What Really Happens During a Paired Reading Project?

Sam Winter, formerly an educational psychologist working in Hartlepool, is now lecturer in the Department of Education, Hong Kong University. He is currently conducting an inquire into paired reading as a method of helping children who experience difficulties in learning to read.     

Where are the Missing Masses? The Quasi-Publics and Non-Publics of Technoscience

The paper offers a political-philosophical analysis of the state and publics in the age of technoscience to propose three distinct categories of publics: scientific-citizen publics constituted by civil society, quasi-publics that initiate another kind of engagement through the activation of ??political society,?? and non-publics cast outside these spheres of engagement. This re-categorization is possible when the central role of the state in its citizens?? engagement with technoscience is put upfront and the non-Western empirical contexts are taken seriously by Science, Technology and Policy (STP) studies. The paper argues that in most of the world the state maintains a political contract with technoscience to form a functional coupling as the state-technoscience duo, which shapes public engagement with science through different functional modalities of government. Civil society is the sphere of legitimate engagement and participation in technoscientific issues for the scientific-citizen publics. The quasi-publics choose to be in the shady zone of political society establishing a paralegal relationship with the state-technoscience duo, while the non-publics come into being due to conditions of extra-legality created by the duo. The non-publics are implicated in the political community paradoxically as an excluded category who cannot be included in deliberation because of their status as being expelled from political community in a ??state of exception.?? The paper proposes that the scientific-citizen publics are mobilized in contrast to the quasi-publics and with reference to the non-publics, helping STP studies to identify the ??missing masses?? of technoscience.     

do i know its wrong: children’s and adults’ use of unconventional grammar in text messaging

There is concern that the violations of conventional grammar (both accidental and deliberate) often seen in text messages (e.g., hi how is ya?!!) could lead to difficulty in learning or remembering formal grammatical conventions. We examined whether the grammatical violations made by 244 British children, adolescents and young adults in their text messages was related to poorer performance on tasks of grammatical knowledge, including translating grammatically unconventional text messages into standard English. We found that variance in the production of grammatical violations in naturalistic messages was inconsistently predicted by grammatical task performance. Specifically, primary school children who made poorer grammar-based spelling choices were more likely to make more grammatical violations in their everyday messages, and university students who failed to correct more grammatical errors in a given set of messages were also more likely to make such errors in their own messages. There were no significant relationships for secondary school students. We conclude that using unconventional grammar when texting is not a consistent sign of poor grammatical abilities, although there may be links between some aspects of grammatical skill and grammatical violations in text messages.     

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Checkpoint: Teaching Stand-Up Comedy in Occupied Palestine

ABSTRACT

This article considers ideas about the performance of personal stories in stand-up comedy that emerged during a teaching and performance project in a refugee camp in Palestine. After experimenting with a range of stand-up techniques and approaches, participants created public performances sharing their experiences of life under military occupation.     

Introducing the use of a semi-structured video diary room to investigate students’ learning experiences during an outdoor adventure education groupwork skills course

Outdoor adventure education courses are used in higher education to develop transferable skills such as groupwork and problem-solving skills. There is a need for exploratory investigation into students’ perceptions of this experience. This study aimed to develop an innovative qualitative data collection method, and to use it to explore students’ perceived learning processes and developmental outcomes when taking part in an outdoor groupwork skills course. Participants (n = 40) were undergraduate engineering students who were taking part in the 3 day residential course as part of their degree course. Students’ experiences were captured whilst immersed in the course, using a semi-structured video diary room. Participants entered the diary room at different time points throughout the course and responded to openended questions. Following a thematic analysis, students were found to arrive on the course with mixed feelings towards groupwork and expected learning outcomes. Activities were enjoyable yet challenging, revealing students’ weaknesses and demanding a range of skills and coping methods. The outdoor environment added novelty, risk and natural consequences. Students reported developing a range of skills in groupwork, adaptability, persistence, planning, problem-solving, time-management, communication, leadership, cooperation, group reflection and team spirit, as well as benefits to physical activity, self-confidence, self-awareness, peer and staff relationships and internationalisation. These findings provide a base for future investigation into the long-term impact on student development and skill transfer. The semi-structured video diary room yielded rich data, contributing to the literature by offering a simple, yet effective, qualitative research method that can be implemented in a variety of contexts.