Planning,plumbing, or posturing? Explaining the weakness of human resource development structures and policies in South Africa

In South Africa, a national peak structure, the Human Resource Development Council, led by the Deputy President and consisting of key Cabinet Ministers, senior leaders from organised labour and business, community representatives, professional bodies and experts from research and higher education, was established to enable high-level coordination at a strategic level. There is little evidence of achievements of this Council and its associated human resource development strategy. This paper suggests that human resource development strategies in South Africa have been more about posturing to be seen to be doing something, than actually planning the development of the skills of the nation, with one brief period when there was a focus on ‘plumbing’ – or dealing with specifically targeted ‘blockages’ in the skills ‘pipeline’. The underlying problem, we suggest, lies in the very notion of national human resource development, which seems on the one hand to be too broad and unwieldy a concept to be useful to governments; on the other hand, it seems to carry too much of the weight of economic development. These conceptual weaknesses, as well as bureaucratic weaknesses in South Africa, explain the poorly conceptualised structures and processes.     

The Benefits of Intergenerational Learning in Higher Education: Lessons Learned from Two Age Friendly University Programs

This article focuses on the role of universities in the promotion of intergenerational learning and the facilitation of reciprocal sharing of expertise among learners of all ages. The principles of the Age Friendly University are used as a particular lens for interpreting two university programs, one in the United States and one in Ireland. Though different in operational implementation, core commonalities emerged within the nature of benefits to younger learners, older learners, the university, and the community. A review of these benefits illustrates how universities can provide opportunities for older and younger learners to co-create experiences and mutually enrich each other’s lives.     

Malaysian Parents' Ideal and Actual Perceptions of Pre-school Education La Perception Ideale et la Perception Reelle de l'Enseignement Prescolaire par les Parents Malaisiens Percepciones Ideales y Reales de los Padres Malasios sobre la Educacion Preescolar

This study explores and describes the perceptions of Malaysian parents concerning pre-school education. The study examines the potential influence of socio-cultural elements on the parents' perceptions and in doing so, challenges the current notion of what constitutes 'appropriateness' in early childhood education. Findings indicate that Malaysian parents hold both idealised and actualised perceptions of pre-school education. The former relate to the parents' image of childhood and the type of education they would like their child to receive in an ideal world, whilst the latter relate to the type of education parents feel their child needs in order to meet the needs of Malaysian society. The authors suggest that this model may be a useful one for exploring perceptions in future studies. Cette etude explore et decrit la perception de l'enseignement prescolaire par les parents malaisiens. Elle examine l'influence potentielle des elements socioculturels sur la perception des parents et elle souleve ainsi la question de ce qui constitue le caractere 'approprie' de 1'enseignement des tres jeunes enfants. Les resultats indiquent que les parents malaisiens ont une perception idealisee et une perception actualisee de 1'enseignement prescolaire. La premiere depend de 1'image que les parents se font de 1'enfance et du type d'education qu'ils voudraient que leur enfant recoive d'un point de vue ideal, tandis que le seconde se rattache au type d'education que les parents pensent necessaire a leur enfant pour repondre aux besoins de la societe malaisienne. Les auteurs suggerent que ce modele pourrait sent a explorer les perceptions dans de futures etudes. Este estudjo explora y describe las percepejones de los padres malasios con relacion a la educacion preescolar. El estudio examina la posible influencia de los elementos socioculturales en las percepciones de los padres y, con ello, se reta la nocion actual de lo que constituye 'lo apropiado' en la educacion de la infancia. Los descubrimientos indican que los padres malasios tienen tanto percepciones idealizadas como reales de la educacion preescolar. La primera hace relacion a la imagen que los padres tienen de la infancia y el tipo de educacion que les gustaria que sus hijos recibieran en un mundo ideal, mientras que la segunda hace relacion al tipo de educacion que los padres creen que necesitan sus hijos a fin de satisfacer las necesidades de la sociedad malasia. Los autores sugieren que este modelo podria ser util para explorar percepciones en futuros estudios.     

Artificial intelligence and multimodal data in the service of human decision-making: A case study in debate tutoring

The question: “What is an appropriate role for AI?” is the subject of much discussion and interest. Arguments about whether AI should be a human replacing technology or a human assisting technology frequently take centre stage. Education is no exception when it comes to questions about the role that AI should play, and as with many other professional areas, the exact role of AI in education is not easy to predict. Here, we argue that one potential role for AI in education is to provide opportunities for human intelligence augmentation, with AI supporting us in decision-making processes, rather than replacing us through automation. To provide empirical evidence to support our argument, we present a case study in the context of debate tutoring, in which we use prediction and classification models to increase the transparency of the intuitive decision-making processes of expert tutors for advanced reflections and feedback. Furthermore, we compare the accuracy of unimodal and multimodal classification models of expert human tutors' decisions about the social and emotional aspects of tutoring while evaluating trainees. Our results show that multimodal data leads to more accurate classification models in the context we studied.     

