Editorial

This article describes a collaborative action research process in pre-school and primary education in Spain during a four-year period (2006–2010). The aim was the need to promote a level of reflection among the participants as to their teaching practice. The methodology used was a technologically mediated action research process. The results are analysed based on the constructed meanings in the area of practice, innovation strategies used and the degree of collaboration reached in the research. Finally, conclusions are made regarding the essential need to prioritize the research and professional development of teachers in the innovative use of technology. It proved necessary to promote collaboration in action research in order to rethink and negotiate the use of technology in a social learning environment.     

浅谈多媒体技术在初中音乐教学中的运用原则

文章在总结了初中音乐教学的目标和教学重点的基础上,分析了多媒体技术运用于初中音乐教学的原则,以期对多媒体技术运用到初中音乐教学的实践有所帮助。     

Ethnographies across virtual and physical spaces: a reflexive commentary on a live Canadian/UK ethnography of distributed medical education

This article draws on an ongoing ethnography of distributed medical education (DME) provision in Canada in order to explore the methodological choices of the researchers as well as the wider pluralisation of ethnographic frameworks that is reflected within current research literature. The article begins with a consideration of the technologically mediated ways in which the researchers do their work, a way of work that is paralleled within the DME curriculum that forms the focus of the ethnography. The article goes on to problematise relationships amongst the researchers and between the researchers and the field of research, and to consider the ways in which methodological choices are mediated. In so doing, the article proposes an acceptance of methodological pluralism that is tempered by the need to acknowledge the sometimes-slight differences that distinguish ethnographic paradigms.     

Cascading the use of Web 2.0 technology in secondary schools in the United Kingdom: identifying the barriers beyond pre-service training

This paper reports on research that took place at two universities in the United Kingdom, over two years. The research focuses on the use of Web 2.0 technology, specifically blogs, with pre-service teachers, both during their university programme and the first year of teaching as full-time newly qualified teachers (NQTs). The purpose of this research was to add to a developing body of knowledge by identifying whether technology used by pre-service teachers during their training course can be cascaded into their practice once qualified. Key findings identify a number of enablers and barriers to cascading technology in the classroom; these include curriculum time, pupil skills and support. The research concludes that early professional support and development should continue during the early years of teaching and assumptions about new teachers as champions of cascading innovative use of Web 2.0 technologies into their practice as NQTs may be over-optimistic.     

混合式教学中作文同伴互评的应用研究

“互联网+”时代的到来,使得在线教学不仅仅在传统高校得到应用,在中小学教育教学中也萌发新芽。研究选取40名初一学生进行为期一学期的初中语文作文同伴互评混合式教学实践,探讨了混合式教学中作文同伴互评的应用。研究采用行动研究,以知识建构理论为指导,设计建构了以“观点为中心”的混合式教学中作文同伴互评的应用流程,以此改革初中作文教学。研究结果表明:作文同伴互评的混合式教学,有助于促进学生作文兴趣的提升;有助于促进学生作文水平的提高;有助于充实和延伸初中语文作文教学。研究是“互联网+”环境下信息技术与语文作文教学深度融合的一项应用,会对初中语文作文教学方式改革产生一定影响。     

基于虚拟仿真实验教学项目的工程实践

在全面实施“六卓越一拔尖”计划的进程中,工程实践教学对于提高高校理工科学生的专业素质尤其重要。虚拟仿真实验是专业与信息技术深度融合的产物,它突破了高校传统的实验教学模式,在工程实践教学中优势明显。文章主要分析了传统工程实验教学的局限性和虚拟仿真在工程实践中的优势,并分析了存在问题,提出了解决对策。     

iTEC: conceptualising,realising and recognising pedagogical and technological innovation in European classrooms

Innovation, a complex concept, underpinned a four-year pan-European research project designed to increase the effective use of technology in school classrooms. This article revisits evaluation data collected during the project and explores the challenges of conceptualising, realising and researching ‘innovation’. The authors describe how innovation was conceptualised, highlighting key issues, not all of which could be resolved in the project. The development of an approach to support teachers to change their practices facilitated the realisation of innovation in the classroom. This approach, through which researchers and national pedagogical coordinators worked with teachers to develop their teaching and learning practices with technology in potentially innovative ways, is outlined. Case study data are then used to exemplify how teachers and other stakeholders applied this approach and how they perceived innovation in practice within their own countries. Through a discussion of these cases, the article highlights the challenge of defining innovation in different country settings and, in turn, the complexity of identifying its occurrence. It concludes by proposing the next steps for similar research endeavours.     

