The scientific method,Nintendo, and Eagle feathers: Rethinking the meaning of "culture-based" curriculum at an Ojibwe tribal school

In this article, the author analyzes the assumptions people make about culture and curriculum and asks what prevents the idea of culture-based curriculum from making radical changes in Native American schooling. She attributes the segregation of "culture" from "academic" curriculum to an internalization of colonial structures. In this scenario, "culture-based" (Native American)curriculum is superimposed on a curriculum that is already based in culture (Western European.) She discusses some of the ways a static notion of culture is played out at one tribal school and what the implications of these hegemonic practices are. Further, she discusses some classroom practices that refuse an essentialist definition of "Ojibwe" culture as a basis for curriculum and instead act to engage students in the process of making meaning in their classroom. It is suggested that by thinking of culture as creating relationships and meaning, we shall be able to move beyond the destructive dichotomy that associates intellectual rigor with Whiteness.     

Globalisation and citizenship education

This article discusses the notion of globalisation by reference to several of its proponents and critics. Issues of citizenship education in an era of global electronic communications are examined and the author argues that citizenship education that has a global dimension will necessarily be concerned with economic, social and political inequalities between citizens both within and between nation states. Global divisions involve fundamental inequalities of resources, rights to residence and much else. Since globalisation invokes differing responses from citizens around the world and within nation states it is likely that global citizenship education will have varied effects.     

Cognitive‐Preference Testing in the Natural Sciences‐‐Some Question‐Marks

Summaries

English

Cognitive‐preference measurements have in recent years become a major research area, with particular reference to curriculum evaluation work. Several questions concerning the nature of cognitive preferences and their measurement have so far remained unsolved. The author indentifies and discusses some of these in this article.     

The practice of whiteness among teacher candidates

This article discusses the findings of a study on 35, mostly white teacher candidates at a Canadian university. White racial identity and beliefs about causes of educational inequality are explored in relation to the teacher candidates'; value systems. Inconsistencies are found to be integral to the teacher candidates' positions. Contextualized within the practice of whiteness, the findings raise questions about the interrelationship of inconsistent beliefs, social distance, and how whiteness is effected. The author suggests that contradictory positions are a manifestation of a whiteness striving to sustain its legitimacy against an unstable social network. The denial and resistance so commonly found among white teacher candidates are performative in this sense.     

Institutionalizing China’s Research University through Academic Mobility: The Case of PKU

Abstract:

Academic mobility is becoming a tread in academic life and a professional development globally, regionally and nationally. This article makes use of a case university—Peking University (PKU)—as an analytical approach to explore how and why academic mobility can happen in China’s research universities. The author first presents an overview of the academic mobility at PKU from a historical perspective, and then describes the changing status quo of its academic mobility that has undergone for three decades. In the third part, the author analyzes and discusses the outcome made by the academic mobility from both positive and negative sides. In the end, the author notes that academic mobility is one among the best ways to internationalize China’s research universities, including PKU.     

Teaching about Cuba: The concientization of a US teacher-researcher

In this paper the author offers a reflective perspective of her experiences while conducting research in Cuba in 1995 and 1996, and upon her return to the United States, teaching Cuban culture and history in a public school. In particular, she discusses the challenges surrounding her positioning, location, and accountability as author, researcher, teacher, and comparative educator. She explores the interaction of cultural identities faced as a researcher from the United States and the ideologically charged ironies that teaching Cuban history and culture evoke in an American middle school. Moreover, she chronicles her shifting perceptions of cultural identity and interfacing with the opposing responses between suspicion and acceptance in both countries. While negotiating between these two cultures, the repositioning on the continuum of critical pedagogy offers insight into the problems inherent in these situations.     

The Influence of Managed Care

ABSTRACT

During the past 15 years managed care has greatly influenced all forms of health services, including at colleges and universities which have long functioned like health maintenance organizations but without commercialism. This article discusses managed care's rise to power, the new forces countering it, and its influence on psychotherapy practice. The article suggests that preventive and developmental ideals are better served generally within institutions of higher education than by external, commercial managed care companies.     

