From the Bronx to Bengifunda (and other lines of flight): deterritorializing purposes and methods in science education research

In this essay I explore a number of questions about purposes and methods in science education research prompted by my reading of Wesley Pitts’ ethnographic study of interactions among four students and their teacher in a chemistry classroom in the Bronx, New York City. I commence three ‘lines of flight’ (small acts of Deleuzo-Guattarian deterritorialization) that depart from the conceptual territory regulated by science education’s dominant systems of signification and make new connections within and beyond that territory. I offer neither a comprehensive review nor a thorough critique of Wesley’s paper but, rather, suggest some alternative directions for science education research in the genre he exemplifies.     

The Place of English Revisited

In this essay I explore the constraints and opportunities confronting me as a newly qualified teacher and how these affect my pedagogy. I have reflected on my own development from beginning to newly qualified teacher and considered how such forces have shaped my identity as a teacher, my values and my approach to the job. As part of my exploration of my practice and the values I hold, I have revisited ‘The Place of English’, an essay I wrote midway through my Postgraduate Certificate in Education (PGCE) year; I have reconsidered how the current climate of educational reform and my subsequent experience have altered or strengthened these initial perceptions. In what follows I have reflected critically on two episodes of teaching and learning with my Year 10 class, my most challenging group, in order to further understand the way in which I have responded to the responsibilities and pressures placed on a classroom teacher. These pressures, I suggest, are intensified by the preconceptions of age and gender within my school and implicit more widely in the traditional values of our culture. The fragments of my practice that I have explored reveal tensions that gesture at a gap between educational theory, first-hand professional experience and governmental policy. They present an argument to resist the temptations of oversimplified, linear conceptions of teaching and learning, and maintain the place of English as a subject of creativity, exploration and expression that, at its heart, values both individual and collective student voices and identities.     

Missing voices and possible dialogues: problems and possibilities for teacher education

ABSTRACT

Teacher education exists today in a context of rapid globalization, which affects the systems in which future teachers will work, the governance of teachers’ work, the students teachers will be teaching, as well as the policies, programs, curricula and students in teacher education itself. Several ideas recently have gained traction internationally and are shaping the working landscape of teaching and teacher education in many countries. This essay critically examines the circulation of what appear to be a small set of ‘core’ ideas that are influencing national and institutional policies of teacher education. I explore the emergence of new players in teacher education internationally, including individuals, corporations, and international bodies. Using policy documents, influential research studies, university program statements, and interviews, the essay provides a discursive analysis of the contradictory voices in what is becoming a global conversation of teacher education. In many ways, these ideas marginalize the voices of teachers and teacher educators. They tend to narrow the definitions of education and teaching. As a counterpoint to these widely circulating arguments, I explore how reciprocal teacher education exchange programs in China and the US create opportunities for alternative constructions of visions of teaching and teacher learning.     

论西部教师教育培养体制的现实超越

西部区域教育发展的特点决定了当前必须创新教师教育培养体系,作者认为应该创新西部教师教育的主体参与模式,建立起以师范院校为主体、多类学校参与的立体型教师教育网络;应该创新西部教师教育的培养类型,当前主要是以区域内部市场和更广阔的外部市场为导向加速培养职业技术师资;应该创新西部教师培养过程特别是要充分重视信息技术在教师教育过程中的作用,充分挖掘校本培训模式的潜在优势。     

The discourse of issues management: A genre of organizational communication

In this essay, I use the rhetorical approach of generic criticism to analyze issues management campaigns: instances of public relations discourse in which an organization makes explicit efforts to influence public policy. There are striking similarities among contemporary organizations’ issues management campaigns in terms of their organizing principle, situational requirements, and substantive and stylistic characteristics. Using a structurational perspective, I illustrate the genre rules (Yates &; Orlikowski, 1992) that serve as the medium and outcome of this discourse. Throughout the essay, I employ the University of Minnesota's recent attempt to increase its public funding during a period of institutional transition to explicate the genre rules.

This article outlines a framework for the analysis of issues management campaigns and provides a first step toward the development of a structuational theory of their genre rules. Moreover, it argues that a rhetorical approach to the study of such organizational communication creates fresh insights and understandings in an area traditionally dominated by a focus on effects.     

Books only got us so far: the need for multi‐genre inquiry

This study examines the instructional steps I took, based on gaps between what was happening in a graduate literacy class I taught and what I had intended to happen. This study describes the ways that I re‐imagined the class and what came about when I created a pedagogical approach that featured multi‐genre inquiry. I define inter‐discursivity as a signal of learning (i.e. when traces of language from one genre spill over into the language of other genres), and I searched for examples of this overlapping language in data. In doing so, I found that the multi‐genre approach led to moments of inter‐discursivity as teachers extended their understandings by appropriating language from one genre into another.     

