The Contestant Perspective on Taking Tests: Emanations From the Statue Within

Views on testing—its purpose and uses and how its data are analyzed—are related to one's perspective on test takers. Test takers can be viewed as learners, examinees, or contestants. I briefly discuss the perspective of test takers as learners. I maintain that much of psychometrics views test takers as examinees. I discuss test takers as a contestant in some detail. Test takers who are contestants in high‐stakes settings want reliable outcomes obtained via acceptable scoring of tests administered under clear rules. In addition, it is essential to empirically verify interpretations attached to scores. At the very least, item and test scores should exhibit certain invariance properties. I note that the “do no harm” dictum borrowed from the field of medicine is particularly relevant to the perspective of test takers as contestants.     

A situative turn in the conversation on motivation theories

In this commentary I take a situative turn in the theoretical conversation around the question, “Why do people do what they do?” The first section describes in broad strokes what a situative perspective on motivation or engagement entails. Next, I comment on aspects of the five articles as they relate to the history and methods of socio-cognitive and situative approaches to understanding motives to learn. Then, using the central organizing framework of “meaning systems” in situative approaches, I suggest ways that a situative perspective might contribute to ongoing work in the five motivation theories and how some of the authors take steps in that direction.     

Language mosaic. Developing literacy in a second–new language: a new perspective

This article presents a new approach to examining second language writing among young learners, which I define as “Language mosaic”. It offers a new perspective on the process of writing development and examines how and what children do in the writing process while developing an additional language.     

Adult and community education in complex societies: reconsidering critical perspectives

In this contribution, I explore how critical pedagogical perspectives can inspire adult and community education practices. The central argument is that today, in contrast with the heydays of emancipatory practices and theories, the classical critical approaches need reconsideration. The paper explores how these approaches sometimes have a stultifying effect on the participants in practice. In line with the French philosopher Rancière, a perspective is explored that departs from emancipated participants rather than from participants in need of emancipation. The theoretical investigation is inspired by reflections on art practices that struggle with similar questions on emancipation as the field of adult and community education.     

Assuming my Transformation: Transforming my Assumptions

As a White, middle-class, English-speaking female of the type commonly found in teacher education programs, I have had to learn how to use my perspective to challenge the assumptions of the “typical” student teachers for whom I am a teacher educator. This self-study describes how I have been transformed by this learning process. Studying my teaching has provided me with opportunities to challenge my own assumptions about teacher education and to confront my issues of control and ambiguity as they relate to teaching.     

Teaching and Learning Metaphor

In this study I look at recent work done by psychologists in the field of metaphor comprehension as well as longer‐established philosophical theories. I suggest that there is a great deal that English teachers can gain by having a broader understanding of metaphor. I look at how Year 7 pupils, in particular, can benefit a great deal from such notions.     

Challenges in identifying target skills for math disability screening and intervention

Gersten, Jordan, and Flojo (in this series) review their research on math difficulties, with an emphasis on applying current knowledge to inform practices of early identification and intervention. On a practical level, educators are in dire need of empirically based screening and intervention tools. From a scientific perspective, it is important to recognize the need to clearly define what we seek to identify and remediate, and to acknowledge that we are currently far from achieving this goal despite recent advances in the field. Among the studies reviewed by Gersten et al., as well as other studies by several other researchers, there is much variability in how mathematics difficulties are defined and measured, and even in the terms used to refer to them. I address the degree of consensus and controversy currently characterizing the state of math learning disabilities research, with an emphasis on the usefulness of a developmental perspective in appraising this young field.     

The utopia of science education

In this forum I expand on the ideas I initially presented in ??Extending the purposes of science education: addressing violence within socio-economic disadvantaged communities?? by responding to the comments provided by Matthew Weinstein, Francis Broadway and Sheri Leafgren. Focusing on their notion of utopias and superheroes, I ask us to reconsider science as inevitably violent. Utopia is a concept that contributes to articulating our ideals, and serves to give us perspective on how our current reality differs from our goals. I suggest that by recognising alternative views of nature, science and ??superheroes?? we could see a science that is committed to the lives and struggles of students as well as the lives and struggles of other animals.     

