Creating a “third space” in student teaching: Implications for the university supervisor’s status as outsider

The work of teacher education during student teaching typically takes place in two distinct “spaces”: placement sites and college/university settings. The program featured in this article is structured in ways that clearly mark out those two spaces. Yet this configuration led our university supervisors, whose work primarily took place in the field, to feel like “outsiders.” To redress this concern, a third learning space was incorporated into our student teaching seminar. We suggest that “third spaces” in combination with return-to-campus courses not only mitigates the peripherality of university supervisors, but also amplifies the influence of a teacher preparation program.     

Child Development and Structural Variation in the Human Genome

Structural variation of the human genome sequence is the insertion, deletion, or rearrangement of stretches of DNA sequence sized from around 1,000 to millions of base pairs. Over the past few years, structural variation has been shown to be far more common in human genomes than previously thought. Very little is currently known about the effects of structural variation on normal child development, but such effects could be of considerable significance. This review provides an overview of the phenomenon of structural variation in the human genome sequence, describing the novel genomics technologies that are revolutionizing the way structural variation is studied and giving examples of genomic structural variations that affect child development.     

JEWISH EDUCATION IN EXTREMIS: A PROLEGOMENON TO POSTMODERN JEWISH EDUCATIONAL THOUGHT

Abstract In this article the author argues that for 150 years Jewish education has negotiated the tensions between modernity and Judaism by means of liberal religion, ultra Orthodoxy, and secular Zionism. All three are in crisis today due to the rise of postmodernism. Jewish educational thought therefore needs to create new syntheses between Jewish and postmodern life. To this end the concepts of Aliyah, modernity, and exile should be reevaluated and Jewish education should embrace the goal of working with God toward redemption. For more than 150 years Jewish education has focused on the tensions between rabbinic Judaism and modernity. Each of the models for negotiating these tensions-religious liberalism, ultra orthodoxy, and secular Zionism-succeeded beyond the imaginations of those who conceived them. Yet, each is in a state of crisis today, resulting from a deconstruction of both the rabbinic and modern assumptions upon which they are based. Addressing these crises requires reevaluation of key assumptions about the educational significance of Israel, modernity, and exile in order to lay the groundwork for more productive interactions between the Jewish people and its heritage on the one hand and the postmodern condition into which we are emerging on the other.     

Attitudes of Australian chiropractic students toward whole body donation: A cross‐sectional study

Cadavers play an important role in anatomy education. In Australia, bodies for anatomy education are acquired only through donations. To gain insight into educational dynamics in an anatomy laboratory as well as to facilitate body donation programs and thanksgiving ceremonies, it is important to understand students' attitudes toward body donation. In this cross‐sectional study, the attitudes of Macquarie University's first, second, and fifth year chiropractic students toward body donation were investigated. Macquarie University chiropractic students have a four semester long anatomy program, which includes cadaver‐based instruction on prosected specimens. A questionnaire was used to record respondents' demographics and attitudes toward body donation: personal, by a relative, and by a stranger. It was found that ethnicity and religion affect attitudes toward body donation, with Australian students being more willing to donate a stranger's body and atheists and agnostics being more willing to donate in general. Furthermore, willingness to donate one's own or a family member's body decreases as year of study increases, suggesting a possible negative impact of exposure to cadavers in the anatomy laboratory. This was only true, however, after controlling for age. Thus, the impact of viewing and handling prosected specimens, which is the norm in anatomy classes in Australia, may not be as strong as dissecting cadavers. It is suggested that anatomists and educators prepare students for cadaver‐based instruction as well as exhibit sensitivity to cultural differences in how students approach working with cadavers, when informing different communities about body donation programs and in devising thanksgiving ceremonies. Anat Sci Educ 7: 117–123. © 2013 American Association of Anatomists.     