The politics of fear in the making of worlds

This paper revisits "the Menchú controversy" by examining the relationship between "truth", politics and fear in the "making of the worlds." The author argue that "Menchú controversy" can teach us a lot about how "truth" involves a politics of containment whereby "others" are contained by the judgment that they have failed the truth at the very moment that they challenge how some "truths" are given or become givens. Such judgments are not simply about reading the testimonios of others as "perjured", but also work to construct others as fearsome and threatening, such that the defence of truth becomes "a matter of life and death." To explore the role of fear in containing others, the author offers a reading of the Menchú controversy alongside the reception given to Sunera Thobani's speech in which she criticizes the United States' "war on terrorism." She shows how Thobani's speech is constructed as an act of terror because it calls into question the very "truths" that have justified the war, by showing that they rely on an ontological distinction between legitimate and illegitimate violence. The paper relates both the Menchú and Thobani cases to broader discourses of fear and anxiety that have circulated since September 11 2001 and argues that fear works to secure "truths" precisely through the narration of crisis or insecurity. Rather than considering fear as coming from within a subject, or as a characteristic of an object, the author suggests that fear works to effect the very boundaries between subjects and others, partly through the feeling that such boundaries have already been threatened by the presence of others. She also shows how fear operates as an affective economy of truth: fear slides between signs and sticks to bodies by constituting them as its objects. In making this argument, she shows how fear sticks to some bodies and not others. For example, the judgment that somebody "could be" a terrorist draws on past and affective associations that stick various signs (such as Muslim, fundamentalist, terrorist) together. At the same time, fear is reproduced precisely by the threat that such bodies "may pass (us) by." Such bodies become constructed as fearsome and as a threat to the very truths that are reified as "life itself." This paper hence shows how truth becomes an affective technique of containment in which the failure to contain is the justification of containment. The author concludes that if truth is a matter of containers and containment - about who or what gets contained to allow certain worlds to become given - then the risk taken by subaltern women, such as Rigoberta Menchú and Sunera Thobani, in speaking out against such truths is the risk of making an-other kind of world.     

Poststructuralist approaches to empirical analysis

This article develops a range of concrete analytic approaches to empirical studies inspired by poststructuralist thinking. The analytic strategies offered provide examples of "putting deconstruction to work" in the context of the analysis of qualitative data. The discourse-destabilizing impacts are shown by examples derived from the author's own research and that of others. Among the analytic strategies, the author discusses the ways in which constructions of discursive categories and storylines can be investigated. And as a means of sharpening the discourse-transgressing lens, the use of troubling and alienating concepts and models of analysis is explored, together with the use of paradoxes and nonconventional renarrations of data. The approaches are not presented as directly transferable techniques. They are meant to work as inspiration for other researchers in their methodological development of analytic tools.     

Guidance in Secondary Education: The Flemish Experience

This paper outlines the characteristics of peer mediation in schools and its potential, evident in the literature, for reducing pupil–pupil conflicts referred to teachers. Then, drawing on personal experience, research and a review of literature, the author argues that for peer mediation projects to be effective they need to be in synergy with the culture of the school, including its approach and vision to the management of conflict. Making this argument requires a means of modelling school culture, which will be outlined. Finally, the author argues that attention also needs to be given to how the service will be sustained.     

Academically Successful Students with Serious Mental Health Difficulties: A Psychodynamic Developmental Perspective

Abstract

This commentary discusses Robert May's reflections on policy for student mental health services on college and university campuses. The Report of the Harvard Provost's Committee on Student Mental Health Services is the impetus for his reflections. While May suggests that the student mental health unit be taken out of the medical unit, the Committee recommends that the variety of services be maintained, but out of the grip of managed care, and that there be greater collaboration and coordination among the services. While noting the psychiatric orientation of both the Committee and its Report, this author sees that the Report emphasizes the institutional context for students' emotional problems and the neglect of that context by recent Harvard University Health Services policies. The present author urges better collaboration between the services located in counseling services and those located in medical services.     

Using Simulations to Teach Leadership Roles

This paper investigates the nature of informal learning through a study of children's (age 9-13) use of chatrooms and in a computer games class in an out-of-school-centre. The paper discusses contemporary policy interest in the concept but argues that it loses value for educationalists except as "critical lens" to explore formal learning. Key elements of informal learning are dissected and close analysis of children's talk in informal learning situations is analysed in terms of its pedagogic structure.     

