Pedagogical love in the transactional curriculum

The original meaning of pedagogy is grounded in the relational and intentional responsibility of adult to child. The vulnerability of the child calls forth a loving attitude from the adult, as pedagogue, that is directed toward the physical security and the social, emotional, and educational well‐being of the child as student. The lived experiences of five teachers and their students presented in this paper demonstrate that pedagogical love as a favourable influence, or auspice of heart in teaching, is a mediating influence within the transactional curriculum. In the learning process, human beings, whether child or adult, develop an understanding of themselves and Other and in the process share a common heart. Pedagogical love cannot be perceived, nor received, in a curriculum environment in which feeling for the Other is absent or marginalized. Pedagogical love invites teachers and their students to actively participate in the understandings and knowledge that co‐emerge in the transactional curriculum.     

The History of the Planar Elastica: Insights into Mechanics and Scientific Method

Euler’s formula for the buckling of an elastic column is widely used in engineering design. However, only a handful of engineers will be familiar with Euler’s classic paper De Curvis Elasticis in which the formula is derived. In addition to the Euler Buckling Formula, De Curvis Elasticis classifies all the bent configurations of elastic rod—a landmark in the development of a rational theory of continuum mechanics. As a historical case study, Euler’s work on elastic rods offers an insight into some important concepts which underlie mechanics. It sheds light on the search for unifying principles of mechanics and the role of analysis. The connection between results obtained from theory and those obtained from experiments on rods, highlights two different approaches to scientific discovery, which can be traced back to Bacon, Descartes and Galileo. The bent rod also has an analogy in dynamics, with a pendulum, which highlights the crucial distinctions between initial value and boundary value problems and between linear and nonlinear differential equations. In addition to benefiting from the overview which a historical study provides, the particular problem of the elastica offers students of science and engineering a clear elucidation of the connection between mathematics and real-world engineering, issues which still have relevance today.

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Software visualization as a pedagogical tool

The teaching of computer programming can benefit from looking ahead towards the needs of experienced programmers, who routinely use industrial strength programming environments. Two of the main attributes of such environments are (a) their ability to scale up to handle large examples and (b) the way they facilitate visualization of program execution. We describe our approach to software visualization, a collection of techniques which allows beginners to see the innards of program execution clearly and at the same time allows experts to view high level program abstractions which help them home in quickly on buggy code. This approach can be combined with recent developments in Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITSs) and has the added benefit of allowing students to explore on their own using a discovery-based paradigm. Were-work some well known examples from the ITS community and show how our approach scales up to handle a more sophisticated problem involving a 7,500 line operating system.