Physical Activity in the Life of a Woman with Severe Cerebral Palsy: Showing competence and being socially connected

We used a life‐history approach to investigate the meanings and experiences of physical activity in the life of a 25‐year‐old woman with severe cerebral palsy (Amy). Amy and her mother were interviewed about Amy’s life and her involvement in physical activity. The conversation was audio‐recorded and transcribed verbatim. We interpreted Amy’s story using psychodynamic theory. Although Amy enjoyed learning to walk, she developed a sense of inferiority on entering the school environment because her skills did not compare favourably with those of her classmates without disabilities. Despite these negative experiences, Amy became more physically active as an adult than she had been as a child and as an adolescent, with the intention of delaying further functional decline, to stay socially connected to the people around her and to gain self‐esteem through displaying competence at physical tasks. For Amy, engaging in physical activity was intimately tied to psychosocial growth, especially as a young adult. Further research should be conducted to investigate whether this relationship between physical activity and psychosocial growth is present in the lives of other people with disabilities.     

Australia’s 1988 Bicentennial: national history and multiculturalism in the primary school curriculum

As in many countries, such as Germany, Turkey, the United States and Japan the history/culture wars of the past two decades have increased public interest in what is taught in schools. This has resulted in rigorous debates in the general community, encouraged and sustained through regular media coverage. Partly as a response to this, History has been designated as a separate subject in the first wave of planning and implementation of the Australian National Curriculum. Two of the reasons for this include first, to recognise the importance of teaching historical skills as a distinct subject; and second there is an ongoing bipartisan political interest in privileging history disciplinary knowledge and content to ensure that national history narratives are taught to students. To contribute meaningfully towards the development and implementation of a National Curriculum, it is important to understand past curriculum constructions, so that the disciplinary knowledge and content of history remains independent, and not subsumed within current (or future) political trends. Based on examples of national history from the Queensland Social Studies syllabus and government endorsed sourcebooks in the lead-up to the 1988 Bicentennial of British colonisation of the Australian continent, this article examines the influence and role of multiculturalism in History teaching in primary schools. Particular attention is paid to Indigenous representations and British heritages, as an example of two groups that have often been represented as binaries to each other throughout Australian history. An analysis of the curriculum materials illuminates the differences between multiculturalism and history—highlighting how the two are merged at the expense of accurate historical knowledge and concepts, particularly in the area of national history. This study will demonstrate that as a result of the infiltration of multiculturalism into history content within the Social Studies curriculum, historical knowledge becomes silenced in the school curriculum – resulting in vague and sometimes historically inaccurate information being presented to students; and the privileging of certain types of multiculturalism.     

Moving on and Moving up: Confronting the Complexities of School Improvement in the Improving Schools Project

Despite recent advances, the research literature on school effectiveness, school improvement and educational change has relatively little to say about how schools become effective over time, and what strategies or combination of strategies work best to improve schools at different levels of effectiveness. A recent British research study – ‘The Improving Schools’ project funded by the Economic and Social Research Council – has been designed to explore these (and other) issues. This article describes the rationale for the fieldwork aspect of the project, which includes 13 secondary schools from 3 English local education authorities and presents 4 themes that have emerged from the first phase of the research that cast some light on the phenomena of the ‘improving school’. These themes – multiple starting points, the complex interactive and intuitive nature of school improvement strategies, the missing instructional level, and the importance of context – are described. The article concludes that given the non-linear and unpredictable nature of improvement seen in the case studies, schools need to become more skilled in ‘change agentry’ in order to continue to improve.     

