LINKÖPING: 33RD MEETING OF THE COUNCIL OF EUROPE COMMITTEE FOR HIGHER EDUCATION AND RESEARCH

The 33rd Meeting of the Council of Europe Committee for Higher Education and Research (CHER) was held in Linköping (Sweden) from 12 to 14 May 1976. The main points of discussion were the following: - the position of modern language lectors abroad;

- the setting up of advisory committees for medical and pharmaceutical edu.cation;

- multi-media distant study systems;

- admission to tertiary education (early selection at secondary-school level, attitudes of students and parents as a result of new admission rules, role of working life experience in admission, consequences for higher education resulting from new admission rules);

- financial aid to students;

- education in science and technology and research careers (attitudes to the study of science and technology, ageing of the research population);

- teacher education (creation of an association for teacher education in Europe, current trends);

- situation of and trends in tertiary education;

- progress report of the Secretariat . (special project mobility, equivalence of diplomas, curriculum re- o form and development);

- CHER programme of work for 1977 and 1978.

     

The conflicts and contradictions of working in a mass higher education system

Education must be a force for opportunity and social justice, not for the entrenchment of privilege. We must make certain that the opportunities that higher education brings are available to all those who have the potential to benefit from them, regardless of their background (DfES, 2003 Department for Education and Skills. 2003. The Future of Higher Education, London: The Stationery Office. Cm 5735 [Google Scholar] : 67).

We will continue to widen participation in higher education and encourage students of all backgrounds with academic potential to go to university (Queen’s Speech, 15 November 2006).     

Charles Sturt University Extended Practicum Program: Deliberative and Serendipitous Learning

Two recent trends in teacher education in Australia have been partnerships and internships or extended practica. Both of these trends are underpinned by a recognition of the importance of site‐based learning as part of teacher education and professional development. Whilst many extended practicum programs in Australia are in their infancy, it is worth examining the grounds on which they were established and the opportunities they provide for the participants. This paper is concerned with an Extended Practicum Program (EPP) that is based on a partnership between Charles Sturt University in Wagga Wagga, the New South Wales Department of School Education (NSW DSE) and the New South Wales Teachers Federation (NSW TF).     

Iconology and Education: Notes on the Iconographic Representation of Education and Related Terms

In spite of the educational importance of the history of imagery, the range of available images and that of ways of seeing, historians of education have not troubled themselves about the uses of imagery and the attempts to impose one image or representation rather than another upon any given area. In this paper I first comment on those characters and objects most frequently put forward by iconographic conventions and employed to represent concepts and ideas connected to education, as well as those used to stand for the word education itself. Thereby, I try to draw attention not only to the various iconographie conventions, but also to their sources, to the concepts and ideas underlying given representations and to the general use of a feminine personification in order to represent education and other related terms.

This preference for a feminine personification in different modes is analyzed starting principally from the famous Iconologia (1603) of Ripa and the Iconologia cnstiana y gentflica (1850) by Castellanos de Losada, with the Dictionnaire iconologique (1779) by Lacombe de Prezel and the Iconologie (1791) by Gravelot and Cochin as intermediary influences. Also examined are the network of interrelated terms symbolically linked to the feminine which have educational connotations and some examples taken from the imagery of different artistic periods of the Western World. At the same time, this analysis shows how these representations of education (personifications, objects, mottoes, scenes, etc.) reflect different conceptions and ideas of it.     

Katsushika Hokusai and a Poetics of Nostalgia

Abstract

This article addresses the activation of aesthetics through the examination of an acute sensitivity to melancholy and time permeating the literary and pictorial arts of Japan. In medieval court circles, this sensitivity was activated through a pervasive sense of aware, a poignant reflection on the pathos of things. This sensibility became the motivating force for court verse, and through this medium, for the mature projects of the ukiyo-e ‘floating world picture’ artist Katsushika Hokusai. Hokusai reached back to aware sensibilities, subjects and conventions in celebrations of the poetic that sustained cultural memories resonating classical lyric and pastoral themes. This paper examines how this elegiac sensibility activated Hokusai’s preoccupations with poetic allusion in his late representations of scholar-poets and the unfinished series of Hyakunin isshu uba-ga etoki, ‘One hundred poems, by one hundred poets, explained by the nurse’. It examines four works to explain how their synthesis of the visual and poetic could sustain aware themes and tropes over time to maintain a distinctive sense of this aesthetic sensibility in Japan.     