Education,Measurement and the Professions: Reclaiming a space for democratic professionality in education

Abstract

In this article, I explore the impact of the contemporary culture of measurement on education as a professional field. I focus particularly on the democratic dimensions of professionalism, which includes both the democratic qualities of professional action in education itself and the way in which education, as a profession, supports the wider democratic cause. I show how an initial authoritarian conception of professionalism was opened up in the 1960s and 1970s towards more democratic and more inclusive forms of professional action. I then show how, in the wake of the transformation of the welfare state and the rise of neo-liberal forms of governing, the democratic dimension of professionalism became distorted. I discuss three distortions: having to do with the position of clients, the nature of accountability and the status of professional knowledge. While at first sight, the developments in each of these areas can be seen as furthering the democratisation of the professions, I argue that in fact they have eroded the democratic dimension of the professions and show the contribution of the culture of measurement to this erosion process. In the final step of my argument, I suggest how a more democratic mode of professional action might be regained and how such a mode of professional action might contribute to wider processes of democratisation.     

Does Education have Independent Power? Bernstein and the question of relative autonomy

In this article, I focus on some of the ways Basil Bernstein's positions can help us understand the question of the relative autonomy of the school and of the 'class belongingness' of its cultural dynamics. In the process, I show how this differentiation of various social fields of power and of the complex ways in which class relations work within them enables a considerably more subtle perspective on 'who controls what' and on what that 'what' actually is. I also argue that we cannot fully answer the question of whether schools can 'create a new social order' unless we unpack the relations of outside to inside, of what constitutes the inside, and especially of what the specific power relations are both within what Bernstein calls 'the symbolic field' and between it and 'the field of production' and the 'field of the state'. Of particular importance here is the notion of the 'pedagogic device', Bernstein's apparatus for demonstrating the specific cultural configuration that enables us to uncover 'why things stay the same' and how they might be different. For Bernstein, the issue became not only explaining change, but also explaining what he saw as the remarkable stability and similarity of education among different political economies. I use as an example the pedagogic device in one specific nation and demonstrate how we can employ it to more rigorously focus our attention on the possible effects education itself has.     

Personal Universes: revealing community college students’ competences though their organization of the cosmos

In this article I present a study on learners’ conceptions in cosmology by situating the results in the context of broader historical and sociocultural themes. Participants were community college students in California from non-dominant cultural and linguistic backgrounds finishing their first semester of astronomy. Data were collected through a drawing activity and card sort given during clinical-style interviews. This type of work is typically done from the perspective of conceptual change theory, using drawings to reveal student “misconceptions.” I argue that in analyzing this kind of data, we need to come from the perspective that students are competent, and put their conceptions in context. I begin by presenting traditional frameworks for evaluating and describing learning, all of which rely on an outdated “banking” or “transmission” model of learning that puts an over-emphasis on the performance and attributes of individuals. Not only do these theories provide an incomplete picture of what learning looks like, they create and reify unnecessary divides between “scientific” and “unscientific” that can contribute to student alienation from the world of science. To illustrate this, I present my own results as a window into the logic of learners’ assumptions within a sociocultural context, and suggest ways to support their learning trajectories, rather than figuring out how to unlearn their misconceptions. Through this analysis, I hope to show how taking student conceptions out of sociocultural context can potentially exclude students from non-dominant cultural and linguistic backgrounds from science.     

What counts as knowledge: learning to use categories in computer environments

In this article, I develop a perspective on learning as multilayered phenomena. I take a socio-genetic approach in order to understand human activity and to show how categories are a fundamental part of learning in a specific type of institutional practice. In the empirical section, student dialogue is analysed in relation to a set of categories taken from scientific discourse. The analysis illustrates how categories in the progressive inquiry model could guide students towards a more systematic orientation to problem solving.     

Education for sustainable development and the secondary curriculum in English schools: rhetoric or reality?

Can education for sustainable development (ESD) policies help to create a more sustainable society? In the article I argue that contemporary secondary school curriculum policies relating to ESD are rhetorical devices that will achieve little towards resolving global problems. I suggest that the conceptualization of SD is itself fundamentally flawed and inevitably restricts the scope of possible policy solutions. I analyse three ESD curriculum policy texts to reveal their concealments, silences and blocks to enquiry, demonstrating how their rhetorical forms make them readily assimilable into dominant economic discourse. I then introduce a recent UK Government Report explaining the failure in implementing ESD policies in the school curriculum and I expose how this analysis is a further demonstration of the problems in the prevailing policy perspective. In conclusion, I propose a new direction for progress in curriculum policy regarding sustainability.     

