Nietzsche, he then analyzes the meaning and value of his notion of the ‘power of forgetting’ and argues that it can serve as an antidote to some of the dangers of antiquarian history. In the final part of this article the author examines how the power of forgetting might be educationally valuable.     

经验合作教学:校本教师培训的新思路

文章基于我国新课程改革和教师发展的教育背景,提出了经验合作教学的校本教师培训构想,对经验合作教学的概念、理论来源、对教师发展的促进作用及其在实践中的可行性进行了论述。     

An analytical framework for policy engagement: the contested case of 14–19 reform in England

This article attempts to construct an analytical framework to reflect upon the deeply contested area of 14–19 education and training policy in England following the publication of the Government’s White Paper 14–19 education and skills. We argue that the evolution of 14–19 policy over the last 15 years, culminating in the publication of the Tomlinson Final Report on 14–19 reform and then its rejection by the Government, might be better understood by looking at this area through the application of four related conceptual tools—political eras, the education state, the policy process and the operation of political space. These concepts or tools are used here both to narrate historical and recent 14–19 developments, to critique current policy‐making in this area, and to identify opportunities and challenges facing researchers seeking to engage with the policy process. We suggest that this analytical framework might not only be applied to reform in the 14–19 phase but also to education policy more widely.     

Interest,not Preference: Dewey and Reframing the Conceptual Vocabulary of School Choice

School choice positions parents as consumers who select schools that maximize their preferences. This account has been shaped by rational choice theory. In this essay, Terri Wilson contrasts a rational choice framework of preferences with John Dewey's understanding of interest. To illustrate this contrast, she draws on an example of one parent's school decision‐making process. Dewey's concept of interest offers an alternative conceptual vocabulary attentive to the complex, value‐laden, and evolving process of choosing a school. Her analysis considers how schools might not just appeal to the preexisting preferences of families, but might instead actively shape those interests to democratic ends.     

Salamanca Statement and IDEA 2004: possibilities of practice for inclusive education

This article offers a comparative analysis of the Salamanca Statement and Framework for Action, and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act, within a critically discursive framework. The author creates the notion of possibilities of practice, and analyses each policy document as to how these are created, by means of interdiscursive, intertextual and recontextual analyses. In turn, the author demonstrates how each policy differs in the textual dimensions that represent themes of social representation/construction, such as: how pupils are constructed; how schooling is constructed; how inclusion/exclusion is constructed; how teacher preparation is constructed; and how resource allocation is constructed (or constricted). Finally, the author discusses the policy that best allows for possibilities of practice that promote the inclusion of ALL children.     

A Socio-cognitive Approach to How Children with Deafblindness Understand Symbols

Children with congenital deafblindness are a population of learners who may need intervention in order to develop symbolic understanding. They experience a combination of vision and hearing impairments that can affect how they make sense of the world, develop relationships, and understand symbols. In this article, the author reviewed a socio-cognitive framework of symbolic understanding and suggested it as one way to organise the extant research on symbolic development of children with deafblindness. A socio-cognitive framework describes the development of children’s individual skills and how their abilities are supported by active participation in social and cultural experiences. Symbolic understanding is not an isolated cognitive skill, but rather a complex socio-cognitive developmental process that is intimately supported by meaningful interactions. A socio-cognitive framework may help teachers to support the symbolic understanding of school-aged children with deafblindness. Teachers of children with deafblindness can use the framework to understand their students’ individual socio-cognitive abilities and their social interactions. In other words, a socio-cognitive framework may support teachers of children with deafblindness to understand the abilities and environments that are critical to the development of symbolic understanding.     

(Re)constructing career education as a socially just practice: An antipodean reflection

The author contends that career education has lost its way, and needs to be (re)located within a critical social justice framework if it is to effectively prepare young people to engage with the social, political and economic discourses that inform the shaping of ‘career(s)’. Relating to the New Zealand context, differing versions of social justice are outlined, the challenges for career education explored, and the potential for change discussed.     

Can ubuntu provide a model for citizenship education in African democracies?

Some proponents of Africanism argue that African traditional education and the principles of ubuntu should provide the framework for citizenship education. While conceding that understandable concerns lie behind defences of ubuntu as underpinning African democracy, we argue that the Africanist perspective faces various problems and makes substantial errors: political, moral, epistemic and educational. While democracy and democratic citizenship necessarily involve sensitivity to local context, their fundamental principles and tenets are universal. Failure to acknowledge this comes at a substantial price. Taking as its initial focus an analysis and critical evaluation of Malegapuru William Makgoba's critique of liberal democracy, the paper questions the purported uniqueness of ubuntu and its value and efficiency as a practical guide to action and policy, as well as its capacity to indicate how conflict between its associate principles and values might be resolved, insofar as these principles and values are indeed morally worthy.     

What is Lesson Study?

This article addresses the conceptual question “what is lesson study?” as an issue that arises in the context of the globalisation of lesson study as a method for improving teaching and learning beyond its presumed origins in the Japanese education system. To what extent can adaptations of the method in different national settings be interpreted as faithful representations of its practically significant “critical features” in the country of origin? In order to address this question, the article begins by examining the comparative classroom research by Stigler and Hiebert that culminated in the publication of The Teaching Gap. This work is generally acknowledged to have been seminal for the global development of lesson study as a method for improving teaching and learning. Sponsored by the 1997 TIMMS testing programme, the research sought to explain pronounced differences in measured educational attainment between students of all ages in Japan, and the US and Germany. In the process Stigler and Hiebert discovered the extensive use of lesson study in Japanese primary schools as a school‐based research method for securing consistency between learning goals and teaching methods. In doing so, they identified six principles which underpinned the method and pinpointed its practical significance. In this article, the author claims that the principles identified by Stigler and Hiebert can be used as a framework for assessing adaptations of lesson study in the context of globalisation, and connecting it to related methodological ideas that are internationally circulating. In particular, the author stresses links between lesson study, the tradition of classroom action research forged by Lawrence Stenhouse and his colleagues at the University of East Anglia, UK and the theory of variation developed in Sweden and Hong Kong by Ference Marton, Lo Mun Ling and others. Such links can deepen a theoretical understanding of “lesson study” and safe‐guard it against a “cherry‐picking” approach to its implementation in a context of globalisation. The article particularly highlights the importance of understanding the ways in which the organisational cultures of schooling in many countries shape and distort the implementation of lesson study. It argues for the greater involvement of school leaders and administrators in a form of second‐order action research aimed at transforming the organisational context of teachers’ work in classrooms and creating more space for them to spend less time as test data managers and more time as lesson researchers in accordance with the six principles outlined.     

Peddling Poverty for Profit: Elements of Oppression in Ruby Payne's Framework

Ruby Payne, CEO of aha! Process, Inc., and author of A Framework for Understanding Poverty (2005), has become one of the most influential figures in the U.S. public education milieu. Payne's framework, built largely upon understanding the “culture” of poverty, instructs educators on the values and mindsets poor students carry into the classroom as well as how to help them develop middle-class values and culture. But despite Payne's popularity, scholars and activists representing a wide variety of disciplines, from critical theory to mathematics education, have been highly critical of her work. In this essay I synthesize the existing critiques, dividing them into “eight elements of oppression” in Payne's work. I then offer a vision for a more authentic framework—one for authenticating anti-poverty education.