Rhetoric and Power: The Idealism and ‘Philosophy of Life’ of the Olympic Movement

In this article we analyze from a multidisciplinary perspective some of the philosophical foundations which underpin the theories on Olympism fostered by the current Olympic institutions. We start from the theory that Olympist idealism1 is based on social representations of the modern sport, implicit to which is the ideological justification for the political and social practices of the Olympic Movement (OM) regarding the various historical episodes in which it has been caught up. This idealism has shaped an inherited view of the sport which has moved beyond the ambit of the OM and into the realm of sports science, which has adopted and continues to adopt some of the postulates of the Olympist discourse when undertaking a critical review of the Olympic history and philosophy.     

Educational leadership and culture in China: Dichotomies between Chinese and Anglo-American leadership traditions?

This article explores the extent to which Chinese school leaders espouse dichotomous or integrated Chinese and Anglo-American leadership and management preferences. Data are drawn from questionnaires completed by school leaders and from semi-structured interviews with individual school leaders from different parts of China. The exploratory study shows that Chinese school leaders perceive a coexistence of Chinese and Anglo-American leadership and management values, rather than the domination of one over the other. The findings suggest that it is important to understand the impact of national cultures on leadership and management. Differences between Chinese and Western culture and leadership and management are open to the challenge of stereotyping, and should not be over-stressed, as school leaders are working in an increasingly interconnected and interdependent world, and are exposed to and socialized into cultures of a multileveled polity ranging from the school to the local, national, and even global levels.     

Students’ Ideas about How and Why Chemical Reactions Happen: Mapping the conceptual landscape

Research in science education has revealed that many students struggle to understand chemical reactions. Improving teaching and learning about chemical processes demands that we develop a clearer understanding of student reasoning in this area and of how this reasoning evolves with training in the domain. Thus, we have carried out a qualitative study to explore students reasoning about chemical causality and mechanism. Study participants included individuals at different educational levels, from college to graduate school. We identified diverse conceptual modes expressed by students when engaged in the analysis of different types of reactions. Main findings indicate that student reasoning about chemical reactions is influenced by the nature of the process. More advanced students tended to express conceptual modes that were more normative and had more explanatory power, but major conceptual difficulties persisted in their reasoning. The results of our study are relevant to educators interested in conceptual development, learning progressions, and assessment.     

Old Educational Ideas,New American Schools: Progressivism and the Rhetoric of Educational Revolution∗

Drawing on books and essays of prominent progressive educators, this essay seeks to identify key elements that should be included in a working definition of progressive education. Such a definition is crucial for determining the degree of influence progressive ideas have had on American schools. The essay looks at how these ideas appear to have influenced the designs of a number of highly visible "whole-school reform" programs in the United States, programs that are perhaps the leading educational reform effort in the United States today. The essay then assesses how effective these programs have been in boosting student achievement. The essay concludes by speculating that the oft-used rhetoric of educational revolution, which was employed by early progressive educators and by later whole-school reformers, is a serious obstacle to genuine improvement in educational policy and practice.     

儿童为什么学编程？——Mindstorms:Children,Computers,and Powerful Ideas一书的启示

最近几年,包括中国在内的许多国家又重新提出要普及儿童编程活动。儿童为什么要学编程、是否能够学会编程、应该怎样学习编程,再次成为参与和推动儿童编程事业的人士需要思考和回答的问题。在MindStorms一书中,作者佩珀特从两个方面阐述了儿童为什么要学编程:一方面是分析、论述儿童应该采用的学习方式,顺带批判学校教育破坏了儿童天生所具有的学习能力,伤害了儿童的学习自信;另一方面阐述了计算机不仅对人类的思维加工过程有工具性影响,而且它还会影响人类的基本思考方式,如使用计算机创造的微世界可以让儿童学习的天性得以发挥,从而全面改善儿童与学习相关的人与事的关系。     

The Anthropogenic ‘Greenhouse Effect’: Greek Prospective Primary Teachers’ Ideas About Causes, Consequences and Cures

This study explores the ideas of Greek prospective primary teachers about the anthropogenic greenhouse effect, particularly about its causes, consequences and cures. For this purpose, a survey was conducted: 265 prospective teachers completed a closed-form questionnaire. The results showed serious misconceptions in all areas (causes, consequences and cures). The most prominent misconception found by this survey is the conflation between the greenhouse effect and the ozone layer depletion, which is widely reported in the literature. There is also the notion that ??good things?? (like clean beaches) can help ameliorate the greenhouse effect, whereas ??bad things?? (like insecticides) can enhance it. One of the secondary results of the survey is that prospective teachers?? main source of information about the greenhouse effect is school. This calls for educational interventions to fight misconceptions at the source. Some suggestions are presented in this paper. The results of this study are compared with the results of two similar studies conducted in the UK and in Turkey.     

