Ubuntu,ukama, environment and moral education

This article outlines a moral education guided by African traditional values such as ubuntu and ukama. It argues that ubuntu is not by definition speciesist, as some have claimed, but that it has strong ecocentric leanings, that is, if ubuntu is understood as a concrete expression of ukama. In fact, ubuntu deconstructs the anthropocentric–ecocentric distinction which has characterised and continues to characterise debates in environmental theory/philosophy. To become more fully human does not mean caring only for the self and other human beings but also for the entire biophysical world. Some implications that this discussion has for moral education are explored, as well as some opportunities that post-apartheid curriculum frameworks offer for implementing a moral education guided by ubuntu.     

Computer,craft, complexity,change: explorations into science teacher knowledge

In this article we review the notion of teacher knowledge from four metaphorical standpoints – teacher knowledge as computer, as craft, as complexity and as change. We employ each of these metaphors to examine and analyse the work of one teacher of science. We draw implications from our analysis for teacher education, teacher development and the study of teaching.     

Hemoglobin, growth, and attention of infants in southern Ethiopia

Male and female infants from rural Ethiopia were tested to investigate relations among hemoglobin (Hb), anthropometry, and attention. A longitudinal design was used to examine differences in attention performance from 6 (M = 24.9 weeks, n = 89) to 9 months of age (M = 40.6 weeks, n = 85), differences hypothesized to be related to changes in iron status and growth delays. Stunting (length‐for‐age z scores < ?2.0) and attention performance, t(30) = ?2.42, p = .022, worsened over time. Growth and Hb predicted attention at 9 months, R² = .15, p < .05, but not at 6. The study contributes to the knowledge base concerning the relations among Hb, early growth, and attention.     

Compelling diversities,educational intersections: policy,practice, parity

The ninth international Gender and Education Association Conference Compelling Diversities, Educational Intersections hosted by the Weeks Centre for Social and Policy Research, London South Bank University engages with key debates surrounding the interplay between dynamics of education, work, employment and society in the context of crisis, upheaval and cutbacks, which reconfigure axes of intersectional inequalities. In considering diversity in education, this conference looks at the relationship between new equality regimes and continued educational inequalities, exploring organisational ambivalence, change and resistance. Participants will be asking important questions about the role of feminist research at a time when education, and its variously placed subjects (academics, pupils, students, and policy-makers), wrestle with the commitments and contentions in doing diversity and being diverse. This brief commentary piece probes at what – and who – is being compelled into, through and for diversity and explores the promises, pay-offs and pains of diversity when siphoned off from equality, justice and parity as policy and practice goals.     

Wuwei,self-organization,and classroom dynamics

Abstract

This article juxtaposes the notion of wuwei in Daoism and philosophical principles of self-organization in systems theory to re-imagine classroom dynamics in which pedagogical relationships, students’ interactions with texts, and peer interplay come together to enable an open system of education, learning, and growth. Wuwei is a way of governing and leadership, while self-organization is the emergence of new structures at the global level as a result of local interactions. The combination of top-down and bottom-up processes contributes to create a dynamic classroom. The contemporary Neo-Daoists’ concerns with creating conditions for wuwei to happen can be addressed by principles of self-organization, while wuwei provides a philosophical underpinning that is informative to systems theories. This article first introduces the Daoist notion of wuwei, then articulate important principles of self-organization theory, and further juxtapose the two in both resonance and dissonance in four aspects: the role of change, the role of diversity, the role of the individual person, and the role of the teacher’s wuwei leadership in the self-organizing classroom. In the last section, the article discusses how to shift classroom dynamics toward emergent, relational, and creative pathways, including creating conditions for self-organization and wuwei to happen in the classroom.     

Personal fables,narcissism, and adolescent adjustment

The relationship among three personal fables (omnipotence, invulnerability, personal uniqueness), narcissism, and mental health variables was assessed in a large, cross‐sectional sample of adolescents drawn from Grades 6 (n = 94), 8 (n = 223), 10 (n = 142), and 12 (n = 102). Participants responded to the New Personal Fable Scale, the Narcissistic Personality Inventory, the Children's Depression Inventory, three indices of suicidal ideation, an inventory of delinquent risk behaviors, the Global Self‐Worth scales from the Self‐Perception Profiles for Children and for Adolescents, and two subscales from the Self‐Image Questionnaire for Young Adolescents. The results showed that omnipotence and narcissism strongly counterindicated internalizing symptomatology, and were robust predictors of positive mental health and adjustment. Invulnerability was strongly associated with risk behaviors. Personal uniqueness was strongly associated with depression and suicidal ideation, a relationship that increased with age. Hence, personal fable ideation is a multidimensional construct with differential implications for adolescent mental health. Adolescent fables of invulnerability and personal uniqueness are risk factors for externalizing and internalizing symptoms, respectively, while “narcissistic omnipotence” is associated with competence. Implications for theory, practice, and future research are discussed. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Psychol Schs 43: 481–491, 2006.     