Bundled or unbundled? A multi-text corpus-assisted discourse analysis of the relationship between teaching and research in UK universities

Creating and disseminating knowledge through research and teaching has long been regarded as the hallmark of the modern university. However, new university business models have called into question the ‘bundling’ of teaching and research, and sustained research on the relationship between teaching and research has found little evidence of an insoluble connection between the two activities. In this article, we explore the relationship between teaching and research from the perspective of universities’ institutional discourse. We use corpus-assisted discourse analysis to examine the relationship between research and teaching as presented in two sets of institutional texts currently influential in UK Higher Education: Research Excellence Framework environment statements and Teaching Excellence Framework provider submissions (a total of 2143 documents and 12,492,071 words). Our findings show that, while universities emphasise the value of research to their teaching, they do not always emphasise (or sometimes even decry) the influence of teaching on their research. We empirically evidence that, according to what universities themselves write in institutional texts, teaching and research are not always in a mutually beneficial entanglement, but often rather a one-way relationship in which research expertise and institutional prestige are used to bolster claims of teaching excellence. This has implications for the communication of both the vision and the purpose of a university in regulatory exercises and wider policy, but also speaks to the broader idea and practice of being a university in the twenty-first century.     

Teaching without a blackboard and chalk: conflicting attitudes towards using ICTs in higher education teaching and learning

This article, derived from a three-year ethnography of distributed medical education provision in a Canadian university, explores the ways in which information and communication technologies are used by teachers and students in their everyday work within technologically rich teaching environments. The environments being researched are two university campuses: a campus at the main university site and a satellite campus in a neighbouring province. The article seeks to contrast dominant, institutional discourses of technology use in higher education teaching with the everyday practices of staff and students. The article concludes that there is a gap between policy and practice in distributed education and that the teaching and learning experience and context of staff and students in different sites need to be analysed in depth, in terms of: whether the experience of learning across sites can be positioned as being comparable; the extent to which technology ameliorates learning and teaching; and understanding the work done by staff.     

Facilitating evidence-informed practice

This article draws on the notion of communal constructivism to explore its potential to frame and facilitate the development of evidence-informed practice. The explicit aspiration to nurture a research-informed workforce is prominent in discourse across policy makers, educational researchers and teacher professional groups in England; however, research evidence indicating how and why teachers might actually use research to inform their practice is limited. Furthermore, the vision for research engagement of itself is not necessarily shared between researchers and practitioners. This study examines the relationships between research and practice when academics and professionals work together. Drawing on data from the co-construction of an online research-informed guide for the teaching of English as an Additional Language (EAL), analysis highlights the complexities inherent in translating research into practice for different stakeholders. Discussion argues for the recognition of communal constructivism as a pedagogy of learning that can build understanding between researchers and practitioners for how practice might become research-informed.     

大学本科教学管理制度研究十年回顾

以社会变迁尤其是自1999年以来的高校大规模扩招为背景,研究者从文化、价值和制度分析等不同视角以及运用文献研究、案例研究和调查访谈等研究方法,对大学本科教学管理制度在促进教学、改善管理、提高质量等方面发挥的作用给予了客观的分析与评价,同时阐释了大学本科教学管理制度从形式到内容存在着的诸多局限。尽管如此,研究者对大学本科教学管理制度的整体性、系统性研究,尤其是对大学本科教学管理制度体系架构的研究,仍显得有些不足。     

高等院校的跨学科教学与创新人才培养

通过多年的跨学科创新人才培养的实践,我国各大高校在这一方面积累了丰富的经验,但是同时还存在着颇多的难题,在这种现实的驱使下,纷纷有研究者研究这些难题,并努力发展理论以便更好地指导实践。笔者充分调查牡丹江医学院跨院系科研项目管理现状并根据一些专家的推荐,选取牡丹江医学院的各跨学科科研机构做深入的案例研究,试图探讨跨学科创新型医学专业人才培养的必要性和可行性,以及一些具体的方法。     

Examining the role of technology-related policy and constructivist teaching belief on English teachers’ technology acceptance: A study in Chinese universities

This large scale study investigated the influences that technology-related policies and teachers’ constructivist teaching beliefs have on their intention to use technology in Chinese universities. Data were collected from 696 English teachers working in 59 Chinese universities. Five variables (subjective norm, constructivist teaching belief, perceived importance of policy, computer self-efficacy and voluntariness) were examined in this study. Results indicated that perceived importance of policy, constructivist teaching beliefs and subjective norm were significant antecedents of perceived usefulness. The relationship between subjective norm and teachers’ intentions to use technology was moderated by voluntariness. Besides perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use also had significantly influenced English teachers’ behavioural intention. Overall, the research model explained 69% of variance of teachers’ intentions to use technology. This study has the potential to enrich our understanding of technology acceptance in teaching by contextualising the study in the rarely researched English teaching context in Chinese universities. The findings from this study also provide suggestions for policy makers and teacher educators.     

