“Neuromyths”: A Critical Consideration

The term “neuromyth” is becoming part of discourse in the field of mind, brain, and education. In this article, I review some problematic aspects of the practice, critique specific examples, and propose an alternative way of communicating with the public about findings in psychology and neuroscience.     

Turning a City into a Milieu of Study: University Pedagogy as “Frontline”

In 2016 Bruno Latour delivered a lecture at Cornell University in which he responded to what he called the actual situation of disorientation and (literal) lack of common ground by offering some “hints for a neo‐Humboldtian university.” One hint he offered was that we should consider pedagogy as the frontline for staging an approach to societal challenges that links basic research and public engagement. Here, Jan Masschelein follows and extends upon this hint through exploring some ways to reclaim or reinvent the university as pedagogic form. Concretely, he describes the development of a course on designing educational practices that is conceived as a way to turn cities into a milieu of public and collective study. Masschelein's contribution to this symposium offers a “technical story” about physical, material experiences, one that contains some prepositions and propositions, an example, many detours, and a few practical notes and considerations. By this means, he explores the meaning and form pedagogy takes when we do not reduce it to teaching and extension, but instead approach it as the genus and the locus of a nexus between public engagement and basic research. Masschelein concludes by proposing the “public design studio” as a pedagogic form suited to the neo‐Humboldtian university.     

From “truth” to “invented reality”: A discourse analysis of high school physics students' talk about scientific knowledge

Students' views of the nature of scientific knowledge have been recognized as an important component of science learning environments. In this study, we analyze an extensive data base consisting of 23 students' written and oral discourse about ontology, epistemology, and sociology of scientific knowledge collected over a 15-month period in the context of two consecutive junior- and senior-level physics courses. Over a 2-month period at the beginning of the second year, students read, reflected on, and talked about a text which discusses epistemology in the context of physics. Our study shows that students drew on nine types of discursive resources to support their ontological, epistemological, and sociological claims. Toward the end of the study, the range and number of supportive statements had increased. Simultaneously, few students changed their ontological and sociological claims, but a considerable number changed their epistemological claims. Two case studies illustrate the development of student discourse in the course of the study. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 34 : 145–179, 1997.     

“Helping” Versus “Being a Helper”: Invoking the Self to Increase Helping in Young Children

Can a subtle linguistic cue that invokes the self motivate children to help? In two experiments, 3‐ to 6‐year‐old children (N = 149) were exposed to the idea of “being a helper” (noun condition) or “helping” (verb condition). Noun wording fosters the perception that a behavior reflects an identity—the kind of person one is. Both when children interacted with an adult who referenced “being a helper” or “helping” ( 2 ) and with a new adult ( 3 ), children in the noun condition helped significantly more across four tasks than children in the verb condition or a baseline control condition. The results demonstrate that children are motivated to pursue a positive identity. Moreover, this motivation can be leveraged to encourage prosocial behavior.     

“A Fantasy of Untouchable Fullness”: Melancholia and Resistance to Educational Transformation

The progressive language of growth and development that informs our shared ideal of the educated subject also informs the curricular structure of schooling, in which new learning builds upon established knowledge and students' development depends upon their desire to take on those identities associated with various achievements of knowledge. Each re‐creation of the student's identity requires a new production of the student's former identity as an uneducated self — a negative statement of the self‐overcome, fashioned in the language of the curriculum. But what of those objects of attachment or aspects of the child's identity that can neither be integrated in the student's educated identity nor accounted for as a recognizable lost object of childhood? In this essay James Stillwaggon argues that considering the student subject in terms of its melancholic attachments offers some alternatives to thinking of student identity primarily in terms of its progressive learning function. Julia Kristeva's treatment of melancholia as “asymbolia,” or against the representational function of language, is especially significant to this discussion, as it highlights the melancholic's resistance to the most basic educational purpose, namely the further engagement of the subject in language.     

Friendship and the Public Stage: Revisiting Hannah Arendt's Resistance to “Political Education”

Hannah Arendt's essays about the 1957 crisis over efforts of a group of youth, the “Little Rock Nine,” to desegregate a high school in Little Rock, Arkansas, reveal a tension in her vision of the “public.” In this article Aaron Schutz and Marie Sandy look closely at the experiences of the youth desegregating the school, especially those of Elizabeth Eckford, drawing upon them to trace a continuum of forms of public engagement in Arendt's work. This ranges from arenas of “deliberative friendship,” where unique individuals collaborate on common efforts, to a more conflictual “public stage,” where groups act in solidarity to change aspects of the public world. While Arendt famously asserted in her essay “The Crisis in Education” that political capacities should not be taught in schools, it makes more sense to see this argument as focused on what she sometimes called the conflictual “public stage,” reflecting the experience of the Little Rock Nine. In contrast, Schutz and Sandy argue that Arendt's own work implies that “deliberative friendship,” as described in her essay “Philosophy and Politics” and elsewhere, should be part of everyday practices in classrooms and schools.