Pedagogic transformation,student-directed design and computational thinking

In a world where technology has become pervasive in our lives, the notion of IT integration in education practice is losing its significance. It is now more appropriate to discuss transforming pedagogy where technology is not considered a tool anymore but part of what we are. To advance this hypothesis, an enterprising, student-directed approach is proposed which embraces problem-solving as activity and computational thinking as knowledge development. In order to test its efficacy, a case study of students developing a 3D virtual space for international collaboration is used to exemplify the transformational pedagogy. From observations of the enactment of heutagogical characteristics and computational thinking, it is argued that we can now teach and learn “in” technology. This modality will come to dominate how technology operates “as” our lives, and become central to what it means to know and learn.     

新建地方本科院校教学团队建设研究

本科教育的质量是本科院校生存和发展的基础,是新建地方本科院校的生命。随着1999年以来高校不断扩招,提高教育教学质量是本科院校急需解决的问题。教师团队的教科研水平直接关系到人才培养的质量,如何加强师资队伍建设,促进新建地方本科院校的教学改革,使本科教育的质量和人才培养质量再上一个台阶成了新建地方本科院校直面问题。文章沿着"什么是新建地方本科院校教学团队-教学团队有哪些类型-为什么要建设教学团队-如何建设教学团队-在建设过程中存在哪些问题"的研究思路,探讨新建地方本科院校在教育教学改革过程中所面临的一些现实问题。     

“Research-based” and “profession-oriented” as prominent knowledge discourses in curriculum restructuring of professional programs

This article questions what kind of actors become involved and analyzes what forms of knowledge are activated, when discourses such as “research-based” and “profession-oriented” become basic preconditions in national curriculum change processes in Norway. A “mapping” is conducted, comprised of actors and ideas, played out in two national curriculum change processes in Norway, namely “the Integrated Master Program in Teacher Education” and “the Bachelor Program in Engineering.” The analysis shows that actors and the roles they were able to play may have had an effect on what kind of knowledge forms was prioritized in the curriculum change processes. In both, curriculum process integration of discipline-based/theoretical knowledge and practical and context-specific knowledge are emphasized. However, in the teacher education process, principled knowledge about specific professional problems and theory-based decisions are highlighted as important, while, in the engineering education process, procedural knowledge about how to solve problems and innovative capacity is more emphasized. The analysis shows a relationship between such curriculum change processes and the composite “epistemology” of the wider and contextually developed policy space. It is also demonstrated, in the two cases, that the knowledge base for professional work is subject to negotiations far beyond the academic community and is embedded in a wider set of social, professional, and political institutions and frames.     

Hallway Conferencing: Achieving Teacher Buy-In to the Writing Center

Technology education, not to be confused with educational technology, has an “official curriculum.” This article explores this “official curriculum” and answers the following questions; what are the goals of technology education, what should technology education look like in classrooms, and why technology education is important. This article provides a primer on technology education that would be helpful to educational professionals interested in helping students become more technological literate.     

PISA as a Political Tool in Spain: Assessment Instrument,Academic Discourse and Political Reform

This study examines to what extent there is a sort of “political appropiation” by political parties when they seek to set a discourse about the Spanish PISA outcomes. We have consistently found that programs for assessing the competencies of students, especially PISA, have become tools of rationalization and the legitimization of education policies in both the national and territorial contexts. Furthermore, each regional government focuses its discourse on what it feels to be its strong points, that is, a clear “self-justifying reading” of PISA outcomes.     

Teacher knowledge: a complex tapestry

Teachers need to know a great deal, in many areas and in multiple ways. Teacher knowledge is a complex tapestry, and teachers must successfully weave the multiple threads. In this article, I present a conceptualisation of teacher knowledge that provides a framework for describing the complexity of teacher knowledge. The framework describes three ways of knowing: “knowing how,” “knowing why,” and “knowing what” and then applies these three knowledge discourses across six domains of teacher knowledge. The framework was developed from a study of 14 teachers in their first year of teaching, and in this article the framework is applied to their experiences to illustrate specific gaps in their teacher knowledge. It is proposed that this conceptualisation of teacher knowledge allows those involved in teacher education and induction to more clearly identify professional learning needs and develop their programmes with specificity.     

疫情背景下复兴人文教育传统的价值

新冠肺炎疫情的全球蔓延使得全世界人的生活受到极大影响。因疫情引发的观念、意识及各个领域的冲突和危机凸显。这样的情势使得我们有必要重温并激活人文教育传统,特别是中国儒家传统中的"为己之学"和西方自古希腊以来的人文教育,纠正当前教育中过多的功利主义倾向,在教育中实现"认识自我、理解他人",从而达到教育提升生命品质的"初心":培养人性之仁。     

Points of Vulnerability and Presence: Knowing and learning in globally networked communities

This is a paper about knowledge, learning and the idea of community in what we call “hybrid workspaces”. Hybrid workspaces “bring together physical place and cyber place” in communication networks (Castells, 2001, p. 131). Many people work in various kinds of hybrid workspaces. A person working on a production line might have real-time co-workers in their own town, just as a colleague might work in a hybrid workspace and rely upon others who communicate asynchronously via a website to help them solve problems. Hybrid workspaces, like most workspaces, are centrally concerned with the global production and diffusion of certain kinds of routine and innovative working knowledge. In this paper we think about knowledge as social action that is generated, mediated, negotiated and traded among people in the politically charged dynamic of hybrid workspace communities. We consider the ways people adopt, modify and are changed by the technologies they implement in these workspaces. We are especially interested in what people have to learn to know, and to be, to operate effectively in these hybrid communities, and what role formal, informal and non-formal education has to play in negotiating what counts as knowledge, and who can say so, in virtual workspaces.     

“什么是教育”辨证

基于心智成熟、拓展自我与自我完善三个维度给"什么是教育"进行新的界定和辨别,并围绕教育的基本属性提出判断"什么是教育"的标准,纠正处于教育发展潮流中那些不知不觉地将不是教育的东西纳入到教育之中的行为。鉴于此,在现代教育发展进程中,需要回到原点自觉地彻底地反思"什么是教育",运用新思维方式对"教育究竟是什么"进行再思考,更需要人们去容纳并利用这种对教育新的定义。     

Teacher as Tragic Ironist

In this article Karl Hostetler portrays teachers as tragic ironists whose existence is prone to “playful disruptions of the soul,” when the meaning and value of ideas pertinent to teaching — including “teaching” itself — become puzzling, prompting a reassessment and reinvigoration of those ideas. In developing his concept of tragic irony, Hostetler draws particularly on Jonathan Lear's A Case for Irony and the Greek tragedies Oedipus Tyrannus and Medea. According to Lear, the aim of irony is “to inject a certain form of not‐knowing into polis life.” Relatedly, Hostetler observes, a frequent theme in classical Greek tragedy is the misery that can result from purporting to “know.” Tragedy and irony, he argues, can be particularly powerful and unsettling avenues for introducing uncertainty. He further contends that teachers as tragic ironists maintain a measure of uncertainty about their craft, not only recognizing that they do not know everything, but sometimes questioning whether they know anything. In a culture that tends to valorize certainty, Hostetler concludes, this is an essential attitude in the practice of and discourse about education.     

Assessing equity beyond knowledge‐ and skills‐based outcomes: A comparative ethnography of two fourth‐grade reform‐based science classrooms

When evaluating equity, researchers often look at the “achievement gap.” Privileging knowledge and skills as primary outcomes of science education misses other, more subtle, but critical, outcomes indexing inequitable science education. In this comparative ethnography, we examined what it meant to “be scientific” in two fourth‐grade classes taught by teachers similarly committed to reform‐based science (RBS) practices in the service of equity. In both classrooms, students developed similar levels of scientific understanding and expressed positive attitudes about learning science. However, in one classroom, a group of African American and Latina girls expressed outright disaffiliation with promoted meanings of “smart science person” (“They are the science people. We aren't like them”), despite the fact that most of them knew the science equally well or, in one case, better than, their classmates. To make sense of these findings, we examine the normative practice of “sharing scientific ideas” in each classroom, a comparison that provided a robust account of the differently accessible meanings of scientific knowledge, scientific investigation, and scientific person in each setting. The findings illustrate that research with equity aims demands attention to culture (everyday classroom practices that promote particular meanings of “science”) and normative identities (culturally produced meanings of “science person” and the accessibility of those meanings). The study: (1) encourages researchers to question taken‐for‐granted assumptions and complexities of RBS and (2) demonstrates to practitioners that enacting what might look like RBS and producing students who know and can do science are but pieces of what it takes to achieve equitable science education. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc., Inc. J Res Sci Teach 48: 459–485, 2011     

