Peter novick and the “Objectivity Question” in history

Author's note: Like most of the historians I have encountered in my lifetime, I have always found what happened in the past more interesting than those who write about it. I therefore rarely spend time reading books about historians. But when I learned that Peter Novick had agreed to participate in the panel, I decided I should look at his book,That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession,¹ which is about historians, as opposed to about history as most understand that word. Even though Novick reneged on that commitment by withdrawing from the panel shortly before it was to take place, what I found in his book struck me as sufficiently disturbing to merit extended remarks. What follows here is based on those portions of my talk that bore on Novick's book.     

Re/writing the subject: a contribution to post-structuralist theory in mathematics education

This text, occasioned by a critical reading of Mathematics Education and Subjectivity (Brown, 2011) and constituting a response to the book, aims at contributing to the building of (post-structuralist) theory in mathematics education. Its purpose was to re/write two major positions that Mathematics Education and Subjectivity articulates: that which it takes with respect to (a) L. S. Vygotsky and the activity theory he gave rise to, which are subject and subjected to critique, and (b) Lacan and his theory of the subject, which radically change signification in and through their adoption in the book. Moving between languages becomes a major issue of theory building captured in the diction “traduttore, traditore” (translating is committing treason). The present text should be read as a contribution to an ongoing dialogue on theory, incomplete and partial, as (perfectly) imperfect as Mathematics Education and Subjectivity itself.     

Conference Interpreting Explained

This book written by Roderick Jones is easy to read for me.It gives me a bit confidence through reading a book and this time I know a bit about how to read a book quickly.After this,I will read more books about interpreting and translating for my further study.From my perspective,every part of this book consists of three parts,that is,the theory part,the examples part and the concluding part.Through reading this book,I know something about interpreting such as simultaneous interpreting techniques and some actual examples.Anyhow,I still need a lot of practice to improve my English capability.What I have written below is the main content of the fourth part in this book,and the feelings of my reading the book.     

Domestication and Foreignization of the Translation in Harry Potter

In this essay,I am going to do some research about the effect of the Domestication and Foreignization of the magic words' translation in Harry Potter.Harry Potter is my favorite book both in childhood and now.It is a series of fantasy novel written by British writer J.K.Rowling.It tells about the life of Harry Potter with his friend Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger.Domestication and foreignization are two ways in translation,regarding the degree to which translators make a text conform to the target culture.It is the translation made me feel the charm of the book.This book was my favorite book in childhood,and I really appreciate the translator's skills to translate this book.The essay includes spells,magic animals,magic items and names four parts.Each part is divided into Domestication and Foreignization two aspects.The research method of this essay includes comparative analysis,exemplification,induction and literature summarization.     

Harvey,Michael (2012) Interactional coaching Routledge (New York & London) isbn 978‐0‐415‐61472‐6 262 pp £17.99 http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415614726/

As the title makes clear, this is a book devoted to coaching—in this context, a one‐to‐one approach to development in which the coach, ideally an applied psychologist, identifies the needs of the coachee and pro‐actively sets out to prompt the coachee to perceive and address his/her needs regarding decision‐making and career choices, and to make these choices expeditiously. If you believe the content of this book is likely to be relevant to you, I advise that you will probably find only parts of it of interest or use. John Cowan     

Managing Endings in a Longitudinal Study: Respect for Persons

In this paper I describe and discuss the way that a book I had written on a five-year longitudinal study of school science teaching was received by the pupils and teachers it featured. By and large the pupils’ reception was positive. However, one group of teachers was deeply hurt by the book. I trace this mainly to my failure to consider adequately their fears of the consequences of the book’s publication and possibly to my failure to consider with them the psychological significance of my withdrawing from the school after five years of regular study. I hope that there are lessons not only for myself but also for others considering longitudinal and ethnographic research in science education and more broadly.     

Telling a tale: pieces of SMEC in my wind of memories

This article is a personal history of the Science and Mathematics Education Center (SMEC) in Perth, Australia, during my time there as a student. I make use of narratives to express what I see as the impact on my professional practice of having attended SMEC. I am grateful to SMEC, but what is being grateful really? In this paper I try to illustrate it, agreeing that while it is easy to start a thanksgiving text, I feel handicapped to capture all the greatness I am full of.     

