A Perspective on Individual Growth and Classroom Management

I have come to a frightening conclusion. I am the decisive element in the classroom. It is my personal approach that creates the climate. It is my daily mood that makes the weather. As a teacher I possess tremendous power to make a child's life miserable or joyous. I can be a tool of torture or an instrument of inspiration. I can humiliate or humor, hurt or heal. In all situations it is my response that decides whether a crisis will be escalated or de‐escalated, and a child humanized or dehumanized. ¹ 1. Ginott, Haim. Teacher and Child. New York: MacMillan, 1972. View all notes     

Group Process and Emotional Education: Can the group process as described by Louis R. Ormont be effective in modifying the behavior of young children? (A retrospective study)

Several years ago I began to see children in my classroom who did not respond to the techniques I had used for many years to develop behavioural adjustment.

While searching for a new method that would be more effective, I was introduced to Louis Ormont's theories regarding the Group Experience involving adults.

Immediately I began to see the possibility of adjusting the adult Group Process to address the needs of the 5‐6‐year‐olds in my kindergarten class.

In my presentation I will discuss Dr Ormont's theory as I see it relating to my classroom and describe how I implement the Group Process and the results that were achieved over three years’ time with several classes of children.

My presentation will give new meaning to the terms ‘Group Meeting’ and ‘Behavioural Modification’ in the kindergarten classroom. In my mind the results are enormously positive. Children learn to take charge of their own behaviour and are strengthened by the feelings of group membership and personal empowerment.     

Severed Heads and Compliant Bodies? A speculation about principal identities

When I had to reapply for my own position as principal I felt as if I was facing the prospect of losing a part of myself. Conversations with other women colleagues confirmed that I was not alone in this response. Taking this as my cue, I explore the notion of principal “identification” practices—that is the continuing process of forming a “principal identity”—through personal narrative, a Cartesian metaphor and emerging research evidence. In particular, I focus on how conditions of entrepreneurial governance change a continuing policy commitment to heroic leadership, and how principal and school identities are conflated through accountability regimes, marketing requirements and work intensification. I propose that a study of changing principal identities might fruitfully add to critical leadership and management scholarship, complementing the emergent corpus on emotions in leadership.

I am telling you stories. Trust me. (Winterson, 1988 Winterson J (1988) Passion London: Vintage  [Google Scholar], p. 160)     

Letter writing throughout the ages

‘… Meantime I writ to Romeo That he should hither come, as this dire night To help to take her from her borrow'd grave, Being the time the potion's force should cease, But he which bore my letter, friar John, Was stay'd by accident; and yesternight Return'd my letter back.’

Romeo and Juliet

     

WHAT COUNTS AS TEACHING?

AID — the acronym stands for Assessment for Instructional Development — is a behaviourally referenced class questionnaire developed by the author from a data base drawn from 12 institutions of HE (Polytechnics and Universities). It is intended to help the user locate

• objectives in their own progress towards which his students report they lack confidence

• teaching behaviours that seem to bear on these objectives

• changes of teaching strategy that may therefore help the students

AID is focussed on the individual class and subject discipline — it is not suitable for ‘accountability’ uses.

The paper describes the rationale for choosing a behaviourally referenced system (focussed on what teachers and students do or feel, and how often) rather than a ‘satisfaction scale’ (focussed on ‘do my students like me?'), and the way AID was developed from earlier, mainly North American behaviourally referenced systems, such as IDEA. Crucial changes in research methodology are explained and justified. The characteristics and capabilities of the developed system are then outlined, and how to use it is explained. Finally, illustrations are given of three typical uses of the system — a comparison of three elements in a part‐time course for use by the course team in a course review, and two analyses of particular teaching programmes for individual lecturers.     

2014 Australian Association for Research in Education Presidential Address

The 2014, 41st Australian Association for Research in Education (AARE) presidential address is both inspired and guided by the discursive genres of presidential addresses and the role of the president in a member association such as AARE. In the address, typically the president speaks to the members on an issue or issues that are to shape or conclude their term of office, as it is in my case. Like many of the 40 AARE presidents who have gone before me, I will embed some things that are professional, personal and political—not in the interests of advancing my research agenda, but to add “to the weave and pattern of the association’s history” (Reid 2010, p. v). Threads of my research since completing my PhD in 2000 will appear to support the broad argument. Also, I will draw on the outcomes of the 2014 Australian Research Council Discovery round (see Australian Research Council: ARC archives 2016) to encapsulate my key argument that educational research and its (ex)changes are being reshaped: in a post human digital age, the tree of knowledge is mutating. To make my argument, I will review how the thinking and doing of educational research mid-way through the second decade of the twenty-first century is constructed and ask what research endeavours might be created to make the best possible worlds for our member community and the aspirations of the association.     