How teaching the English Revolution (or not) became a landmark debate in German history didactics

ABSTRACT

This paper focuses on the development of history teaching in West Germany from the 1970s onwards. When in the early 1970s the relevance of history – both as an academic discipline and as a school subject – was challenged, this led to fierce debates as a multitude of new concepts were being developed. One of these was Annette Kuhn’s revolutionary concept of teaching history which immediately came under attack. This debate – and others – had far reaching consequences. At first glance it was a debate about how to model objects like the English Revolution in a way to make them suitable for the history classroom. At second glance, however, this debate revolved around fundamental issues like the role of history in school, the relation between social sciences and didactics, and history’s relevance for today in general. The debate and its eventual outcome are explained within the framework of Bourdieu’s field theory. The study re-examines the consequences of this debate. In discussing alternatives to Kuhn’s approach, it shows how debates forced upon traditional history led historians to readdress the essentials of historical thinking and thus to gain new theoretical strength which resulted in a stronger position for history at universities and schools as well as in history didactics. This resulted in a specific construction and role of Geschichtsdidaktik in Germany which helps to explain why there is a difference in comparison to other countries.     

Being Ethnically Fluid in Post-Brexit Britain: How Teaching English Literature in England Made Me Want – Momentarily – to Return to Russia and Join Putin’s Party

A descendant of Chekhov’s extended family, Darya Protopopova has always loved all things literary. When she found out that Chekhov was popular with British modernist writers, she decided to do a master’s and then a doctorate in English modernism at the University of Oxford. Having completed both, she chose to spread her love for English literary giants among the masses and trained as a teacher of English at University College London. A year and a half into her first job, she was forced to leave after her school management told her she could no longer teach her GCSE (General Certificate of Secondary Education) class, as some parents had complained about her foreignness. Shocked and disappointed, she briefly contemplated going back to Russia and becoming a xenophobe herself. However, the good had triumphed over the evil in her heart, and she is now happily teaching in a multilingual school in central London.     

The Comparison and Analysis of Sino-American Family Educational Ways—from the Case of American Chinese “Tiger Mother” Family Educational Way

Amy Lynn Chua is a daughter of Chinese immigrants, a lifetime professor of Law school of Yale university, she became popular and controversial since she published her child-rearing memoir《Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother》, in which Amy Chua wrote down how to teach her two daughters in a harsh and strict way, especially a discussion about Chinese and American family educational ways. This paper use this case as an example to compare differences between Chinese and American family educational ways and try to analyze reasons.     

Current status of secondary school mathematics curriculum development in China

In this article, we intend to give a brief account of secondary school mathematics curriculum development in China. Some experimental teaching materials and teaching methods are introduced. One of the most influential projects is described in detail.Heartfelt gratitude is due to our supervisor, Professor David F. Robitaille at the University of British Columbia. It is under his encouragement and guidance that this article sees the light.Appendix 1–3 are quoted from Leung's (1987) article.     

CSE and the 16+: Teachers' Views

During the interview ‘Mary’ – who had last year been a school pupil and this year is a first‐year undergraduate on the new degree in Education (with Teaching Certificate) – talked at some length, and with considerable feeling, about how her main frustration as a female pupil had been what she saw as her systematic disenfranchisement from influence over the content and process of the schools' curricula which she had pursued over the previous thirteen years. Although she felt that all pupils suffered this lack of influence she was convinced that girls suffered disproportionately. [Some time later in the interview], when talking about the ‘teaching practice’ she had recently completed, ‘Mary’ described how her ‘music and movement’ work had met with ‘loud and disruptive’ reaction from some of the boys in the mixed class of 7–8 year‐olds, even though the majority of the children had clearly enjoyed and been engaged by the scheme she had designed. Faced with this rejection, and experiencing some anxiety about how the teachers and her tutor would assess her potential as a future teacher if she was not seen to be exercising what they would count as ‘good control’ of the class, ‘Mary’ resolved her ‘problem’ by designing an alternative scheme which the few boys would not (and did not) reject. Although the girls had ‘subsequently shown less interest’, their quiet acquiescence to what she offered them reduced her anxiety about her assessment as a teacher. When she related her pupil experience to her teaching practice experience ‘Mary’ was dismayed to realise that she had ‘reproduced for others precisely that frustration which [she herself] had experienced as a pupil’.

Extract from author's notes when evaluating a new pre‐service degree course, June 1983.     

