Can the Differences Between Education and Neuroscience be Overcome by Mind,Brain, and Education?

ABSTRACT— The new field of Mind, Brain, and Education (MBE)—sometimes called educational neuroscience—is posited as a mediator between neuroscience and education. Several foundational concerns, however, can be raised about this emerging field. The differences between neuroscience and education are many, including differences in their histories, philosophies, and epistemologies. Historically, science and education have demonstrated separate, but interwoven, influences on society; philosophically, the values by which they operate are often in opposition; and epistemologically, the fields have relied on different conceptualizations of knowledge. Discussion about these differences has been largely absent in attempts to promote MBE. Two steps are proposed to respond to this omission. First, encouraging discussion about disciplinary differences and assumptions may enable better understanding between disciplines and facilitate the establishment of a more collaborative research community. Second, a transdisciplinary framework that focuses on salient issues of interest across disciplines should be considered. Transdisciplinarity aims for the creation of an inclusive research environment that transcends traditional disciplinary approaches to complex problems. This article initiates an exploration of disciplinary differences and proposes commitment to transdisciplinarity as a guiding principle that may increase the viability of MBE as a mediating field between neuroscience and education.     

Introduction to “Racial Inequality and Education: Patterns and Prospects for the Future”

Abstract

American society is in the midst of profound economic and demographic changes. At the same time that the racial and ethnic composition of American society is changing, disparities in income and wealth have grown wider and more pronounced than ever before. This article explores the ways in which race is implicated in the widening gaps in wealth and opportunity, and how these inequities impact educational achievement.     

Education in China and America

My little brother is six years old, in his first grade. Yesterday, he gave Mum a letter from his teacher. "I got a red card today. Could you     

Introduction to Special Issue—STEM Workforce: STEM Education and the Post-Scientific Society

Journal of Science Education and Technology - An assumption is often made that STEM shortages can be remedied by either increasing the number of STEM graduates or...     

National Education and ‘Active Citizenship’: Implications for Citizenship and Citizenship Education in Singapore

Citizenship and values education in one form or other has existed in Singapore since it acquired self‐government in 1959. Much has been written about the different forms that this education has taken over the years. In recent years, there have been efforts at describing and analyzing aspects of National Education, which was introduced in 1997. At the same time, a number of books and papers have been written examining the concept of citizenship in Singapore, which cover the period between the late 1980s to the mid 1990s. In the last five years leading to the millennium, there have been two major sets of changes in Singapore that have had implications for the conception of citizenship and for citizenship education. The first is to do with the introduction of National Education; the second, with the notion of active citizenship. This article describes these recent changes, and discuss their implications for the concept of citizenship and for citizenship education in Singapore.     

Interpreting the Rules: Language and Transformation in a Boys’ Comprehensive

This essay emerges from my position as a new trainee teacher, entering my first school, a school as unique and also as typical as any. What struck me was the complexity of the school's culture (and counter-cultures). Language was revealed as a site of resistance, a clash between staff and pupils at the point of instruction; a reluctance to read or write; an unanticipated response to text. This resistance was often shut down, yet it must at some level be meaningful. Indeed, it was often clearly communicated to me by the boys' complaints about having to read the texts prescribed to them, or indeed in the depth of the creative responses, particularly to visual images, that many of them displayed when given the opportunity to write in class. This suggests the need for a broader understanding of the way language is used, the different registers employed by pupils in interactions in the classroom; and, for me in my new role as teacher, the challenge of how to harness those moments which enable students to explore expression in ways they find meaningful.     

Education and climate change – some systemic connections

Unlike most papers on education and ecology, this one is not concerned with the content of education but its organisation as a system and hence its purpose or finality. The central contention of the paper, which takes English education and training (or ‘learning’) as a case in point, is that in a new market‐state formation the pursuit of short‐term goals is tied to the global free‐market economy over which any attempt at democratic control has been relinquished. At a time when humanity worldwide faces increasing change in the ecology that sustains it, this is considered to be ‘ecocidally insane’ and the opposite of any sort of learning from experience to alter behaviour in the future. The re‐regulated new global market is seen in conclusion as a crisis response to the end of the previous Keynesian welfare nation‐state formation. As such, it is argued to be unsustainable in any sense.     

General Studies for Students in Further Education – A Critique and an Alternative

It is surprising to see how rarely the ‘laws of reason’ or of scientific practice are examined by professional teachers. Modern education is ‘scientific’ because teachers often accept the cosmology of science as uncritically as once they accepted the cosmology of Popes and Cardinals. For them, science is a neutral structure containing positive knowledge independent of culture, ideology or prejudice. However, according to modern research in the sociology of knowledge and in the sociology, psychology, history and epistemology of science itself, there are no universal ‘standards of rationality’ and there are no value‐free or objective facts’ existing somehow ‘out there’. It is my claim that professional general educators falsely assume otherwise and that this infiltrates papers, aims, syllabuses, etc., in General Studies components of Further Education courses. General education is set within a positivist scientific rationality which determines in a taken‐for‐granted manner not only the aims and objectives of General Studies but also the methods and tools by which these may be tested and judged.     

Interpreting students' and teachers' discourse in science classes: An underestimated problem?

This article deals with the problem of the proper interpretation of discourse between students and teachers in classrooms. First, several interpretations of a concrete classroom protocol dealing with the paradigmatic case of static forces are discussed: an “ordinary” teacher's analysis, an analysis in terms of misconceptions, and an analysis in terms of alternative conceptions. Though they represent common ideas from the literature, it is argued that those analyses all in some way misinterpret the discourse. By drawing on Davidson's principle of charity and by distinguishing between belief and meaning, we present an analysis that in our opinion interprets the discourse correctly. Its consequences for teaching are discussed, as well as its foundation in Davidson's philosophy. © 1996 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

The Introduction of English‐language Education in Early Colonial Hong Kong

This article examines the attitudes of the colonial and metropolitan governments towards the promotion of English‐language education on Hong Kong Island between 1842 and 1860. The study, which draws on a range of unpublished primary sources, was conducted in response to Whitehead’s recent call for detailed case studies of colonial education policies. This article explores, within the context of Hong Kong, a centrally important aspect of education in the Empire, and one that has been the subject of surprisingly little archival research: British policies towards the teaching and learning of English as a second language. The article begins by analysing the political, economic and demographic forces that influenced the study and use of English in Hong Kong during the 1840s and 1850s, and then moves on to examine language policies and practices in the colony’s mission schools, with a particular focus on the Morrison Education Society School, the first Western school to be established on the Island after the British occupation. The final section analyses the introduction of English teaching in the government vernacular schools in the early 1850s.