Using technology to break gender barriers: gender differences in teachers’ information and communication technology use in Saudi Arabian classrooms

How does teachers’ gender influence their information and communication technology-based instruction in Saudi Arabian government schools? Using unique data collected in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, in 2014, the analyses presented here show that male and female teachers in intermediate school classrooms differently use information and communication technology. As one of the only completely gender-separated educational systems in the world, the differing pedagogies, knowledge and skills of teachers by gender in Saudi Arabia reveal the unique approaches that both the Saudi and technology context provide for students’ learning. Female teachers’ use of technology in the classroom is more frequent and of different types than that of males. Implications are discussed for teacher professional development and for understanding the important role of cultural context around gender and information and communications technology in education.     

Still no pedagogy? principle,pragmatism and compliance in primary education

This article revisits Brian Simon's 1981 Simon B (1981) Why no pedagogy in England? in: B. Simon & W. Taylor (Eds) Education in the eighties: the central issues (London, Batsford) 124 145  [Google Scholar] judgement that for deep‐seated historical reasons English education lacks a coherent and principled pedagogy. Given that since 1997 the tide of educational centralisation has added teaching methods to those aspects of schooling which the UK government and/or its agencies seek to prescribe, it is appropriate to test the continuing validity of Simon's claim by reference to a major policy initiative in the pedagogical domain: the government's Primary Strategy, published in May 2003. This article defines pedagogy as both the act of teaching and its attendant discourse and postulates three domains of ideas, values and evidence by which both are necessarily framed. It then critically assesses the Primary Strategy's account of some of the components of pedagogy thus defined, notably learning, teaching, curriculum and culture, and the political assumptions which appear to have shaped them. On this basis, the Primary Strategy is found to be ambiguous and possibly dishonest, stylistically demeaning, conceptually weak, evidentially inadequate and culpably ignorant of recent educational history. The article is an extended version of the last in the 2002–2003 Research Lecture series at Cambridge University Faculty of Education, and preserves some of the style of its initial mode of presentation.     

How do students coordinate context-based information and elements of their own knowledge? An analysis of students’ context-based problem-solving in thermodynamics

ABSTRACT

In science education, context-based learning is mostly based on problem-oriented tasks [Gilbert, J. K. (2006). On the nature of “context” in chemical education. International Journal of Science Education, 28(9), 957–976]. Therefore, a relevant question is, how do students integrate the information given in the task into their problem-solving process? The basic assumption is that there is a transition from the situation described in the task to a science model needed to solve the problem [Mestre, J. (2002). Probing adults’ conceptual understanding and transfer of learning via problem posing. Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology, 23(1), 9–50]. The transition needs to be described by parameters of the situation, the science model and the transition process itself. This investigation focuses on the influence of these three elements on the problem-solving process to understand variations in performance [Bennett, J., Lubben, F., & Hogarth, S. (2007). Bringing science to life: A synthesis of the research evidence on the effects of context-based and STS approaches to science teaching. Science Education, 91(3), 347–370]) and the interaction with interest. Despite the large body of research on the mutual influence of context-based problem-solving and interest, research attempting to examine their interplay regarding performance is still lacking. We conducted a hierarchical regression analysis with 178 participants from German high-track schools to investigate three parameters with regard to their influence on affective variables and successful problem-solving: contextualisation of the situation described in the task; the complexity of the scientific model underlying the task; and transparency, which assesses whether and how the learner can identify this model [Löffler, P., & Kauertz, A. (2015). Modellanwendung in kontextualisierten Problemlöseaufgaben [Applying models in contextualised problem solving tasks]. In S. Bernholt (Ed.), Heterogenität und Diversität - Vielfalt der Voraussetzungen im naturwissenschaftlichen Unterricht (Vol. 35, pp. 648–650). Kiel: IPN; Durik, A., & Harackiewicz, J. (2007). Different strokes for different folks: How individual interest moderates the effects of situational factors on task interest. Journal of Educational Psychology, 99(3), 597–610)]. Our findings suggest that these parameters have different effects on how interest is triggered and maintained. Aspects of transparency exhibit small effects on successful problem-solving processes. The results support the assumption that the transition process is the main aspect of context-based problem-solving and can therefore be operationalised as the use of elements of the scientific model in students’ statements. Surprisingly, the usage of such elements cannot be sufficiently explained by pre-knowledge or cognitive abilities.