Schools as dangerous places

When students set off for school each day how many of them or their caregivers consider for a moment that they will spend the day at a potentially dangerous place? On the contrary, students and caregivers probably view schools as safe havens, and official research suggests that this is the case for the majority of teachers and pupils. However, underlying this official view, schools are more and more seen as much less benign and safe. The popular press, for one thing, is certainly keen to report instances of schools as dangerous places. This article examines schools as dangerous places because of dangers from pupils to pupils, teachers to pupils, teachers to teachers, pupils to teachers and dangers from the physical and natural environment. The discussion is framed in terms of the culture of the school and the increasingly legal nature of the schooling and educational environment.     

Entrepreneurialism and the transformation of Russian universities

Like many Western knowledge‐practices, experiential learning is seen to require what is, in effect, an act of self‐dismemberment, a splitting of the head from the body that denies the connectedness of knowledge to the body and thus loses sight of knowledge as a product of corporeally and emotionally grounded human life. This article first traces the history through which modernist knowledge‐practices were predicated on the rejection of the experiencing body and examines the impact of the resultant epistemology on power relationships. It then suggests that, as a function of memory, experiential learning is more properly understood as an act of re‐membering. It argues that experience is itself located in the body as well as in the social and material locations that bodies invariably occupy — and asks what a theory of experiential learning might look like that re‐members body and mind.     

转型时期大学办学行为的思考

在相同的社会环境中 ,大学的发展主要取决于大学自身。大学办学自主权的增加 ,既为大学快速发展提供了契机 ,也可能为大学发展设下误区。当前我国大学存在三个办学行为误区 ,转型期内重点理工大学要防止这些误区 ,需处理好学校近期发展和长远发展之间的两个关系     

Students positioned as global citizens in Australian and New Zealand universities: A discourse analysis

ABSTRACT

Higher education plays a critical role in producing society’s leaders by preparing graduates with the knowledge, capabilities and disposition to appreciate diversity and address social injustice. Many higher education institutions within and beyond Australia have aimed to internationalise their curricula to ensure students achieve capabilities that enable them to contribute to an evolving global knowledge economy. However, the inclusion of global citizenship as a graduate attribute embedded in internationalised curricula, and the processes to achieving this, are highly contested. Guided by a discourse analysis approach, this study explored how Australian and New Zealand universities position students as global citizens in public web pages. Publicly available policy and other text documents on university websites relating to internationalisation and/or global citizenship were collected and screened. Those that met inclusion criteria were analysed to identify discourses and to further understand how higher education institutions describe their plan to advance and achieve global citizenship agendas. Two key themes were generated: expressions of internationalisation policy and global citizenship as an obscured educational intention. These findings are further elaborated, providing an outline of the possible implications for higher education policy and practice relating to the internationalisation of curriculum for global citizenship and its potential impact on educators and students.     

Adult education as experienced by the learners

This article discusses how central words in education were transformed into a technocratic and economic language during the 1980s, and how the concepts of lifelong learning and knowledge are laden with other content. This means that they lose their humanistic and democratic content, and become wares to buy and sell at the market. The main answer to this international development is some kind of conservative humanism. This paper attempts to redefine concepts of lifelong learning and knowledge with a humanistic and democratic sense, of a new kind in a new situation. The opportunity is to widen our understanding of what we mean by knowledge, education and learning. For this work, the resources brought from history can be used and be transformed to a new form. This has to be done in multiple ways from different perspectives, depending on what aims we have and what values we believe in.     

Happy places,horrible times,and scary learners: affective performances and sticky objects in inclusive classrooms

Drawing on data from two studies conducted in US public schools, this paper traces the affective productions and performances of teachers to illustrate the role of affect in delineating (non)normative pedagogical practices in inclusive classrooms. Occupying a borderland space in narrative inquiry that permitted the straddling of differing philosophical traditions, we sought to both acknowledge the agentive work of teachers as well as the affectively constituted nature of their engagements with schools and learners. Data from teacher narratives disclosed particular preconceptions of schools as ‘happy places,’ that delineated affective norms for an inclusive classroom. As teachers took up the affective responsibility of schools, they managed and modified their own as well as their students’ affective performances and orientations, producing meanings of disability that often worked at odds with inclusive ends. Their efforts indexed the importance of affect in the delineation of teacher competency for inclusive pedagogy.     

转型期的地方高校图书馆工作的挑战与变革

目前,高技能、创新能力强的人受到了很多用人单位的青睐。很多地方高校也意识到要想更好的发展,转变教学观念,实施战略转型模式的重要性,在人才培养方面进行了全面的改革与创新。地方高校的战略转型也为高校图书馆事业的发展带来了新的契机,高校图书馆应抓住先机,实现从资源提供到以服务为导向的转化,以使其更好的为大学生提供竭诚的服务。基于此,现对转型期的地方高校图书馆工作面临的挑战与变革路径进行了探讨。     

Parents as adult learners in family-centered early education

Several concepts from the adult learning literature are described that relate to working with parents of young children who are deaf. It is proposed that an adult learner perspective makes an important contribution to the family-centered philosophy and knowledge base that guide the development of practice in early intervention. Three areas are discussed: the context for adult learning, that is, the life situation of adults, including their social roles and responsibilities and experience; learning related to transitions in the adult life cycle; and transformative learning, which examines the ways people make changes in how they understand their experience. Implications for practice in early childhood education are presented.     