Rethinking Climate Education: Climate as Entanglement

Climate change education often relies on climate science's mantra that climate change is human induced, not natural. In a posttruth world, this can seem unequivocally necessary. However, I worry that this perpetuates the human/nature dualism and may thus reiterate the very distinction we are seeking to transgress. In this article, I outline my efforts toward conceptualizing a climate pedagogy that doesn't presuppose and reinforce this anthropocentrism and representationalism, while working for informed climate response-ability. Working with Barad's concept of entanglement (2007 Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. [Google Scholar]) and atmospheric temperature as an example, I show that we are part of that climate we seek to understand. I contend that neither the human nor the atmosphere (and by extension, the climate) preexist their intra-action, but rather, that they are ontologically inseparable (entangled). Through material-discursive apparatuses such as (but not limited to) the practices of climate science, the climate and the human are contingently, agentially coconstituted. Climate as an entanglement thus accounts for how climate science works while foregrounding how climate, climate knowers, and climate knowledge co-emerge. Pedagogically, this moves us from knowing about climate—which implies a disconnected knower and a static world—to diverse, worldly practices of climating and becoming-climate.     

A SYSTEMATIC CLASSIFICATION OF PUBLICATIONS RELATIVE TO THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION

“The accent in cultural history is on close examin‐ ation — of texts, of pictures, and of actions — and an open‐mindedness to what those examinations will reveal, rather than on elaboration of new master narratives.”

Lynn Hunt (Ed.), The New Cultural History (Berkeley, Calif., 1989), p. 22.

“[Films] are a legitimate way ... of representing, interpreting, thinking about and making meaning from the traces of the past ... that seriously deals with the relationship of past and present.”

Robert A. Rosenstone (Ed.), Revisioning History (Princeton, N.J., 1995), p. 3.

One of postmodernism's major lines of development collapses the boundaries and hierarchical distinctions between elite or academic culture and popular culture, giving us new opportunities to cross boundaries separating history from literature and the arts, the “academic” from the “popular”, the archival from the imaginative. I embrace the freedom that postmodernism offers to entertain new ideas, play different kinds of language games, challenge established “ways of seeing”.

I propose here that we extend the range of what we regard as historical “source” to include film, and that film be accepted by historians of education as a legitimate form of textual representation and important evidentiary “source” for our exploration and interpre‐ tation of culture and of education. What follows is an attempt at integrating film into the historiography of education. For illustrative purposes, I've chosen Peter Weir's “Dead Poets Society” ("DPS”, 1989) for my text. I don't presume to give “the” meaning of “DPS” for understanding recent American educational history, but to suggest some of its possible meanings, which, given the problematic nature of “meaning” in our postmodern epoch, is about all we can hope for, but which may be enough to continue the conversation about movies after the movie is over.     

STUDENTS AND MISSIONS TENTH QUADRENNIAL STUDENT VOLUNTEER CONVENTION

It is my profound belief that churches must get out of the way and encourage sexually explicit instruction that takes seriously peoples’ needs for intimacy. . . . I would also say that the churches and synagogues, after cleaning up their own house — and maybe in the process of cleaning up their own house — are in fact a resource for educating people in this society [about AIDS]; and should not be written off; and should be in fact at the educational task which — as the word “rabbi” would tell you — is basically the task of the church. ^{1 1}Rev. Joan Campbell, Executive Director, U.S. Office of the World Council of Churches — Address to III International Conference on AIDS, Washington, DC, June 4, 1987.