The Improvement of Teaching Based on Group Reports of the Oxford Conference,Miami University,Oxford, Ohio,July, 1947

The Diploma Disease: Education, Qualification, and Development by Ronald Dore. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977. 227 pp. $15.00 cloth, $5.50 paper.

Public Policy and Private Higher Education edited by David W. Breneman and Chester E. Finn, Jr. Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution, 1978. $16.95 cloth, $7.95 paper.

Toward a New World Outlook: A Documentary History of Education in the People's Republic of China, 1949-1976 edited by Shi Ming Hu and Eli Seifman. New York: AMS Press, Inc., 1977. 335 pp. $21.50 cloth, $9.95 paper.

Classroom Discipline for Effective Teaching and Learning by Laurel N. Tanner. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1978. 214 pp.

The Gifted and the Creative: A Fifty-Year Perspective edited by Julian C. Stanley, William C. George, and Cecilia H. Solano. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978. 284 pp. $4.95.     

Faculty at work: Focus on research,scholarship, and service

Within the framework of cognitive motivation theory, selected personal and environmental motivational variables for faculty in eight liberal arts and science departments from community colleges, liberal arts colleges, comprehensive colleges and universities, and research universities were regressed against faculty allocation of work effort given to research, scholarship, and service. The data came from a 1988 national survey of faculty.Gender, (sociodemographic), quality of graduate school attended, career age, andrank (career); self-competence andself-efficacy regarding research, scholarship, and service andpercent time prefer to give to research, scholarship, and service (self-valuations); andinstitutional preference, consensus andsupport, andcolleague commitment to research, scholarship, and service (perception of the environment) were entered into regressions.R ²s were generally strong (.64 for liberal arts-I institutions) and significant. For all institutional types,self-valuation (self-competence and-efficacy) motivators significantly accounted for the explained variance.Sociodemographic andcareer variables did not explain appreciable amounts of variance.     

Transference,Counter-transference,and Reflexivity in Intercultural Education

The article addresses the contributions psychoanalytic theory, particularly its concepts of transference and counter-transference, can make to our understanding of reflexivity in intercultural education (IE). After the introduction, the article is organized into three parts. The first part is a psychoanalytic discussion that focuses on the concepts of transference and counter-transference. The second part elaborates on the concepts of transference and counter-transference by presenting examples through existing studies in the fields of multicultural and IE and psychoanalysis to illuminate what it would mean to psychoanalytically understand aspects of intercultural relations and reflexivity. In the third section, while contending that this article does not exclude other forms of reflexivity or delimit the danger of uncritically accepting the potentials for reflexivity, it offers the implications drawn from the discussions in the first and second sections by concluding that psychoanalysis is an area of inquiry that forces us to question how unconscious forces affect our interaction with students, the curriculum, and the meaning we give to teaching and learning experiences. The article concludes that reflexivity in IE can benefit from considering the effects of transference and counter-transference.     

Policy prolepsis in education: Encounters,becomings, and phantasms

We argue that the concept of a policy prolepsis is a category of becoming-policy that actualizes educational practices within spaces of desired policy initiatives and implementations. Policy prolepses represent a range of emergent policy ontologies produced through the interface of educational actors’ senses of policy and their estimations of possible outcomes. We use Deleuze's (1990) logic of sense to argue that becoming-policy occurs in a pre-conscious space, and that this space is produced politically and used strategically for desired, yet ostensibly unformed, policy outcomes. Educational policy, then, is an ontological activity representing a myriad of policy outcomes through the management of semiotic desires and actors’ inferences about these persuasive signs. The paper illustrates the practical idea of policy prolepsis by demonstrating how policy apparitions use fear in becoming-policy. Policy apparitions, then, are just one species of policy prolepses that utilize the affect of fear to manipulate educational actors’ interpretations.     

