Should we abolish the schooling of children?

In this same sectionProspects published in its previous issue (Autumn 1972) an extract of a working document presented at a conference held in Bellagio last May on education and development under the sponsorship of the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations.It is obvious that the article in question does not reflect, either in its spirit or its contents, the position of Unesco.Our purpose in publishing it was to stimulate a dialogue about such problems among our readers.The following constitutes a contribution to this dialogue, which we hope will be established in this section among educators and other people interested in educational problems.     

Flights of fancy: Science, reason, and common sense

Barry R. Gross was professor of philosophy at York College of The City University of New York and held high positions in both the National and New York Associations of Scholars. Professor Gross delivered this address to the New York Academy of Sciences conference “The Flight from Science and Reason” on 31 May 1995. This address is reprinted with permission from the proceedings of that conference, published as Volume 775 of theAnnals of the New York Academy of Sciences.     

A model for teaching criminal justice ethics

Questionnaire data from 137 panel chairs at the 2003 Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences meeting in Boston reveal respondent perceptions of the conference site, overall impressions of the conference, as well as panelist attendance, and the quality of information presented by panelists. The findings reveal high marks for the conference space, hotel rooms, and the city of Boston itself, resulting in an overall positive conference experience, but responses also highlight several areas of concern, including panelist attendance problems and presentation etiquette. Recommendations are provided, which may foster positive, incremental change at future ACJS annual meetings.     

Navex-69 Conference

The great exhibition hall of London's Olympia provided a fitting venue for the 1969 Conference and Exhibition of the National Committee for Audio-visual aids in Education. Readers of Audio-Visual Media will be interested to learn that the special 1970 exhibition and conference, which will be coupled with the ICEM's Annual General Assembly and an international conference, will also be located at Olympia.     

Professional experience: learning from the past to build the future

The title of the 2014 Australian Teacher Education Association (ATEA) conference was Teacher Education, An Audit: Building a platform for future engagement. One of the conference themes was Professional Experience: What works? Why? I seized upon this theme and the title of the conference as it afforded me an opportunity to do an audit of my research in professional experience over the last 25 years. This article presents this evidence base and the messages I have taken from this evidence. I have done this in the hope that, by collating some of the insights gained from the past and the present, it will help to “build a platform for future engagement” in professional experience. In preparing this article I was asked by the Editors to reflect also on how I developed my distinctive line of inquiry and expertise in relation to the practicum across an extended period. These reflections are included. I hope they will support university-based teacher educators in enhancing their satisfaction and achievements from working in this stimulating and provocative field of study.     

Chapter 2.

Abstract

In 2002, the first in a series of working conferences was held as a collaboration between the counseling service of Bennington College and the Austen Riggs Center's Erikson Institute. The title of the first conference was The Escalating Use of Medications by College Students: What Are They Telling Us, What Are We Telling Them?. It was meant to provide a space to explore the meaning and context of this phenomenon. The primary contexts examined were the student's familial/ cultural context and then the institutional context from which the counseling staff was attempting to respond to the student. This paper describes that initial conference and the emergent themes over the next few years.     

The Politically and Culturally One-Sided Campus: Causes, Consequences, Remedies: Pernicious Politicization in Academe: Victims of the One-Sided Campus: Advocacy in the College Classroom

The three papers that follow were delivered on 22 April 2006 at a conference of the California Association of Scholars at the Annenberg School on the campus of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. The aim of the panelists was to diagnose the political and cultural imbalance in higher education, to analyze its causes and consequences, and to look for remedies. Other essays from that conference may appear later in AQ.     

Wissenscha Ftsdidaktik: Didactics of the Sciences

Prominent among the scholars who devote attention to the systematic improvement of university teaching is Professor Hartmut von Hentig, head of the Center for Interdisciplinary Research at the New University of Bielefeld (and also the director of a laboratory school where the new theories and approaches can be tried out and developed). In April 1969, the Center held a conference on the problems of the didactics of the sciences. The participants included professors and assistants as well as students. Professor von Hentig delivered the main paper, of which the major portion is presented here in English translation. The original paper was published in Neue Sammlung, 1969, Fifth Special Issue.     

