Should Homosexuality be Taught as an Acceptable Alternative Lifestyle? A Muslim perspective

In most western countries homosexuality is gaining growing support as an alternative lifestyle and, being a part of sex education in schools, is presented to children as a positive image. The first section of the paper summarises the current political and social aspirations of the gay and lesbian movement and examines the underlying values and assumptions in this position as well as its educational implications. The second section considers evidence of the extent to which the gay and lesbian aspirations are receiving a sympathetic hearing from liberals, sex education specialists, Christians, members of other world religions and the population at large. The third section develops a Muslim perspective on (male) homosexuality, based mainly on Islamic teaching but also referring where appropriate to practices in Muslim countries. Muslims oppose the teaching of homosexuality not only because Islam proclaims homosexual practices to be an ‘abomination’, but also because the notion of homosexuality as a lifestyle at all, let alone a natural and equally valid one, is itself incoherent from a Muslim perspective. The paper concludes with some suggestions about the educational implications of the Muslim perspective.     

Feedback as an assessment for learning tool: How useful can it be?

This study investigates the feedback practices and perceptions of lecturers and students in a UK university setting. To assess how lecturers give feedback in practice, 47 pieces of lecturer-written feedback were categorised into a total of 571 analytical points. Analysing the feedback from lecturers’ perspectives in terms of the value of feedback, the role of feedback and the effectiveness of feedback helps in an understanding of the rationale for and effects of feedback provision. The results of feedback analyses from students’ perspectives show the impact of individual background and intercultural communication barriers on the effective reception of feedback. Differences were identified between students and lecturers’ views of feedback as an assessment for learning tool.     

Should History be Forgotten?

History is a recurring motif contained in various literary works.Actually,it has found omnipresent expression in our daily life.Yesterday is history and even the very past one minute can be reckoned to be history.However,whether history should be erased from our life has never failed to arouse a widespread bitter controversy.     

Should teachers be taught to be rational?1

Programs of teacher education have tried often to make teachers follow a priori models of the rationality. These models fit poorly with the way teachers actually think. Rather than concluding that even more teacher training is required, recent research on teacher thinking has tried to uncover the rationality underlying teachers’ practice. The temptation to demand conformity with the new models of rationality uncovered should be resisted. Instead, research on teacher thinking should be used to make teachers aware of possible modes of thought, to give teacher educators a sense of how their students may change, and to give in‐service educators an idea of how their students may view instruction.

     

Should mobile learning be compulsory for preparing students for learning in the workplace?

From the contexts of current social, educational and health policy, there appears to be an increasingly inevitable “mobilisation” of resources in medicine and health as the use mobile technology devices and applications becomes widespread and culturally “normed” in workplaces. Over the past 8 years, students from the University of Leeds Medical School have been loaned mobile devices and smartphones and been given access to mobile‐based resources to assist them with learning and assessments as part of clinical activity in placement settings. Our experiences lead us to suggest that educators should be focusing less on whether mobile learning should be implemented and more on developing mobile learning in curricula that is comprehensive, sustainable, meaningful and compulsory, in order to prepare students for accessing and using such resources in their working lives.     

Should Homosexuality be Taught as an Acceptable Alternative Lifestyle? A Muslim perspective: a response to Halstead and Lewicka

This article focuses upon that part of Halstead and Lewicka's argument which contends that ‘a gay and lesbian world view’ on homosexuality is, at least in certain respects, incommensurable with a Muslim view. This thesis is challenged and certain educational implications of this challenge are explored. The view originally formulated by Patricia White that in liberal, democratic societies such as the UK ‘a school has no reason not to present homosexuality as a morally acceptable way of life which some of its student members may one day lead’ is endorsed     

Should Science be Taught in Early Childhood?

This essay considers the question of why we should teach science to K-2. After initial consideration of two traditional reasons for studying science, six assertions supporting the idea that even small children should be exposed to science are given. These are, in order: (1) Children naturally enjoy observing and thinking about nature. (2) Exposing students to science develops positive attitudes towards science. (3) Early exposure to scientific phenomena leads to better understanding of the scientific concepts studied later in a formal way. (4) The use of scientifically informed language at an early age influences the eventual development of scientific concepts. (5) Children can understand scientific concepts and reason scientifically. (6) Science is an efficient means for developing scientific thinking. Concrete illustrations of some of the ideas discussed in this essay, particularly, how language and prior knowledge may influence the development of scientific concepts, are then provided. The essay concludes by emphasizing that there is a window of opportunity that educators should exploit by presenting science as part of the curriculum in both kindergarten and the first years of primary school.     

Should ‘ought’ be taught?

