Putting themselves together

The author describes a semester teaching basic composition to a class of New York City women college students on public assistance. His narrative dramatizes how the students write in powerful and impressive ways on a variety of themes and have original and interesting responses to the short stories they read and to a guest author they meet.     

Civic Science for Public Use: Mind in the Making and Vroom

Mind in the Making and Vroom are partner initiatives that exemplify a unique “civic science” approach to “bringing developmental science into the world.” Mind in the Making offers families and professionals working with children 0–8 access to developmental research, by engaging them in an active process of professional development and community outreach. Vroom is an outreach and communication initiative that brings “brain building basics” to communities, inviting parents to participate in the science of early learning through partnerships with trusted entities. These initiatives use collaborative, iterative processes in disseminating findings and implications of child development research. Preliminary evidence shows early promise of these initiatives to help promote engaged learning and life skills based on executive function in adults and children.     

心路历程--世世代代

Dear Friends, Every one of us was young at some time inthe past.Even our planet was young once-billionsof years ago.Some of you are still young.The rest of uslook back to our youth with mixed feelings.We generallyhad better health and more energy than we have atpresent.But,we did not have the life experiences that wehave gathered over the years.     

Assessing the Occurrence of Learning in Children with Profound Intellectual Disability: A Conditioning Approach

Although children with the most profound forms of intellectual disability are clearly capable of learning, they are frequently unable to acquire skills and knowledge through the familiar social learning processes of modelling and verbal instruction. Instead, they rely on more basic learning processes, such as habituation, classical conditioning, and operant conditioning. This paper defines these basic processes and indicates their importance in allowing behaviour to adapt flexibly to changing environmental circumstances. Research on basic learning processes in which children and young adults with profound intellectual disability have acted as participants is then evaluated. The literature indicates that work of this kind is of clear relevance to those involved in facilitating the development and education of children with intellectual disability. This is because research and theory in the area of learning suggests effective ways of assessing non‐verbal children's cognitive capabilities and preferences and indicates ways of changing behaviour to produce educational outcomes and remediation of problem behaviours. Work of this kind thus provides the basis for intervention programs that can enhance the quality of life for this most disadvantaged group of children.     

Defects 101

An English professor at a community college in New York City argues, by analogy with contentions made by the neurologist Oliver Sacks about some of his patients, that the testing his university system uses to evaluate his students' writing is only good at exposing deficiencies, not strengths; he claims that students write under constraints that no professor or professional writer would accept. He concludes that it is less important for his students to satisfy mandated rubrics than to satisfy his own rigorous responses as a professional and devoted reader of literature.     

Mobile Chinese students navigating between fields: (Trans)forming habitus in transnational articulation programmes?

Abstract

Transnational articulation programmes are one way China is attempting to advance its higher education (HE) system. We report a study of twelve Chinese students’ experiences in two China-Australia 2?+?2 articulation programmes. In our analysis of semi-structured interviews, we use Bourdieu’s concepts of field and habitus to understand the impact on the habitus of the students. We report the experiences of the Chinese students in the HE sub-field in Australia. Students were like fish in water with the logics of practice of Chinese HE. In the new sub-field of HE in Australia, their habitus was out of place. This field/habitus mismatch created a field-habitus dissonance that can be productive of change to the habitus. Some in the study strategised to overcome this field-habitus mismatch and to adjust to the logics of the new field. We designate this emergent habitus as an in-between, diasporic cosmopolitan habitus, while others were able to ‘compartmentalise’ the demands of the new field, indicating durability of habitus.     

Environmental Thought,the Language of Sustainability,and Digital Watches

The field of education, and derivatively environmental education, is filled with inherently difficult concepts, yet we have not, I believe, given sufficient attention to understanding these ideas that ground our work. For example, the term 'education for sustainability,' has gained rapid acceptance yet little critical attention has been given to the term. Before launching into a critique, I do acknowledge the importance of 'sustainability' and the usefulness of this concept in environmental thinking. Many ecological processes are not sustained-not kept going continuously. Species are going extinct at an alarming rate and whole ecosystems are at risk. So, it is important to talk about sustainability. However, I argue that this alone is not sufficient. In this article I examine limitations associated with the language of sustainability and their implications for environmental thinking. Using the idea of digital watches as a metaphor, I explore what sustainability is not. Contemporary examples from advertising, curriculum development, and 'wildlife management' will be used to illustrate the central theme.