“互联网+教育”背景下高职外语信息化教学改革思路探析——基于学生线上自主学习能力视角

“互联网+教育”背景下,在线自主学习已经成为学生提升外语知识水平和素养的重要手段之一,因此培养学生的线上自主学习能力是外语教学的一项重要任务。教师应分析学生的线上外语自主学习能力情况,提炼用于提升学生线上自主学习能力的教学策略,这对培养学生的线上自主学习习惯和技能以及提高学生线上学习的效率和质量具有重要意义。     

文化存在论教育学论纲——文化存在论教育学产生的时代背景与基本主张

文化存在论教育学理论是在教育学这门学科究竟主要是一门以哲学运思为主的精神科学,还是一门方法至上的实证科学这一历史性交锋中应运而生的。文化存在论教育学的提出是对实证主义范式在教育学领域过度宣扬的匡正。教育学是一门有着浓郁的强烈的丰富的人文性、艺术性、审美性、价值性和伦理性的学科。从学科嬗变史、学科本质、学科研究方法借鉴路线图等来考察,我们可以得出这样的结论,教育学作为一门“成人”的学科所具有的境遇性、生命性、个殊性、复杂性等特质无法被完全数据化的定量研究所把握。文化存在论教育学分别从教育本质、教育目的及教育方法出发,聚焦三个根本性问题:儿童“是”什么?儿童会成“为”什么?儿童之所以会成“为”社会与文化所期望的那个样子,需“要”什么?针对这三个根本问题,文化存在论教育学提出了理想的教育应确立的四项重要原则:首先,教育要关注儿童的“精神”或者“生命”成长,关注儿童的心灵世界、精神世界、生命世界;其次,教育是“相遇”的历程,是一场充满“境遇”的人生旅程,多元、丰富、奇幻的教育孕育着儿童各种生长的可能性,教育既关怀当下,又指向未来的生活;再次,教育要注重“关系”的营建,魅力在于生活世界中诸般“关系”的和谐与共融,儿童与教师在美好的教育“关系”中相濡以沫,砥砺前行;最后,儿童是“文化”的存在,教育要关注文化在陶冶滋养儿童的向善、求真、育美中的重要作用。     

我国高等教育重点建设政策的历程与省思

纵观新中国70余年我国高等教育重点建设政策演进,政府角色、资源配置方式、建设路径、制度运作模式等都发生了重大转变。制度自信日益凸显,但渐进式政策制定模式、政府主导的政策执行过程、效率优先的政策价值基础仍是我国高等教育重点建设政策的总体特征。由此,在政策实践过程中,呈现出关于“谁是主角、谁是配角、谁是参与者”、高等教育发展效率与公平以及制度运作的适度性等问题。未来,提高重点大学政策决策的民主与科学性,进一步明晰国家、地方政府和高校在重点大学建设中的权责,完善重点建设的制度体系与配套政策,处理好重点与特色的关系,平衡重点与非重点、公平与效率等关系问题将成为“双一流”建设推进的关键。     

Whither social theory?

