Understanding new hybrid professions: Bourdieu,illusio and the case of public service interpreters

Public spending reductions across the advanced capitalist world are creating new professions that have a ‘hybrid’ status and/or role. However, research on professional learning has paid little attention to them. This qualitative study of one such profession, public service interpreting (PSI), addresses that lacuna. The paper focuses on interpreters’ interactions with other professionals and with migrants using public services. It evokes Bourdieu’s important but neglected concept of illusio – the extent to which players invest commitment in the stakes of a field – to frame the analysis. This highlights the lack of autonomy for PSI, interpreters’ own ambiguous illusio, and their conflicts with the illusio of more powerful professions with which they must work. We conclude that there is a need for more research on the power relations between new hybrid professions and established professions, and that Bourdieu’s illusio is a potent analytical concept for this task.     

READING MATHEMATICS REPRESENTATIONS: AN EYE-TRACKING STUDY

We use eye tracking as a method to examine how different mathematical representations of the same mathematical object are attended to by students. The results of this study show that there is a meaningful difference in the eye movements between formulas and graphs. This difference can be understood in terms of the cultural and social shaping of human perception, as well as in terms of differences between the symbolic and graphical registers.     

Interdisciplinary Collaboration Supporting Social-Emotional Learning in Rural School Systems

In this article we illustrate the roles of school psychologists, administrators, social workers, teachers, and parents in school reform by describing the adoption, initial implementation, and formative evaluation of an evidence-based social and emotional learning (SEL) program within several rural Midwestern school districts in a geographically large county. As part of a countywide initiative aimed at improving children's mental health services, an interdisciplinary team collaborated to select and implement a universal school-based curriculum addressing SEL objectives. Professionals in the county's special education cooperative lead the reform effort, general education teachers deliver the curriculum, and school psychologists and school social workers have served as trainers and consultants to educators and building administrators. An ecological model of organizational consultation informs these efforts. We illustrate this model by describing its application to the collaborative school-based initiative addressing SEL objectives. We also discuss implications for future consultation research, training, and practice.     

Citizenship education in Mexico: the depoliticisation of adolescence through secondary school

Recent contributions have argued about the depoliticisation of citizenship education (CE), mainly through theoretical and documentary analyses, and based on the European context. Nonetheless, there is a lack of field studies which can provide empirical evidence about how does the depoliticisation of CE actually operate. Based on a mixed-method research in Mexico City’s secondary schools, this paper shows how the contemporary approach to CE, instead of looking at nurturing children’s and adolescents’ politicity, contributes to pupils’ depoliticisation. Among different potential characterisations of political participation (PP), the curriculum of CE circumscribes it within the arena of formal politics, from which students are largely excluded in the present. Additionally, CE promotes a range of practices of participation which are deprived from a political meaning. Students appropriate them discursively, but perceive limited opportunities for perform them, especially in school. Through the depoliticisation of CE, adolescents mostly learn that PP is a promise of inclusion in the future, while the idea of active citizenship becomes reduced to a correct discourse about largely imperceptible practices in students’ everyday life. The article stresses the need of shifting the priority of CE in Mexico from the formal curriculum to the transformation of school practices, in order to develop students’ politicity through participation.     

Crossed looks: globalisations and curriculum in Guinea-Bissau

This article focuses on education in Guinea-Bissau in the context of globalisations, examining the concept of globalisation and its relation to education and the curriculum. It focuses on the relatively neglected area of national education policies in Guinea-Bissau, comparing differences and common points of interference/influence of multilateral (international and regional) and bilateral organisations in these policies. Data collection was based on content analysis of a corpus of documents – the Education Act, the document of Portuguese Cooperation Programme, the Education Sector Policy Paper, the Education for All National Plan of Action, and Policy n. 3/2007/CM/UEMOA – and field notes collected from 2009 to 2012. The article argues that there is a tendency for the homogenisation of curriculum policies, at least at the macro-level, due to the different types of pressures coming from international/regional organisations.     

Neural Correlates of Self and Its Interaction With Memory in Healthy Adolescents

Adolescence is marked by the development of personal identity and is associated with structural and functional changes in brain regions associated with Self processing. Yet, little is known about the neural correlates of self‐reference processing and self‐reference effect in adolescents. This functional magnetic resonance imaging study consists of a self‐reference paradigm followed by a recognition test proposed to 30 healthy adolescents aged 13–18 years old. Results showed that the rostral anterior cingulate cortex is specifically involved in self‐reference processing and that this specialization develops gradually from 13 to 18 years old. The self‐reference effect is associated with increased brain activation changes during encoding, suggesting that the beneficial effect of Self on memory may occur at encoding of self‐referential information, rather than at retrieval.     

When Cultural Criticism Blurs Cultural Hierarchies

This article analyzes the emergence of TV series criticism, a recent journalistic genre in French magazines. It aims to show how dedicated fans have become professional series journalists starting in the early 1990s. The study demonstrates that this new kind of journalism challenges cultural hierarchies by legitimizing TV series as a cultural genre and distinguishing between different types of series.