Just us,just discussing: imagined homogeneities in the Gender Studies classroom

This article explores practices of othering through formations of normative sameness in discussion-based seminar classrooms. It takes literary scholar Stanley Fish's question, ‘Is there a text in this class, or is it just us?’, back into the classroom to explore the formation of a ‘just us,’ an imagined homogeneous interpretive community which, I argue, has discriminatory effects by normalising some voices and practices. It draws on feminist and anti-oppressive theory to discuss ways to pedagogically trouble the enactment of homogeneous interpretive communities in the Gender Studies classroom. As the Gender Studies teacher, I devised pedagogical practices based on the allocation of specific roles as a way to work towards an anti-discriminatory classroom by de-mystifying academic practice and framing seminar practice as a social genre. The article critically reflects on students' subsequent reluctance to take on roles and their preference for free-flowing discussions, doing what comes naturally, a ‘doing' of academia which, I suggest, is linked to social privilege.     

Performing for the Students: Teaching Identity and the Pedagogical Relationship

Teacher identity is defined in its relations, on the one hand, to curriculum and, on the other, to students: to be identified as a teacher is to be taken by the latter as a bearer of the former. In this essay I consider some variations on theorising teacher identity within these relational terms. Beginning with the educational task of cultivating student subjects within the often impersonal aims of curriculum, I reject a correspondingly personalised production of teacher identity that would humanise education through the teacher's personality. Turning instead to the idea of a teaching role defined by institutional authority, I look at two perspectives from which the teacher's identity can be theorised as a matter of performing that role. Jane Gallop's performative definition of teaching highlights the teacher as a pre-existing role but is fundamentally concerned with the teacher's self-understanding, this fails, however the relational requirements of teaching. Ultimately, bringing performativity into the context of the transferential relation between teacher and student provided by Plato's Symposium , I argue that student desire produces teacher identity in response to the teacher's performed relation to truth.     

杂文文体特征辨识

撇开非此即彼的二元论观念,杂文可以定义为一种兼容现实功利性和文学审美性的独立文章样式,它既非单纯的文学文体,也非纯实用的应用文章。杂文的文学性可以通过杂文艺术形象的真实存在得以佐证,但并不因此就证明杂文是文学文体。杂文区别于他种文体的突出特点有二,一日重“胆”,二日杂文创作的思维品质具有二重性。     

Food Science Education and the Cognitive Science of Learning

In this essay, I argue that the traditional view of teaching, that the teacher's responsibility is to present information that students are solely responsible for learning, has been rendered untenable by cognitive science research in learning. The teacher can have a powerful effect on student learning by teaching not only content, but how to study and think about information. Student learning is a shared responsibility between teacher and students, and effective teaching is much more challenging than traditionally believed.     

Writing the queer self: Using autobiography to mediate inclusive teacher education in Canada

Writing the queer self involves locating the self within a broad understanding of queer that recognises a spectrum of sex, sexual and gendered subjects. In this article, I discuss how I write the queer self to link the personal to my positional practice as a gay teacher educator. I overview my work with Agape, which is a focus group that I initiated in my university's teacher education programme to explore sex, sexual and gender differences in education and culture. I explore how I link my queer autobiography to the professional and the pedagogical, and how I use it to engender deliberations about queer presence, representation and place in education. I conclude by speaking on the importance of doing this work as an ethical project for social justice and educational transformation.     

Taking a Return to School: Using Self-Study to Learn about Teacher Educator Practice

The work of teacher educators is complex and multifaceted and requires knowledge of pedagogy and practice in both schools and teacher education institutions. This complexity, combined with calls for teacher educators to work in close partnership with schools, sees some in teacher education working in hybrid roles and across the boundaries of schools and universities. Drawing on a self-study conducted over a one-year return to teaching, I explore my return home to teach in a secondary school and I examine the continuing impact of this experience on my practice as a teacher educator. Using the concept of tensions as a conceptual framework to analyse the data I explore three tensions in this article: (1) teacher as technician versus teacher as pedagogue; (2) challenging versus being responsive to other’s views of learning; and (3) teacher versus teacher educator identity. I explore how a return to teaching in school and the tensions I experienced enabled me to develop my practice and understandings as a teacher educator. I argue that rich professional learning can result from using self-study to examine teacher educator practice, particularly for teacher educators working in hybrid roles and partnership contexts.     