Re-imagining learning through art as experience: An aesthetic approach to education for life

Abstract

This paper investigates what it may mean to re-imagine learning through aesthetic experience with reference to John Dewey’s Art as Experience (1934). The discussion asks what learning might look like when aesthetic experience takes centre stage in the learning process. It investigates what Dewey meant by art as experience and aesthetic experience. Working with Dewey as a philosopher of reconstruction of experience, the discussion examines responses to poetic writings and communication in learning situations. In seeking to discover what poetic writing (as art) does within the experience of a reader and writer it considers three specific learning situations. Firstly there is an examination of a five-year old child’s experience of shared communication through the story of Horton the Elephant. Secondly there is an account of the responses of an 11-year-old child to poetry in a 1950s classroom setting, and later reconstructions of those experiences by the child as adult. Thirdly, the paper extends to intensive writing with 12 to 13-year-old children. The focus is on the process of learning via acts of expression as aesthetic experiences. Through art as experience the child develops perceptions that recover a coherence and continuity of aesthetic experience in art as in everyday life.     

Anticipated developments: East Africa's private universities and privatisation of public universities in the global context

Abstract

The growth and development of private universities has been one of the most dramatic features of African higher education in the last two decades. Using the three East African countries of Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda as a case in point, this analysis examines the extent to which developments in the region echo international trends, as well as how they illustrate contrasts. The analysis focuses on three key themes: (a) growth and historical antecedents; (b) institutional developments in terms of continuity and innovation; and (c) internationalism. While only relatively recent phenomena, private universities in East Africa and the increasing privatisation of public universities mirror developments in other parts of the world with a longer tradition of private university developments in terms of growth and historical antecedents, continuity and innovation in institutional development, as well as in internationalism. However, there are some situations in which the East African case is exceptional.     

Internationalisation of universities: local perspectives on a global phenomenon

Tertiary Education and Management - The policy making in internationalisation of higher education is shaped at the national level, and influenced by regional policy debates and globalisation...     

社会转型期我国高校校园文化建设研究

高校校园文化建设是推动学校发展的有力保障,社会转型时期经济结构、文化形态、价值观念等方面发生巨大变化,对校园文化建设提出了严峻考验。从学生工作的视角,以分析社会转型期我国高校校园文化发展特点为入手点,提出主导与兼容相结合、传统与现代相结合、虚拟与实体相结合等基本原则,并以培养和提升学生的文化自觉、文化自信为线索,从组织、思想观念、手段等方面探索推动高校校园文化建设的实现路径,以期为高校校园文化建设的实践提供参考和借鉴。     

The development of values as affective traits in learners

Abstract

The aim of this study is to investigate the development of affective traits in learners. The investigation is based on an analysis of documents and literature in a South African context. Ways of developing affective traits are analysed theoretically. The “teachability” of affective traits is examined, followed by ways in which these traits can be interpreted and actualised in the classroom. Certain implications of the development of affective traits are considered in order to seek answers to possibilities for the cognitive development of affective traits. Findings emerging from the literature investigation are that the establishment of a personal conceptualisation of affective traits is necessary to enable learners to take affect to a more serious level. In conclusion, certain variables are identified that should be considered in developing affective traits in the classroom.     

Fostering communities of teachers as learners: disciplinary perspectives

Education research in learning and teaching has alternated historically between periods in which subject matter disciplines were used as the organizing framework for investigation and implementation, and other periods in which the content areas nearly disappeared in favour of a quest for generic principles of instruction that could transcend disciplinary boundaries. There are few examinations of how these factors interact in the context of specific classroom‐ and pedagogy‐centred school reform. The papers that follow in this issue of JCS examine this issue through the lens of the pedagogic reform, ‘Fostering a Community of Learners’. This introduction outlines the key characteristics of this reform and describes the main issues in subsequent examinations of teachers learning to implement ‘Fostering a Community of Learners’ in science, social studies, English language arts, and mathematics.     

Investigating students' beliefs about their preferred role as learners

Secondary school students were asked to state their preference for an objectivist or a constructivist learning environment and consider the consequent implications for their role as a learner. They did this by identifying with the dialogue depicted in two concept cartoons. Results indicate an overwhelming preference among students for a constructivist learning environment. This suggests not only that students would be receptive to moves by teachers towards more constructivist principles in the classroom, but also that a failure to promote such a transition may contribute to an epistemological gap between teaching and learning styles that will be an impediment to meaningful learning. Students anticipated constructivist learning environments would be more interesting, more effective at developing students' understanding and would permit them to take greater ownership of their learning. Some limitations of the study are described.