‘To provide for the edifice of learning’: Researching 450 Years of Jesuit Educational and Cultural History,with Particular Reference to the British Jesuits 1

Jesuit education provided the first rigorous educational ‘system’ in the Western world from the 1540s onwards. By 1773 more than 700 Jesuit colleges and universities educating some 250,000 students worldwide constituted the largest educational network in existence up to that time. At the present day, in 68 countries worldwide, the Society of Jesus is responsible for 848 educational institutions serving an estimated 2.5 million lay students. This article examines the extensive historiography of Jesuit education and the educational archives that the Society of Jesus has generated since 1540. Particular attention is paid to the foundational Ratio Studiorum of 1599, a key educational document drawing on earlier traditions, and a source of later reformulations and scholarship in many parts of the world. The scope of Jesuit archives around the globe is examined and an assessment made of their significance for educational and cultural historians.

There are few religious institutions in the Roman Catholic Church that have aroused more fascination, during its four and a half centuries of existence, than the Society of Jesus, few that have inspired such curiosity and misunderstanding, such attraction and repulsion. ^{2 2} Woodrow, Alain. The Jesuits: A Story of Power. London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1995: 10.      

Beyond Rote-Memorisation: Confucius’ Concept of Thinking

Confucian education is often associated with rote-memorisation that is characterised by sheer repetition of facts with no or little understanding of the content learnt. But does Confucian education necessarily promote rote-memorisation? What does Confucius himself have to say about education? This article aims to answer the above questions by examining Confucius’ concept of si (thinking) based on a textual study of the Analects. It is argued that Confucius’ concept of si primarily involves an active inquiry into issues that concern one’s everyday life, promotes inferential thinking, and facilitates self-examination. Far from advocating rote-memorisation, Confucius highlights the need for us to take ownership of our own learning, engage in higher order thinking, and reflectively apply the lessons learnt in our lives.     

Moving Images: Propaganda Film and British Education 1940‐45

Village School (1940) and Children's Charter (1945) are two propaganda films produced on behalf of the British government at the beginning and the end of the second world war and are key visual sources for educational history, quite accessible but so far much neglected by educational historians. This paper examines the two films as case studies of the visual in the making of educational space at one moment in history. The historical moment is the second world war in Britain, and the space is the public space in which educational policies and ideologies are promoted.

The two motion pictures are located in their historical context, followed by comparative and critical comments from three perspectives: the image as a document of relations between producer and consumer; the image as a medium of expression; and the image in its relation to a wider iconography of education. A major focus for this paper is the way in which promotion of a progressive curriculum and teaching method is inscribed within a film on schooling in wartime evacuation, and it also highlights the complexity of reading motion pictures, and especially propaganda film, as historical evidence.     

The Teacher Education Reform Process in Ethiopia: Some consequences on educators and its implications

With the emergence of the discourse of TESO, teacher education in Ethiopia has been struggling to change rhetoric and practice by reaffirming a managerially driven reform performance. The terrain is now characterized by fresh, but globally dominant rhetoric. Salient in the emerging discourse is reform mottos and agendas such as ‘active learning’, ‘competence’, ‘participatory’, ‘paradigm shift’ and ‘system overhaul’. However, the process pursued by the ‘reform’ task performers is noticeably and evidently characterized as a managerial approach which sidesteps pedagogues and pedagogy in favor of fulfilling instrumental, central and market‐oriented agendas. The process has so far signaled a ‘reform’ process which I typically refer to as peripheralization of pedagogical practitioners. Conspicuously absent in the process is a critical vision of learning to teach and a structural continuum that connects faculty and school. The process has so far clung to the reinscribing of traditional modes of doing teacher education which has fallen far short of fulfilling what is in the high sounding rhetoric.     

Curriculum Studies and Education for Teaching

This article is the second of two papers by Michael Golby on Curriculum Studies, the first of which appeared in Education for Teaching, 100, Summer 1976.     