终身学习与大学教师职业素质

本从大学教师的角色定位等方面阐述了终身学习时代，大学教师应该具备的职业素质。     

Towards decolonial praxis: reconfiguring the human and the curriculum

ABSTRACT

This theoretical inquiry applies threads of Sylvia Wynter’s intellectual project to scholarship in curriculum studies to consider how Wynter’s insights might urge new potential in educational theorising and practice. The central concern driving Wynter’s intellectual project is that our present understanding about what it means to be human is entrenched in epistemological legacies of colonialism that preserve a Western bourgeois genre of Man. This essay begins by detailing Sylvia Wynter’s rigorous and innovative intellectual project that reworks the category of the human. We argue that contemporary curriculum is based upon this Western genre of the human and explore the limits of multicultural curricula. Synthesising Wynter’s interrelated lines of thought – how the notion of being hybridly human calls forth a conceptualisation of humanness as a collective act – we argue that her revised category of the human is a necessary means to radically reimagine and decolonise curriculum.     

论职前教师教育中反思型教师的培养(英文)

国内外教育界诸多研究表明,教师的反思能力是实现教师自身发展的关键。师范教育中如何培养学生的教学反思能力已经为越来越多的人所关注。本文提出职前教育应该以培养反思型教师为目标,并在此基础上提出了不同形式的旨在培养学生的反思能力的培训活动。     

The Oppressor Within: A Counterstory of Race, Repression, and Teacher Reflection

In this paper, I offer my own counterstory of matriculating through a teacher education program as an African American student on a predominately White campus as a reference point for thinking through how racism operates through teacher education’s dominant discourse and practice of teacher reflection. It is an important story to tell primarily because it touches on a largely unexplored dimension of teacher reflection. While the large majority of the literature has focused on how to prepare White preservice teachers to teach in a culturally and racially complex world, little qualitative attention has been given to the preparation of nonwhite students. While there are a few select and important articles that touch on some of the challenges African American students face in predominately White teacher education programs, including covert and overt racism, none focus on how teacher reflection might reproduce these dynamics. Thus what the literature on teacher reflection often suggests is that it is a racially neutral practice. In this essay, however, I suggests otherwise, by providing an intimate and critical look at my process of learning to be a reflective practitioner. The question I seek to grapple with is quite simply, “What does teacher reflection work to repress?”     

Relationships in the workplace: Doing what comes naturally?

In this paper I explore the connection between workplace relationships and teacher development. Using a conceptual framework built on Brim and Wheeler's (1966) ideas on self-socialization and Erickson's (1963) theory of psychosocial development I draw on information gathered in year one of a 2-year qualitative study of teacher socialization to explore the following questions: With whom do beginning teachers form relationships in their new professional contexts? What is the nature of these relationships? What functions do they serve? Are some relationships more important at some times than others? How do certain relationships facilitate or constrain the various aspects of teacher development? Can facilitating relationships be contrived? Can contrived relationships be facilitating? And, finally, what role does context play in all of this?The focus on relationships grows out of a need to understand better the role of the “other” in the professional growth process. By examining information gathered through conversations with 13 new teachers I will uncover and explore some of the issues pertaining to professional relationship formation and development particularly in relation to teacher socialization and the psychosocial aspects of teacher development. These insights will be used as a basis for a discussion of formalized induction programs which feature forms of institutionally imposed collaborative arrangements. Drawing on some of the recent work on teacher culture and collegiality (Hargreaves, 1990; Little, 1990; Rosenholtz, 1987, 1989), Barth's (1990) ideas on school improvement through the creation of a “community of learners”, and on Noddings' (1986) and Gherke's (1987) notions on the building of caring and helping communities, I will discuss the limitations of some of the recent trends in professional development for new teachers. I will recommend an alternative approach to new teacher induction, one that takes into account the individuality of the teacher, the school culture, and the socialization process. In essence, I will argue for a “natural” and integrated approach to teacher induction.     

对外汉语本科专业不同性格类型学生英语学习策略差异研究

通过采用了北京师范大学外语系的程晓堂和郑敏两位学者的英语学习策略调查表对新疆师范大学汉语教育学院的对外汉语本科05级的同学进行了英语学习策略的诊断;用文秋芳博士的性格测量表对该班同学的性格特点进行了分析。结果发现不同性格的学生学习策略的使用情况也各不相同;而通过皮尔逊相关系数的计算发现学习策略与学习成绩两个变量的相关性很强,即:学习策略使用得越多,学习成绩越好。