The challenge of change: Using activity theory to understand a cultural innovation

This article explains how an inservice teacher education organisation in New Zealand embarked on a cultural innovation to challenge and build bicultural pedagogies, policies and practices. To understand the process and the impact of a three-year cultural innovation both intended and unintended changes need to be explored. Using a framework of second generation cultural historical activity theory, the article examines the individual and institutional changes, exposing both tensions and learning. Key successful factors included establishing a clearly recognized purpose, widening individual and group involvement, and creating flexibility to build a strong platform to support the innovation. However, tensions were created when externally imposed factors such as changes in government policy and re-prioritization of funding were introduced. The external tensions challenged the internal organisational structures and stability, which in turn affected the cultural innovation and destabilised the change process.     

The challenge of sustaining change: contradictions within the development of teacher and librarian collaboration

Teacher and librarian collaboration has relatively low priority in schools and in educational research. This is a paradox, as teachers and librarians share a common social and educational mandate of literacy education. The purpose of this article is to examine this paradox through exploring systemic contradictions in teacher and librarian collaboration within literacy education. Our data consist of discursive interaction between project leaders in an educational intervention project in Norway. The aim of the intervention is to develop teacher and librarian collaboration in two primary schools. Our analytical starting point is a critical conflict that occurred in one of the project leader meetings. The conflict arises from differing discourses of literacy education held by the local education authority and by the intervention project. We analyze how the project leaders respond to the conflict, how the conflict triggers new tensions and dilemmas within the project leader group and how the conflict creates obstacles to sustaining teacher and librarian collaboration in the project schools. We argue that sustainable change can be achieved by tracing conflicts, dilemmas and tensions to systemic contradictions within and between activity systems.     

From change and challenge to new directions for school leadership

Reflecting on the countries represented in this issue, this chapter analyzes the topics and problems raised and suggests, through comparative analysis, new directions for school leadership. The role of the school site leader, be the headteacher or principal, is a role laden with more responsibility than ever before. One difference between the countries is the amount of attendant authority that is linked with devolved responsibility. To varying degrees in the four countries discussed, there are issues that present a quandary for school leaders, such as centralization of some key decisions (particularly concerning curriculum) and decentralization of managerial responsibility. These international themes have implications for policymaking and for those who prepare leaders and provide ongoing professional support.     

Religion in education policy in South Africa: a challenge of change

Since 1995, the National Department of Education has developed a number of policies to give effect to the proposed transformation outlined in White Paper 1 (Notice 196 of 1995) and in subsequent legislation. A range of Acts and policies were introduced, many of them dealing with how religion should be dealt with in schools and it culminated in the promulgation of the National Policy on Religion and Education (2003). In all these policies the role of the school and, in particular, of the school principal has been foregrounded as important for effective implementation of policies. This article is based on research conducted to determine how school principals dealt with religion and the implementation of the religion and education policy. This study found that school principals often ignore the policy and maintain the status quo. When faced with conflict of religious interests, they partially sub-contract into the policy. The study also found that past experiences with religion in education, either as students or educators, had a major impact on how principals perceive the role of religion in schools and how they dealt with it.     

Motivation and demotivation of teachers in primary schools: the challenge of change

Motivation is crucial to both individual and organisational performance and even a very able and well-trained member of staff will not perform effectively unless they are motivated to do so. Despite this fact, research into the motivation of teachers is limited both internationally and, more specifically, in relation to the English system of education which has undergone a series of rapid, multiple and systemic changes since the 1988 Education Act which are likely to have affected teachers' motivation and morale. This article reports on research in six primary schools in England which attempted to determine the nature of the issues impacting upon motivation and demotivation at the start of the twenty-first century. The study provides additional insight about how these factors might be affected by ethnographic and demographic characteristics. Findings suggest that the principal motivators for teachers in primary schools are extrinsic motivators, such as positive responses from children and that, conversely, demotivators are poor responses from children and workload factors.     

巴西半干旱地区干旱和气候多变情况下的雨水收集(英文)

通过巴西半干旱地区的一些成功案例,介绍了当地农村社区在2011~2013年严重旱灾期间所采取的有效措施:对生活用水、农业用水和畜牧用水采取水资源管理技术;对土壤湿度和含水层采取诸如蓄水池、地下水坝等环境保护措施.根据这些经验,总结出旱灾和气候变化环境下的生活原则,并制定成可持续性生活生产的指导方针:获取足够的水资源和土地面积;利用雨水以保证家庭和社区的用水安全;种植、养护与管理抗旱植物;倡导对中小型家畜养殖的水和饲料储存;加强农作物品种甄选及其产品的可持续生产、加工和销售;重视居民的水资源保护思想和能力培养.这些原则为指导干旱气候条件下人与环境和谐相处提供了宝贵的经验.     

The challenge of weather prediction

This three part series brings into focus problems and challenges involved in weather forecasting. The first part deals with the fundamental forces governing weather and climate while the second part deals with the practical and conceptual difficulties. The last part describes old and new ways of weather forecasting.     

The challenge of fluid flow

You look up at the sky, and see a lovely cloud; you look down, and may see lovely ripples on a rivulet (or river). On a hot summer afternoon you see dancing dust devils; on a cold winter evening you can see smoke rising lazily from achulah, and hang up there as if it has given up. You peer at a telescope, and see intense supersonic jets, or vast whirling galaxies; you measure in a wind tunnel, and sense powerful tornadoes behind an aircraft wing. The universe is full of fluid that flows in crazy, beautiful or fearsome ways. In our machines and in the lab, as in terrestrial nature, one sees this amazing diversity in the flow of such a simple liquid like water or a simple gas like air. What is it that makes fluid flows so rich, so complex-some times so highly ordered that their patterns can adorn a saree border, sometimes so chaotic as to defy analysis? Do thesame laws governall that extraordinary variety? We begin with a picture gallery of a number of visible or visualized flows, and consider which ones we understand and which ones we do not, which ones we can compute and which ones we cannot; and it will be argued that behind those all-too-common but lovely flows lie deep problems in physics and mathematics that still remain mysteries.