Teaching and Learning About Inquiry: Insights and Challenges in Professional Development

The purpose of this study was to determine if teachers who participated in a professional development program continued to learn about inquiry and inquiry teaching as they implemented inquiry in their classrooms. A qualitative design utilizing inductive analysis was used to investigate teachers’ understanding and classroom implementation of inquiry. Findings are presented as assertions, drawing support from four focal teachers. For each assertion, confirming and disconfirming data are presented. Based on these data, we assert that a) there was little or no change in teachers’ individual understanding of inquiry, and b) professional development enhanced teachers’ ability to design inquiry-based activities – however, classroom implementation did not reflect a high level of inquiry.     

Oral traditions: a contextual framework for complex science concepts—laying the foundation for a paradigm of promise in rural science education

The overarching goal of this paper is to bring a diverse educational context—rural sayings and oral traditions situated in ecological habitats—to light and emphasize that they need to be taken into consideration regarding twenty-first century science education. The rural sayings or tenets presented here are also considered alternative ways of learning and knowing that rural people (elders and children) acquire outside of school in rural places of home and habitat. Throughout this paper we explore the complex nature of rural sayings or tenets that have been shared by community elders and examine their historic scientific roots. In so doing, we uncover a wealth of information regarding the diverse rural sociocultural and ecological connections and the situated macro and micro-contexts from which these tenets arise. We argue for a preservation and educational revitalization of these tenets for current and future generations. We show how this knowledge both augments and differs from traditional western science and science curricula by illuminating the ways in which oral traditions are embedded in place, people, memory and culture. We close by presenting an alternative paradigm for science education that incorporates pluralism as a means to enrich current place-based pedagogies and practices. We suggest that in order to tackle the complex problems in this new age of the Anthropocene, revitalizing elders' wisdom as well as valuing rural children’s diverse knowledge and the inherent connectivity to their habitats needs be cultivated and not expunged by the current trends that standardize learning. As stated in the call for this special issue, “rurality has a real positionality” and much can be learned from individual and unique rural contexts.     

Show Us the Love: Revolutionary Teaching in (Un)Critical Times

In the wake of racial violence in urban schools and society, we question, “Can the field of urban education love blackness and Black lives unconditionally and as preconditions to humanity? What does it look like to (re)imagine urban classrooms as sites of love? As educators, how might we utilize a pedagogy of love as an embodied practice that influences holistic teaching? How might we utilize a pedagogy of love to include Black youths’ racialized and gendered life histories and experiences and their language and literacy practices? We outline and discuss five types of violence in schools (physical, symbolic, linguistic, curricula/pedagogical, and systemic school violence) which interfere with the creation and sustainability of revolutionary love in urban schools. We present examples of ‘fake love’ and provide the current backdrop. We operationalize revolutionary love and offer Afrocentric praxis and African Diaspora Literacy as antidotes to anti-Black types of violence that many students experience in urban schools.

     

Butches,Bullies and Buffoons: Images of Physical Education Teachers in the Movies