     

Interpreting biography in the History of Education: past and present

Epigraph

At the time I began work in university, I entered a world which was leisured, privileged and patriarchal, in the United Kingdom at least…. I came from a world in which only 3% of the population aspired to university. I belonged to a world in which, having got where I was through the eleven-plus and ‘A’ levels, there was almost a sense that society owed us a living. (Roy Lowe, 2002 ^{1 1}Roy Lowe, ‘Do We Still Need History of Education: Is it Central or Peripheral?’ History of Education 31, no. 6 (2002): 492–3. )

Women were not obviously on the outside when I attended my first conference – a day conference in 1976 at what was then the Birmingham Polytechnic, now University of Central England. Many women attended although in the first years few were keynote speakers. More importantly there was little about women in the history itself except in the meetings of the Women’s Education Study Group where Carol Dyhouse, June Purvis, Penny Summerfield and Gaby Weiner were all dominant. (Ruth Watts, 2005 ^{2 2}Ruth Watts, ‘Gendering the Story: Change in the History of Education’, History of Education 34, no. 3 (2005): 226. )

In 1967, aged 11, I moved on from my primary school in south London, and was selected to enter the local grammar school. I left most of my friends behind and began a daily routine of walking nervously through the council housing estates in my school uniform. By the time I left this school, seven years later, it had moved to one of the more prosperous suburbs of London to avoid being turned into a comprehensive. In the early twenty-first century, it is one of the leading academic secondary schools in the country, which it certainly was not in 1967. (Gary McCulloch, 2007 ^{3 3}Gary McCulloch, ‘Forty Years On: Presidential Address to the History of Education Society, London 4 November 2006’, History of Education 36, no. 1 (2007): 6. )     

Identifying transcendence in educating for public service: reflections on qualifying to teach as a pedagogic example

In this critically reflective piece, I describe the design of a foundations of education course and my first year teaching experience. I discuss thematic statements of issues that emerged as I came to construct the meaning of my experience and evolving ideas about teaching for public service professions. These included that:

• Questioning is not ‘normal’ for everyone;

• The experience of classroom safety may be different for student participants than for teacher participants;

• Reflection is a situated responsibility; and

• Assessment and authority interact within the context of learning in a formal classroom.

Discussing these issues helped me in framing teaching for public service as itself a transcendent public act, one that crosses boundaries of time and space and that requires embodied, rather than idealistic, understandings of qualifying to teach.     

Be Revolutionary Education Workers

After my article entitled "How I Corrected Discrimination Against Workers' Children" was published in Chung-kuo fu-nu [Chinese Women] and Kuang-ming jih-pao [Kuang-ming Daily], I heard some comrades say: "The reason Yao P'ei-k'uan could do this is that she comes from a good family." I reflected seriously on the comment and found that it was only partly true. I have not always been lucky. As a matter of fact, I have had deviations and have learned my lessons. Now let me begin this article with why I chose to be a teacher.     

Change,Changing, and Being Changed: A Self-study of a teacher educator's becoming real in the throes of urban school reform

Set against an organized school reform backdrop, this inquiry features four challenges I faced as a result of working alongside teachers and principals whose urban schools were awarded major school research grants for a 5-year period. In addition to teasing out the origins of the dilemmas I encountered and showing how they impacted my teaching practice, I make two knowledge contributions through my public presentation of this self-study. First, I add a new set of partnered narratives—the stories of teacher educators/teacher educators' stories of self. Second, I extend my research niche to reveal the role I played as a living, breathing dimension of the educational conduit.

Rabbit: What is REAL? Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?     

THE CHURCH AND EDUCATION

In the ten years following 9/11 there was unprecedented interest in, and commitment to, religious education in the school curriculum in England. Politicians, academics, and professionals all argued that learning about religion could foster “social cohesion” and even prevent terrorism. Accordingly there were a number of national and international initiatives to develop religious education as a part of intercultural education. With a focus on England, but taking full consideration of landmark transnational collaborations, this article examines developments in policy and professional discourse concerning religious education that occurred after, and sometimes as a direct result of, the events of 9/11. It is argued that this emphasis, often instigated at the behest of politicians, led temporarily to an increased status of the curriculum subject in England, but that this influence may have also led to increased instrumentalism, and with it, associated risk to the subject's intellectual autonomy and integrity.

¹ Although the argument and views presented are my own, and any errors remain my own responsibility solely, I thank Robert Jackson, Joyce Miller, David Aldridge, Victoria Elliott, and James Robson for their comments on an earlier draft of this article. I also acknowledge the contribution of the late Terence Copley who, by telephone in November 2010, gave sage advice on the issues discussed in this article.      

