Historical Thinking through Classroom Simulation: 1919 Paris Peace Conference

For almost one hundred years, educators have used model deliberative bodies (e.g., Model United Nations) as a pedagogical tool to teach students about the complexities of diplomatic negotiations. We argue that this type of classroom simulation activity may also serve to illustrate specific historical realities and, more broadly, provide a model of student-centered instruction focused on investigation and decision making. Employed in social studies classrooms, this tool has the potential to foster historical thinking and empathy by calling on students to engage in the act of deliberation as experienced by contemporary actors of a particular negotiating body. The lesson activity we outline in this article charges students to wrestle with the multiplicity of complex dilemmas and conflicting claims that characterized the 1919 Paris Peace Conference. Assuming the role of actual delegates, students not only discuss pertinent issues but also deliberate. That is to say, just like the representatives who convened at the meeting, the students will not have the luxury of merely reflecting on and talking about key geopolitical questions. They will have to reach concrete decisions for a world finding itself in a terrifying, yet hopeful, flux.     

‘Designing the plane while flying it’: concept co-construction in a collaborative action research project

In the field of collaborative action research (CAR), the quality of the collaborative partnerships between university researchers and practitioners has received much attention. Most accounts focus on three areas: the question how to organise and optimise the encounter of these ‘worlds’ of scientific and practical reasoning; the professional development and emancipation of practitioners; and the enhancement of the practical utility of a CAR-project. In this article, we look at CAR projects from a different angle and explore the question how theoretical concepts are co-constructed in CAR-projects, thereby acquiring both practical as well as scientific relevance. We have focused on the participatory process of conceptualization during a CAR project in primary education, in order to find out how a key concept in the considered project is co-constructed and operationalized in multidisciplinary communities of practices. Both the theoretical validity of the concept is evaluated as well as the validity of collaboration. An ‘hourglass’ model is introduced for analysing participation in CAR projects, holding a more relational and dialogic interpretation of participation than the ‘Participation Ladder’ model. Furthermore, a heuristic approach to conceptualization in CAR projects is proposed.     

Teacher facilitation support in ubiquitous learning environments

ABSTRACT

Teacher support for students in ubiquitous learning environments is challenging owing to physical distance and a lack of reliable real-time multimedia-rich communication. This is further complicated because the learning process is dynamic and problems need quick resolution. Given these challenges, this study proposes an architecture for a teacher facilitation support system. The system was implemented in the form of an interactive teacher dashboard. The interface also generates possible solutions to learning challenges while leaving the ultimate decision up to the teacher. The system feasibility was tested by work-through scenarios designed and validated by two experts. The system usability was evaluated using the System Usability Scale by 40 potential users. The ?ndings revealed that the dashboard has good feasibility and usability for providing teachers relevant information about their students’ learning progress in ubiquitous learning environments. It also enabled opportunity for pedagogical intervention when needed.     

An Exploration of Moshe Greenberg's Religious Vision and its Manifestation in His Bible Scholarship and Writings on Bible Education

This article is an attempt to explore the religious vision of Moshe Greenberg in some detail, and in particular, to analyze how his approach to education is applied to and reflected in his ideas about the teaching and learning of Bible, and in his own Bible scholarship itself. The paper examines the connection between Greenberg's philosophy of religion and Wilfred Cantwell Smith's conception of religion as a collection of religious “symbols,” one of which is the sacred text itself. The article includes an analysis of Greenberg's Bible scholarship and writings on Bible education.     

Identifying teaching in wild animals

After a long period of neglect, the study of teaching in nonhuman animals is beginning to take a more prominent role in research on social learning. Unlike other forms of social learning, teaching requires knowledgeable individuals to play an active role in facilitating learning by the naive. Casting aside anthropocentric requirements for cognitive mechanisms assumed to underpin teaching in our own species, researchers are now beginning to discover evidence for teaching across a wide range of taxa. Nevertheless, unequivocal evidence for teaching remains scarce, with convincing experimental data limited to meerkats, pied babblers, and tandem-running ants. In this review, our aim is to stimulate further research in different species and contexts by providing conceptual and methodological guidelines for identifying teaching, with a focus on natural populations. We begin by highlighting the fact that teaching is a form of cooperative behavior that functions to promote learning in others and show that consideration of these key characteristics is critical in helping to identify suitable targets for future research. We then go on to discuss potential observational, experimental, and statistical techniques that may assist researchers in providing evidence that the criteria that make up the accepted operational definition of teaching have been met. Supplemental materials for this article may be downloaded from http://lb.psychonomic-journals.org/content/supplemental.