Computational What? Relating Computational Thinking to Teaching

Computational thinking is one of the skills critical for successfully solving problems posed in a technology driven and complex society. The limited opportunities in school settings to help students develop computational thinking skills underscores the need for helping teachers integrate it in their practices. Besides developing the knowledge of technology, content, and pedagogy, teachers need to recognize the relevance of computational thinking to their teaching, a factor influencing their future practice with it. Drawing from the literature on problem-solving and TPACK framework, this paper discusses strategies, including content-specific examples, problem-solving nature of computational thinking, and the methods of teaching problem-solving for enabling teachers to make the connections between computational thinking and their practices.     

What happened to literacy? Historical and conceptual perspectives on literacy in UNESCO

For more than six decades, UNESCO has dedicated itself to be the international agency leader in literacy, even though other aspects of educational development have received greater attention and resources by the broader international community. Resources for UNESCO's literacy work have not increased, and its programmatic activities have been increasingly debated when seen in relationship to the scope of literacy challenges across the globe. Moving forward in a time of restricted budgets will require UNESCO to strengthen itself as a professional innovator and thought leader.     

The Scholarship of Teaching in Teams: What does it look like in practice?

The extent to which teaching in universities should reflect scholarly values has received increased attention over the past few years. There has, however, been little attention paid to what the scholarship of teaching might look like in practice and no attention to what the scholarship of teaching would look like from the perspective of a teaching-team. This paper reports on a study of five groups of university teachers working in teaching-teams. It considers how their practice as a team matches what is claimed to be scholarly and collaborative in the existing literature on scholarship and teaching and learning, on the one hand, and on collaboration and teamwork, on the other. A model of scholarship of teaching is further developed to include the scholarship of teaching in a team. The ways in which the teaching-teams in the study fit this model are explored and implications for improved practice are considered.     

OP-ED Whatever happened to 'heightened consciousness'?

The uses of a great professor are only partly to give us knowledge; his [sic] real purpose is to take his students beyond knowledge into the transcendental domain of the unknown, the future and the dream to expand the limits of the human consciousness. (Eiseley 1987: 118)     

The “Datafication” of Teaching: Can Teachers Speak Back to the Numbers?

Teachers face considerable and increasing pressure in their working lives. Labor intensification compels teachers to work faster, harder, and longer. However, teachers also experience increasing external control over what they teach and how they teach. These processes are increasingly made possible by the “datafication” of teaching, whereby the educational process is increasingly transformed into numbers that allow measurement, comparison, and the functioning of high-stakes accountability systems linked to rewards and sanctions. Although there is no question that being able to use student assessment data to support learning has an important place in teachers' repertoire of skills, “datafication” refers to the use of data in a way that has become increasingly detached from supporting learning and is much more concerned with the management of teacher performance as an end in itself. This article presents two currents of critical thought in relation to teachers' work, labor process theory and poststructural analyses grounded in the concept of performativity, and discusses them as a way of “making sense” of teachers' work and the “datafication” of teaching, with a particular focus on questions of control and resistance.

?It seeks to understand why, despite the pressures on teachers, teacher resistance has seldom developed in ways, at times, or on a scale that both experience and theoretical insight might have predicted. There are clearly significant differences between the two perspectives presented in this article, not least in the ways they conceptualize and explain “resistance.” However, common ground is identifiable and the two theoretical approaches can be bridged in a form that can be productive for those seeking to “speak back to the numbers.” In looking to broker this theoretical divide, I argue that frame theory, rooted within the sociology of social movements, can offer a fruitful way of theory bridging, while also providing the basis for a wider politics of transformation. The article offers several examples of grassroots initiatives formed to oppose standardized testing in England that provide practical examples of this “ideas work” in action.     

Observing and Teaching Reform-Minded Lessons: What Do Teachers See?

We describe the way in which 12 primary-grade teachers responded to reform-minded teaching of multidigit addition and subtraction. Three teachers were hired to deliver 6–12 weeks of specially designed instruction; the other 9 teachers observed this instruction in their classrooms. Results of follow-up interviews showed that teachers who believed mathematics was more than a collection of skills and that students must construct their own understandings were inclined to interpret and appreciate the special instruction as the developers had intended. Teachers who believed mathematics was primarily a set of skills they must teach focused on a few individual features of the instruction, usually the use of physical materials, and, if they transferred any of the special instruction into their own teaching, often distorted the developers' intent. The more intensive involvement of the hired teachers led to more positive assessments of the instruction, but even here antithetical beliefs constrained later practice. Observations are provided on the nature of effective teacher development programs. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Whatever happened to TVEI's equal opportunities policy?

The funding criteria for the Technical and Vocational Education Initiative included a high‐profile commitment to equal opportunities for boys and girls. By including such a commitment, the architects of TVEI implicitly assumed that it was possible for TVEI to act as an agent of change with respect to gender divisions within schooling (and, indeed, beyond). This paper firstly considers whether TVEI was actually setting itself a theoretically impossible task given that socialist feminist critiques of education are largely based on the premise that schools overwhelmingly serve as agents for the reproduction of sexual divisions of labour. It then briefly considers the emphasis which the policy developed once TVEI was in operation, and finally questions the origins of the policy, suggesting a number of alternative reasons for its inclusion, in contrast to the somewhat contradictory ‘official’ justifications. The paper concludes that “whilst TVEI undoubtedly had an important catalytic effect in putting gender issues on the educational agenda, it failed to deliver even in its own terms for success, not least because of a failure to engage in the theoretical issues which lay at the heart of the equal opportunities project.     

The S‐Machine: An Alternative Approach to Teaching Assembler Programming

The demand for assembler language programmers has dropped dramatically over the past 20 years with the advent of structured programming languages and the accessibility of hardware features from high‐level languages. Nevertheless, a course in assembler language programming is often the first, and sometimes the only, introduction a student has to a machine's hardware. For this reason alone, assembler language programming courses should not be removed from a curriculum; instead, they should be kept and taught in conjunction with modern software engineering practices. This article describes an alternative approach to teaching assembler language programming. Whereas the students are still introduced to a machine and its assembler language, they are required to write several low‐level library routines they used in introductory courses (such as ACM CS1 and CS2). Furthermore, the S‐Machine's support software allows students to study the internals of an assembler, a librarian, and a linker.     

What to Teach?

In this column, the editor of The Journal of Perinatal Education discusses why Lamaze International conducts a comprehensive job analysis of what childbirth educators are teaching and their beliefs of what is important for pregnant women and their partners to learn. The editor also describes the contents of this issue, which offer a broad range of resources, research, and inspiration for childbirth educators in their efforts to promote, support, and protect natural, safe, and healthy birth.     

Teaching a Human Sexuality Course: What Are Counseling Students Thinking?

The pervasiveness of sexual issues in counseling suggests the necessity of educating counseling students about relevant topics. Students enrolled in a human sexuality course anonymously submitted topical questions and secrets/fantasies. Following a content analysis, findings depicted themes of content and tone that provided curricular implications for counselor educators.