Serious Leisure,Health Perception,Dispositional Optimism,and Life Satisfaction Among Senior Games Participants

This study investigated factors that explain the life satisfaction of Senior Games participants. One 193 older adults from the 2005 Michigan State Senior Games and the 2005 New York State Senior Games participated in the study. The results of the study show that one of the indicators of serious leisure (affective attachment) was positively correlated to optimism (.16, p <.05), age (.28, p <.01), and the number of years participated (.28, p <.01). Regression analysis was also used to identify which variables contribute to predicting life satisfaction. It was found that dispositional optimism (β =.308, p <.001) and perceived health (β =.185, p <.05) were significant predictors of life satisfaction.     

A Review and Meta-Analysis Examining the Relationship of Music Content with Sex,Race, Priming,and Attitudes

This meta-analysis (k = 35, N = 11,629) examines the effect that listening to music, particularly popular music, has on consumers. Results demonstrate that listening to music generates an effect on listeners consistent with the content of the music (average r = .210, k = 35, N = 11,629). This effect was similar when considering survey research (r = .227) or experimental research (r = .265). The tenets of excitation transfer theory received some support, particularly when considering the effects of music as a priming material (r = .399), demonstrating the impact of music as a means of establishing mood, and ultimately the subsequent reactions of individuals. One conclusion is that efforts toward media literacy or education may prove far more productive than media content restrictions when attempting to curb potential undesirable media effects. Additional implications for policy and theory are discussed.     

Ren-li,reciprocity, judgment,and the question of openness to the Other in the Confucian Lunyu

Here the author takes ren-humanity to be, as Confucius says, an underlying, ineffable, potentially universal human quality, and draws a distinction between three different types of moral capacity in the Lunyu: the man of ren’s capacity for li-proper interactions, his capacity for total reciprocity with another, and his capacity to make moral discriminations. The nature of these moral judgments is then discussed in relation to the praxis of entering into shu-reciprocity with another and that of recognizing others’ actions as being li-proper. A key question is that of whether even an intuitive feeling of commonality, if not identity, with another man-of-ren involves a subjective judgment. Confucius’ view that foreigners can respect ren even if they may not possess it is also discussed. The author suggests that any viable ethical model would need to maintain a universal standard of humaneness while also including a maximum degree of openness to the other.     

Exponential functions,rates of change,and the multiplicative unit

Conventional treatments of functions start by building a rule of correspondence betweenx-values andy-values, typically by creating an equation of the formy=f(x). We call this acorrespondence approach to functions. However, in our work with students we have found that acovariational appraoch is often more powerful, where students working in a problem situation first fill down a table column withx-values, typically by adding 1, then fill down ay-column through an operation they construct within the problem context. Such an approach has the benefit of emphasizing rate-of-change. It also raises the question of what it is that we want to cal rate across different functional situations. We make two initial conjectures, first that a rate can be initially understood as aunit per unit comparison and second that a unit is theinvariant relationship between a successor and its predecessor. Based on these conjectures we describe a variety of multiplicative units, then propose three ways of understanding rate of change in relation to exponential functions. Finally we argue that rate is different than ratio and that an integrated understanding of rate is built from multiple concepts.     

Profiles of ability, effort, and difficulty: Relationships with worldviews, motivation and adjustment

Adopting a person-centered approach, we profiled 5th and 6th grade children's (152 boys and 161 girls) school-related beliefs about perceived task difficulty and agency beliefs in ability and effort. Five clusters were compared across key learning-related dimensions encompassing underlying worldviews (means–ends beliefs, normative difficulty, nature of ability), motivation (intrinsic, identified, introjected, and extrinsic), and adjustment (achievement and well-being): Agentic (high ability, high effort, low difficulty), Strivers (above average ability, high effort, high difficulty), Normative (average ability, effort and difficulty), Disengaged (low ability, low effort, average difficulty) and Challenged (low ability, low effort, high difficulty). The findings suggest that difficulty, perceived either as challenge or obstacle, plays an important role for the belief profiles, and that relationships with worldviews and motivation are indicative of adaptation and maladaptation.     

Tourists of History: Memory,Kitsch, and Consumerism from Oklahoma City to Ground Zero,by Marita Sturken

Cultural and Scientific Speech Education Today. Compiled and Edited By W. Aethur Cable. Expression Company, Boston 1930, pp. 206; $2.00.