Student Identities and/in Schooling: Subjection and adolescent performativity

This article uses a fictionalized scenario to examine how three students at an “ordinary” suburban high school in Canada negotiate the context-specific conditions, discourses, and practices that make schools important sites of identity formation. It argues that drawing from Foucault's ideas on the “subjection” of individuals, as well as from the field of performance studies, provides a fresh perspective to redress the potential mismatches between official multicultural education discourses and the lived schooling realities of students. In the process, it demonstrates how subjection and adolescent performativity can be useful analytics through which to understand student identities and/in schooling. The article concludes with some implications for shifts in policy, pedagogy, and practice to help schools engage with student diversity.     

THE TWELFTH ANNUAL CONVENTION

This article offers a response to two provocative questions about the relationship of theology to religious education posed by Norma Thompson in her Presidential address given at the annual meeting of APRRE in 1978. I offer contemporary answers to these questions from the perspective of a theological educator. First, I show how feminist theory and practices are transforming theological education. Second, I discuss how feminist pedagogy and theologies inform my teaching as a university professor. Third, I show how the themes of justice, dialogue, and imagination that emerge from feminist practices shape my work and the learning of my undergraduate theology students.     

Higher-Order Comprehension Processes in Struggling Readers: A Perspective for Research and Intervention

Many children struggle to learn to read, and these difficulties can persist well into adulthood. To address this problem, researchers have investigated the processes that underlie reading. An informative body of work has thus identified basic skills (e.g., decoding, vocabulary knowledge) as necessary for successful reading. Researchers also have begun to examine comprehension skills and their contributions to the reading process. In this article we describe research from the cognitive sciences on the processes that underlie higher-order, coherence-oriented comprehension to provide an empirically and theoretically driven perspective for investigating struggling readers' difficulties. We show that this perspective is particularly beneficial in the development and assessment of instructional approaches by relating it to existing, effective interventions. Finally, we demonstrate how our own research activities have derived from this perspective and how preliminary findings extend our understanding of readers' difficulties. This work seeks to address existing challenges in the field of reading comprehension while also suggesting new ways of investigating the plight of struggling readers.     

"The Morality of it All:" The Educational Value of Canadian Drama for Moral Education

Recent theories in moral philosophy elaborate on the dialogical nature of moral development and stipulate that moral identities are constituted within social, historical, and cultural contexts. According to this philosophical perspective, one of the ways in which moral agency needs to be understood and evaluated is according to those contextual variables which may generate moral response. This article aims to illustrate how theatre is a potent instructional medium to educate about the often enigmatic nature of moral choice. I suggest that plays include compelling studies of moral agents caught in complex and lifelike dilemmas through which are exposed the often ambiguous and paradoxical dimensions of moral conduct. Furthermore, I argue that contemporary Canadian plays offer useful fictional contexts to illuminate the intricate process of moral choice, and I cite concrete examples to illustrate the kinds of moral scenarios recent Canadian drama explores.     

Restructuring the relationship between STEM faculty and K-12: crafting a figured world of partnership

Over the past 50 years, identity has provided us with a dynamic tool to understand and examine how people are constituted as agents as well as subjects of culturally constructed, socially enacted worlds. Pertinent to this conceptualization, Skerrett and Sevian focus on science and mathematics faculty’s identities and seek to understand how certain aspects of their identities mediate certain motivations to involvement in K-12 service. While I believe that the authors presented an affluent discussion of agency from the perspective of identity, I think that if we are to understand agency from a sociocultural perspective, we have to magnify a view of identity and agency in the figured world of practice/activity. My main goal is not only to reclaim the importance of the individual dimension and agency within a profoundly social view of the self, but also to highlight the figured contextual factors that would either enable or constrain STEM faculty’s involvement in K-12 outreach. After first outlining the perspective of identity and agency that was adopted by Skerrett and Sevian, I extend the discussion of Skerrett and Sevian to move forward toward a figured world of partnership. I conclude by positing that the third generation of activity theory has a potential for contributing to our understanding of how the social institutional context and its structure is important to our understanding of individual agency.     

Children,Self-knowledge and Cultural Reproduction

This article evaluates two most popular normative theories about the reproduction of cultural values through children from the perspective of self-knowledge: Brighouse and Swift's parent-child relationship argument and Clayton's public reason argument. I suggest that while plausible on some grounds, these arguments struggle to accommodate the normative importance of the child's substantive self-knowledge. I propose that we understand cultural reproduction as a learning process and require that children, in addition to cultural content their parents transfer to them, must also acquire knowledge of their own unique personal identity.