The promise of experiential education in teacher education: transforming teacher beliefs and practices

Building from the theories of Dewey and Kolb and Fry, we sought to examine the impact of experiential education in teacher education on teacher beliefs and practices. The teacher education model described in this article sets out to challenge the seduction of the apprenticeship of observation and create an opportunity for in-service teachers to re-imagine their teaching in concrete and transformative ways. Immersed in a weeklong experiential residency in either the mountains or at a local environmental education farm, the teachers in the study were challenged physically, intellectually, socially, and emotionally in and through the experience. The experiential work ultimately led to changes in teacher participants’ beliefs and practices related to teacher and student roles and potentialities. Although challenges exist for this type of practice in K-12 classrooms and in teacher education, experiential education has a significant potential to change the way teachers think about and act in their practice.     

The rhythms of pedagogy: an ethnographic study of parenting education practices

Educational research is increasingly turning to conceptual frameworks from a range of disciplines in order to enrich understandings of education, pedagogy and learning. This paper draws on the work of Henri Lefebvre, specifically rhythmanalysis, to explore the nature and the function of pedagogy. The context is an ethnographic study of parenting education and pedagogic practices in a child and family service in Sydney. Three features of rhythmanalysis are discussed: kinds of rhythm, rhythms and bodies, and oppositions such as repetition and difference, fast and slow and secret and public. Through these concepts, intricate connections between rhythm and pedagogy are identified, including rhythms as providing a pedagogic imperative, rhythms as content and mechanisms at the heart of pedagogy and rhythms as outcomes of learning. The paper argues that rhythmanalysis opens up possibilities for new questions, different kinds of empirical sensibilities and distinctive accounts of pedagogy and learning in continuing education.     

Coming home: The cost and promise of community-based education and development

Three theses are presented regarding the integration of education and development within communities. The need for modles of intergration for education and development is discussed. Also, this article discusses the question of power: who has it? why? and how to get it. Finally there is a definition of values and ideologies which are used in education and the implication of these for the development of the community.     

Re/writing the subject: a contribution to post-structuralist theory in mathematics education

This text, occasioned by a critical reading of Mathematics Education and Subjectivity (Brown, 2011) and constituting a response to the book, aims at contributing to the building of (post-structuralist) theory in mathematics education. Its purpose was to re/write two major positions that Mathematics Education and Subjectivity articulates: that which it takes with respect to (a) L. S. Vygotsky and the activity theory he gave rise to, which are subject and subjected to critique, and (b) Lacan and his theory of the subject, which radically change signification in and through their adoption in the book. Moving between languages becomes a major issue of theory building captured in the diction “traduttore, traditore” (translating is committing treason). The present text should be read as a contribution to an ongoing dialogue on theory, incomplete and partial, as (perfectly) imperfect as Mathematics Education and Subjectivity itself.     

The promise and the promises of Making in science education

Making is a rapidly emerging form of educational practice that involves the design, construction, testing, and revision of a wide variety of objects, using high and low technologies, and integrating a range of disciplines including art, science, engineering, and mathematics. It has garnered widespread interest and support in both policy and education circles because of the ways it has been shown to link science learning to creativity and investigation. Making has taken root in out-of-school settings, such as museums, science festivals, and afterschool and library programmes; and there is now growing interest from primary and secondary educators in how it might be incorporated into the classroom. Making expands on traditions associated with Technology Education and Design-Based Learning, but differs in ways that can potentially broaden participation in science and STEM learning to include learners from communities historically underrepresented in STEM fields. STEM-Rich Making is centrally organised around design and engineering practices, typically integrating digital tools and computational practices, and positions scientific and mathematical concepts and phenomena as the materials for design. This paper takes a critical view of the claims about Making as a productive form of science teaching and learning, and reviews the current research literature’s substantiation of the ways in which Making supports students’ agency, promotes active participation in science and engineering practices, and leverages learners’ cultural resources.     

Cool Guys,Swots and Wimps: the interplay of masculinity and education

Most educational work concerned with changes in gender relations has been addressed to girls, justified on ‘equal opportunity’ principles, and governed by ‘sex‐role’ theories. This framework is not very relevant to educational work with boys, yet gender issues arise here too. The paper presents retrospective data on schooling from the life‐histories of two groups of men, drawn from a larger study of contemporary changes in masculinity. Unemployed working‐class men recall ‘getting into trouble’, a process of constructing masculinity through conflict with the institutional authority of the school. Here, the school, as part of the state represents a power they cannot participate in. However, the school is also a site of the differentiation of masculinities. Some working‐class boys embrace a project of mobility in which they construct a masculinity organised around themes of rationality and responsibility. This is closely connected with the ‘certification’ function of the upper levels of the educational system and to a key form of masculinity among professionals. Some young men from this background, however, reject the connection with abstracted knowledge and bureaucratic authority, among them men interviewed who are in the environmental movement. A number of these men had encountered feminism first‐hand, for instance through feminist texts. Where there are low levels of literacy, especially political literacy, feminist influence on men is slight. On the other hand, a common reaction among men who do study feminist writing is a demobilising guilt. A major opportunity for educational action exists, but there are difficulties in designing it. Broadly, the strongest effects of schooling on the construction of masculinity are the indirect effects of streaming and failure, authority pattern, the academic curriculum and definitions of knowledge—rather than the direct effects of equity programmes or courses dealing with gender. This is a major strategic problem for reform. Two criteria for action can be suggested: curricula need to be designed to broaden boys’ sources of information about sexuality and gender; programmes need to be designed that allow for practical accomplishment on these issues, not open‐ended problem identification alone.     