Trends in teachers' recommendations for changing elementary and junior-high school science programs

Since 1978 many studies have called for changes in the practices of science teaching. These changes in instruction will occur only when the teachers decide to change their practices. This study uses surveys to consider the question of what were the trends in the teachers' recommendations for changes in elementary and junior-high school science programs between the years of 1978 and 1982. Large samples of teachers in British Columbia, Canada, responded anonymously to questionnaires in these years: 3040 teachers in 1978 and 1631 in 1982, with return rates ranging from 77.5% to 85%. These teachers described themselves as shifting their classroom practices toward ones that emphasize passive learning and memorization. The British Columbia Science Assessments recommend more inservice programs to stop this trend. There were very few differences in the teachers' recommendations for changes in the schools. The elementary-school teachers had major changes in their rankings of only two activities: they increased their ranking of “activity-centered learning” and reduced their ranking of “outdoor education.”     

Imagining a profession: a beginning teacher's story of isolation

Policy documents informing the profession of teaching in Australia and elsewhere explicitly recommend nurturing those new to the profession working collaboratively with colleagues. Key to the development and growth of beginning teachers is the informal exchange of ideas and knowledge between colleagues – essentially through the functioning of a community of practice. In practice there are beginning teachers who do not experience productive professional collaborations. In this article we use positioning theory and discourse analysis as a methodological “hearing aid” to listen to the story of a beginning teacher, a global English speaker, as she tells of her personal experiences of being excluded by her colleagues as she begins teaching at her first school. Speakers of global English are defined, for this research, as those for whom English is not their first language but may be one of many spoken languages. This story reflects similar accounts gathered during a larger research study conducted by the authors that focused on the early career experiences of global English speaking teachers. We conclude with suggestions for ways forward through awareness and practical reforms.     

Universities under financial crisis: the case of British Columbia

This paper addresses the consequences of the 1980–1983 economic recession in Canada for the political climate in British Columbia and for the University of British Columbia. After prolonged recession, the Social Credit Party gained power on a platform that government be significantly downsized. The University of British Columbia, after years of accommodating budgetary shortfalls, was asked for a further ten percent reduction between 1984–1986. The University's response to these cuts is placed in an appropriate provincial and national context, and the implications of marked reductions in public support for higher education are discussed.     

Oral history in education: teacher's memory and teachers' history

This paper explores the educational experiences of a specific group of refugees, namely academic women refugees who were members of various branches of the International Federation of University Women, and who came to Britain under the auspices of the British Federation of University Women from 1933. As a result of voluntary or forced migration some 400 such women from Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia and Austria sought entry to Britain following Hitler’s accession to power in Germany in 1933. The help they received from the specially formed Emergency Refugee Committee of the British Federation of University Women, not only in gaining entry to the country but in refashioning their pre‐migration educational and academic achievements, is looked at in detail, and the extent to which the women were able to retrain, re‐qualify or complete training courses curtailed by political events and migration is considered.     

英美文学在高中英语教学中的应用研究

英美文学不仅具有独特的艺术韵味,而且其发展还和英语语言学习有着密切的联系。将英美文学引入高中英语教学中,可以激发学生的学习兴趣,提高学生的英语语言运用能力,促进英语课堂教学效果的提高。文章基于高中英语教学现状和高中英语教学中渗透英美文学的意义,对高中英语教学中英美文学渗透的有效途径进行论述。     

Grade 10 Students' perceptions of and attitudes toward science teaching and school science

Grade 10 students' perceptions of classroom practices and activities, as well as their attitudes toward science teaching and school science, were assessed in the Westend School District (pseudonym) in British Columbia, using both quantitative (statistics of Likert-type scales) and qualitative (critical interpretive analysis of interview data) methods. The major findings of the study were that students do not appreciate the most prevailing contemporary practices in science classes, perceived by them as mainly the copying of the teacher's notes, and that they prefer science teaching and learning in which they take an active and responsible part. Additionally, teaching style appears to be the major determinant of high school students' attitudes toward science and science teaching. No change in students' perceptions of and attitudes toward science teaching and school science (in 1989 compared with 1986) could be detected in spite of the impact made by the recently advocated constructivist and science-technology-society (STS) approaches on science curriculum and science education. It is argued, therefore, that more emphasis must be placed on the science teachers' role and their teaching style if an educational change in the constructivist/STS direction is to be achieved.     

