Competency vs. good intentions: Diversity ideologies and teacher potential

Since the 1970s, some form of diversity ideology has been used in teacher education programs. Since these efforts have yielded few or no results, this response points out how various diversity ideologies guide research agendas, influence future scholarship, and propagate assumptions on the schooling issues facing our children. It describes the evolvement of a body of scholarship that appears to emphasize hope and advocacy, and tolerates excuses of poverty and racism, rather than focus on the psychological stress and academic failure our children experience daily. While we may have the ability to inspire, we have not demonstrated capacity to educate a professorate who can prepare teachers to succeed in diverse settings, nor have we developed teacher preparation programs that understand how to select the programmatic content, experiences, and strategies needed to help teachers develop from novice to expert levels and to apply cultural and language dimensions to curriculum and practice.     

A model of relationship between collective identity and language in pluricultural and plurilingual settings: Influence on intercultural relations

The introduction of the Spanish Constitution in 1978, together with the development of the Statutes of Autonomy in the autonomous communities, established the co-official status of the regional language alongside Spanish. In one of these communities, Catalonia, located on the north-west boundary of the Lleida province, is the Aran Valley, where three languages coexist: Occitan-Aranese (regional language), Catalan (Catalonia's co-official language) and Spanish. The Valley of Aran is an ideal setting to study the construction of their collective identity and its relation to the language in an intercultural setting. As a result of immigration and the gradual decrease in the population born in the region, intercultural contact takes place among clearly distinct groups.In this work we present an analysis of the development of the Aranese identity and of the role language plays in this process and the way this process influences intergroup relationships. The study is based on a perspective that considers that the influence of language on the creation of collective identity is not a categorical and universal phenomenon [Fernández, M. A. (2000). Cuando los hablantes se niegan a elegir: monolingüismo e identidad múltiple en la modernidad reflexiva. Estudios de Sociolingüística 1 (1), 47–58; Siguán, M. (1996). L’Europa de les Llengües. Barcelona: Edicions 62]. Rather, we view language as a socially constructed means of expressing community membership. In this way, language plays an important part in the formation of Aranese identity, but the meaning given by the population to the language varies according to whether residents identify themselves or not with the Aranese world. At the same time, language also interferes in the relationship between the different groups living in the territory.     

Kant's Philosophy of Education: Between Relational and Systemic Approaches

The purpose of this paper is to view Kant's approach to education in the broader context of Kant's philosophy of culture and history as a process whose direction should be reflectively assumed by human freedom, in the light of man's moral vocation. In this context, some characteristic tensions of his enlightened approach to education appear. Thus, while Kant takes the educational process to be a radically moral enterprise all the way through—and hence, placed in a relational context—he also aspires to constitute education as a science, to be improved through experiments, thereby paving the way for a systemic approach to education; in spite of its moral inspiration, his systemic approach not only could enter into conflict with the moral demand of taking each individual subject as an end, but is also marked by an intrinsic paradox, already involved in the ambiguity of the term ‘humanity’, which might mean a) humanity as a moral disposition present in each individual human being or b) humanity as a whole, as the ‘human species’.     

Rolling: A new technique for the practical teaching in computer science university degree

In this paper we describe a new methodology for practical teaching in the Computer Science University Degree. The methodology is based on the Rolling technique. This technique consists in assign, in a rotary process, tasks, activities and responsibilities to students along an established calendar with the aim of developing a software product. Practical teaching is supported by a student-teacher contract that describes the goal, rules, plan with stages and activities, responsibilities and even the assessment method. Students are organized in groups and teams, emulating a company organization. They develop all the activities of the software engineering process in order to obtain a commercial product (the goal). In this process, students take different responsibilities over the software verification and validation, activities and tasks, and over groups and teams leadership. Along the teaching process, comprehensive information about the working team, time invested, deliverables in each stage, and work/students assessment is gathered. The methodology has been tested for 4 years at the University of Córdoba and the results, described in this paper, have shown an improvement in the students learning as well as in the acquisition of attitudes and skills mandatory for their professional development.     

Book clubs: an ethnographic study of an innovative reading practice in Spain

The most innovative reading practices currently rely on the paradigm of dialogic reading. Book clubs, literary gatherings and study circles are emerging in different social spaces to promote reading and literary discussion amongst adults, and libraries, bookshops, cultural centres, etc. are increasingly developing strategies in this direction. Despite the vast development of reading clubs throughout Spain, empirical research on this phenomenon is still at the embryonic stage. This paper queries the ability of this practice to encourage the pleasure of reading, as well as civic and literary education. The results, obtained from an ethnographic study of nine book club meetings and six key informant interviews, show that the discussions contribute to: (1) developing a taste for reading, literature and reading habits; (2) fostering debate about values and learning about personal experiences related to the stories covered in the various readings; and (3) learning academic skills that go beyond the scope of an informal literary analysis. The main conclusion of our study is that book club meetings generate a very favourable context for literary analysis, as they foster reading innovation and the cultivation of literature, as well as promoting values education and adult learning from a dialogic perspective.     

Technological Training Requirements in Catalonia

The topic of Training Requirements in Industry is relatively new. This article identifies the needs of training and the possible problems that can otherwise occur, with the primary objective being to provide guidelines for the planning of postgraduate courses.     

Institutional repositories versus ResearchGate: The depositing habits of Spanish researchers

Despite the increase in the number of institutional repositories worldwide, most of them seem underpopulated. At the same time, scientists are apparently willing to share copies of their publications on academic social networking sites. This paper compares the availability of the scholarly output in the institutional repositories of 13 top Spanish universities and in ResearchGate (RG). Results show that just 11.1% of the articles published in 2014 by researchers at these universities were available in their institutional repository in the first quarter of 2016. However, most of the articles that were not available in institutional repositories (84.5%) were published in journals that allow the deposit of the article in some form. In contrast, 54.8% of the articles were available in full text on RG. When authors who had uploaded copies of their articles to RG but not to their institutional repository were asked about their reasons, most replies focused on two issues: ignorance about the existence or operation of the institutional repository and awareness of the advantages offered by RG.