‘The otherness that implicates the self’: towards an understanding of gendering from a theory of proximity

In this article, I consider ways in which the concept of “proximity” can be put to work to understand how gendering occurs in the conduct of gender research – the theme of this special issue. If we accept that researchers are always already inside and implicated in the issues into which they inquire, and that they simultaneously establish an outside position which enables them to notice patterns, make inferences, and develop understandings, then we can say that researchers are always in proximity to something, and that this proximity, inherited or otherwise, places objects, capacities, and understandings within their reach, while also permitting them to extend their reach. In this article, I consider what happens in gender research contexts when researchers register certain proximities, fail to see others, or deny those that make them uncomfortable. Framed by my ongoing research into place cultures in boys’ schools, I argue that thinking gender research practices with the concept of “proximity” pushes researchers to think beyond essentializing accounts of how they gender and are gendered in doing gender research.     

Academic Freedom,Innovation, and Responsibility: Towards an ‘Ethical GPS’ in Higher Education and Science

In lieu of the usual ‘From the Editors’ piece, Jan Sadlak, Director of UNESCO‐CEPES, and Henryk Ratajczak, Vice‐President of the European Academy of Arts, Sciences and Humanities (EAASH), describe below the scope and highlights of the International Conference on Ethical and Moral Dimensions for Higher Education and Science in Europe, held in Bucharest on 2–5 September 2004. The articles in this issue, some of which are drawn from Conference presentations, are also introduced here.

The Conference was organized by the above two organizations, in collaboration with the United Nations University (UNU) in Tokyo and the Division of Basic and Engineering Sciences of UNESCO in Paris. It took place under the joint high patronage of Mr. Jacques Chirac, President of the French Republic, and Mr. Ion Iliescu, President of Romania, and received further distinction in the form of special messages from Pope John Paul II, HRH Prince El Hassan bin Talal, and Mr. Koïchiro Matsuura, Director‐General of UNESCO. All Conference documents can be accessed on the UNESCO‐CEPES website, ?www.cepes.ro?.     

‘Education and the working class’: a conversation with the work of Dennis Marsden and his contribution to the sociology of education

This paper is both a careful analysis of a seminal piece of work in the sociology of education, as well as a passionate plea to revisit with renewed urgency, the way in which education continues to fail unacceptably large numbers of working-class children. Through closely examining the work of Dennis Marsden (with his colleague Brian Jackson) in Education and the working class, the paper argues that this pioneering work done in working-class Huddersfield the 1950s, remains a stoic statement of what is wrong with working-class education, and is as rich in substantive and methodological insights as when it was written in 1962. By taking some biographical slices of key contemporary scholars, in particular Stephen Ball and Diane Reay, who have themselves been prolific scholars in this field, the paper speaks to the central arguments of Marsden’s unique work through their biographies, while establishing the distinctiveness of Marsden’s contribution to understanding social class within the wider field of sociology of education. The paper argues for a reinvigoration of the elusive search for the kind of authentic understandings of working class pioneered by Marsden, as the basis for an equitable and just schooling for working-class children.     

Flourishing as the aim of education: towards an extended, ‘enchanted’ Aristotelian account

Flourishing, understood along Aristotelian or quasi-Aristotelian lines as objective eudaimonic well-being, is re-emerging as a paradigm for the ideal aim of education in the 21st century. This paper aims to venture beyond the current accounts and Aristotle’s own, by arguing that both suffer from a kind of ‘flatness’ or ‘disenchantedness’ in failing to pay heed to the satisfaction of certain impulses that have been proven to give fullness to our lives: impulses having to do with awe-inspiring emotional attachments to transpersonal ideals. I thus argue that while Aristotelian flourishing is a necessary place to begin, it is not a sufficient one to conclude, a study of human flourishing, either generally or in classroom contexts; it needs to be extended and ‘enchanted’ in order to do so. That venture does not necessitate an embrace of supernaturalism, however.     

Science Instructors’ Perceptions of the Risks of Biotechnology: Implications for Science Education

Developing scientifically literate students who understand the socially contextualized nature of science and technology is a national focus of science education reform. Science educators’ perceptions of risks and benefits of new technologies (such as biotechnology) may shape their instructional approaches. This study examined the perceived risk of biotechnology of four groups of science educators: pre-service science teachers, in-service science teachers, biology graduate teaching assistants, and biology professors (n = 91). Data sources included a survey instrument and card sort task designed to determine the respondents’ structure of risk perception and factors contributing to this structure. The perceptions of the four educator groups were compared and contrasted along these dimensions. Results showed that the teacher groups were similar along many aspects of risk perception, but university professors were more likely to view the more subtle “gray areas” between biotechnology risks. The results are discussed in the context of understanding teacher risk perception on science pedagogical practice as well as the role of content knowledge and teaching experience on risk perception formation.     

Living with Ghosts: ‘Disciplines’, Envy and the Future of Teacher Education

The continuing instability of Education as a discipline is examined against renewed arguments for its ‘disciplinary’ status. Teacher education in particular is seen as Marjorie Garber’s concept of ‘discipline envy’ to propose a more positive relationship between disciplines that might work for the good of teacher education.     

Working in the methodological ‘outfield’: the case of Bourdieu and occupational therapy

The article reports on a study of methodological innovation involving occupational therapy (OT) students in higher education (HE). It is based on an original project which examined the experiences and outcomes of non-traditional entrants to pre-registration OT education. A feature of the original project was the application of the epistemological and methodological approach of the French social theorist Pierre Bourdieu, most noticeably in exploring the way that social back ground (habitus) interacted with the educational (field) context in terms of experience and educational outcome. Bourdieu used a ranged of techniques – both qualitative and quantitative – in collecting and analysing data. In particular, he used multiple correspondence analysis (MCA), a type of geometric data analysis recognized as a powerful tool enabling the representation of social space and the situating of individuals within it with respect to a number of variables. The article considers methodological principles in comparing ethnographic, traditional statistics and MCA. We show how the original data were reanalysed according to MCA. The article compares the original analyses and findings with those based on MCA in order to explore its strength over the previous approach and the potential it has to cast light on various issues in HE.     

Education and the Contested Meanings of ‘Global Citizenship’

This article examines the oftentaken-for-granted educational policy and curricular discourses of globalization and global citizenship within their larger cultural, political, and economically uneven histories and unequal consequences. Drawing upon evidence from recent scholarship on the implications for classroom pedagogy embodied inefforts to internationalize curricula in the North American university contexts, as well as specific related efforts in one Canadian context, the University of British Columbia,this article unpacks the contested meanings of global citizenship from above and below.The author analyzes three dominant curricular discourses of global citizenship. Far from weakening the Canadian state and building instances of transnational democratic educational communities, these dominant discourses may actually reinforce notions of Canadian gendered and racialized nation-building and nationalism. The article raises questions about what an alternative curricular and educational policy discourse from below premised upon efforts to decolonize curricula might look like. By way of provisional conclusion, the author discusses some promising examples of such an alternative,showing how they depend on seeing the relations between the local and global neither as fixed abstractions nor as a slogan system to be applied in absolutist racial, geographical,national, or culturally essentialist terms.     

Education as Séance: Specters,Spirits, and the Expansion of Memory

In this essay I propose that education be conceived as séance: a place where ghosts are summoned in order that we may come to (speaking) terms with them. Against the backdrop of my own summoning of the ghosts haunting my childhood visits to a nearby castle, I draw on the work of Jacques Derrida to provide a theoretical rationale for the importance of spirits and ghosts. The concepts of inheritance and hospitality place a central role in understanding how to come to terms with ghosts. I conclude with a reflection on the summoning of ghosts in education, and the role of the curriculum as medium in this séance.     

‘Hardworking,determined and happy’: first-year students’ understanding and experience of success

While all agree student success in higher education is important, there is less agreement on what it means to be a successful student. Student success is often measured by institutional reports of grades, student retention and qualification completion. More recently, broader definitions have emerged; however, these do not incorporate student perceptions of success. The current study addresses this gap by exploring how first-year students talk about their success. Drawing from weekly interviews of students at an Australian regional university, the data are analysed through the lens of a conceptual framework of student engagement. The findings demonstrate that success is inextricably linked with student engagement as well as other dimensions of the student experience. As expected, students assess their success extrinsically with institutional measures such as grades and feedback. In addition, their behavioural engagement was seen as a more immediate measure of their success, while happiness and satisfaction were necessary for some students to feel successful. Perceptions of success have important consequences for students in terms of increased positive emotions, self-efficacy and course belonging. Success for these students has multiple dimensions. These findings give rise to suggestions for a staged approach to supporting first-year student success. However, the student experience is complex and multifaceted and further research is needed with different student cohorts who may define and experience success in other ways.     

Challenges and Changes: Developing Teachers’ and Initial Teacher Education Students’ Understandings of the Nature of Science

Teachers need an understanding of the nature of science (NOS) to enable them to incorporate NOS into their teaching of science. The current study examines the usefulness of a strategy for challenging or changing teachers’ understandings of NOS. The teachers who participated in this study were 10 initial teacher education chemistry students and six experienced teachers from secondary and primary schools who were introduced to an explicit and reflective activity, a dramatic reading about a historical scientific development. Concept maps were used before and after the activity to assess teachers’ knowledge of NOS. The participants also took part in a focus group interview to establish whether they perceived the activity as useful in developing their own understanding of NOS. Initial analysis led us to ask another group, comprising seven initial teacher education chemistry students, to take part in a modified study. These participants not only completed the same tasks as the previous participants but also completed a written reflection commenting on whether the activity and focus group discussion enhanced their understanding of NOS. Both Lederman et al.’s (Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 39(6), 497–521, 2002) concepts of NOS and notions of “naive” and “informed” understandings of NOS and Hay’s (Studies in Higher Education, 32(1), 39–57, 2007) notions of “surface” and “deep” learning were used as frameworks to examine the participants’ specific understandings of NOS and the depth of their learning. The ways in which participants’ understandings of NOS were broadened or changed by taking part in the dramatic reading are presented. The impact of the data-gathering tools on the participants’ professional learning is also discussed.     

‘A Long-Legged Fly Upon the Stream’: Poetry,Memory and the Unconscious

Abstract

In this paper I introduce some concepts from psychoanalysis, a poem, a clinical vignette and a personal anecdote. I am asking what light the knowledge of unconscious processes can throw on the memorisation of poems and therefore what use to the individual can be derived from learning poems by heart. A version of the paper was first given at the Poetry, Memory and Performance conference at Homerton College, University of Cambridge, in March 2015.     

‘Teaching’ the path towards university: understanding student access through storied-futures and meritocratic grand narratives

The notion that the stories of our lives shape dispositions towards imagined futures is another lens through which university underrepresentation should be viewed. A storied lens attends to how futures, like university attendance, are storied during childhood to the extent that some youth imagine, and therefore plan, these futures as natural progression. Such was the case for study participants, indicating that childhood stories contain answers for mitigating social reproduction connected to parental education and cultural forces within the home. Examining social mobility through the underexplored storied-futures grand narrative presents unique solutions that lay hidden within the dominant meritocratic grand narrative.     

Analysis of the Educational Potential of a Science Museum Learning Environment: Visitors’ experience with and understanding of an immersion exhibit

Research pertaining to science museum exhibit design tends to be articulated at a level of generality that makes it difficult to apply in practice. To address this issue, the present study used a design‐based research approach to understand the educational potential of a biology exhibit. The exhibit was considered an educational environment which embodied a certain body of biological knowledge (Biological Organisation) in a certain exhibit type (Museographic Organisation) with the intention of creating certain learning outcomes among visitors. The notion of praxeology was used to model intended and observed visitor outcomes, and the pattern of relationship between the two praxeologies was examined to pinpoint where and how divergences emerged. The implications of these divergences are discussed at the three levels of exhibit enactment, design, and conjecture, and theoretically based suggestions for a design iteration are given. The potential of the design‐based research approach for educational exhibit design is argued.     

Clergy’s Views of the Relationship between Science and Religious Faith and the Implications for Science Education

Since many teachers and students recognize other kinds of knowledge (faith) based on other ways of knowing, consideration of these realities is appropriate for the science education community. Understanding the multitude of ways that clergy view relationships between science and faith (i.e. alternative ways of knowing) would assist in understanding various ways that people address complex issues arising from ideas about science and faith. We administered a questionnaire composed of multiple-choice and short answer items to 63 United Methodist ministers. Findings included (1) that formal, organized faith contexts (e.g. church services) serve as informal science education opportunities, (2) participants demonstrated considerable diversity regarding the types of relationships developed between science and faith, and (3) participants recognized a need exists for better understandings of science and its relationship to faith for them, their colleagues, and their congregations.

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Linking ‘The Book of Nature’ and ‘The Book of Science’: Using Circular Motion as an Exemplar beyond the Textbook

Bacon exhorted the natural philosophers of his day to read and interpret the book of nature by clever and cunning experimentation. The increasing scientific activity after Bacon and Galileo, however, quickly produced a second book. This was a book of interpretations of nature, namely the the book of science. Newton went beyond Bacon and Galileo and developedan ongoing dialogue between these two books, a repeated give and takebetween mathematical construct and physical reality. Unfortunately, thephysics textbook, the book of science the students read, does not acquaintthem with this style of reasoning. As an example of high-grade scientificthinking this paper discusses Newton's long struggle with the concepts ofinertia and especially of centrifugal force. In his quest to understand thedynamics of circular motion Newton clearly progressed through four levelsof conceptualizations, leading to progressively less severe discrepancies, inhis ascent to a full understanding of centripetal acceleration. While it is notpossible or desirable to expect teachers or students to recapitulate high-gradescientific thinking, partial retelling of the intellectual struggle that was involved in establishing important scientific concepts must be seen as important. This kind of pedagogy, however, requires that physics teachers have a good understanding of the history of scientific ideas as well as the findings of cognitive science.     

Spanish Science Teacher Educators’ Preparation,Experiences, and Views About Nature of Science in Science Education

Science & Education - The obstacles and difficulties that science teachers face when teaching the nature of science (NOS) are well-known. Nonetheless, little is known of what science teacher...     

Putting Sociology First—Reconsidering the Role of the Social in ‘Nature of Science’ Education

Contrasting two examples from 2005, a creationism-trial and a recent textbook, the article shows two different ways of employing social considerations to demarcate science from non-science. Drawing conclusions from the comparison, and citing some of the leading proponents of science studies, the paper argues for a novel perspective in teaching nature of science (NOS) issues, one that grows out of sociological and anthropological considerations of (scientific) expertise. In contrast to currently dominant epistemic approaches to teach NOS, this view makes it possible to incorporate epistemic and social norms in a unified framework that can alleviate presently problematic aspects of NOS modules, and can help students appreciate science as a privileged form of knowledge-production without becoming scientistic. A pilot module to carry out the above is presented and assessed, showing that a broad sociological starting point is closer to the lifeworld of students, and that traditional epistemic considerations need not be compromised.     

The ‘Nature of Science’ and the Perils of Epistemic Relativism

Research in Science Education - There is an increasing demand in the field of science education for the incorporation of philosophical and sociological aspects that are related to the scientific...