“What Do We Know about Elementary Social Studies?”: Novice Secondary Teacher Educators on Learning to Teach Elementary Social Studies Methods

This collaborative self-study examines the critical friendship of two doctoral students charged with teaching a methods course in elementary social studies. The authors formed a critical friendship in Fall 2010, initiated by participation in a teacher educator community of practice that encouraged collaboration. With limited experience in elementary education, the authors created a space to investigate the limitations and opportunities in teaching a course outside their educational expertise. The result was a space of support in three forms: pedagogical, affective, and intellectual. Pedagogical support was provided through the process of curriculum development and the sharing of classroom strategies, affective support resulted from the validation of feelings related to status and time, and intellectual support allowed the authors to uncover personal philosophies for teaching elementary social studies and to analyze how program structures influenced their instruction. Findings suggest that novice teacher educators could benefit greatly from critical friendships that may help them become more reflective and better navigate the process of learning to teach teachers. In addition, the authors found that critical friendships can minimize the feelings of being an outsider and allow for collaborative insights into the inner workings of teacher education.     

Did My Religious Education Teach Me to Hate My Family’s Religiosidad? An Autobiographical Analysis of My Religious and Theological Education

Abstract

This article begins with a brief autobiographical depiction of my religious education. It then charts the ways in which the inadequacies of that religious education caused me to treat my family's traditional religious expressions with suspicion rather than appreciation, undergirding coloniality as a phenomenon within my religious education. My graduate theological education helped to rectify this phenomenon, revealing important contributions for religious educators as a protection against the erasure of cultural identities.     

My Understanding on Michael Halliday’s Contribution to Syntactic Semantics

The essay attempts to summarize Michael Halliday’s contribution to the theory of syntactic semantics according to the author’s understanding. Starting from the origin of his ideas, the essay then explains what syntactic semantics means and the concept of transitivity system and several processes such as material processes, behavioural processes and mental processes. Finally, Halliday’s new ideas are described-namely the micro perspective of one part of the functional linguistics.     

What starts to happen to assessment when teachers learn about their children’s informal learning?

Classroom assessment practices are greatly influenced by national and local policies on assessment. Typically, these include accountability requirements for schools to evidence and report their students’ learning in the form of specific learning outcomes, calibrated against national benchmark standards of achievement and progression. An implication for teachers is that their understanding of children’s learning is influenced by an official curriculum that is more likely to be weighted towards particular policy priorities, and desired learning outcomes. This means the knowledge, skills and understanding that children develop outside school are less likely to be included in classroom assessment measures or judgments about desirable progress and achievement. This article explores what happens to teachers’ thinking when they learn about their children’s informal learning outside school and begin to relate to learners in a different way. The findings reported here from a New Zealand three-year longitudinal study identified possibilities for teachers to assess expanded conceptions of children’s learning within the classroom, even though the pressures of assessment against National Standards were ever present. We argue that teachers engaging with knowledge of their students’ informal learning act as a catalyst to rethink and re-conceptualise learning more broadly. Incorporating a strong student voice component in assessment, together with a focus on ipsative assessment, enables teachers to mitigate some of the unintended educational consequences of assessment accountability policies and practices.     

Freirean critical pedagogy’s challenge to interfaith education: what is interfaith? What is education?

Interfaith education has been boosted recently by the imprimatur of current and previous political world leaders. However, a critical analysis of what makes good interfaith education is yet to emerge. Indeed the attention may distract from the effort needed to ensure positive outcomes. This paper questions whether the uncritical nature of some interfaith education initiatives encourages the continuation of cultural and theological bias. Critical social theorist Paulo Freire viewed education as an opportunity for social evolution. His pedagogy of freedom relied on the idea that no knowledge is out of bounds and that such freedom nurtured the security to greet difference with humility. This paper examines some Australian approaches to interfaith education in light of Freire’s challenge. It questions the persistence of an Abrahamic skew and calls for a more critical approach to differences of belief.     

A Discursive Psychology Approach to English Learning Experiences Narrative: What’s Behind the Failures?

This article takes a discursive psychology approach to the analysis of Non-English major students’ English learning experience narrative. The students took part in my survey are those just say goodbye to the high school and are freshmen in college now. The English learning experience narrative is in a form of diary. Through the students themselves’ own point of views in recounting their English learning experiences, I want to find the reality hidden behind their failures in learning English. And hope this can give the most teachers who work for public English education in colleges or even universities some inspiration about teaching.     

The impact of significant others’ actual appraisals on children’s self-perceptions: What about Cooley’s assumption for children?

The aim of this paper was to study the construction of children’s self-perception relying on Cooley’s hypothesis. More precisely, we were interested in the mediation effect of significant others’ actual appraisal on self-perception by the perception of others’ actual appraisal (i.e., reflected appraisal). First, we argued that this mediation effect would occur in the domains where children have feedback from significant others (here teacher or parents). Second, we took into account two measures of reflected appraisal: reflected appraisal assessed in a classic fashion and appraisal social support assessed with Harter’s scale (1985b). We argued that reflected appraisal assessed in a classic fashion would be a better mediator of the effect of actual appraisal on self-perception by reflected appraisal in comparison to appraisal social support. In order to test these hypotheses, we conducted a study with 126 children (age 8–9), 106 parents and six teachers. The results, taken as a whole, support these hypotheses.     