The purpose of this study was to examine the cinematic images of physical educators during the past decade. This study is approached from two perspectives: (a) framing and (b) social cognition. Framing, an approach to media studies most often reserved for critical analysis of news, provides useful generalities for a formative study of movie images, which directs explicit attention toward the construction and use of media frames. Contemporary social cognition theory blends social learning theory with an understanding of the power of media images. Media observers (i.e. movie viewers) can acquire symbolic representations of behavior through media images and these images are powerful and informative enough to inform subsequent behavior. Using the Internet Movie Database (IMDB), each researcher compiled a list of movies. After an initial list from the IMDB was compiled, researchers added films that they knew, from personal knowledge, included physical education teachers. A final list of 18 movies was distributed to each of the four coders, with a stipulation that the coding take place during a specified time period of no more than three months. Each researcher observed the videotapes independently while noting the dialogue and camera shots of all scenes involving physical educators for emerging frames of reference regarding physical education teachers. Ethnographic content analysis, a media studies variation of the constant comparative method, aided in the identification of frames (categories and themes) that emerged from the data. The researchers independently made notes concerning the video observations and then later developed a system of classification by comparing notes and discovering regularities within the data. The constant comparative method was used to assist in the assessment and grouping of framing approaches. Agreement between researchers had to be 100% for a frame to be included in research findings. It was agreed that frames had to be constructed by both verbal and visual indicators in the films, and it had to be strongly associated with at least three films. Although nuances in setting, plot and the personalities of characters might arguably make frames in each film studied 'unique', several frames emerged as characteristic of depictions of physical educators: (a) there is no distinction between physical educators and coaches, (b) physical educators are incompetent teachers, (c) physical educators are drill sergeants and are the proverbial 'bully from hell' who enjoys seeing a student humiliated, and (d) characteristics of physical educators are gendered: women are often depicted as 'butch' or lesbian; men, as buffoons devoid of 'masculine' leadership qualities. An understanding of these frames is important because it provides clues about social cognition and behavior in regard to issues of physical education--from the classroom to the school board meeting, from decisions made about participation in physical education class to decisions made about the priority of physical education in the school setting.     

Transitioning to an athletic subjectivity: first-semester experiences at a corporate (sporting) university

This paper explores how eight women experience, and are incorporated into, the regulatory regimes and pedagogical practices of a corporate (sporting) university in their first semester of college. Using Foucault's conceptions of power, discipline and subjectivity, we situate women's participation on the soccer team within the context of a corporatized Division-I University. As sport has become increasingly corporatized, low-profile sports have begun to emulate high-profile sports. The corporate university and corporate sport model indicative of high-profile college programs, such as the one involved in this study, use (sporting) bodies as resources, rendering them detached and alienated from many college experiences. As evidenced in the data from this study, the pedagogies of highly structured schedules and authoritative-, peer- and self-disciplining mechanisms functioned to normalize the experiences of stress, tension, isolation, loneliness and little autonomy. Nevertheless, we also discuss a point of rupture, wherein two women, for different reasons, refused their athletic subjectivities at The University after their first semester by discontinuing their athletic participation. The contextualization of such experiences reveals the complex relations of power emerging from young adults’ immersion into an athletic system imbued with corporatist ideologies housed within a simulated aura of education and development. This paper aims not to provide definitive answers but rather, by exploring power relations, to open for discussion critical questions about college athletics and to advocate for a more humanist research agenda that considers athletic subjectivities.     

Predicting high school students' cognitive engagement and achievement: Contributions of classroom perceptions and motivation

Path analysis was used to test predictions of a model explaining the impact of students' perceptions of classroom structures (tasks, autonomy support and mastery and evaluation) on their self-efficacy, perceptions of the instrumentality of class work, and their achievement goals in a particular classroom setting. Additionally, the impact of self-efficacy, instrumentality, and goals on students' cognitive engagement and achievement was tested. There were 220 high school students who completed a series of questionnaires over a three-month period in their English classes. Data strongly supported the model demonstrating that student perceptions of classroom structures are important for their motivation. Also supported was the importance of perceiving the current class work as being instrumental for future success. Implications were discussed.     

Contextual influences on the interaction between conflicting memories in the rat

Contextual events redundant to the learning, in sequence, of passive and active avoidance were of one type for the former task and of another for the latter. During later testing, these contextual events were found to determine which of these acquired, conflicting dispositions would be manifested in behavior. Mutual interference in retention otherwise seen under similar circumstances seemed subordinate to the influence of the three types of contextual stimuli tested—drug (pentobarbital), compound (the experimental room in which conditioning took place), and a relatively unitary stimulus (a constantly sounding buzzer). The discussion considered the defining characteristics of a “contextual stimulus” and the mechanisms through which contextual events control the manifestation of learned behaviors and alleviation of interference in retention.     

A look at the present — A step to the future: An analysis of career and employment counselling in Canada

This paper reports the findings from a major survey of career and employment counselling in Canada. It describes the current state of career and employment counselling in Canada and outlines several emerging issues for future consideration.Canadian Guidance and Counselling Foundation