Bring up the children: national and religious identity and identification in Dutch children’s historical novels 1848–c.1870

Historical fiction is a powerful way of transmitting national history to later generations. It emerged in the nineteenth century as a means of building identity and fostering solidarity. This article investigates Dutch historical novels for children. First, it explores the relation between educational ideas and historical novels for children, distinguishing between two groups of children’s novels: novels written in the spirit of ideas on national non-denominational education and novels opposing Christian neutrality in education, by glorifying orthodox Protestantism and inculcating combativeness and intolerance. Second, the literary strategies employed to relate history are analysed. Both groups of novels use the same strategies, such as fictional characters as figures of identification, narrators mediating between the present and the past, and restructuring the past in favour of a triumphant ending to the story. However, there is a striking difference in character development.     

Schools library services: their changing value to the education of London’s children

In the history of education Schools Library Services are relative newcomers. The London County Council and its successor, the Inner London Education Authority, developed Schools Library Services for their own schools from the 1950s onwards. After the Education Reform Act 1988 became law, responsibility for education passed to the inner London boroughs, but the setting up of local Schools Library Services was optional. This article reviews the significance of Schools Library Services in education as it is reflected in the decision‐making process of three boroughs – Hackney, Islington and City of Westminster. It discusses factors which influenced the establishment (or not) of Schools Library Services in all the new local education authorities, and relates elements of the case studies to wider themes in the political and educational environment of the time.     

Tradition and Innovation in the Practical Culture of Schools in Franco’s Spain

The paper reviews school practice in Spain through the long historic period of the dictatorship of Gen. Francisco Franco between the 1936 Civil War and Franco’s death in 1975. For this purpose, an analysis is made of the most relevant documents (school materials, reports, direct testimonies by practising teachers, scientific papers on education and education legislation) of each period of Franco’s Regime. Those different types of documents objectify, in accordance with Agustin Escolano’s terminology, three distinct modalities of school culture: the practical, experience‐based culture which is shaped and transmitted by teachers while practising their profession; the scientific culture, which is organized around the knowledge acquired from teaching speculation and research; and the political culture, which comprises political‐institutional discourses and practices that are translated into regulatory provisions supporting the formal organization of education. These three different cultures were supported by three different logics, which proved to be autonomous and at the same time interdependent during the long Franco period. The result will be a presentation of the different importance attached in school practice to tradition, teaching innovations, professional routines and changes.     

Replication and Pedagogy in the History of Psychology II: Fowler & Wells’s Phrenology

Phrenologists believed that specific brain regions corresponded to certain character traits. In addition, the size of each brain region was believed to determine the strength of the respective trait. Phrenology originated in Austria with Franz Josef Gall and was popularized and commercialized in America at the end of the 19th century by Orson Squire Fowler. In this project, we conducted a replication of Fowler’s phrenology in order to better understand the specificity of the manualized methodology, the extent to which the methodology allowed for positive versus negative analyses, and the implications for the scientific rejection and public acceptance of phrenology. The results of our replication revealed that the subjective judgments and biases of the examiner strongly influence the results of phrenological analyses. This project originated as a class assignment in the Spring of 2003 (Tweney, this issue). See Tweney (2004) for general information on historical replication.

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Braille,amma and integration: the hybrid evolution of education for the blind in Taiwan, 1870s–1970s

Industrialisation and mass education have long been considered two main determinants in the emergence of special education, but in many formerly colonised countries, such as Taiwan, historical development did not follow along these lines. In Taiwan, schools for the blind were initially set up by missionaries and colonisers, and were primarily designed to meet the latter’s preconceptions and needs. However, pedagogic knowledge and techniques were unexpectedly displaced and transformed as they crossed borders. This study examines the emergence and development of education for the blind in Taiwan from the 1870s to the 1970s. Documentary sources, government statistics and proclamations and oral histories were used in the analysis; they reveal how in Taiwan, education for the blind was shaped under different foreign and domestic influences within specific historical–social contexts.     

Infant Educators’ Use of Pedagogical Questioning: Relationships With the Context of Interaction and Educators’ Qualifications

Research Findings: This study investigated the prevalence of pedagogical questions posed by 27 early childhood educators as they interacted with infants in each of two naturally-occurring contexts: book-focused interactions and educator mediated play. The pedagogical questions expressed by educators to infants were coded as confirm (yes/no), specify (what, who, where, when) or explain (why, how) on the basis that these question types present infants with different opportunities to use their developing communication skills to provide information to others. We sought to determine associations between question use, activity context and educators’ qualification levels. Explain questions were used very rarely, while confirm and specify questions were more frequent, comprising 7.60% and 8.32% respectively of the messages expressed by educators to infants. A 2 (activity context) × 2 (qualification level) mixed factorial MANOVA, supplemented with post-hoc qualitative analyses, demonstrated that, in specific activity contexts, degree qualified early childhood teachers used pedagogical questioning in ways which differed from their less-qualified counterparts. Practice or policy: The findings provide much needed data on how educator questioning is used with children under two, how questioning affords context-specific language learning opportunities for infants in ECEC centres, and how educator qualifications may be implicated in these opportunities.     