The hearing environment

Glue ear, a condition resulting in intermittent hearing loss in young children, affects about 80% of young children under seven years old. About 60% of children will spend a third of their time unable to hear within normal thresholds. Teachers are unlikely to consider the sound quality in classrooms. In my research young people provided suggestions to help them hear, identifying the benefits of using their insight in improving the hearing environment. This article identifies five aspects from the literature which impact the hearing environment in classrooms. The focus is on practical low‐cost actions that teachers can implement in their classrooms, thus reducing stress levels in students and teachers.     

Collaborative learning and teaching: Reflections on a facilitated journey

Abstract

This report summarises the first year of an innovative and multilayered teaching and learning collaborative experience within the context of an undergraduate unit in early childhood. The facilitative influence is two‐fold: (a) generic information skills training (GIST) project which is a joint initiative between the Institute of Early Childhood (IEC), the Library and the Centre for Flexible Learning to teach information literacy skills which are contextualised within the unit presentation mode, its requirements and assessment tasks, and (b) redesign of the unit from a former third‐year level to a first‐year level to incorporate the notion of problem‐based, collaborative teaching and learning. Many challenges were faced by those involved in the unit in its first year, mainly class size and heterogeneity of student levels, incorporation of technology into learning and teaching, and flow of information for smooth operations for students, the teaching team and Library staff. Multilevel collaborations were central to this experience, and examples of student‐student, student‐teacher, and teacher‐staff collaborations are provided. The first of the 2‐year cycle of the GIST project has generated substantive data, as has the implementation of the unit in an innovative format. The complexity and challenges presented in the unit seemed to account for student withdrawal of about 25% in the first month; final evaluations are obtained from 292 students. Survey results presented here are both from the withdrawn students, as well as those who completed the unit. Modifications to the delivery of the unit in its second year and ways of strengthening the communities of learners and teachers towards a common goal are briefly reviewed.     

Identity development: what I notice about myself as a teacher

Teacher identity has been recognised as critical to the practice and development of teachers. However, there remains a paucity of scholarship capturing the voice of pre-service teachers’ meaning making of their own development as teachers during initial teacher education. This paper sets out to explore seven pre-service teachers’ meaning making of becoming a teacher. Reflections gathered using autobiographical narratives and teaching metaphors, were prompted by video clips of practice during School Placement. Results suggest that pre-service teachers’ were initially drawn to the physical depiction of what a teacher looks like. Their meaning making then turned towards instances of dissonance between their prior meanings of what it is to be a teacher and their lived experiences of School Placement. These sources of dissonance challenged the pre-service teachers’ ongoing construction of their teacher identity. The findings of this paper are discussed in terms of relevant literature.     

The uncertainty and fragility of learning to teach: a Britzmanian lens on a student teacher story

This paper turns the kaleidoscopic lens of Professor Deborah Britzman’s writings on a student teacher story of learning to teach. It begins by briefly setting the context for the research. It then explains the study’s ontological and epistemological focus on experience and how student teacher and researchers create expressions of experience through an interpretative process. This leads to the design for interpretation in this study and to an explanation of why the work of Britzman became part of the interpretative layering for understanding student teacher Ciara’s texts. It continues by explicating Britzman’s concept of ‘struggle for voice’ as a metaphor for learning to teach and briefly makes comparison with the work of Bakhtin and his concept of the dialogical imagination. It then presents the layered interpretation in the form of indicative excerpts in a chronological story. Finally it focuses on the salient and pervading theme of affect and offers a brief commentary on its significance in initial teacher education and the need for developing an understanding for the feeling world of learning to teach.     

The diversity of attention deficits in ADHD: the prevalence of four cognitive factors in ADHD versus controls

The performance of participants with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) relative to control participants was measured on four tasks uniquely assessing the functions of selective attention, executive attention, sustained attention, and orienting of attention. The results showed that deficits in sustained attention were the most pronounced, characterizing most participants with ADHD and deficits in each of the other three functions characterized more than half of these participants. Different participants with ADHD revealed different clusters of attentional deficits. These results call for a revision of leading theories of ADHD that identify the core of the pathology as a sole deficit in executive functions.