Editors' Note

Since the start of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, millions of educated youths all over the country have answered Chairman Mao's great call that "educated youths must go to the countryside." With high revolutionary aspirations, they have made their way to the countryside and border regions. There they forge revolution and are reeducated by the poor and lower-middle peasants. Being tempered through the Three Great Revolutionary Struggles in rural areas, they are sturdily growing up.     

Editors' Note

With this issue, the editorship of CHINESE EDUCATION passes into new hands, and a statement from the incoming "team" on the nature of our approach to this undertaking seems in order.     

Editors' column

This article proposes a theoretical frame for technical communication peda- gogy based on six layered literacies: basic, rhetorical, social, technological, ethical, and critical. The layered literacies frame advocates diverse instruction in technical communication programs, ranging from the ancient art of rhetoric to the most contemporary of technologies, from basic reading and writing skills to ethical and critical situational analyses. The article also suggests how the frame can be applied to a program of study or individual course in order to establish teaching objectives; develop course and lesson activities; and assess pedagogical materials, students, and programs.     

Editors' Note

Although educational research and practice has found many benefits of long-term and complex design activities, an issue of growing concern is that students might lose sight of science learning while diverting their attention to design aesthetics, collaborative management, and technology. A question is whether or not science is actually separate from these aspects; it may be that science permeates the design environment and is thus contexted within these other activities. To investigate this possibility we followed a classroom of 33 students, divided into 7 teams, and we examined their science discussions as they planned for creating instructional software designs. Specifically, we investigated which conversational contexts gave rise to science talk. We found that a focus on the fine-grained details of the instructional science designs themselves and the contributions of more design-experienced students played an important role in the sophistication of the science content in the planning discussions. In examining less productive contexts for science talk, we found that a conversational focus in planning discussions on collaboration and software issues, as well as the science focus of the software designs, impacted the quality of science integration. In our discussion, we address the issue of which design contexts afford opportunities for richer discourse and the implications for other project-based design activities.