Translating policy: governmentality and the reflective teacher

This paper deploys some concepts from the work of Michel Foucault to problematise the mundane and quotidian practices of policy translation as these occur in the everyday of schools. In doing that, we suggest that these practices are complicit in the formation of and constitution of teacher subjects, and their subjection to the morality of policy and of educational reform. These practices are some ways in which teachers work on themselves and others, and make themselves subjects of policy. We conceive of the processes of translation, its practices and techniques as a form of ethics, the constitution of a contemporary and contingent version of professionalism through the arts of self-conduct. In all of this, it is virtually impossible to separate out, as Foucault points out, capability from control. We argue that the development of new capacities, new skills of classroom management, of pedagogy, bring along with it the intensification of a power relation. We are primarily concerned with Foucault’s third face of power, pastoral power or government and how this interweaves and overlap with other forms of power within processes of policy and educational reform.     

Digital Explanation as Assessment in University Science

Research in Science Education - Assessments in tertiary science subjects typically assess content knowledge, and there is current need to both develop and assess different forms of knowledge and...     

Searching for a crack to let environment light in: ecological biopolitics and education for sustainable development discourses

This article traces the shifts in environmental education discourses from the 1972 UN Conference on the Human Environment, to the 2012 UN Rio+20 Conference on Sustainable Development, and beyond through a biopolitical lens. Each of the earlier shifts is reflected in environmental, sustainability and science education policies and curricula—but what of the most recent shifts at Rio+20 and in UNESCO’s (2014) Roadmap for Implementing the Global Action Programme on Education for Sustainable Development? The article examines how the ecological version of politics emerged and then became integrated into technocentric biopolitics and how this shift affected the shaping of environmental, sustainability and science education policies and curricula. In particular, the article analyzes the shifting biopolitical interfaces that have occurred between “natural environment” and “society”—from a goal of preserving the natural foundations of life to a focus on exploiting these foundations, modifying and transforming the environment through scientific and technological means—and the manifestations of this in Australian curriculum documents.     

One Model or Two? Sentence Verification in Children and Adults

We employed the sentence‐picture verification paradigm to ask whether children are more likely than adults to construct unitary representations of ambiguous sentences. Six kinds of sentence were presented with the two kinds of inherently ambiguous sentences being: “There are crosses either above or below the line” and “There are crosses above [below] the line”. These sentences are inherently ambiguous because they afford both ‘inclusive’ and ‘exclusive’ readings, the readings being determined by whether subjects judge a picture with crosses both above and below a line to be true of the sentences. In Experiment 1, which had a sentence‐picture order, and in Experiment 2, which had a picture‐sentence order, the verification reaction‐time and the true/false judgement data together suggested that the younger subjects were more likely to construct unitary representations for the ambiguous sentences. Our strongest evidence for this claim was that children are heavily biased towards an inclusive reading of disjunction. Analysis of the sentence reading times in Experiments 1 and 3 suggested that children, unlike adults, may be deferring the construction of a mental model of the disjunctive sentence until the picture arrives.     

Ethnically Speaking

Today more than ever, as citizens of the world face unknown threats and seemingly irresoluble, disparate philosophical views, examination of ethical issues is essential. In our technological age, educators and researchers in the field of educational technology bear the responsibility for engaging in thoughtful debates about topical issues that call for rationale judgements. Teachers from K-university levels can contribute to such endeavors by encouraging discussions among their students about personal and social responsibility within and across cultures. These resources are but one beginning. Scholarly commentary related to this effort is welcome.     

Editorial

Ohne Zusammenfassung

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Editorial

     

Social and dimensional comparison effects on academic self-concepts and self-perceptions of effort in elementary school children

By focusing on the domains of math and German, the present study with 200 elementary school children investigated the specific relationships of self-reported grades with academic self-concepts and self-perceptions of effort within the competence-affective separation of academic self-concepts. In addition, possible mediator effects of academic self-concepts were explored. In both domains, self-reported grades positively predicted academic self-concepts of corresponding domains, which, in turn, positively predicted self-perceptions of effort of corresponding domains. However, there were no negative cross-domain achievement effects on academic self-concepts and no negative cross-domain self-concept effects on self-perceptions of effort. Both academic self-concepts mediated the effects from self-reported grades to self-perceptions of effort in corresponding domains. This research indicates that children’s self-perceptions of effort can be inferred by their competence and affective self-concepts.

• Highlights

• Self-reported grades positively predict academic self-concepts of corresponding domains.

• Academic self-concepts positively predict self-perceptions of effort of corresponding domains.

• There are no negative cross-domain achievement effects on academic self-concepts and no cross-domain self-concept effects on self-perceptions of effort.

• Academic self-concepts mediate the effects from self-reported grades to self-perceptions of effort in corresponding domains.

     

Visual discrimination learning and memory in nocturnal prosimians

The ability of two nocturnal prosimians—greater galago and slow loris—to learn and to remember two-dimensional black-white pattern discriminations was investigated. There was no significant species difference. Both were found to be: sensitive to the number of visual cues available, able to benefit from repeated exposure to similar problems, capable of retaining previously learned material over a long period of time. Although they are individually quite variable in performance, these primitive primates are by no means untrainable on visual discrimination problems, as previous reports have suggested.