Contemporary Speeches. Compiled by James M. O'Neill and Floyd K. Riley. New York: The Century Company, 1930; pp. xviii, 558.

Modern Literature for Oral Interpretation (Revised Edition). By Gertrude E. Johnson. New York: The Century Company, 1930; pp. 638; $2.50.

Influencing Behavior Through Speech. By Howard Hubert Higgins. Boston: The Expression Company, 1930: pp. ix, 346; $2.50.

Strategy in Handling People. By Ewing T. “Webb and J. B. Morgan. Boulton, Pierce and Company, 232 East Erie Street, Chicago, 1930; pp. 260; $3.00.

Ralph Dennis

The Story of the Drama (Beginnings to Commonwealth). By Joseph Richard Taylor. Boston: The Expression Company, 1930; pp. xxv, 555.

Medieval Rhetoric and Poetic. By Charles Sears Baldwin. New York: Macmillan, 1928, pp. xi, 321, $2.50.

Greek Rhetoric and Literary Criticism. By W. Rhys Roberts. New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1928, pp. 164.

Acting, Its Theory and Practice. By Lane Crauford. New York: Richard R. Smith, Inc., 1930: pp. xiii, 248; $3.00.

The American Public Mind. By Peter Odegard. New York: Columbia University Press, 1930; pp. 308. Teachers are always being told that “here is a book that must

David Lloyd George. By J. Hugh Edwards, M. P. New York: Sears and Co., 1929, 2 vols.

Evangelized America. By Grover C. Loud. New York: Lincoln McVeagh, 1928.

The Stammering Century. By Gilbert Seldes. New York: John Day Co., 1928.

Conversation. By Andre Maurois ; translated by Yvonne Dufour. New York: E. P. Dutton &; Company, 1930; 82 pp.     

A comparison of first-year,fifth-year,and former teachers on efficacy,ego development,and problem solving

Differences in first-year (N=50), fifth-year (N=49) and former (N=30) teachers on measures of efficacy, ego development, and problem solving were analyzed. The three groups were graduates from the same university who responded to a written survey. ANOVA was used for each variable across all groups, with an alpha level of.05, and the Scheffé multiple range test was used to determine significance between groups. On measures of efficacy and ego development, both first-year and fifth-year teachers scored significantly higher than former teachers, but did not differ from each other. There were no significant differences among the groups on the measure of problem solving.     

Hot and Cool Self-Regulation,Academic Competence,and Maladjustment: Mediating and Differential Relations

This study examined differential and mediating relations between hot and cool self-regulation (M_age = 48.2 months; N = 1,155, 48% girls), first-grade (M_age = 77.5 months) maladjustment (externalizing [EXT] and internalizing [INT] behavior), and first- and second-grade (M_age = 89.5 months) academic competence (AC). Using teacher reported EXT, INT, and AC, partial support for the differential perspective was found in that only hot self-regulation was significantly related to EXT, whereas both hot and cool self-regulation was significantly related to AC. Moreover, hot self-regulation indirectly predicted second-grade AC through first-grade EXT, lending some support for the mediating perspective also. The findings contribute to an understanding of how self-regulation is related to academic and behavioral school adjustment.     

Increasing school personnel's self-efficacy,knowledge, and response regarding nonsuicidal self-injury in youth

Rates of students engaging in nonsuicidal self-injury (NSSI) are rising and additional supports in the schools are needed (Nock, 2010, Ann Rev Clin Psychol, 6, 339–363; Stargell et al., 2017, Prof Sch Couns, 21, 37-46). School psychologists, school counselors, and school nurses are key personnel in responding to self-injurious behaviors within the school setting. The results of a practice-based research project are described, in which school psychologists, school counselors, and school nurses participated in training to increase their self-efficacy, knowledge, and response in regard to NSSI. The training provided information regarding best practice in responding to NSSI in youth (Hasking et al., 2016, Sch Psychol Int, 37(6), 644–663; Kanan et al., 2008, Sch Psychol Forum: Res Prac, 2, 67–79; Walsh & Muehlenkamp, 2013, Sch Psychol Forum: Res Prac, 7, 161–171). This exploratory study indicated that training positively impacted participants' perceived self-efficacy and knowledge with respect to responding to youth who engage in NSSI. Handouts and resources for school-based staff are included. Limitations and future directions are discussed.