“Strong,Independent, Able to Learn More …”: Inclusion and the construction of school students in Iceland as diagnosable subjects

This paper deals with the way the vision of including children with special educational needs into their home school, constituted for instance in UNESCO's The Salamanca Statement and Framework on Special Needs Education, has merged with other contemporary discourses (ideas and practices) in Icelandic education. In particular, the paper focuses on the historical conjuncture of inclusion politics, individualism, a technological approach to education, and market ideology and practices in Icelandic education. These approaches are analysed as discursive patterns of legitimating principles functioning in Icelandic education at the beginning of the twenty-first century.     

Feeling Brown in the Academy: Decolonizing Mentoring Through a Disidentification Muxerista Approach

According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, “Hispanics” comprise only 4% of the full-time faculty in U.S. universities, although Latin@s comprise 16.4% of the U.S. population. Given the under-representation of Latin@ faculty, efforts to support and retain them are paramount. Recently a small body of literature has surfaced explicitly centering the practices of peer mentoring among Latin@s. Through collaborative auto-ethnography and counter-storytelling, using a framework of disidentification, muxerista mentoring, and community cultural wealth, we add to this literature by discussing our experience of engaging in non-hierarchical Latina peer mentoring at a predominantly White university. The main themes include: merging emotional needs with professional growth, forging learning and research partnerships, Browning teaching spaces and transforming institutional practices.     

Development of argumentative discourse based on learning demand / Evolución del discurso argumentativo en función de la demanda de aprendizaje

Abstract

This study is part of a larger project focused on the development of argumentative competence and its effect on knowledge construction. It aims to analyse and compare the changes in the evolution of the claims and the quality of the written arguments used by university students in two learning scenarios: a first scenario where students participated in a debate with the aim of convincing; and a second scenario where the debate was aimed at achieving an agreement by consensus. The participants were 77 first-year university students in Education and Speech Therapy. A quasi-experimental design was adopted with repeated measures, in which students from the two groups wrote two argumentative texts (initial and final) for each type of debate. The results indicate that the initial claims evolved towards more moderate positions at the end of the process; and the quality of the arguments that students wrote in their texts varied significantly depending on the type of demand and the time of writing (initial or final).     

AIDA: a methodology independent support tool for educational software authoring

Many authoring tools have been proposed in an attempt to find more effective ways to face the challenge of developing educational software. However, most of them are reported to be restrictive, since they are strongly connected to a specific educational software development methodology. The AIDA (Ambiente Integrado para o Desenvolvimento de Aplicações educacionais) authoring environment was developed at the University of Coimbra having as its main objectives the support of most of the activities involved in authoring and making educational software development easier. The AIDA system is based on a design module, i.e. a prototyping tool allowing the creation of Windows-based software, including multimedia features. The system assists evaluation activities and it caters also for support on translation and cultural adaptation, as well as on the reutilization of educational materials. The use of the AIDA environment is illustrated by three small examples using different development methodologies.     

Students’ conscious unknowns about artefacts and natural objects

This study attempts to characterise what 7th- and 12th-grade students believe they do not know about artefacts and natural objects, as well as the dependence of what is unknown on a knowledge of these objects. The students were asked to make explicit through questioning what they did not know about a sample of objects. The unknowns generated were categorised according to a scheme based on lexical semantics theory. Two of the categories focused specifically on imprecise unknowns expressed through What is X? questions, and on unknowns concerning functions. The results showed, firstly, that a lower grade level and lower knowledge of a certain class of objects was associated with more imprecise unknowns. Secondly, unknowns about the functions of artefacts were significantly more frequent than unknowns about the functions of natural objects at any of the grade levels. Overall, the results were consistent with the hypothesis of a correspondence between knowledge and unknowns.     

Exploring the Functionality of Visual and Non-Visual Strategies in Solving Rotation Problems

This article deals with the solving of rotation problems, and shows that there is an alternative to using mental rotations or their encoding into verbal terms: namely using geometrical properties. The idea is consistent with the theory which distinguishes between visual and analytical individuals, but uses the construct strategies instead of the construct preferred processing mode. Moreover, contrary to many researchers who refer to this distinction, but who often use it to classify students, this researcher introduces a new parameter, namely the nature of the task. The article presents the analysis of the functionality and effectiveness of the different kind of strategies as a function of the task's characteristics. The research, dealing not with individual traits but with solving strategies, offers information that could be helpful for the improvement of geometry teaching.