Constructing a Sense of Purpose and a Professional Teaching Identity: Experiences of Teacher Candidates with Disabilities

Abstract

Using grounded theory, we examined the ways in which undergraduate teacher candidates with disabilities developed a sense of purpose and constructed professional identities. Our findings suggest K-12 experiences with advocacy as well as exclusionary school experiences influenced their emerging professional identities. Resistance to a deficit view of disability was central to teachers’ professional identities and influenced their desire to become “change agents” in their future professions. We describe collegiate experiences that affirmed or presented roadblocks to their career path.     

Dialectical Features of Students’ Argumentation: A Critical Review of Argumentation Studies in Science Education

This paper explores the challenges of using the Toulmin model to analyze students’ dialogical argumentation. The paper presents a theoretical exposition of what is involved in an empirical study of real dialogic argumentation. Dialogic argumentation embodies dialectical features — i.e. the features that are operative when students collaboratively manage disagreement by providing arguments and engaging critically with the arguments provided by others. The paper argues that while dialectical features cannot readily be understood from a Toulminian perspective, it appears that an investigation of them is a prerequisite for conducting Toulminian analysis. This claim is substantiated by a detailed review of five of the ten most significant papers on students’ argumentation in science education. This leads to the surprising notion that empirical studies in the argumentation strand — even those studies that have employed non-dialectical frameworks such as the Toulmin model — have implicitly struggled to come to terms with the dialectical features of students’ discourse. The paper finally explores how some scholars have worked to attend directly to these dialectical features; and it presents five key issues that need to be addressed in a continued scholarly discussion.     

The effect of predictive cues on freezing in rats

Rats were given five shocks over a 5-min period and then observed for 20 min. Much more freezing was observed in animals that remained in the shock situation than in animals moved to another situation. Freezing, therefore, seems to be controlled primarily by external shock-related cues. Freezing appears to be also partly controlled by the inherent stimulus properties of the situation.     

Students’ Perceptions of Religion and Science,and How They Relate: the Effects of a Classroom Intervention

Abstract

In England, both Religious Education (RE) and science are mandatory parts of the school curriculum throughout the 5-16 age range. Nevertheless, there remain concerns that, as in many countries, students do not have a good understanding about the scope of each subject nor about how the two subjects relate. This article reports on a study that involved an intervention of six lessons in RE and six in science that were intended to help 13-15?year-old students develop a better appreciation for the relationship(s) between science and religion and a less reductionist understanding of biology. Our focus here is on the understandings that students have about the relationship between science and religion. The intervention was successful in improving the understandings of almost half of the students interviewed, but in these interviews we still found many instances where students showed misunderstandings of the nature of both religious and scientific knowledge. We argue that RE needs to attend to questions regarding the nature of knowledge if students are to develop better understandings of the scope of religions and how they arrive at their knowledge claims.     

Recognising ethnic identity in the classroom: a New Zealand study

The recognition and affirmation of student identity in New Zealand primary schools is a policy requirement. While directives for its implementation are found in the current national curriculum, little, if any, guidance is given about what this means or how it might look in classroom programmes. This paper discusses a study concerning the beliefs, understandings and practices of teachers as they interpret the curriculum related to the identity directive. The findings indicate that a marked divergence exists between the identity directive encoded into the curriculum and the way in which teachers decode and enact the directive in their practice. This article argues that two unintended effects are produced as a result of this divergence. First, rather than promote the affirmation of student identity, the enactment of this directive might, in fact, lead to ethnic division. Second, attempts to recognise and affirm identity have led to the displacement of school subject knowledge in classroom programmes. These unintended outcomes are not only unacknowledged, but they continue to disadvantage the community the identity directive was intended to address.     

Approach-avoidance conflict in preweanling rats: A developmental study

Ten- and 15-day-old rat pups were trained with two procedures to approach an anesthetized mother, and then were punished for approaching. Both ages of subjects exhibited increased latencies to reapproach the mother, indicating passive inhibitions, but only the older pups retreated. All but one of the younger pups eventually reached the mother within 3 min after the punishment, while only half of the older pups did so. In a second experiment examining the development of locomotor avoidance reactions, 5- to 20-day-old rats were shocked without the mother present. Fifteen- and 20-day-old rats significantly decreased their activity patterns in reaction to shock and spent significantly less time in the shock area than either of the younger aged pups. These results suggest that flight reactions are components of a rat’s defensive repertoire that appear very rapidly between 10 and 15 days of age.     

The construction of common treadmills significantly affects biomechanical and metabolic variables

ABSTRACT

Surface compliance has been shown to affect leg stiffness and energetics. It is unknown if compliance differences between common treadmills would elicit such changes. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to determine if compliance design differences of common treadmills would affect the mechanics and energetics of running. Eleven runners ran at moderate, self-selected, matched belt speeds for three minutes on two treadmills: compliant (CT) and rigid (RT) decks. During the last minute of each trial, oxygen consumption and six markers describing the torso, thigh, shank and foot, and one marker to determine treadmill deflection were recorded. Leg stiffness, continuous relative phase (CRP) and CRP variability were calculated. Compared to RT, running on CT resulted in a significantly more compliant leg (8.591 kN?m^?1 > 9.063 kN?m^?1), lower oxygen consumption (34.69 ml?kg^?1?min^?1 < 36.86 ml?kg^?1?min^?1), different coordination patterns and greater variability, particularly during the push-off phase. These results are inconsistent with the literature because the deck of CT rebounds back at the runner during the absorption phase and away from the runner during the push-off phase. Therefore, care should be taken when using treadmills for research and comparing mechanical and energetic measures between studies.