Re-visioning from the inside: getting under the skin of the World Bank’s Education Sector Strategy

This paper uses the device of imagining Education personnel at the World Bank engaging in study and discussion that causes them to rethink their 1999 Education Sector Strategy document. The Bank’s educators discuss issues that lead them to see that the World Bank’s assumptions of human capital theory are deficient. Having studied the severe limitations in the effectiveness of the education reforms of several countries, they admit not only that the education model being promoted by the Bank is flawed, but also that its preferred paradigm of modernist development is unsustainable. Thanks to the program of study and reflection, Bank educators decide to meet the challenge of reinventing themselves as educators collaborating with their national clients in developing new paradigms in which both creative education and sustainable development can flourish.     

美国教育创客空间的发展逻辑、核心议题与未来展望

伴随着创客运动的繁荣,教育创客空间已然成为推进创客教育、培养创客思维的基础物理空间。在基于创客教育已有研究的基础上,结合《美国教育创客空间全国报告》的相关内容,本研究认为美国教育创客空间的发展过程中存在着三个核心议题:创客空间活动设计的公平性与包容性发展、创客空间课程设计潜在的隐性偏见和创客社群中的文化塑造问题。展望未来,美国教育创客空间的设计者应首先考虑为全体学生营造创客学习的氛围,创设无边界、无限制的创客空间学习环境,而并非选择特定的设备或项目;新的创客空间建设者要侧重最大化地开放创客空间,尽可能地拓宽与创客社群的合作与分享。     

师范生创客能力培养的路径、困难及其对策

师范生创客能力培养关系儿童创新能力发展,意义重大。当前我国师范生创客能力培养虽然在创客空间的建设、大学生创新创业项目等方面取得了一定的成绩,但是总体效果还远不能满足基础教育的现实需求,尤其是在创客空间建设、创新创业项目实施两项创新能力发展举措上还存在不足。当前师范生创客能力培养面临的根本问题是校园创客教育生态建设缺位,主要表现为如何提升师范院校创客教师队伍整体素养、如何有效选择和组织创客教育内容以及设计培养计划、如何让创客教育发展得到持续支持等。针对这些问题和困难,在未来的师范生创客教育中需要进一步加强创客教育理念宣传推广,加强课程建设,加强师资队伍建设,加强创意实践训练、强化实践技能,改革创客空间运作机制及项目申报机制。     

Multimodal Hip Hop Productions as Media Literacies

Abstract

This study draws on ethnographic data from a year-long multimodal media production (MMP) course and the experience of an African American female adolescent who used the production of multimodal Hip Hop texts to express her creativity and growing socially conscious view of the world. The study demonstrates how students made meaning multimodally and how media production, in combination with participating in community-based research, provided powerful opportunities for youth to develop new literacies, especially critical media literacies.

[Supplementary materials are available for this article. Go to the publisher's online edition of The Educational Forum for the following free supplemental resources: Figure 1 and Figure 2, which show pictures of Gina and her group, the lyrics to the raps, gestures used with the raps, and other pertinent information.]     

Literacy,achievement and success in a Māori tourism certificate programme: reading the world in order to read the word

ABSTRACT

This article critiques international assessment of adult literacy using research findings from students completing a Māori tourism certificate who achieved significant gains in assessment. It is argued that the focus of literacy assessments potentially forces educators to narrow their teaching and learning approaches, manoeuvring them into teaching toward singular or convergent literacy. This leads to utilising teaching and learning strategies drawn from the cultural and social capital of the dominant culture, which is problematic for students without abundance of such capital.

Blending Kaupapa Māori research theory with appreciative inquiry, research revealed that students made significant gains in assessment scores because their educators acknowledged and utilised ways in which they made sense and meaning of their world. Educators drew upon the social and cultural capital of students and engaged them as partners in culturally based teaching and learning processes. Relating to students’ multiple literacies, and the contexts with which they bring meaning to their world in this way, is referred to as drawing from divergent literacies.

This study proposes a need to develop and research alternative ways for improving convergent literacy outcomes. It is suggested that multiple interventions using multi-modal and 360° approaches need to occur simultaneously for best outcomes.     

高职院校开展创客教育的价值及策略探析

转变办学理念,提升文化精神,培养具有创客特质的技能型人才,提高大学生综合素养,深化教育教学改革,要求高职院校在创客教育上主动作为。高职院校开展创客教育,需要重视创客空间与创客队伍建设,促进创客教育评价及创客成果转化,利用项目化教学、翻转课堂、产学研一体化等实现创客教育与专业教育的融合。     

跨学科视域下学生创客大赛的现状、问题与改进

学科与竞赛相结合是创新融合新阶段人才培养的重要方式。创客大赛属于\"跨学科实践型\"竞赛。文章在跨学科视域下探讨学生创客大赛的现状,分析创客大赛存在的问题:跨学科创新主题偏重理科知识,人文方面有待加强;团队跨学科合作偏重形式,异质性内容耦合不足;学生跨学科创新意识强烈,跨学科创新能力薄弱;跨学科竞赛区域发展不平衡,跨学科课程体系建设亟待加强。针对以上问题,文章从学生、学校、社会三个层面提出改进策略:学生综合运用跨学科知识,从\"跨学科阅读-跨学科思维-跨学科实践\"三个维度形成解决复杂问题的方案;学校充分引导师生参与跨学科创客大赛;社会营造创客大赛的跨学科文化氛围。     

中小学创客教育课程现状调查及对策建议——以宁波市为例

在中小学信息技术课程全面改革的背景下,创客教育已成为信息技术课程改革发展的一个新趋势。当前,国内中小学创客教育普遍存在课程体系缺乏、教材短缺、课程单一及考评机制不健全等问题。为此,根据创客情境学习理论的教育思想,以宁波市中小学创客教育为例,归纳总结宁波市中小学创客教育重比赛轻教学的特点,并提出打造规范化的课程体系、开发标准化的课程教材、设计多样化的教学活动和构建多元化的评价机制等方面建议。     

A crisis of professional identity: How primary teachers are coming to terms with changing views of literacy

As definitions of literacy become reconceptualised, so too do constructions of the primary teacher's identity. This study analyses the discourses that emerged from interviews with a group of Australian primary teachers who talked about their reactions to teaching media. Teachers who embraced this area of learning had a more futures-oriented view of their identity. However, there were still teachers who retained a more traditionalist perception of their role, including some who viewed teaching media as an unnecessary burden. These contrasting perspectives suggest that a crisis in identity will remain unless the boundaries that separate conventional literacies from new literacies can be challenged.     

Against methodocentrism in educational research

Abstract

This essay defines and critiques ‘methodocentrism’, the belief that predetermined research methods are the determining factor in the validity and importance of educational research. By examining research in science studies and posthumanism, the authors explain how this methodocentrism disenables research from taking account of problems and non-human actants that are presumed to be of no importance or value in existing social science research methodologies, both qualitative and quantitative. Building from a critique of these methods as profoundly anthropocentric, the authors examine three crucial problematics in which methodocentrism functions in educational research: the institutionalization of graduate training, a wide-spread privileging of the visual (part and parcel of empiricism), and the seeming necessity of ‘data’ in social scientific research methodologies. Ultimately, this article does not reject the necessity of particular studies having methods—rigorous, philosophically grounded approaches to problems in the world—but it argues that the belief that methods must be selected from existing options and assembled before approaching the ‘objects’ of study is not only a form of bad science, it is also deeply implicated in anthropocentric and colonialist politics. Instead, what research requires today is a thorough rethinking of the very distinction between subject and object and a renewed questioning of how agency functions in specific research settings.