About Creativity,Giftedness, and Teaching the Creatively Gifted in the Classroom

In this case study the author explored a teacher's beliefs about creativity and gifted‐ness and investigated the classroom practices of this teacher of gifted students for 20 years. Seven semi‐structured and 2 open observations were carried out in her classroom, and 2 prefigured interviews were conducted with her. She believed that creative children are those who are “free thinkers” and have “imaginative intelligence.” The thin line between an academically gifted child and a creatively gifted child is built by “imagination,” “emotional intensity,” and “curiosity.” In creative writing, she tried to implement activities such as learning to write poetry, personal narratives, research reports and essays posing solutions to real world problems, and mystery stories decorated with similes, metaphors and imaginative expressions. In reading, students analyzed characters, problems, places and times in stories and novels, and then rewrote stories.     

Developments in the Teaching of Secondary School Mathematics

Abstract

Through the Purdue Opinion Panel, preferences for 12 television program types, and the relationship of these preferences to a criterion of self-reported grades, were investigated in a research sample of 974 boys and 1026 girls, representative of the national population of high school students. Television program types most preferred were comedy, detective stories, westerns, dramas and specials, mysteries, and movies. Programs least preferred were cartoons, variety, and music and dance. Television program types associated with higher grades were news and documentaries, and drama and specials; programs associated with lower grades were movies, westerns, cartoons, mysteries, detective stories, variety, and music and dance. Preferences for comedy and sports events were not associated with the criterion of reported grades.     

Yours,Mine or Ours: What Counts as Innovation?

Abstract

In this paper, I argue that research and development organizations (R&DOs) have particular perspectives on what counts as an innovation whereas the potential adopting users usually have quite different often diverse perspectives. If these ‘worldviews’ do not overlap or speak to each other, then what R&DOs consider innovative might constitute a waste of time and resources from the potential users' perspective, thereby negating the entire adoption process. Using complex systems theory and storytelling concepts, I argue that innovation emerges from the confluence of diverse stories. If, however, the dominant perspectives informing these stories originate from within an R&DO (in-house storytelling), then innovation will occur in a vacuum. Stories from potential adoption contexts external to an R&DO (out-of-house storytelling) need to be integrated into the innovation process at all stages whereupon out-of-house stories are actively sought out and brought into the R&DO (inward flow) and in-house stories are actively shared within relevant external contexts (outward flow). Juxtaposing in-house and out-of-house stories provides a co-evolving emergent pathway for innovation. The R&DO focuses its energy on needs/issues highlighted in out-of-house stories, thereby co-constructing the context for innovation and potential adoption. Those providing out-of-house stories become primed for innovation through an understanding of in-house stories, thereby co-constructing the adoption context. This paper integrates complex systems and storytelling concepts to provide a unique perspective on the innovation process; a process that explicitly harnesses the complex interactive dynamics between R&DOs and adopter contexts.     

Eco-heroes out of place and relations: decolonizing the narratives of Into the Wild and Grizzly Man through Land education

Eco-heroic quests for environmental communion continue to be represented, mediated, and glorified through film and media narratives. This paper examines two eco-heroic quests in the Alaskan ‘wilderness’ that have been portrayed in two Hollywood motion pictures: the movies Grizzly Man and Into the Wild. Both films vividly document and re-inscribe heroic status to the stories of Timothy Treadwell (Grizzly Man) and Christopher McCandless (Into the Wild), their tragic encounters with nature, and the pivotal experiences that gave them both eco-heroic identities in the American imagination. As is often the case for Greek and Shakespearean dramas, each hero met a tragic, unnecessary death in Alaskan ‘wilderness’, but in the process reiterated a settler colonial narrative. We argue that an Indigenous-focused Land education and its counter-narratives of holistic relations are sorely needed. It is Indigenous Land education that can break the cycle of Eurocentric celebrations of solitary heroism, rugged individualism, and ignorance of place. In order to forge Indigenous/non-Indigenous relations in our cultural imaginations and to address compounding environmental struggles, we need to turn to Indigenous stories and teachings that are already in place, in deep relation with the Land, water, animals and plants on Indigenous territory. We need to turn to Land education that is currently not in place or acknowledged in environmental education.     