FROM CONFUCIAN MASTER TEACHER TO FREIRIAN MUTUAL LEARNER: CHALLENGES IN PEDAGOGICAL PRACTICE AND RELIGIOUS EDUCATION

Abstract

This article addresses the dilemma faced by religious and theological educators committed to a feminist, liberative pedagogy when teaching learners in the church whose Confucian upbringing has socialized them into different means of instruction. After a brief sketch of the Confucian ethos that permeates the life of such persons and communities in present‐day North America, the article examines the pedagogical practices of Confucius/Kongzi, traces the historical development of Confucianism, and suggests how we might live and teach in the tension of what appears to be two extremes of pedagogical practice.

At fifteen 1 set my heart on learning; at thirty I firmly took my stand; ... At seventy 1 followed my heart's desire without overstepping the boundaries of right.

—Analects 2:4

Learning something and practicing it often—is this not a delight?

—Analects 1:1

Whenever three persons walk together, there is sure to be a teacher for me.

—Analects 7:22

I learn without flagging and teach without growing weary.

—Analects 7:34     

EVALUATION OF TEACHING

This paper attempts to ‘lay out’ as clearly as possible some of my preconceptions and assumptions about the evaluation of teaching. The main focus is on teaching in higher education but I hope the ideas may be applicable to teaching in general.

The main reason for this analysis was a feeling of dissatisfaction with many of the papers I had read, but the attempt to make my assumptions as explicit as possible was the result of trying to understand the process of bracketing — a process central to existential‐phenomenological psychology in which one attempts to take a ‘transcendental attitude'’ ‘ to the world rather than a ‘natural attitude’. Whilst my understanding of this process may be inadequate, even faulty, I think the process has helped me to clarify my ideas about both teaching and the evaluation of it.     

Animal Research on Campus: Reflections on My Experience in the Field

In this essay, I discuss my experience as a member of my university’s Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (IACUC). Using Blum’s (2016 Blum, S. (2016). “I love learning, I hate school”: An anthropology of college. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. [Google Scholar]) model of experiential learning (or “learning in the wild”), I reflect on the connected processes of reading, thinking, seeing, hearing, smelling, talking, and listening that were the basis for my education about the use of animals for research on university campuses. In conclusion, I suggest that faculty members, staff members, and students have an obligation to understand, and work to change, the lives of the animals who exist among us.     

14 Removing XU Mumin's "Patriotic" Mask

After I read "Zheng wen" [A Solicited Letter — selection 13, above] by Xu Mumin of Middle School No. 2 in Dezhou, Shandong, in the eighty-ninth biweekly "Writing Reform" feature in Guangming ribao, I groaned with indignation. I am not a researcher in writing reform, but I cannot suppress my anger, I must express it. First, I feel that the Party's policy of "Let a hundred flowers bloom, a hundred schools contend" has rightly opened up free discussion on scientific questions; it is also right that erroneous views made with good intentions should be published. But such insults and false accusations as Xu Mumin's cannot be tolerated. The title that he has chosen, "A Solicited Letter," appears to me to be a challenge to battle. His whole essay is composed of filth which brings false accusations of the worst kind against writing reform; this is not just fortuitous. He has issued a "summons to war" to writing reform, and we must be prepared to strike back with determination.     

Creating a Culture of Reform and Reflection

“The most important words in the teaching profession are ‘I have an idea.’ Someone needs to be there who is genuinely interested in hearing that idea or it will get lost.”

— Margaret, Science Teacher of 22 Years

     

Re-embodying (preservice middle years) teachers? An attempt to reposition the body and its presence in teaching and learning

This four-part story is about one teacher educator’s attempt to embody praxis as a form of academic work, emphasizing the importance of the corporeal in learning and teaching. I describe the inter-related context (1) of my embodied self, the teacher education course I constructed, and theory employed in mediating course practices. Evidence of praxis in emergence (2) is illustrated through written text and visual artefacts of the operationalized assessment. I discuss (3) using embodied subjectivities, the importance of practice/praxis, and how we operationalize discourse in education to then pose questions (4) as flows for teacher educators, preservice teachers and teachers in their classpaces.