James Hutton’s Geological Tours of Scotland: Romanticism,Literary Strategies,and the Scientific Quest

Rather than focussing on the relationship between science and literature, this article attempts to read scientific writing as literature. It explores a somewhat neglected element of the story of the emergence of geology in the late eighteenth century—James Hutton’s unpublished accounts of the tours of Scotland that he undertook in the years 1785–1788 in search of empirical evidence for his theory of the earth. Attention to Hutton’s use of literary techniques and conventions highlights the ways these texts dramatise the journey of scientific discovery and allow Hutton’s readers to imagine that they were virtual participants in the geological quest, conducted by a savant whose self-fashioning made him a reliable guide through Scotland’s geomorphology and the landscapes of deep time.     

American cultural diplomacy and post-war educational reforms: James Bryant Conant’s mission to Italy in 1960

This paper, largely based on new, previously unused documents from US archives, considers the consultancy group financed by the Ford Foundation in 1960 to support the school reforms the Italian Minister of Education Giuseppe Medici was promoting. The group was headed by James Bryant Conant, and its evaluations were based on principles of ‘meritocratic’ democratisation: universal access to comprehensive lower secondary school should have been accompanied by ‘cooling out’ mechanisms at subsequent levels. Conant’s suggestions were ignored. In 1962, the new Scuola media was established thanks to a compromise between the Christian Democrats and the Socialists, and was founded on uniform treatment and equal outcomes rather than equal starting points in competition. In spite of this, the Italian experience was subsequently used within the Ford Foundation to integrate Conant’s ideas in their strategies for international programmes, and gave birth to planning studies for national education requirements based on manpower needs.     

Commentary — Motor Learning: Theory and Practice

The reconceptualization of sex role classification to include psychological androgyny is presented. An explanation of this concept is followed by a summary of related research and a critique of instruments which purport to assess sex role orientation. The implications of the results of sex role research for athletics as well as future directions in such research are discussed. The discussion centers on the difficulties encountered in the implementation of the theoretical construct of androgyny to the athletic setting.     

Teachers’ Ideas About the Nature of Science: A Critical Analysis of Research Approaches and Their Contribution to Pedagogical Practice

This paper looks into research aimed to elicit teachers’ ideas about science through the development of resources as questionnaires, problematic tasks and interviews. It is focused on how those ideas are conceptualised and how such conceptualisations have been reflected in the methodological approaches adopted and the advantages and disadvantages of research instruments. This analysis suggests four broad categories to group studies considering substantially different perspectives on teachers’ knowledge. Drawing upon the general finding that teachers tend to develop stereotypical views connected to science, there is an attempt to respond to the question of why such views are not sustainable from an educational point of view. A salient conclusion is that the large majority of such research remains marginal in informing pedagogical practice and faces serious conceptual and methodological challenges. It is also claimed that those studies adopting pedagogical embedded view of ideas about science do illuminate the way forward. The paper ends with a discussion on the implications of teachers’ images of the world of science in their practice.     

Sensing the realities of English middle-class education: James Bryce and the Schools Inquiry Commission, 1865–1868

This paper explores the contribution of James Bryce as an Assistant Commissioner to the Taunton Commission from 1965 to 1868. It highlights his criticisms of the English middle class and of middle-class education represented in the endowed grammar schools of Lancashire, England. These criticisms were based partly on finely detailed observation of the buildings of these schools in their local and geographical settings. They also drew on acutely developed responses of a sensory and emotive nature relating to a broad sensory register of sight, sound, taste, touch and smell. The paper therefore helps to develop the potential value of sensory history in the history of education well as to provide a detailed examination of middle-class education in England in the 1860s. It also suggests that the realism characteristic of mid-Victorian writing and art may help to shed further light on the nature and experience of schooling in this period.