Giving feedback after a lesson observation

Student teachers spend a large proportion of their ITT course teaching classes on their own. It has always been an expectation, and now more formally an entitlement, that they will be observed on some of their lessons and given feedback during a de‐briefing session. In order to explore the nature and quality of the feedback given to students a number of tutors and mentors have been videoed giving feedback to students after observing them teach. The focus of the research is on the style which the tutors and mentors adopt and the interactions between themselves and students. Encouraging reflective practice requires facilitative interactions for which counselling skills are invaluable.     

Significant Evidence

The purpose of this column is to keep religious educators abreast of the relevant significant research in the general field of psychology. Its implications for methods and materials in religious education are clear. Religious educators may well take advantage of every new finding in scientific research.

Each abstract or group is preceded by an evaluation and interpretative comment, which aims to guide the reader in understanding the research reported.

All of these abstracts are from PSYCHOLOGICAL ABSTRACTS, and are used by permission of that periodical. The abstract numbers are from Volume 25, Numbers 11 and 12, November‐December 1951.     

THE RELIGIOUS BASIS OF WORLD ORGANIZATION

The purpose of this column is to keep religious educators abreast of relevant significant research in the general field of psychology. Its implications for methods and materials in religious education are clear. Religious educators may well take advantage of every new finding in scientific research

Each abstract or group is preceded by an evaluation and interpretive comment, which aims to guide the reader in understanding the research reported

All of these abstracts are from PSYCHOLOGICAL ABSTRACTS, and used by permission of that periodical. The abstract numbers are from Volume 23, 1949

The literature in developmental psychology grows at an overwhelming rate     

Australian core Catholic youth,Catholic schools and religious education

This paper reports on research on the attitudes of a differentiated sample of students to Catholic schools in general and religious education in particular. Core Catholic youth are described, following Fulton et al. (2000 Fulton, J., Abela, A., Borowik, I., Dowling, T., Marler, P. and Tomasi, L. 2000. Young Catholics at the New Millennium; the Religion and Morality of Young Adults in Western Countries, Dublin: University College Press.  [Google Scholar]: Young Catholics at the New Millennium, Dublin, University College Press), as individuals who have an existing connection with the parish community. Some results that emerge from 58 in‐depth interviews with 14‐ and 15‐year‐old core Catholics are that they value their time in Catholic schools, feel that they are in a safe environment and are not well networked with others of a similar background. Attitudes to religious education by core Catholic youth are described as weak positive. Religious education is not unpopular but is not seen as a discipline that helps resolve some of the difficulties that they experience as young Catholics. These difficulties relate to trying to reconcile what they see as the conflict between the scientific and religious view of creation and many supernatural religious claims.     

Wuwei (non-action) Philosophy and Actions: Rethinking ‘actions’ in school reform

This inquiry aims to enrich conversation regarding school reform. The author asks about what other discourses are possible when the action-oriented question of how to ‘act’ is a major approach to ‘fix’ current educational problems. Drawing from Taoist philosophy of wuwei (non-action), the author provides a frame to review current school reform movement. Political philosophy of wuwei highlights non-interference or non-intervention governance. Laozi discusses his theory of governance that a sage leader should take and explicates the paradox of non-action: By not doing, everything is done. The paradox of wuwei complicates dialogues in the field of curriculum theory by opening spaces for taking effortless actions in the midst of standardization and accountability reform movement.     

Imagined Authority: Blackboard Jungle and the Project of Educational Liberalism

The 1955 movie Blackboard Jungle portrays the efforts of high school teacher Richard Dadier to overcome his students’ resistance to the regime of the school At the same time, Blackboard Jungle inaugurated the use of rock and roll in movies, thereby heralding the emergence of a distinct youth culture. Representations of youth and schooling were uniquely suited to capture the anxieties that arose out of American familial, economic, and political conflicts in the 1950s. By synthesizing matters of male and state authority in an ambivalent blend of rebellion and social control, Blackboard Jungle articulated the ambiguities of the liberal ideology that schooling and the state more broadly could simultaneously insure individual freedom and contain social conflicts. Blackboard Jungle’s gendered narrative was mirrored in academic research into the causes of juvenile delinquency, in differing career paths for men and women educators, and in attacks on progressive curricula. By combining an examination of the film's narrative and visual technique with an analysis of its reception, this article explores the liberal ideology which has shaped American schooling.     

Schooling cultures: institutionalizing heteronormativity and heterosexism

This paper explores how some schooling cultures in New South Wales (hereafter NSW), Australia, police and silence non‐heterosexuality through a number of institutional processes which enable homophobia and heterosexism to flourish, while normalizing and constituting heterosexuality as the dominant and only valid sexuality. The discussion shows that despite an apparent broader societal ‘tolerance’ for non‐heterosexuality, as well as legislation that condemns anti‐‘homosexual’ discrimination in education in NSW, homophobic prejudice — often in the form of silence, omission and assumption — prevails. It illustrates that schools need to be much more aware and proactive in addressing issues pertaining to this social justice issue to ensure a safe and equitable learning and teaching environment for all members of the school community.

There is not one but many silences, and they are an integral part of the strategies that underlie and permeate discourses.

(Foucault, 1978 Foucault, M. 1978. The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An introduction, Edited by: Hurley, R. New York, NY: Vintage.  [Google Scholar], p. 27)

Lying is done with words, and also with silence.

(Rich, 1980 Rich, A. 1980/84. On lies, secrets and silence. Selected prose 1966–1978, London: Virago.  [Google Scholar]/84, p.186)     

Disordered eating and disordered schooling: what schools do to middle class girls

This paper focuses upon relationships barely explored in the sociology of education either in the UK or elsewhere that lie between the practices and processes of formal education and the aetiology (the ‘causations’) and development of eating disorders, specifically, anorexia nervosa (AN) in young women and girls. In so doing, it also touches on other relationships relatively under explored in the sociology of education, between formal education and ‘the middle class’. Our analyses point to the ways in which social trends outside schools relating to ‘the body’ and health generate and intersect with what we refer to as performance and perfection codes following Bernstein (2000 Bernstein B (2000) Pedagogy, symbolic control and identity (Boston, Rowman & Littlefield)  [Google Scholar]) and Evans and Davies (2004 Evans J Davies B (2004) The embodiment of consciousness: Bernstein, health and schooling in: J. Evans, B. Davies & J. Wright (Eds) Body, knowledge and control: studies in the sociology of physical education and health (London, Routledge/Falmer)  [Google Scholar]). These create conditions of school work that, while increasingly difficult for many students, may be deeply damaging to the identities and health of the vulnerable few, especially if they coincide with other problematic features of their lives. Our request, as articulated through the voices of the young people in our study, is for greater understanding of the ways in which formal education and schooling may be implicated in the production of disordered eating and ill‐health. Such understanding might better equip teachers and others to help young people, irrespective of their class and cultural background, avoid falling prey to conditions that may damage or even potentially destroy their young lives.     

Principals of audit: testing,data and ‘implicated advocacy’

Historically, school leaders have occupied a somewhat ambiguous position within networks of power. On the one hand, they appear to be celebrated as what Ball (2003 Ball, S., 2003. The teacher's soul and the terrors of performativity. Journal of education policy, 18 (2), 215–228.[Taylor &; Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) has termed the ‘new hero of educational reform'; on the other, they are often ‘held to account’ through those same performative processes and technologies. These have become compelling in schools and principals are ‘doubly bound’ through this. Adopting a Foucauldian notion of discursive production, this paper addresses the ways that the discursive ‘field’ of ‘principal’ (within larger regimes of truth such as schools, leadership, quality and efficiency) is produced. It explores how individual principals understand their roles and ethics within those practices of audit emerging in school governance, and how their self-regulation is constituted through NAPLAN – the National Assessment Program, Literacy and Numeracy. A key effect of NAPLAN has been the rise of auditing practices that change how education is valued. Open-ended interviews with 13 primary and secondary school principals from Western Australia, South Australia and New South Wales asked how they perceived NAPLAN's impact on their work, their relationships within their school community and their ethical practice.