The argument in this paper is that teachers and other education professionals could benefit from the opportunity to develop ethical understanding, in addition to other aspects of professional knowledge. Having first discussed the nature of ethics, the first main section of the paper establishes the case in favour of including ethical education in the initial or ongoing professional learning of teachers. The case focuses particularly on showing the negative effects of the fashionable claim that ‘values are relative or subjective’ which I argue is a key source of confusion for teachers. In the final part of the paper I discuss some of the kinds of consideration about values and ethics that teachers might find useful.     

Should Creationism be Taught in the Public Schools?

This article discusses philosophicalarguments relevant to the question of teachingcreationism, especially with regard to developments inthe debate since the early 1990s.Section 1 reviews the newfactions within the creationist movement, and theoverlapping views from young earth to intelligentdesign creationism, as well as non-Christianvarieties. It also considers what are the relevantdifferences for the policy question for private,public schools, and for home schoolers, as well aspossible differences in what it means to teachcreationism. Sections 2 & 3 discuss the main legal argumentsthat have ruled in the public school case, as well asarguments from academic freedom, fairness, censorship,parental rights and majority rule. Section 4 evaluates theepistemological issues regarding competing claims oftruth, and the contention that excluding whatChristians know (Alvin Plantinga) amounts toviewpoint discrimination (Phillip Johnson). Section 5argues that religious protection arguments actuallyfavor excluding creationism more than including it. Section 6 considers the goals of education, especiallyDewey's views on science education, and what theseimply regarding the teaching of a theistic science. In Section 7, I review a new argument of Alvin Plantingabased upon a purported Rawlsian basic right of aparent not to have her children taught anything thatviolates her comprehensive beliefs, and show whyRawlsian agents would reject it.     

Should Trump Bother with an Education Agenda?

The principal opportunities awaiting the Trump administration in K–12 education are only loosely related to the candidate’s campaign comments about advancing school choice and reducing the federal Education Department. Recent passage of the Every Student Succeeds Act signals that Congress will be loath to re-open the major federal K-12 programs for amendment. Bright opportunities away in connection with the Perkins Act, special education and the Institute of Education Sciences (IES), as well as various domains--beginning with the Office for Civil Rights--that beg for strategic deregulation.     

Should We Pay for Music Downloads?

当磁带和CD渐渐退出人们的视线,从音乐上赚钱逐渐变得困难——在电脑上养成了免费下载的习惯后,用户逐渐拒绝了为音乐付费的消费模式。然而,享受数字音乐"免费大餐"的日子恐怕不久就要过去了。有报道称,包括华纳在内的几大国际唱片公司,拟在2013年初联合国内的酷狗、酷我、百度音乐等音乐服务网站尝试采取音乐下载收费包月制度。面对这样的转变,你持什么样的态度呢?     

Belarusian as an endangered language: can the mother tongue of an independent state be made to die?

While decline and/or extinction threaten an ever-increasing number of languages, most of these are minority tongues that struggle for survival against dominant languages. The present paper reports the case of Belarusian, a national and co-official language, which the great majority of the population of Belarus considers as its mother tongue, but which has become endangered due to sustained official policies discriminating against it, and the general apathy of the population. The paper places this complex and puzzling situation in the historical context of people long accustomed to changing cultural and linguistic elites, with a succession of rulers that paid little regard to the wishes or needs of the majority of the country’s inhabitants. Recent data are presented showing the rapid decline in the teaching of Belarusian language in schools and other public domains and the use of mixed dialects as the prevailing mode of communication, shifting through a Belarusian-Russian mix (trasianka) to Russian. The effort of a small national linguistic elite to sustain the use of standard Belarusian is examined against the concept of language as a core value of culture and Fishman’s framework for reversing language shift, in order to evaluate the prospects of maintaining Belarusian as an integral part of the linguistic heritage of Europe.     

Reflection and its Place in the Curriculum on an Undergraduate Course: Should it be assessed?

In the fast changing world of health care the need for therapists to be reflective practitioners is no longer disputed. How reflection is taught and assessed at undergraduate level is however more contentious. This longitudinal study explores the experiences of students undergoing a number of assessments of reflection and also examines whether members of faculty have similar perceptions of those assessments. Analysis of data from focus groups and individual interviews suggest that students have a number of concerns about the assessment of reflection, some of which are shared by faculty. The paper concludes that the process of reflection is better left unassessed.     

Should the Cambridge primary review be wedded to Vygotsky?

The Cambridge Primary Review's (CPR) preference for a Vygotskian model of schools learners and learning rather than a Piagetian is queried. There are weaknesses and uncertainties with major Vygotskian ideas such as the ‘zone of proximal development’, ‘internalisation’, ‘joint construction’, ‘language mediation’ and educational acculturation, relative to the Piagetian, while human scientific research with babies suggesting inherited capability thrust humans forearmed into physical and social worlds gives some succour to Piaget's cause. The Vygotskian and CPR premise that teachers can push learners beyond developmentally set limits is not unadulterated good news, depending on how we judge education's acculturation purposes and depending on the kind of learners we want within our educational system.     