Learning to teach: enhancing pre‐service teachers’ awareness of the complexity of teaching–learning processes

Abstract

Interest in story in teaching has been linked to teacher research (Carter, 1993; Elbaz, 1991), to teacher education (Connelly &; Clandinin, 1994), to curriculum (Britz‐man, 1989; Gudmundsdottir, 1991c), and to school change (Giltin, 1990). I wish to argue here for a link between story and one form of teacher reflection, for portfolio construction, unlike more conventional forms of teacher development, encourages teachers to tell the story of their classrooms and to frame that story in particular ways. I wish to argue here for a view that constructing a portfolio shifts the ownership of learning to the portfolio‐maker and that in this constructing, we can trace a teacher's developing understanding of pedagogy. Specifically, my aim is to illustrate the narrative dimensions of a self‐generated portfolio question — its interpretations, the reflections upon its meaning, and its transformations of pedagogical understanding — as this text becomes pedagogy and pedagogy becomes text. This interpretive process is illustrated through a case study of Ellen Nicol, a secondary English as a Second Language teacher, in her graduate teacher education year and her first 2 years of classroom teaching. Ellen's pedagogical text, her question, is reinterpreted with major changes each time she comes to understand more completely the richness and complexity of her classroom. Each new transformation and reinterpretation serve as guide for selection of materials, for selection of pedagogy, and for assessment of success. Each new collection of pedagogical information serves as impetus for possible reframing and transformation of the text.     

Exploring The Island: Mapping the Shifting Sands in the Landscape of English Classroom Culture and Pedagogy

I begin with an account of my own observation of an English lesson taught by one of my student teachers using a teaching resource, The Island, that I used myself as a new teacher more than 20 years ago and of my own responses on finding it transformed by two decades of change in educational policy and practice. It has become almost a given in academic articles on English teaching, to refer, in a sentence or two, to the reduction of the English curriculum, the narrowing of pedagogy and the loss of teacher agency due to the dominance of a high stakes assessment regime. The policy changes that have given rise to this change have been clearly analysed elsewhere, but part of my purpose here is just to look again at how it might be experienced by a particular pupil in a particular class. I am interested in analysing some of the features of The Island’s incarnation then and now, from three different angles: as it is inscribed in the project book, as I remember teaching it and as I observed it recently in a London classroom. I draw on theories of literacy and of the teaching of writing in particular in trying to account for some of the differences but beyond that, I argue that it is essential to link such theories to wider political debates about culture and to reflect back from this to the purposes of the English curriculum and culture of the English classroom.     

图书馆随书附盘的管理与利用

随书附盘已经成为现在出版图书的必备,为了使随书附盘这部分资源得到较好的利用与开发,图书馆应从购进、分类、著录、加整理及保管等诸多环节改进措施,提高管理与利用率。     

On being critical: uniting theory and practice through emancipatory action research

This paper engages with some of the specific issues that challenge critical practice. My argument is related to the Carr and Kemmis debate on ‘staying critical’ and to ideas expressed in my current book, Community Development: A Critical Approach. I refer to critical practice as any practice that has a transformative social justice intention, and which happens in a range of contexts from grassroots community activism to more institutionalised settings, such as hospitals or schools. My own professional base is community development, and this paper is founded on emancipatory action research developed over many years in grassroots practice. It is my view that emancipatory action research, committed to the practice of social justice, with the intention of bringing about social change, is a necessary component of critical practice. In fact, I would go so far as to say that emancipatory action research is the glue that binds critical praxis in a unity of theory and action. However, all too often collective action for change is not followed through to its greatest potential, and practice remains contextualised in the immediate, local and specific without making critical connections with the structural roots of oppression from which inequalities emanate. The result is that we constantly fixate on symptoms, and leave the root causes free to perpetuate oppressions. At the same time, we find ourselves in a globalised world marked by intensifying social divisions. So, it is my intention to raise a few issues which present challenges to get beyond sticking points in critical practice as we face times in which there is an accelerating urgency to ‘become critical’.     

What is policy? 21 years later: reflections on the possibilities of policy research

This paper is a reflection on What is policy? Texts, Trajectories and Tool Boxes, which was first published in 1993, in Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education. It looks back to what the 1993 paper was trying to do and at some of the developments of the ideas first sketched there in my later work, in particular in the book How Schools Do Policy (2012). It also considers the continuing tensions between domination and agency, discourse and text, in policy research and the misuse of the concept of discourse in some policy analysis work.     