Technical knowledge in a technical society: elementary school technology education in Sweden, 1919–1928

The aim of this article is to identify a technical domain of knowledge in the curriculum of the Swedish elementary school and views on elementary school technology of two interest groups – school teachers and engineers. Gradually during the early to mid‐1920s there was increased technical content in the Swedish elementary school, if we look at the new curriculum, in‐service education and stakeholders’ views. The main reasons for this were, first of all, that the first decades of the twentieth century witnessed industrial growth with accompanying technification of large parts of society including the school. Second, the curriculum of 1919 had a broader technical content than earlier curricula, and thus mirrored the societal changes. Third, vocational secondary schools led to new requirements in respect of elementary technology education. Representatives of the Government were prime movers in enhancing the significance of technology in school together with teachers, while engineers generally showed little interest.     

《喜福会》中的文化意象研究

《喜福会》是美籍华裔作家谭恩美的第一部代表作。书中浓郁的中国传统文化气息是通过一系列文化意象传递出来的。本文通过对这些意象的具体分析,来解读它们背后蕴藏的文化内涵以及作者赋予这些意象的功能：一方面是寄托自己对母辈的感情,向西方社会推荐中国的传统文化;另一方面作者通过这些意象的描写,进一步表明了华裔作家在找寻自身文化身份的过程中对母国文化的接受。     

Re-storying practice: Using stories about students to advance mathematics education reform

We apply a literary definition of story (struggle, protagonist, and resolution) to an American primary school teacher's reflections on experimenting with new teaching practices. This definition makes issues of equity explicit and revealed what the teacher saw as possible for changing her practice. By re-storying her stories – offering evidence from interviews, video, and surveys to affirm or complicate interpretations – we consider the power of storytelling to deepen commitments to reform and challenge skepticism. When done collaboratively between teacher educators and teachers, restorying could be a generative analytic process of learning from practice.     

The Ethnic Composition of Nursery Classes and its Effect on Children's Adjustment to Nursery

Teachers’ perceptions of how children had adjusted to school were collected from two groups of classes; one group had a 100% British White population, the other was made up of 26% British White, 54% British Asian, 15% British Afro‐Caribbean and 5% from other groupings. Results showed that the children in the multi‐ethnic classes, the girls and morning attenders were rated by the teachers as having settled significantly better than the British White sample, the boys and afternoon attenders. Possible causes for these findings could lie in the school induction policies, the social makeup of the groups, the teacher subjectivity in completing the schedule or the mix of children from different backgrounds on the one hand compared to the more monoethnic makeup on the other.     

Analysis of the Daughters' Process of Rediscovery in The Joy Luck Club

The Joy Luck Club, written by Amy Tan, has got a landslide winning when it was published in the year of 1989. It not only attracts the western readers but also the Asian ones. Amy Tan wrote this novel partly according to her own living experience. Her mother is the first generation and she is totally growing up in America. She herself does not have a good relationship with her mother when she was young. What we can tell from the Joy Luck Club. This paper will reread the novel from the feminism aspect about the four pair’s mothers and daughters, not only focusing on the daughters’ rebirth from their marriage but also on their rediscovering of themselves.     

高职院校思想政治理论课实践教学探究

社会实践教学是高职院校思想政治理论课教学的重要组成部分。本文首先探讨了加强高职院校思想政治理论课实践教学的重要性;接着对目前高职院校思想政治理论课实践教学存在的问题进行了分析;进而有针对性地对完善高职院校思想政治理论课实践教学提出了几点建议。