Should we be encouraging pupils to ask more questions?

This article investigates the issue of secondary school pupils asking questions. This is an important topic on which very little has been published to date. The article reviews the current literature, which almost exclusively reports the lack of student initiated, content related questioning in classrooms. A small study is described that challenges this view, finding a significantly greater level of student participation, a high percentage of inquiry driven questions and little reluctance on the part of pupils to participate actively in lessons. However, when these questioning patterns, which appear to indicate exemplary lessons on paper, are examined in terms of pupil learning, it is found that large numbers of student questions can lead to severe disruption unless adequately controlled. For effective learning to take place, it is a vital that the learner has the opportunity to ask questions of the teacher. The vast bulk of the literature explores this topic through quantitative analysis of questioning patterns and suggested strategies for increasing the quality and frequency of pupil’s questions. This article reviews this research and explores the issue further through classroom observations, pupil questionnaires and interviews with teachers. The findings are compared with the current paradigm and the issue is discussed in terms of impact on pupil learning.     

Should Farmers' Locus of Control be used in Extension?

Abstract

To explore whether Farmers' Locus of Control (LOC) could be useful in agricultural extension programmes to improve managerial ability. This test records a farmer's belief in her/his control over production outcomes. A mail survey of 2300 New Zealand farmers was used to obtain a range of variables, and to measure their LOC using a question set created from farming situations and terminology. Using regression analysis the farmer LOCs were related to many variables including the Farmers' self assessment of his/her managerial ability as well as their true ability. The LOC had adequate reliability and consistency. The analysis indicated LOC measures some independent characteristics of farmers as its prediction from other variables is by no means perfect. Furthermore, LOC proved to be partially related to a range of output variables. This indicates a farmer's LOC originates in part from fundamental personality traits which in turn relate to managerial ability. When the fundamental variables are available they can be used to help explain, and improve, managerial ability. However, extension programme efforts to change a farmer's view of his control (LOC) will have benefits as, when considered on its own, a farmer's LOC is still related to successful outcomes. Furthermore, LOC may be related to other aspects of farming such as the general satisfaction obtained. The LOC test provides benchmarks to assess Farmers' control belief, and improvements from training.     

Should contentment be a key aim in higher education?

Higher education institutions are major concentrations of political, social, economic, intellectual and communicative resources. They reach freely across populations and cultures and connect to government, professions, industry and the arts. The neoliberal logic of markets has entered the realm of (higher) education. This leads to discourse on the benefits of education being positioned almost exclusively in terms of their effect on income. The perspective taken in the paper is the development of a happiness motive that asks education to challenge what it is to be a member of society: What moral and ontological stance one will seek to take in developing one’s future? The satisfied student perpetuates the current lifeworld in which they find themselves, seeking to improve the quality of the services provided. It is proposed that an overly emphasised desire satisfaction culture inhibits the edifying mission of universities. This is not to argue against high-quality service provision but to differentiate it from the edifying role of personal challenge, determination and social responsibility, conceptualised here as profound happiness or contentment, and the university’s role in its development. It calls for a different and more refreshing approach to higher education.     

Should universities train teachers for employability or for effectiveness?

In principle, the learning sought by universities is universal; that sought by employers of their graduates is contextual. This study illustrates this contradiction in Chile. The three participating universities differ in the socio-economic level of those admitted to teacher training. Teachers for schools in lower-income areas hired from less selective universities are seen by employers as having more skills in classroom management. Schools that enroll middle and upper-income students, on the other hand, hire teachers strong in academic knowledge from the most selective university. This reliance on employability as an indicator of quality of training sharpens social and economic inequalities.     

What should Educational Institutions be for?

In this article, I respond to the work of Gert Biesta regarding the question of what education should be for. He maintains education ought to be oriented towards the ‘good’ rather than measurement, accountability and efficiency. While sympathetic to such claims, I nonetheless question his avowal that discussion of the purposes of education needs to entail reflection upon tripartite processes of qualification, socialisation and subjectification. I also argue that the concept of subjectification presented by Biesta is elusive. He says educators cannot plan to produce it in students. He also suggests there is an unhelpful surplus of reason in education that constrains possibilities for subjectification. According to Biesta, education partly reproduces ‘rational communities’ that stifle the emergence of human uniqueness and inhibit persons from challenging accepted social orders. In response to this, I argue there is currently a deficit rather than a surplus of reason in education concerning the common good. Following MacIntyre, I claim that educational institutions should support students to learn how to think for themselves and act for the common good. I conclude that such utopian thinking about the purposes of education may be needed, now, more than ever.