Looking ahead in the field of gifted education: An interview with Dr. Joyce Vantassel‐Baska

Case studies of two highly gifted preschoolers demonstrate the widely varying abilities of children at the highest ends of the intelligence scales. The article discusses pitfalls in providing programs for the highly gifted and warns that acceleration is not enough. The author suggests that three key components — assessment, flexible scheduling and counseling —are critical to the success of any program for children with advanced intellectual gifts.     

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.     

The (mis)use of SATs to examine gender and achievement at Key Stage 2

ABSTRACT

This article discusses some of the issues raised in the early stages of an Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) study. ¹ 1 Gender and Learning: A Study of Underachievement in Junior Schools, Economic and Social Research Council R000237346. Project directors: Harry Daniels, Valerie Hey, Diana Leonard and Marjorie Smith. The first phase of the project involved an analysis of end of Key Stage 2 (children aged 10–11) Standard Assessment Test (SAT) data within a Midlands and a London local education authority (LEA(M) and LEA(L) respectively). The LEAs were identified according to the quality and accessibility of the data and their socio‐economic and socio‐cultural diversity. The analysis was used as an instrument for selecting schools in each LEA that displayed specific but con‐ sistent patterns of high, low and average achievement which were cross cut by large differences between boys' and girls' achievement in all three SAT subjects (English, maths and science). On one level, this article discusses the difficulties we encountered in identifying schools with consistent patterns of gendered achievement as well as signposting the ‘political’ significance of these difficulties for present and future edu‐ cation policies. On another level, it is a vehicle for the development of the theoretical lenses of learner identity and post‐Vygotskian analysis that have shaped our under‐ standing of gendered achievement which we use to ‘speak’ to and influence the development of the test procedures highlighted in this article.

     

Teacher collaboration: 30 years of research on its nature,forms, limitations and effects

ABSTRACT

This article reprises and reflects on 30 years of the author’s work on teacher collaboration. The distinctive nature of this work has not been in making a case for teacher collaboration in terms of its benefits for students, teachers, or educational change. These arguments are widely available elsewhere. Rather it has examined ways of collaborating that are available to teachers, how formal or informal collaboration should be, how collaborative efforts can be misused or misdirected, and what factors must be considered when deliberately designing teacher collaboration so it will have the most beneficial effects. The article discusses the explanatory and strategic power of three concepts in particular—contrived collegiality, professional capital, and collaborative professionalism. Conclusions are drawn about next steps for educational research in terms of establishing clear typologies of teacher collaboration in relation to their impact and appropriateness in different circumstances.     

Virtual Reality: Real Promises and False Expectations

Abstract

The article examines the latest development in advanced computer‐graphics termed Virtual Reality (VR), which is a technology that entails a 3‐dimensional artificial environment in which the user perceives a sense of presence. The paper discusses the dilemma of defining VR, and the limitations of the current technology. Furthermore, the author describes his experience with VR and looks at the implications of this new technology for education.     

Beyond Borders: Reading “Other” Places in Children’s Literature

The author analyzes two texts, Gloria Whelan’s Homeless Bird and Deborah Ellis’s Parvana’s Journey, in an attempt to explain some of the problems and difficulties associated with those texts. The author examines Whelan’s representations of India and finds troubling binaries associated with that text. In comparison, the author finds Ellis’s depictions of Afghanistan more nuanced and complex. The author also discusses student reception of both texts and offers ways to problematize some of their reactions.

Policy Statement

Abstract

This paper discusses the problems caused by certain approaches to the measurement of educational product and the way in which these conflict with the longer term objectives of the educational process. It argues that, in many areas of higher education, especially those with vocational or professional links, these approaches to the measurement of student performance produce a tendency towards ‘short‐termism’ that is very similar to trends that have been identified in the management and accounting literature. The author argues that whilst accounting educators in the USA have identified a need to broaden the learning experiences of students, and to reduce the significance of surface learning, there are pressures in the, UK that would seem to be forcing students into increased surface learning and less reflective, deeper learning.     

The Generational Bridge

ABSTRACT

Over ihc past three decades, psychotherapy with college aged youth has undergone tremendous changes. Differences in the therapist's life perspective and differences in student concerns have synergized with changes in psychotherapeutic technique and delivery systems to dramatically alter the presenting problems, goals, and process of college student psychotherapy. This article historically traces these 3 interconnected pathways and how ihcy have changed the way the author practices psychotherapy.