The ‘New’ Free Senior High School Policy in Ghana: Emergent Issues and Challenges of Implementation in Schools

Interchange - Free secondary education remains limited in the developing world, where some 80% of 264 million children currently unable to access secondary education across 65 countries associated...     

Comparing conceptual text and documenting photos. Researching Outdoor Education in the Context of Reichwein’s Progressive Teaching and Rousseau’s Émile

ABSTRACT

This paper explores the historic ideas and practice of outdoor education, as developed in Jean Jacques Rousseau’s Émile, and realized by Adolf Reichwein's rural teaching practice. We aimed at developing a comprehensive research design, triangulating different qualitative data (text and photos). In the paper, we explore how the idea of place-based outdoor education unfolded in Rousseaús Émile, and how Adolf Reichwein, in rural Tiefensee, enacted the practice of place-based outdoor education. We also investigate how to correlate different types of qualitative data (conceptual text and documentary photos). We show that it is possible to develop a research language, revealing how a philosophy of education can be enacted as educational practice, and our analysis demonstrates that Rousseaús and Reichwein’s works functioned as precursors for outdoor education and educational concepts, that activate the cognitive, affective, and motoric domains.     

Fathers’ Role in Play: Enhancing Early Language and Literacy of Children with Developmental Delays

Fathers and paternal role models make a unique contribution to children’s development. There is some research to suggest that the types of play males engage in with children is typically more active and thus offers unique possibilities for embedding activities for language and literacy development. In this article, we offer suggestions for how preschool special education teachers can assist fathers and paternal role models as they work and play to enhance the language and literacy skills of their children through reading activities, dramatic play, and pretend or free play.     

Bridging a Cultural Divide Between Play and Learning: Parental Ethnotheories of Young Children’s Play and Their Instantiation in Contemporary China

Research Findings: The current study explored the ethnotheories of 6 Chinese families regarding their young children’s play in Shanghai, the most Westernized metropolis in China. A triangulation of multiple data sources was established through in-depth interviews, home visit observations, and 1-week recordings of child’s daily play activities. The empirical evidence revealed that the 6 families practiced eduplay (Rao & Li, 2009) with their young children, a Chinese version of play-based learning or a compromise between contemporary Western notions of child-centered play and the Chinese tradition of adult-directed academic training. Albeit with individual differences and varieties, parents’ ethnotheories were instantiated in the child’s daily settings for the provision of toys, the use of time in play and learning, and parents’ roles in the child’s play. However, some contextual constraints and barriers prevented the parents from fully putting the imported progressive educational beliefs into action. Practice or Policy: The changing and varying parental ethnotheories of play may reflect a paradigm shift in the early childhood education system, which has been jointly shaped by traditional Chinese beliefs and contemporary Western notions of appropriate practice. More implications of these findings are discussed against the backdrop of sociocultural changes in contemporary Chinese society.     

Rejecting Dialogue for Perspective: Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development and John Calvin’s Divine Pedagogy

James Estep's integration of Vygotsky's work on the Zone of Proximal Development into Christian education and pedagogy falls short of a distinctly evangelical form of integration. Using Ken Badley's schemata of Integration of Faith and Learning, this article distinguishes Estep's “paradigmatic” integration from a more thoroughgoing “perspectival” integration. Perspectival integration best displays the connections between Vygotsky's Zone of Proximal Development and evangelical thinking by using the divine accommodation of John Calvin, as described in the work of Arnold Huijgen.     

Dewey’s Link with Daoism: Ideals of nature,cultivation practices,and applications in lessons

This article explores the pedagogical implications of John Dewey’s claim that his definition of experience is shared by Daoists. It compares characteristics of experience with those in Daoism, and then considers the similarities and differences between key cultivation practices each proposes, focusing on the roles of the teacher and sage. My main reference to Daoism is the translation of the Daodejing by Roger Ames and David Hall, who use Dewey’s conception of experience to explain the character of Daoism. There are two facts that Dewey chooses to define experience and link with Daoism—what it is not, and what it is. Comparisons of these facts with Daoism support Dewey’s claim: both define the ‘what is’ as the principle of unity of opposites. While sharing this view, their proposals for its cultivation reveal similarities, but also some significant differences. The Daodejing gives the Daoist sage a major role to play in the cultivation process of other persons, as does Dewey for the teacher. However, unlike Dewey’s teacher who guides the process, the sage is to create a cultivating environment, thus allowing the sage to ‘let go.’ The Daoist practices offer new ideas to consider in the quest for experience in lessons.