Transactive Teaching in a Time of Climate Crisis

This article discusses three problems that need to be tackled when the climate crisis becomes ‘a sustainability issue’ to be taught in schools. The article highlights, first, how knowledge concerning sustainability in schools risks being reduced and made into knowledge about ‘things’. Secondly, it also discusses how students in such a context risk being treated as instruments for ways of being in the world, rather than being subjects with ethical and political concerns for the world in which they live ‘here and now’. Thirdly, as we explore through some empirical examples, such reduction and instrumentalism objectifies both students and nature, which makes an adequate response to the crises obsolete. As an alternative, the article develops a notion of grievability and its importance for adequately responding to all living beings within a project of sustainability. To this end, it develops suggestions for a transactive teaching approach in a time of climate crisis.     

Institute notes

International Review of Education -     

Teaching,Freedom and the Human Individual

The essay represents teaching as the coming to be of the human individual. In order to do so, it reflects on the character of human life by which it is knowledge of itself. Being knowledge of itself, human life is self-determining or free. Therefore generality and particularity come together in the human being in a distinctive way: a human being is not an exemplar, instance or specimen of a species, nature or life-form. Rather, she is her own principle. This is captured in the idea of the human being as an individual. The essay reveals teaching to be the form of coming to be which is proper to what is an individual in this sense. In this way, the essay shows teaching to be internal to human freedom.     

Why Do Some Young Adults not Graduate From Upper-Secondary School? On the Importance of Signals of Labour Market Failure

In high-income countries, not completing secondary school often entails a high risk of social exclusion. Using data on young adults born in 1985 who grew up in metropolitan Sweden, we study factors associated with not graduating from upper-secondary school at age 21. Our hypothesis is that if a young person sees examples of people who are not able to earn a living despite having a long education, such negative examples are influential. Results from estimated logistic models are consistent with the hypothesis.     

Slippage and/or symbolism: gender,policy and educational governance in Scotland and Sweden

This article provides an overview and analysis of the relationship between gender, educational policy, and governance in Scotland and Sweden and the two countries’ response to European Union and global legislative and policy change. In Scotland, gender is mainly invisible in recent policies on inclusion, achievement beyond academic attainment, and the idealisation of the child. Gender is thus marginalised within a range of factors contributing to social in/equality. In Sweden, in contrast, gender has higher visibility in policy and governance as both an indicator of democracy and a means of preserving social democratic consensus and prosperity. However, recently its privileged position has come under attack. We draw on social capital, gender, and policy theory to analyse the range of influences on gender and educational governance in the two countries including that of the social capital of organised feminism.     

Globalisation and education for sustainable development: emancipation from context and meaning

This article tries to contribute to the critical debate on the ideological and globalising potential of education for sustainable development (ESD), which exists in the research field of environmental education, by highlighting potential contradictions in the argumentation for ESD’s ideological and globalising tendency. Further, the authors of this article argue for an alternative perspective on how education policy on ESD can be seen to contribute to globalisation and homogenisation by merging two conceptualisations of ‘globalisation as connection' and the role of ‘empty signifiers' in political discourse. The ambition with the merger is not to provide a universal explanation of globalisation and ideology, instead, the intention is to outline an alternative theoretical outlook that allows for an empirical study of the processes that can be seen to feed into or interrupt the preservation of hegemony in a global setting.     

Seeing self as others see you: variability in self‐efficacy ratings in student teaching

The main objective of this study was to compare pre‐service English teachers' self‐efficacy beliefs with the instructors' views of the teaching competence of these pre‐service teachers. Thirty‐nine student teachers (13 males and 26 females) and five female instructors participated in the study. For data collection, student teacher and instructor versions of the same scale were used. The results of the research indicated that the student teachers' self‐efficacy judgments were higher than the instructors' judgments for the student teachers' teaching competence. Interviews with the instructors indicated that enactive experiences and verbal persuasion seem to be important factors which affect the personal efficacy beliefs of the prospective teachers in the current study.     

Learning disabilities and the auditory and visual matching computer program

This study examined whether audiovisual computer training without linguistic material had a remedial effect on different learning disabilities, like dyslexia and ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder). This study applied a pre‐test–intervention–post‐test design with students (N = 62) between the ages of 7 and 19. The computer training lasted eight weeks occurring twice a week for 15 minutes per session. After the training period, an improvement in the auditory‐visual matching test was found. According to the hypothesis of this study, the youngest children with dyslexia would benefit most from the intervention. However, the training had also a positive effect on auditory‐visual matching with older students with dyslexia. Surprisingly, the students with ADD benefited from this intervention. According to the teachers, this intervention had also a positive effect on the students' school behaviour.     

Privileging and Artifacts: On the Use of Information Technology in Science Education

The aim of this paper is to develop an approach that can be used in addressing the issue of the use of information technology and its importance in human meaning making. By using a combination of Wittgenstein’s work method, a sociocultural perspective on learning, and a sociotechnical perspective on artifacts a specific focus for analyses was discerned: the relation between the use-of-technology in meaning-making on one hand and the circumstances for this meaning-making on the other hand. The conversations of six groups of children, who worked with an assignment, that required that they doubted information they encountered, were video recorded and analyzed. The analyses were done in three interrelated steps. (a) The students use-of-technology in meaning making, (b) the meaning patterns that the students encounter on the web, and (c) students’ intentions and habits. Our findings show that, while the mode of reinforcement of the texts used by the students may have provided little opportunity for doubt or learning how to doubt, the students’ habits and intentions with their work determined the result of the interaction, namely copying information from the web. Taking our point of departure in this empirical illustration we discuss theoretical and methodological questions concerning the understanding of the use of information technology in educational settings.