“I don’t hide my feelings,even though I try to”: insight into teacher educator emotion display

This article addresses the issue of teacher educators’ emotion display when teaching and interacting with students. Little is known about this phenomenon in higher education generally, and teacher education specifically. An empirical study was conducted to address this gap by investigating teacher educators’ views on appropriate and inappropriate emotion display and its functions in the process of teaching. The study also examined how teachers used emotion regulation strategies to manage the intensity of their experienced emotions. The participants (six male, nine female) were from two public Australian universities and were all teaching first-year students in pre-service education. Data were collected through in-depth, semi-structured face-to-face interviews. Qualitative analyses revealed that these teachers viewed the open expression of positive emotions as an integral aspect of their teaching practice. In terms of negative emotions, they reported the criticality of controlling such experiences, and the occasional need to completely conceal them. Some reflected on the instrumental functions and conscious use of emotion display and emotion suppression. Findings are discussed in light of prior research; limitations of this exploratory study are addressed, and directions for future research are outlined.     

Learning Through Reflection in Mathematics Teacher Education

This article is written from our perspective as both researchers and mathematics teacher educators, and describes how our knowledge has grown as we engage concurrently in both teaching and research. Reflection-on-action is a means for us of approaching the relationship between theory and practice that comes out of the development of our work as researchers and mathematics teacher educators. The article presents the different steps we have identified in the relationship between theory and practice during our professional development. In the discussion, we examine the whole sequence of steps showing what we have learnt. Afterwards, we use the sequence of activity of the reflective process as a framework in which we can operate and reflect about our own development.     

Educational psychology: Practice what we teach! 1

This paper questions three fundamental assumptions which have permeated our thinking and have hampered the teaching of educational psychology especially in the instruction of prospective and current teachers. Beliefs that to know good is to do good, that the good teacher is a junior educational psychologist, and that applied researchers are nothing more than academic blue collar workers are examined in light of current practice and empirical research. In lieu of substantiated relationships between teacher behavior and student behavior, traditional approaches to the teaching of educational psychology flourish. The article concludes with the idea that competency‐based teacher education programs afford educational psychologists the best opportunity to practice what they teach.     

信息技术与物理探究型新授课的深度整合模式研究——压强教学设计

随着素质教育的发展和教育信息化的推进,信息技术与课程整合作为一种新的教学模式正日益受到广大教师的关注。虽然对整合问题,专家和学者有大量的研究理论,但是与具体学科的整合实践理论和实施策略的研究还不够深入和全面。着力探讨信息技术与初中物理探究型课型整合的模式,并提供教学实践案例供大家参考。     

越南留学生汉语学习策略与HSK成绩的关系

大多数越南留学生来华学习的目的是要通过HSK考试,进入中国高校进行学历阶段的学习。我们用SILL量表对其汉语学习策略进行了调查,并用SPSS软件分析了学生学习策略使用及其HSK成绩的数据,发现越南留学生在汉语学习策略的运用上不积极。把学生分为高、中、低分三组深入分析,结果高分组学生倾向于独立学习;中分组学生在学习策略使用上存在不确定性;低分组学生消极合作的学习策略影响他们取得好成绩。我们还就此分析结果对教师们提出了若干教学建议。     

Humanising Writing centre Practice: Peer tutor Reflections at a University of Technology

Abstract

Traditionally, universities of technology (UoTs) have focussed on education to prepare students for the workplace. The Durban University of Technology (DUT) is currently undergoing a pedagogical transformation with the inclusion of a general education curriculum that aims to prepare students for an increasingly complex globalised work environment. This critical paradigm shift in curriculum design foregrounds new ways of teaching, thinking and learning based broadly on humanistic principles. Writing centres in universities are positioned to sustain a teaching and learning environment in which students grow as critical citizens. This article reports on research that explored – through the thematic analysis of tutor reflections – how a humanising pedagogy underpins a responsive writing centre practice within the changing South African context. Thematic analysis of the tutors’ reflections revealed their self-awareness of the significance of communities of practice in their work. These communities of practice could be seen to cultivate a humanising pedagogy within writing centre work, which might contribute to the aesthetic, socio-political and cultural environments in which students live and work.     

基于网络环境下的初中英语阅读课教学实践探索

本文将计算机网络技术引入初中英语的阅读教学中,运用网页的形式来设计阅读教学。以阅读课文Life on Mars为例,探索通过网络技术真正改变了传统的英语阅读教学模式。教学实践表明,网络环境下的阅读教学能提高学生的阅读能力,增强课文理解能力,特别是提高了课堂教学效率和培养了学生运用信息技术的能力。