Baotou People's Representative Assembly Meets

New China News Agency (March 29), Guisui: The First Municipal People's Representative Conference of Baotou, Suiyuan Province, was held March 18-21. More than two hundred representatives were present The conference first heard a report by Mayor Zheng Tianxiang on the work of the municipal people's government. The report was unanimously adopted by the representatives after discussion. They also made constructive criticisms and suggestions on the administration and other work of the municipal government. For example, worker representatives criticized wastage at the publicly owned power plant. They pointed out that last year bureaucratism caused the plant to lose 658,000 kwh of electricity, and 1,970,000 jin of millet, as a result of theft and wastage. Over 45 percent of its personnel were not involved in production. They proposed that a committee be set up immediately to correct matters. Representatives of cultural and educational circles exposed Qin Bangzhen, who had associated with the Guomindang in the past and monopolized the cultural and educational undertakings in the city. They pointed out that Qin had embezzled cultural and educational funds amounting to RMB 2.2 billion yuan, and they demanded that his case be dealt with by the municipal people's government. The conference discussed all these suggestions and decided on the measures to be taken.     

Counselor: Know Thyself

In these, the days of ever-increasing tempo, an unusual yet unmistakable trend is manifest within the fields of counseling and education alike. It can readily be discerned in current professional literature, by talking with counselors and teachers, as well as by attending any conference of decent quality. There is emerging a tremendous concern about issues dealing with the meaning of life. More precisely, the real issue for clients and students is the lack of meaning in life; the lack of a sense of purpose; the lack of any apparent reason for being alive over and above the superficialities of material success.     

Review Essay: Assessing Rhetorics of Social Resistance

This essay draws from Edwin Black's Rhetorical Questions to illuminate the role of mutability in rhetoric, consciousness, and social idioms as it is displayed in Haydar ‘Abd al‐Shafi's speech delivered at the Madrid conference on October 31, 1991. Shaft's speech represents a significant mutation in Palestinian discourse. In this speech, the symbolic mold and the hereditarian social idioms that had controlled the Palestinian narrative until the intifada yielded to a mixed idiom that retained the hereditarian values essential for Palestinian identity but opened up space for the convictional values necessary for negotiation and rapprochement with Israel. This essay demonstrates that rhetorical critical theory could benefit from a close reading and application of the themes in Rhetorical Questions.     

POST‐COMPULSORY EDUCATION IN THE 1980s INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE IN LANCASTER

From 29 August to 1 September 1978 the 4th International Conference in Higher Education “Post‐Compulsory Education in the 1980s” was held at the University of Lancaster. The conference which drew some 250 participants from 25 countries and representatives of several international organizations concentrated on the following problems of higher education in the context of their implications for the future development in this field: structures of post‐compulsory education; higher education and working life; staff development; student learning; role of the media in higher education; and priorities for the 1980s.

The work of the conference was carried out in plenary and working party sessions. In the sessions of the working parties, each group discussed one of the above‐listed conference issues. During the plenary sessions the following addresses were presented:

• the opening address on the present problems of higher education and their implications for its situation in the 1980s, by Lord Briggs, Worcester College, Oxford;

• On “The many faces of academic coordination”, by Professor Burton R. Clark, Director of the Higher Education Research Group, Yale University;

• “Evaluating recurrent education reform or reforming recurrent evaluation in higher education?” by Professor Urban Dahllof from University of Upsala; and

• a summary of the work of the conference by Lord Vaizey,. Brunel University

The conference identified a number of problems, e.g. demographic changes affecting potential student populations in the 1980s, changes in the structure and content of university level education (mainly in the context of higher education systems in the developed countries. We present below the views expressed at the conference, concentrating on those given during the plenary sessions.     

A review of educational technology research in Taiwan

Conclusion Beginning in 1989, the Ministry of Education and the National Science Council of Taiwan have sponsored an international biennial conference organized by different local universities. The purpose of this conference, the International Conference on Computers in Education (ICCE), is to report educational technology research. After the 1993 conference, it became a regional biennial conference held by different countries in the Asia-Pacific region. ICCE 95 was held in Singapore and ICCE 97 will be in Malaysia. After 1997, ICCE will again become an annual conference to reflect the growing research impetus in the region.In Taiwan, after exporting ICCE to the region, the funding agents continue to support an annual conference with a different name, International Conference on Computer Assisted Instruction (ICCAI). This locally organized conference has been held annually since 1994. As a natural result of these activities and consistent support by funding agents, a growing number of international publications are reporting on the more mature results of educational technology research at international conferences and in journals.Contributors included Jon-Chao Hong, Professor of Industrial Education, National Taiwan Normal University, Taiwan; Jihn-Chang Jehng, Associate Professor, Human Resources Management, National Central University, Taiwan; Yu-Fen Shih, Associate Professor, Media and Library Science, Tamkang University, Taiwan; and Gary Chon-Wen Shyi, Associate Professor, Psychology, National Chung- Cheng University, Taiwan.Tak-Wai Chan is an Associate Professor of Computer Science and Information Engineering at National Central University. He is also the President of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for the Advancement of Computers in Education and is an Associate Editor of theInternational Journal of Educational Telecommunications.     