THE CHURCH AND THE CITY

Abstract

This article mingles stories and concepts of young Jewish Israeli children about God, with reflections on the roles of faith, memory, imagination, and cognitive development in children's Religious Education. The stories are meant to illustrate, among other things, the purity and innocence of young children's faith, which is largely untroubled by fact. Then, using Vygotsky's notions of children's spontaneous concepts and the development of more mature and accurate conceptions in the “zone of proximal development,” a central dilemma in Religious Education will be explored. How can religious educators help young people acquire accurate historical information, textual skills, and theological methods of inquiry, while at the same time nurturing the precious flame of faith? Can we do better at combining systematic learning with pure faith? Toward this purpose, three complementary goals of Religious Education will be suggested: cognitive, practical/moral, and spiritual.     

Philosophy,thought experiments and large context problems in the secondary school physics course

In this paper it is argued that scientific thinking in physics involves the progressive clarification of the relationship between mathematics and physics, as well as the clarification of scientific induction and deduction. Furthermore, the framing of theories and the working out of their consequences involve the exercise of the imagination. One locus of scientific imagination is the thought experiment, primarily understood as a mental device that helps explicate concepts and principles, and unravel paradoxes.

A sound curriculum in physics, however, must also be based on broad principles of education. These principles are first stated and then it is argued that in conjunction with what we have said about scientific thinking we should teach physics in terms of contexts of inquiry. These contexts relate to questions, method, problems, experiments, history, and the large context problem itself. Here we find the clarification of induction and deduction, as well as the proper placing of the thought experiment.

In the appendix it is shown how this contextual approach can be used for the teaching of kinematics. It is claimed that when we teach within the contexts of inquiry, physics is liberated from a specifiable method, and becomes historical, relevant, alive, human and exciting.     

Pseudohistory and Pseudoscience

The dangers of pseudoscience – parapsychology, astrology,creationism, etc. – are widely criticized. Lessons in the history of science are oftenviewed as an educational remedy by conveying the nature of science. But such histories canbe flawed. In particular, many stories romanticize scientists, inflate the drama of their discoveries,and oversimplify the process of science. They are, literally and rhetorically, myths.While based on real historical events, they distort the basis of scientific authority and fosterunwarranted stereotypes. Such stories are pseudohistory. Like pseudoscience, they promotefalse ideas about science – in this case, about how science works. Paradoxically, perhaps,the history of pseudosciences may offer an excellent vehicle for remedying such impressions. Characteristically, textbooks of science contain just a bit of history, either in an introductory chapteror, more often, in scattered references to the great heroes of an earlier age. From suchreferences both students and professionals come to feel like participants in a long-standinghistorical tradition. Yet the textbook-derived tradition in which scientists come to sensetheir participation is one that, in fact, never existed. –Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions     

Narrative configuration in qualitative analysis

Narrative inquiry refers to a subset of qualitative research designs in which stories are used to describe human action. The term narrative has been employed by qualitative researchers with a variety of meanings. In the context of narrative inquiry, narrative refers to a discourse form in which events and happenings are configured into a temporal unity by means of a plot. Bruner (1985) designates two types of cognition: paradigmatic, which operates by recognizing elements as members of a category; and narrative, which operates by combining elements into an emplotted story. Narrative inquiries divide into two distinct groups based on Bruner's types of cognition. Paradigmatic‐type narrative inquiry gathers stories for its data and uses paradigmatic analytic procedures to produce taxonomies and categories out of the common elements across the database. Narrative‐type narrative inquiry gathers events and happenings as its data and uses narrative analytic procedures to produce explanatory stories.     

‘Make money,get money’: how two autonomous schools have commercialised their services

ABSTRACT

Using the stories of two autonomous public schools in Australia, this paper demonstrates how commercialisation can simultaneously position schools as both consumer and for-profit producer. Drawing on Foucault's articulation of discourse as that which constitutes and makes available what is possible to be said, done and imagined, the paper illustrates how the current marketised articulation of education is allowing for new possibilities of commercialisation in schools. Together these stories demonstrate that there are creative ways that these schools have embraced their autonomy, while relying on market solutions to acquire the resources they deem necessary for their students and their communities. However, it also shows how these resources and the attainment for them are inextricably constituted by the market orientation of education more broadly and how this presents potential dangers for what schools may be and become as a result.     

Stories about teaching: Using qualitative data to promote reflective practices

Abstract

In this article two teacher educators describe an approach they have used with preservice early childhood and early childhood special education majors. They explain how the approach that they call “stories about teaching” resembles, yet differs from case study methods. The authors explain the process they used to develop, pilot, and use stories derived from qualitative data that they gathered in various early childhood settings. They explain how discussions based on the stories have provided their students opportunities to explore real‐life teaching situations from multiple perspectives, increase the depth of their reflections, and link theory to practice. © 2005 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.     

The Effectiveness of Radio as an Educational Medium

Abstract

Radio is a mass medium that can be harnessed to enhance an education campaign since it can span great distances and reach a large number oflisteners. Because of its wide coverage, relatively low unit cost, ability to reach those who are illiterate and without the use of mains power, it has proved to be an effective educational medium. The features of the radio medium are: it is a ‘blind’ (ie non‐visual) medium; it functions in real time; and its codes are purely auditory, consisting as they do of speech, music, sounds, noises and silences.

The fact that it is non‐visual can be harnessed to improve education quality since the listener is compelled to support the sound message by using his/her own imagination. No other medium has this educational power of stimulating and developing the abstract thinking of its audience and enriching and activating the listener's imagination.     

Causal knowledge and children’s possibility judgments

Children often say that strange and improbable events, like eating pickle-flavored ice cream, are impossible. Two experiments explored whether these beliefs are explained by limits in children's causal knowledge. Participants were 423 predominantly White Canadian 4- to 7-year-olds (44% female) tested in 2020–2021. Providing children with causal information about ordinary events did not lead them to affirm that improbable events are possible, and they more often affirmed improbable events after merely learning that a similar event had occurred. However, children were most likely to affirm events if they learned how similar events happened (OR = 2.16). The findings suggest that knowledge of causal circumstances may only impact children's beliefs about the possibility after they are able to draw connections between potential events and known events.     

Self-made school and the everyday making in Buenos Aires slums

Abstract

A governmentality ethnographic approach is adopted to examine the everyday making of school in Buenos Aires slums. By addressing events at the intersection of the life of school and of the neighborhood, in this article we problematize schooling – how it is put together and the tensions that beset it on a daily basis. The notion of the self-made school is proposed as a way to delve into how management society calls on the population to manage itself. We identify micro-procedures that take the shape of silent struggles to turn the school/neighborhood into a place to live. As a hypothesis, we propose that school is produced at the intersection of everyday struggles and the struggle for the everyday in the context of the precarization of life in the age of management. From a methodological standpoint what are at play are not dichotomies, but rather the stickiness and tension of daily practices.     

Case‐Based Teaching: Four Experiences in Educational Software Design

Abstract

Good teaching is good story telling. Case‐based teaching exploits the basic capacity for students to learn from stories and the basic desire of teachers to tell stories that are indicative of their experiences. The premise of software that used case‐based teaching would be to place a student in a situation that the student found interesting and where the telling of a story would be appreciated. First, case‐based teachers teach the student what he or she needs to know at precisely the point of becoming interested in knowing the information. This information should be presented in the form of stories. Law schools and business schools have been teaching this way for years. They teach cases rather than rules because, by and large, they don't have rules to teach. The second critical part of learning in a case‐based environment is teaching a student to abstract from what the student has been told, and adapting it to situations for which the student was not specifically trained.

At the Institute, we have, to date, built four examples of case‐based teaching software. The programs are:

VICTOR — a voice and image courtesy tutor — built for Ameritech

DUSTIN — a language experience — built for Andersen Consulting

CREANIMATE — a biology experience‐built for schools and supported by IBM

TAXOPS — a tax opportunity advisor and cross seller — built for the Tax division of Arthur Andersen     

Differences in the Processing of Prefixes and Suffixes Revealed by a Letter-Search Task

A letter-search task was used to test the hypothesis that affixes are chunked during morphological processing and that such chunking might operate differently for prefixes and suffixes. Participants had to detect a letter target that was embedded either in a prefix or suffix (e.g., ‘R’ in propoint or filmure) or in a non-prefix beginning or non-suffix ending (e.g., ‘R’ in cropoint or filmire). Prefixed and suffixed letter-strings comprised real stems and affixes but never formed a real word. Effects of letter cluster frequency were also investigated by manipulating the frequency of non-affix beginnings and endings. Letter search took longer in suffixes compared with non-suffix endings but not for prefixes compared with non-prefix beginnings. Moreover, performance was not affected by letter cluster frequency. We interpret our findings in the light of recent accounts of morpho-orthographic segmentation and the different function of prefixes and suffixes.     

Stages of moral judgment development: Applying item response theory to Defining Issues Test data

ABSTRACT

The Defining Issues Test (DIT) has been the dominant measure of moral development. The DIT has its roots in Kohlberg’s original stage theory of moral judgment development and asks respondents to rank a set of stage typed statements in order of importance on six stories. However, the question to what extent the DIT-data match the underlying stage model was never addressed with a statistical model. Therefore, we applied item response theory (IRT) to a large data set (55,319 cases). We found that the ordering of the stages as extracted from the raw data fitted the ordering in the underlying stage model good. Furthermore, difficulty differences of stages across the stories were found and their magnitude and location were visualized. These findings are compatible with the notion of one latent moral developmental dimension and lend support to the hundreds of studies that have used the DIT-1 and by implication support the renewed DIT-2.     

Othermotherwork: testimonio and the refusal of historical trauma

Abstract

This paper is an ofrenda (offering), a testimonio (testimony) of the healing power of reconstituting severed relationships and reconstructing agentic creation stories in the pathology of soul-wounds where pictures and cuentos serve to mend genealogical traumas. This paper is a refusal of neglecting traumas, it is othermotherwork as an invitation of kin towards the healing soul-wounds by engaging my ageing father (apá), who has been battling a debilitating disease for over 30 years. In choosing to erase his memory and refusing well-being, I engage my apá by remembering and restoring cuentos (stories) retrieved from pictures in my abuela’s archival orange box. I retell the cuentos as told by my apá of his mother, father, great-grandmother and great-grandfather, while he offers an unexpected remedy for both our soul-wounds. In this exchange of ancestral herstories, it is an important move towards an Indigenous Else, transits beyond borders and separation, towards the restorative act of forging unity, love and compassion amongst my father, my ancestors and myself.     

Narrative Development in Monolingual Spanish-Speaking Preschool Children

Research Findings: The purpose of this study was to describe differences in the narratives produced by 3-, 4-, and 5- year old Spanish-speaking (SS) children. Narrative productions of 104 typically developing children were collected using a story-retelling task and coded using the Index of Narrative Complexity. The results of this study indicate that 3-year-old SS children produced stories containing characters and actions. Four-year-old SS children’s stories were characterized by the use of characters, actions, and internal responses. Five-year-old SS children retold stories containing characters, settings, initiating events, actions, internal responses, formulaic markers, temporal markers, and knowledge of dialogue. Practice: Developmental information to assist educators working with SS children.     

Life inside a professional development school: What experienced teachers learn

Abstract

Most professional development schools emphasize the benefits to preservice teacher preparation but rarely focus on the professional development opportunities for the practicing, experienced teachers at the site (Clark, 1999). Professional development schools are not only changing the way preservice teachers are prepared, but are drastically changing the roles of the experienced teachers who participate in the process. By telling their stories of involvement in a growing and changing professional development school, experienced teachers can reflect on their experiences and learn new and different lessons from them each time.

Recorded stories of participants in professional development schools can be used to help teachers gain renewed insights into their potential as leaders in school reform. Storytelling, as a strategy for connecting theory to practice in real school settings, allows and encourages teachers to be active participants in creating progress. It acts as a catalyst for generating and clarifying personal and common visions.