中美几何教学理念和内容的比较

几何是中美2国学校数学课程的重要组成部分，2国几何教学存在重大差别．表现在：教学的目的存在差异，中国力图帮助学生打下坚实的学科基础，美国重视帮助学生构建宽广的学科视野；对学生能力的关注存在差异，中国重视推理论证能力，美国重视实验与猜想的能力．我们要学习国外优秀的教学理念，也要发扬本国数学教学的优秀传统．     

Burge,Elizabeth et al ed (2011) Flexible pedagogy,flexible practice Athabasca U Press (Edmonton,Canada) isbn 978‐1‐926836‐20‐1 348 pp cdn$34.95 (free download) http://www.aupress.ca/index.php/books/120203

Here is detailed advice to those who strive to enhance schools’ educational provision through the exercise of their leadership. This is a valuable text for such readers, one in which educational technology in its broad sense is implicit throughout. If the content of this book is likely to be relevant to you, I recommend that you buy a copy for your own use. John Cowan     

Drugs,discourses and education: a critical discourse analysis of a high school drug education text

This paper examines a high school drug education text using critical discourse analysis (CDA) to discern its underlying ideological commitments and political dispositions. I begin with an overview of CDA and why it is a suitable methodology for my work, and then provide a brief history of drug education in North America. Next, I consider some of the primary discursive features of a Canadian eighth-grade drug education teacher's manual called Making Decisions. I continue with a focused interrogation of a student ‘fact sheet’ on hallucinogens, and conclude with some educational implications of my research. Paying careful attention to features such as genre, syntax, interdiscursivity, and lexicalization, I question core assumptions made by both a drug education text and the broader medical, public health, legal and drug policy discourses from which it draws.     

新加坡与中国小学数学教材的比较研究

作为有着重要历史渊源的国家,新加坡和中国在许多方面存在比较借鉴的基础。数学教材是数学教学系统中的重要组成部分。新加坡小学数学教材《我的朋友在这里!数学》MyPals are Here!Maths(第二版)与中国小学数学教材(人教版)有着各自不同的特点,新加坡小学数学教材中弥补双基的不足、问题解决与数学教学相融合、教材的编写以综合的数学活动为基础等做法对中国小学数学课程和教学研究有一定的启示和借鉴意义。     

Philosophy of Science and Education

This is a vast and vague topic. In order to do justice to it one has to write a book or maybe more than one. For it can be understood in quite different ways and on different levels For example you may think mainly of the historical aspect, that is how philosophy of science developed in the last hundred or so years and how its influence on education changed; you may think of quite different schools of philosophy, from Marxist or positivist to such exotic but at some places influential philosophic positions like that of Rudolph Steiner; of course, you may limit the subject to special fields like epistemology, theory of scientific methodology, or, what has become fashionable recently, sociology of knowledge which may have a considerable bearing on physics teaching (Collins and Shapin 1983; Jung 1985). Again we may think of the topic treated by a philosopher, a scientist, an educationalist, a teacher, which would mean quite a difference. I am trying here to speak as an educationalist, with the physics teacher in mind: this is my vocational perspective as someone who educates physics teachers. Of course, our main concern is the contribution of science, especially physics, to general education, which integrates many of the special topics mentioned. Philosophy of science comes in because it is not at all clear what science and physics is, and what of it should be taught, and how such chosen parts should be taught. I also take this opportunity to give an idea of the longstanding tradition of this discussion in Germany, connected with names like Wagenshein, Litt, Heisenberg and many others.     

苗侗地区民族数学文化及其教育——读张奠宙《数学教育概论》的思考

《数学教育概论》是中小学数学教育教学的指导性读物,内容涉及教学实践和教育理论2部分,其中数学文化论述是重要的内容之一.苗族侗族地区有着丰富的文化遗产,它浓缩着2个民族的文化精髓,折射着民族的整个历史,蕴含有丰富的苗侗民族数学文化资源.拜读名著《数学教育概论》,认识数学文化的民族性、地域性,指导多侧面地开展数学文化研究,挖掘原生态民族数学文化,实施揭示数学文化内涵的地方性教育.