What is the place of social theory in mathematics education research, and what is it for? This special issue of Educational Studies in Mathematics offers insights on what could be the role of some sociological theories in a field that has historically privileged learning theories coming from psychology and mathematics as the main theoretical frames informing research. Although during the last 10 years the term “socio-cultural” has become part of the accepted and widespread trends of mathematics education research when addressing learning, this issue gathers a collection of papers that depart from a “socio-cultural” approach to learning and rather deploy sociological theories in the analysis of mathematics education practices. In this commentary paper, we will point to what we see to be the contributions of these papers to the field. We will do so by highlighting issues that run through the six papers. We will try to synthetize what we think are the benchmarks of the social approach to mathematics education that they propose. We will also take a critical stance and indicate some possible extensions of the use of social theory that are not addressed in this special issue but nonetheless are worth being explored for a fuller understanding of the “social” in mathematics education.     

Professionalization of progress and expertise among teacher educators in Iceland: A Bourdieuean interpretation

This paper considers the use of the conceptual framework of Pierre Bourdieu to study curriculum reform and the professionalization of teacher educators in Iceland. It argues that it is theoretically productive to interpret professionalism as the production of expert knowledge and learned discourse. The learned discourse of the Icelandic teacher educators and other education reformers, based on child-centered perspectives, developmental psychology, and child-centered curriculum theory, has become their symbolic capital in the field of educational reform. The paper considers to what extent the discourse on teacher professionalism in Iceland in the 1980s has merely occupied the space (social field) wherein education reformers work. It argues that those who have become “professionalized” are first and foremost teacher educators, curriculum development “professionals,” and teacher leaders, and points out that this was possible in an intermediate social space with much room for a creative redefinition of what can count as capital.     

Researching research: mathematics education in the Political

We discuss contemporary theories in mathematics education in order to do research on research. Our strategy consists of analysing discursively and ideologically recent key publications addressing the role of theory in mathematics education research. We examine how the field fabricates its object of research by deploying Foucault’s notion of bio-politics—mainly to address the object “learning”—and ?i?ek’s ideology critique—to address the object “mathematics”. These theories, which have already been used in the field to research teaching and learning, have a great potential to contribute to a reflexivity of research on its discourses and effects. Furthermore, they enable us to present a clear distinction between what has been called the sociopolitical turn in mathematics education research and what we call a positioning of mathematics education (research) practices in the Political.     

Private Tutoring and Social Cohesion

Mastering the public school curriculum is so important to a child's occupational future that in many regions of the world “shadow” education outside of the public system has now become the norm. In one way, this is excellent news because private investment in human capital is a strong contributor to economic and social development. However, private demand is driving a separate and powerful private industry. According to the constitutional standards in many countries, education is supposed to be “free.” This suggests that, in some instances, shadow education might be unconstitutional. The United Nations Declaration on Human Rights also says that education should be free. This suggests that in some circumstances, shadow education may be contrary to the principles of human rights. The question addressed in this article is whether shadow education is wrong. This article summarizes the arguments in favor and against shadow education and ends with a series of recommendations to better manage what has become a worldwide dilemma.     

Defining the essence of a university: lessons from higher education branding

Branding is a phenomenon that has become increasingly common in higher education over the last few years. It entails defining the essence of what a university “is”, what it “stands for”, and what it is going to be known for, requiring precision and consistency in the formulations as well as internal commitment to the brand. This article details what happened in the process of defining the essence of a regional university in Northern Norway. Addressing the challenges, the article reveals that the notions of consistency, precision, and commitment generated resistance from faculty members and made the process very difficult to fulfill. An important finding is that a university may be too complex to be encapsulated by one brand or identity definition. The article describes this process, explains the reasons for the difficulties, and discusses some implications for higher education branding.     

What We Learned about Using Metaphors in College Teaching: Methods and Meanings

The field of education is rich with metaphors that reveal one's perspective on the nature of teaching and learning—ideas are “covered,” students “absorb” information, teachers offer writing “clinics.” Each of these metaphors indicate nuanced ideas about what schooling is and is for—to be checked off? Taken in unquestioningly? For those who are sick? Two teacher educators in the field of early childhood education share insights from their own experiences in considering novice teachers' metaphors in their preparatory experiences, particularly wondering what these unveil about heretofore unanalyzed beliefs and what instructors can learn so as to form further instruction. Methods are shared and reflection led educators to find important instructional and relationship-building implications for working with novice teachers.