CONTEMPLATIVE INSTRUCTION AND THE GIFTS OF BEAUTY,LOVE, AND SILENCE

In this essay Angelo Caranfa maintains that what education should be engaging in is a ceaseless effort of cultivating in the students attention to the things of the spirit—that is, the world of aesthetic apprehension as described by such figures as Plato and Simone Weil. Caranfa attempts to show that in Plato and in Weil, we receive a vision of education that motivates the contemplative life conceived as contact with the Good, Truth, Justice, Love, and Beauty. This is a life of detachment or withdrawing, of looking or attention, of silence, and of contemplation or prayer, which is essentially a way of learning that leads, step by step, or degree by degree, and by repeated exercises, out of the cave to the realm of goodness, truth, justice, love, and beauty. This contemplative method of learning that the writings of Plato and Weil offer us is not only a critique of today's method of problem solving, of statistical analysis, of verbal noise, and lack of attention, but also of those who speak of learning apart from the spirit of beauty.     

Outsourcing the State’s responsibilities? Third Sector Organizations supporting migrant families’ participation in schools in Catalonia and London

Based on two case studies of Third Sector Organizations (TSOs) working with schools and parents in Catalonia and London, this paper aims to discuss some of the implications of ‘participative’ programmes aimed at involving those migrant families seen by schools as ‘hard to reach’. First, we describe how an ambiguous notion of participation can shift responsibilities to families and leave internal school practices free from critical gaze. Second, we focus on the complexities and tensions involved in the process of partnering TSOs with schools because of the bureaucratic nature of educational institutions and unresolved conflicts of interests and responsibilities. Finally, we argue that the potential of these initiatives were limited and diluted by being stand-alone and time-limited. Our analysis suggests that, in spite of their apparent success, they ended up being part of powerful authorising narratives that justify the outsourcing of public services and the abdication of the State’s responsibilities.     

Pigeons’ memory for sequences of light flashes when gap duration is an unreliable discriminative cue

In Experiment 1, pigeons were trained with a 1-sec dark and a 1-sec houselight-illuminated delay interval to discriminate between sequences of two and four flashes of light (feeder illumination). The sequences could be discriminated on the basis of the number of flashes, the number of gaps, or the duration of the gap between flashes. A choose-few bias was obtained at extended dark delays, but not at extended illuminated delays. Pigeons appeared to confuse long dark delays with the longer gap between flashes on few-sample trials. In Experiment 2, additional sample sequences were included that made gap duration an unreliable cue for discriminating between the few and many samples. A significant choose-many bias was obtained at extended dark delay intervals, but no biased forgetting was found at extended illuminated delays. The pigeons appeared to discriminate light flash sequences by relying on multiple temporal features of a sequence rather than using an event switch to count flashes. The biased-forgetting effects observed appear to be due to instructional ambiguity that results from the similarity of the delay interval to features of the flash sequences. nt]mis|This research was supported by Grant OGPOOD6378 from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada to A.S.     

Pigeons’ memory for event duration: Differences between visual and auditory signals

In Experiment 1, pigeons were trained to discriminate short (2 sec) and long (8 sec) durations of tone by responding to red and green comparison stimuli. During delay testing, a systematic response bias to the comparison stimulus correct for the long duration occurred. Tests of responding without the tone reduced accuracy on long-sample trials but not on short-sample trials suggesting that the pigeons were attending to the tone and not simply timing the total trial duration. The pigeons were then trained to match short (2 sec) and long (8 sec) durations of light to blue/yellow comparisons. During delay testing, “choose-long errors” occurred following tone durations, but “choose-short errors” occurred following light durations. In Experiment 2, accuracy was assessed on test trials in which the tone and the light signals were simultaneously presented for the same duration or for different durations. Pigeons responded accurately to durations of light, but were unable to accurately respond to durations of tone simultaneously presented with the light. The data from Experiment 1 suggest that there are important differences between light and tone signals with respect to the events that control the termination of timing. The data from Experiment 2 indicate that pigeons cannot simultaneously time visual and auditory signals independently and without interference. Consequently, they are inconsistent with the idea that there is a single internal clock that times both tone and light durations.     

National Science Education Standards: A political document

The National Science Education Standards provides a vision teaching and learning science for the science education system and criteria to measure progress toward that vision. The document contains standards for content, teaching, assessment, three major levers of change identified by policy analysts. The Standards also include program standards for schools and districts and system standards. This article describes how the Standards were developed within a political context, through a process with political aspects and includes political intents. It closes with recommendations about why and how science education researchers might engage in the political process. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 35: 711–727, 1998.     

Managing arterial health in adults with metabolic diseases: Is high-intensity interval exercise the answer? Response to the commentary by Lopes et al.

Dear editor, We thank Lopes et al.1 for their interest in our study and for writing an insightful commentary based on our findings, which were recently publishe...