“What’s So Terrible About Swallowing an Apple Seed?” Problem-Based Learning in Kindergarten

Problem-Based Learning (PBL), an instructional approach originated in medical education, has gained increasing attention in K-12 science education because of its emphasis on self-directed learning and real-world problem-solving. Yet few studies have examined how PBL can be adapted for kindergarten. In this study, we examined how a veteran kindergarten teacher, who was experienced with PBL in her own learning, adapted PBL to teach students earth materials, a topic emphasized in the new state curriculum standards but students had difficulty understanding. The pre-post tests showed that students improved their content understanding. Analysis of the classroom discourse showed that PBL and the teacher’s facilitation strategies provided opportunities for students to develop their questioning skills. In conclusion, we discuss the implications of this study for using PBL in kindergarten classrooms.     

“It’s My Place”: Student Perspectives on Urban School Effectiveness

This study investigated how graduates of an urban alternative school understood, interpreted, and compared their experiences in previous schools that they considered ineffective with their experiences at an effective alternative school. This study found that students find those schools effective that create or allow spaces where they can be empowered, leading to a sense of place. Students’ ownership or affinity to school spaces that lead them to refer to school as “my place” derived from school practices that were instrumental in promoting a sense of identification, commitment, integration, and alliances among students and faculty at the school. Based on the findings of the study, this article argues that for urban schools to be effective for students at risk, they not only need to focus on caring relationships and diverse learning experiences, they also need to create the space to foster a sense of “my place” for students.     

“What’s your favorite season?”教学设计

[本课选自仁爱版《英语》七年级下册Unit8,Topic1,SectionA.]一、教材分析本课主要教学内容是询问他人最喜欢的季节,了解每个季节的特征。教学重点是询问天气的句型,     

What is “Soap opera”?

"Soap opera"有一个很形象的中文名字,即"肥皂剧"。Soap opera是一种"以家庭问题为题材的广播节目或电视连续剧",以家庭妇女为主要观众,以家庭日用品商家为赞助商,以普通家庭的生活环境为舞台。     

“Pluto Has Been a Planet My Whole Life!” Emotions, Attitudes, and Conceptual Change in Elementary Students’ Learning about Pluto’s Reclassification

Learning about certain scientific topics has potential to spark strong emotions among students. We investigated whether emotions predicted students’ attitudes after engaging in independent rereading and/or rereading plus discussion about Pluto’s reclassification. Fifth and sixth grade students read a refutation text on Pluto’s reclassification. Participants were randomly assigned to either the reread independently or the reread plus discussion group. Results showed that students in both groups experienced attitude change and that change was sustained over time. Students reported experiencing more negative than positive emotions at pretest. Emotions, which became more positive after intervention, were predictive of students’ attitudes and attitude change. Implications for the role of emotions when learning about controversial topics are discussed.     

What is the Effect of Case-Based Learning on the Academic Achievement of Students on the Topic of “Biochemical Oxygen Demand?”

Research in Science Education - The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of the case-based learning (CBL) method used in “biochemical oxygen demand (BOD),” which is a...     

Only Familiar Information is a “Curse”: Children’s Ability to Predict What Their Peers Know

The ability to make inferences about what one’s peers know is critical for social interaction and communication. Three experiments (n = 309) examined the curse of knowledge, the tendency to be biased by one’s knowledge when reasoning about others’ knowledge, in children’s estimates of their peers’ knowledge. Four- to 7-year-olds were taught the answers to factual questions and estimated how many peers would know the answers. When children learned familiar answers, they showed a curse of knowledge in their peer estimates. But, when children learned unfamiliar answers to the same questions, they did not show a curse of knowledge. These data shed light on the mechanisms underlying perspective taking, supporting a fluency misattribution account of the curse of knowledge.     

What is on our children’s minds? An analysis of children’s writings as reflections of group‐specific socialisation practices

In the present study it has been examined how children’s creative writing tasks may contribute to teachers’ understanding of children’s values. Writings of 300 elementary school children about what they would do if they were the boss of The Netherlands were obtained and seemed to reflect different types of values. Most children were concerned with charity. Also, writings concerned materialist values and socio‐political topics, such as human rights, power and tolerance. Analyses of group‐specific differences showed girls to write more about charity and health when compared to boys. Children from low socio‐economic backgrounds wrote less about environmental issues compared to children from middle and high socio‐economic backgrounds. Children from ethnic minority backgrounds who wrote more about obtaining goods for themselves and less about environmental issues than Dutch‐origin children. In addition, age differences were found in line with an increase in social and moral development. These differences are discussed in light of differential socialisation practices.