Unmasking: on violence, masculinity, and superheroes in science education

Through exploration of public mask/private face, the authors trouble violence and its role in science education through three media: schools, masculinity, and science acknowledging a violence of hate, but dwelling on a violence of caring. In schools, there is the poisonous ??for your own good?? pedagogy that becomes a ??for your own good?? curriculum or a coercive curriculum for science teaching and learning; however, the antithetical curriculum of I??m here entails violence??the shedding of the public mask and the exposing of the private face. Violence, likewise, becomes social and political capital for masculinity that is a pubic mask for private face. Lastly, science, in its self-identified cultural, political and educational form of a superhero, creates permanent harm most often as palatable violence in order to save and to redeem not the private face, but the public mask. The authors conclude that they do not know what violence to say one should not do, but they know the much of the violence has been and is being committed. All for which we can hope is not that we cease all violence or better yet not hate, but that we violently love.     

Integration of external studies and campus‐based education in Australian higher education: The myth and the promise

A series of historical phases in the development of external studies provision in Australia is outlined. Through an analysis of the ways in which current policy has been influenced by previous conceptions of external studies, it is shown that policy formulation fails to take account of the most recent phase of development in the direction of open learning. It is argued that this error, if uncorrected, will lead to the implementation of policy which, though it may maintain the myth of integration of external studies and campus‐based education, must deny its promise. A promise which, ironically, has greater likelihood of fulfillment in Australia, given the absence of a single national provider of external studies.     

Utopian spaces and the promise of education: a conceptual analysis

Abstract

This paper states that modern education and utopian discourse share one common trait, that of being structurally founded on the promise of human betterment. The changing relations between concepts of education and utopianism will be developed through conceptual analysis of the dynamics of the promise in their interweaving process. This shall be discussed through three main topics. The first is the appropriation of space in early modern education (sixteenth century onward), with particular emphasis on the influence of print technology on framing a new conception of educational spaces and practices. Second, the promise of the idea of progress in the Enlightenment period, which will become the further technological promise of a society-to-come, no longer spatially but temporally presented. Finally, the promise of autonomy through and against the modern subject, in which such autonomy is presented like the end of the journey through education, supposed that there is an end to such a journey. The key frame uniting the three topics is that utopian discourse journeying towards a normative conception of human society, as well as modern educational schemes journeying towards a normative conception of adulthood, are limited insofar as their respective promises, which are more impatient than the slow project of creation, more than often outruns it. The paper thus inquires whether or not there is a way to uphold the creative and imaginative possibilities of utopia in education, by acknowledging the pervasive effects of the promise on the social imaginary.     

The promise of action research for critically reflective teacher education

Abstract

This paper is an analysis of the potential that action research theory and practice hold for educating preservice teachers to become more critically reflective. First, action research theory, especially as it informs current notions of educational research and practice, is reviewed. Then critically reflective teaching is described by grounding the term in critical social science views supportive of the social reconstructionist reform tradition in teacher education. Special attention is given in this review to the claims made by action research advocates regarding the power of action research to promote critically reflective teaching. Finally, to examine the empirical basis for these claims, a brief survey is made of several reports of the use of action research by teacher educators. The analysis reveals cautious optimism for the promise action research holds for critically reflective teacher education.     

教育实验研究方法的再认识

The scientificalization of educational research methods was always the most predominant in the two tides of educational experiment in China in the twentieth century, the result of which was unexpectedly dissatisfactory, because researchers misunderstood the connotation of scientificalization in such a degree that resulted in the worship for methods and thought of replacement. If researchers reflect dialectically on the classic codes of experiment, and aim at reconstructing the viewpoint of experiment in education in the dimensions of ideas and pattern, they would guide the research on education by an “ideal type”, decently intervene the “logic of practice” with the “logic of theory”, so that the theorists and practitioners in education can finally coexist and co-develop.      

Globalisation and Its Malcontents: In pursuit of the promise of education

In the course of exploring critiques of globalisation, this essay will focus on two postures—each with its range of arguments—that have emerged as alternatives to globalisation, namely, the delinking position and the subverting position. The first argues for standing “outside” of globalisation and its educational cultures and apparatuses. It brings together positions found in black feminism (as in the work of Audre Lourde), various religious, cultural, and ideology-centred approaches such as Islamic education and Afrocentric education, and critical dependency theorists such as Samir Amin, all of whom argue in one way or another for delinking the “South” from the “North”. The second argues for working “inside” the globalised world. This posture, represented by an eclectic group of philosophies and approaches that span radical constructivism, different versions of multiculturalism, and, on the left, old and new interpretations of Marxism, argues variously for developing more authentic and relevant pedagogies and for making a case for mobilising social structures behind political efforts to change the curriculum. The direction that this essay will take, in the course of critiquing these “outside” and “inside” postures, is to argue that neither is sufficient, by itself, as a reply to the assimilative and exclusionary impulses of the form of globalisation that dominates the world today. It is suggested, instead, that a way towards an alternative imagination to the hegemonic culture of globalisation lies in exploring the relationship between an engaged “inside” and “outside” view.     

The contribution (or not) of UN higher education to peacebuilding: an ethnographic account

This paper examines the role of United Nations (UN) peace academics in teaching for peace within the UN higher education system, and questions what contribution, if any, UN peacebuilding education makes to the broader field of peace and conflict studies education, and in the lives of the people it touches. The study draws on ethnographic data collected over a six-month period at one UN university in 2015. The data collection period involved participant observation, interviews with faculty and postgraduate students, document analysis, and surveys with learners. Findings suggest tensions and contradiction in the university around issues of UN mimicry, Western-centrism, state domination, and institutional capitalism. Implications are briefly addressed and recommendations provided.