Lessons from Magic for the Field of Performance Improvement?

How do you introduce creativity into an organization that is built to be industrial, resilient, and prone to consistency and volume—one that is keen on preserving the spirit of its traditions and has barely changed since its debut in 1964 at the New York World's Fair? (Kuang, 2015 ).     

Démarches individuelles de réponse en mathématique

Sans résumé     

L'histoire de l'éducation au Brésil: traditions historiographiques et processus de rénovation de la discipline

Since the end of the 1980s, Brazilian histoty of education bas been redefined by new historiographical currents. The process of redefinition has taken on particular characteristics because of theoretical and institutional factors involved in the evolution of the discipline as afield of research. The new trends run counter to the historiographical model that dominated the post‐graduate programmes in education of the main Brazilian universities since the 1970s. This model originated in the 1930s and 1940s with the publication of reference works for educational history research. The present essay examines the process of reconfiguration of the discipline with a view to evaluating the restrictions that were imposed upon it.     

Can we administer the scholarship of teaching? Lessons from outstanding professors in higher education

Boyer’s call for the study of the “scholarship of teaching” has rekindled interest in outstanding teaching in higher education. However, most studies of teaching quality and student experiences in higher education have paid little attention to intense, meaningful key experiences and were limited in answering the pertinent question: Can universities administer excellent instruction? The current paper attempts to answer this question by providing exploratory evidence of key experiences in higher education. It is based on evidence from a large qualitative study of such episodes, using retrospective accounts provided by adults who speak about their best educational experiences in higher education. The results are grouped under three major thematic headings. The first describes the centrality of personalized student–teacher relations. The second focuses on the ways in which identification and integrity provided students with models to emulate; and the third tells of excellence in the skills of teaching. These results point that the administration of the scholarship of teaching is an intricate endeavor.     

Lessons from a master: Montaigne’s pedagogy of conversation

There remains much to be learned from searching exploration of the great authors who have meditated on education. Montaigne is one such thinker and this essay endeavors to draw together the strands of his pedagogy and to demonstrate how they gain purchase in the business of teaching and learning. The article also proposes to supplement his vision with practical examples from fiction and autobiography. Perhaps the most striking theme is the need to be able to decentre from the comfort zone of acquired beliefs and convictions and the crucial role played by conversation in cultivating the intellectual and moral openness in order to do so. At the heart of Montaigne’s writing on education is what can be called a pedagogy of conversation.     

Possibilities in the Boy Turn? Comparative Lessons from Australia and Iceland

Recognising that there is now a globalised educational discourse about “failing boys” circulating in the privileged nations of the global north, this article provides a comparative perspective on educational policy responses to the “boy turn” in Australia and Iceland. Specificities of the responses to the boy turn in the two societies offer interesting insights into this policy domain. For instance, Australian policy has been state‐centric with the media playing a significant role in backlash politics and with federal government funding interventions for boys, and Iceland was the only nation in which girls outperformed boys in all areas of mathematics in the PISA 2003 study. The article concludes by arguing the need for a renewed feminist and profeminist agenda to challenge dominant constructions of masculinity and for the establishment of a more equal gender order.     

From lofty ideals to painful failures： Lessons from the rapid expansion of higher education in Taiwan

For the past few decades, many countries have been giving increasing stress on expanding their higher education system, in the belief that greater access to higher education will bring abundant rewards in the era of globalization and knowledge-based economies. Taiwan is no exception. Between 1986 and 2006, the government of Taiwan dramatically expanded the number of higher educational institutions from 28 to 147, expecting that this action would enhance educational equity and lead to greater economic prosperity. Popularization, however, does not necessarily result in equity. To be sure, the increase in the number of institutes of higher education in Taiwan has made it possible to accommodate almost all interested students. Yet, because the government has failed to make commensurate increases in public funding for higher education, the quality of university education in Taiwan has seriously deteriorated. Moreover, since many students from poor families still cannot afford the increasingly expensive cost of higher education, neither equity nor equality of opportunity has been achieved. In light of this phenomenon, this article focuses on： （1） describing the changes which Taiwan＇s higher education system has undergone over the past two decades; （2） examining the equity issues relating to higher education in Taiwan; and （3） putting forth some suggestions which Taiwan＇s policy makers can use to address the problems which have arisen as a result of the expansion of higher education.     

Regulating the unthinkable: Bernstein’s pedagogic device and the paradox of control

Drawing upon Bernstein’s writings on the pedagogic device, this article examines how critical thinking is regulated in Singapore through the process of pedagogic recontextualization. The potential of critical thinking to speak to alternative possibilities and notions of individual autonomy as well as its assumptions of a liberal arrangement of society are problematized in Singapore. By documenting how such curricular discourses are articulated by the state and taken up in schools and classrooms, the article provides a sociological account of the relations between the organization of knowledge and the distribution of social power and control. The analysis reveals that even as official understandings of critical thinking are transmitted in the classroom, alternative, non-official orders of meaning are inevitably made available. Showing how teachers and students act to resist and challenge these prescribed understandings the article argues that the very ideas of change and indeterminacy are fundamentally built into the pedagogic device.     

Approche des statistiques en classe de sixième: Analyse de résultats sportifs

Sans résumé     

Jean Vigo’s Zéro de conduite and the spaces of revolt

In this article we will contribute to the contemporary theoretical debate about film by considering, from a history-of-education perspective, the film Zéro de conduite by Jean Vigo (1905–1934). This film is classified under the umbrella of “poetic realism”: a product of cinéma de gauche and an avant-gardist, surrealist and anarchist-catalogued film by a film-maker described by many as very talented and creative. The paper is divided into five parts. In the first part we sketch Vigo’s own biography and the social biography of the film. The second section documents the response to the film both at the time of its release and subsequently. In the third section we explore anarchist ideas about education both in theory and practice. In the fourth section we use this understanding to analyse the film. The final section returns to the question of film as an underused resource and the possibilities of bringing new elements into historical practice.     

Managing the paradox of control: the case of ground-up implementation of active learning in Singapore’s primary schools

The Singaporean education system has recently shifted emphasis from being highly centralised and standardised towards one that aims to promote innovation and autonomy at the school level. Yet, the concomitant move towards a more decentralised and flexible curriculum enacted and controlled at the local level has not been straightforward. Consequently, Hargreaves, Shirley, and Ng have described five paradoxes of educational and social change that characterise Singapore’s continued performance in academic achievement. One of these paradoxes is the paradox of control: How could the Ministry of Education (MOE) release classroom decision making and curriculum development to teachers and schools, while maintaining overall control across the system? They respond that the MOE maintains a fine balance characterised as bottom-up innovation with top-down support that requires further investigation. In this paper, we illustrate the implementation of an active learning curriculum in four primary schools to illustrate this approach of ‘top-down support for bottom-up’ curricular innovation in schools. In Singapore, the ‘Teach Less, Learn More’ movement has ignited school-based development of innovative curricula to bring about active learning, with the intention of developing pupil attributes such as creativity, collaboration, and self-confidence. Our case study explores how practitioners implement a curriculum that is meant to nurture a more emancipatory spirit in students that builds up their confidence and collaboration through active learning. A key premise is that such a curriculum requires practitioners’ autonomy to interpret the goals and desired outcomes and to plan their pupils’ learning experiences.