政治文明视角下对高校教代会建设的新思考

高校教代会建设是高校政治文明的体现。搞好高校教代会建设才能更好地保障高校民主政治建设,实现民主决策、民主管理、民主监督,全心全意依靠教职工办出人民满意的高等教育。总结了高校教职工代表大会三十年发展的基本态势,分析了存在的主要问题,对高校教代会实现真正意义上的民主管理提出了新的思考和探索。     

Educating for a “Spirituality of Dialogue”: Theological Foundations,Hermeneutical Invitations,and Pedagogical Directions

Inspired by the 2015 REA Atlanta conference theme, The Power of Imagining: The Life Giving Possibilities of Education in Faith, this article proposes a postmodern reclamation of imagination as the human bridge to sacramentally encounter the Divine. It re-examines sacramental religious education retrieving imagination from material fundamentalism, refocusing the sacraments on societal as well as personal development, and counteracting body/spirit dualism by relating sacramental graces and body energy centers.     

Understanding silence: an investigation of the processes of silencing in parent–teacher conferences with Somali diaspora parents in Danish public schools

This article questions the dominant understanding that immigrant and refugee parents in parent–teacher conferences are silent because they come from a culture where one does not question the authority of the teacher. Instead, it is argued that they become silent through certain interactional processes. Building on material from an explorative case study of the home–school relations of Somali diaspora families in Danish public schools, the article argues that while these parents have many opinions about their children’s education that they wish to convey, there are institutional and interactional processes in the parent–teacher conference that systematically silence their voices. The understanding of culture as a stable structure that persons are situated within in a top-down manner is thus challenged, arguing that dynamic here-and-now interactions unfolding in a specific practice result in persons becoming, rather than being, silent.     

Liberal education and politics: Lessons from the American founding

Editor's Note: This essay was delivered at a Carleton University conference titled “Politicizing the Classroom” and will be published with the other papers by the University of Toronto Press in 1995. This essay is printed by permission of the University of Toronto Press.     

Increasing tolerance and respect of clients through the use of solution-focused counselling

The values and goals of two counselling approaches, planned brief counselling, and more particularly solution-focused counselling, are discussed in relation to the conference theme,Counselling and Tolerance. The promotion of tolerance in clients, it is argued, can be enhanced by using counselling approaches that arepolitically centered in the client, that is, approaches that are tolerant and respectful of an individual client's values, capabilities, circumstances and culture.Because all of the terms, counselling and counsellors, therapy and therapists, have been used by authors cited, all of them appear in this paper as well. Although the terms counselling and counsellors are preferred and have been used whenever possible, all the terms are intended to refer to the same activity.     

How One State Tackles Environmental Education

Abstract

In December of 1997, an international conference was held in Thessaloniki, Greece, to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Tbilisi Doctrine and to reorient education for sustainability in the 21st century. The culmination of this event was the Thessaloniki Declaration—a charter for the future of education for sustainability. In only 2 of the 29 statements made in the Declaration was the term environmental education mentioned. One of those references suggested that environmental education be referred to as education for environment and sustainability. The author believes that this scant use of the term environmental education indicates that the term is finding decreasing support in the international community. The author reviews reasons why environmental education's position is in peril and offers a status report on the current criticisms and weaknesses of environmental education. The author outlines several important strategies that must be implemented to preserve the name and the concept of environmental education for decades to come.     

Guidelines for moderating online educational computer conferences

Moderating computer conferences is both is challenging and stimulating. Knowledge of the dynamics of preparing an asynchronous conference and how the functions of moderators differ at different stages of a conference will help to make the process run smoothly and enjoyably. A few concepts to keep in mind are: