Toleration, Children and Education

The paper explores challenges for the interpretation of the ideal toleration that arise in educational contexts involving children. It offers an account of how a respect-based conception of toleration can help to resolve controversies about the accommodation and response to diversity that arise in schools.     

Contrasting concepts of learning and contrasting research methodologies: Affinities and bias

This paper analyses the conceptual significance of different methods of researching learning. Based largely upon our own experiences, we briefly compare the use of mini‐ethnography, life history, cross‐sectional surveys and existing panel survey data. We argue that there are strong affinities between each of these methods and significantly different ways of understanding the nature of learning: mini‐ethnographies with learning as participation, life history with learning as construction and both types of survey with learning as acquisition. Three things follow. The first is that decisions about how to research learning are related to decisions about how to conceptualise and theorise learning. The second is that there is no foolproof empirical way to adjudicate between different conceptualisations of learning, though empirical evidence can and should play a significant part in informing such decisions. The third is that though mixing methods (including mixing more than one different qualitative approach) can bring advantages, the integration of the findings of mixed methods in relation to learning requires careful and sometimes difficult conceptual work.     

Statistical modelling of knee valgus during a continuous jump test

Landing with the knee in a valgus position is recognized as a risk factor for anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) injury. Using linear and non-linear regression analyses, the purpose of this study was to examine the correlation between two-dimensional (2D) knee valgus and three-dimensional (3D) knee kinematics measured during a jump landing task. Twenty-eight female collegiate athletes participated. All participants were required to perform a continuous jump test. The average maximum angles of abduction and internal tibial rotation during landing were measured using the Point Cluster Technique. Average peak knee valgus angle was measured using a 2D approach. Linear and non-linear regression analyses between 2D valgus and 3D knee abduction, and between 2D valgus and 3D internal tibial rotation, were performed. The R ² value between 2D valgus and 3D knee abduction was significantly different from zero and had a moderate correlation for all models, whereas the R ² value between 2D valgus and 3D internal tibial rotation was not significantly different from zero. The 2D approach could be used to screen a specific group of individuals for risk of ACL injury; however, using frontal plane 2D analysis of valgus motion to evaluate internal tibial rotation is not advised.     

Inquiry-Based Science Education Competencies of Primary School Teachers: A literature study and critical review of the American National Science Education Standards

Inquiry-based science education is an important innovation. Researchers and teachers consider it to be stimulating for pupils’ application of research skills, construction of meaning and acquiring scientific knowledge. However, there is ambiguity as to what competencies are required to teach inquiry-based science. Our purpose is to develop a profile of professional competence, required for effective inquiry-based science teaching in primary schools in the Netherlands. This article reviews literature and compares the outcomes to the American National Science Education Standards (NSES). In so doing, it seeks to answer the following research questions: What elements of competencies required by primary school teachers who teach inquiry-based science are mentioned, discussed and researched in recent literature? To what extent are the American NSES (introduced 15 years ago) consistent with elements of competencies found in recent literature? A comprehensive literature review was conducted using Educational Resources Information Centre and Google Scholar databases. Fifty-seven peer-reviewed scientific journal articles from 2004 to 2011 were found using keyword combinations. Analysis of these articles resulted in the identification and classification of 22 elements of competencies. This outcome was compared to the American NSES, revealing gaps in the standards with respect to a lack of focus on how teachers view science teaching and themselves as teachers. We also found that elements of competencies are connected and poor mastery of one may affect a teacher's mastery of another. Therefore, we propose that standards for the Netherlands should be presented in a non-linear, holistic, competence-based model.     

Majors and credits in public speaking

If politics is an art, then matters of style must be crucial to its practice. This essay considers how political actions are shaped by rhetorical practices that depend upon aesthetic perceptions. Modern assumptions of artistic autonomy are replaced by the classical concept of decorum, which offers a model for understanding how political life is styled for rhetorical effect. The role of decorousness in contemporary politics is illustrated by the extreme case of the courtly style, which constitutes power through propriety, is centered on the king's body, displaces speech with gesture, and ends in political paralysis.     

The identity game: constructing and enabling multicultural identities in a Finland–Swedish school setting

This study, building on previous studies stressing the bond between positive sense of ethnic identity and school belonging, puts at its center the very process of ethnic identity construction. Thus, identity is viewed as co‐constructed, within a social–constructionist perspective on learning. The study is two‐folded. It starts out by describing how participants in a Finland–Swedish preschool setting orient to ethnic identity in everyday interactions. Video recordings are analyzed using conversation analysis, a relatively recent approach to the exploration of how ethnicity is accomplished in interaction. It shows that the different ethnic backgrounds of the children were considerably more prominent in the informal self‐initiated interactions between themselves than in situations where adults were present. The children mainly used ethnicity as a resource to investigate themselves in relation to others to negotiate status and construct in‐ and out‐groups. The second part focuses on how to create a more inclusive school‐setting by more actively supporting students' ethnic identity construction. It discusses the experiences from a teacher–researcher collaboration, where the way children constructed ethnic identity in the first part of the study was taken as the starting‐point for the development of new practices. The study suggests the ongoing ethnic identity construction in everyday educational settings to be a fertile area for further research. We need to know more about how these processes can be supported in a manner that is sensitive to the students' needs to decide for themselves whether, and how, they wish to orient to their own ethnic backgrounds.     

Gender,dialogue and discursive psychology: a pilot sexuality intervention with South African High-School learners

Good-quality sexuality education can be effective in reducing sexual health risks, but may also be disconnected from the lived realities of learners’ lives and reinforce gendered stereotypes. In line with the trend towards ‘empowerment’ in and through sexuality education, we implemented a pilot sexuality intervention with Grade 10 participants following a rigorous consultation process. Nine weekly group dialogues were held with 11 participants, with 2 follow-up sessions the next year. Freirian principles of critical consciousness and dialogical pedagogy, infused with discursive psychological understandings, were used to foreground gendered/sexual norms and to provide recognition for participants in a variety of gendered and sexual subject positions. Sessions were recorded, the facilitator kept a diary, and participants were asked to evaluate the intervention. The dialogical format of the group generated curiosity and engagement, and some participants took up a ‘responsible’ sexual subject position in a reflexive manner. A partial normalisation of some ‘hidden’ aspects of sex was enabled, and critical consciousness around some gendered inequities was promoted. We argue, first, that it is not so much sexuality education that young people need, but sexuality dialogues, and second, that a discursive psychology framework provides a nuanced and fruitful dimension to Freirean inspired ‘empowerment’ sexuality interventions.     

Towards a broader understanding of authority in student–teacher relationships

In this paper we problematise the notion of authority as it appears in discourse relating to school discipline. The account of authority that dominates is narrow and restricted, and the term is sometimes used as a synonym for control. This prohibits full consideration of the range of relationships in which authority manifests itself. We draw on sociological and philosophical literature, and argue that a multi-dimensional concept of authority may offer a more nuanced framework for theorising student–teacher relationships in schools. We consider how each of the forms of authority outlined by Wrong (2002 Wrong, D. H. 2002. Power: its forms bases and uses, 3rd edn., London: Transaction Publishers.  [Google Scholar])—coercive, legitimate, competent, personal and authority by inducement—may have some application to the classroom setting. In particular we explore the concept of ‘personal authority' and its potential to enhance understanding of the contested and under-theorised concept of authority. We begin by exploring ways in which the current policy context presents challenges to particular forms of authority.     

Lexical Elaboration in Children's Locative Action Expressions

The spatial locative words used in multiword locative action expressions were tracked longitudinally for 4 children. Children ranged in age from 1–5 to 3–0. Although certain words emerged before others, as previous research has shown, the children were selective about which lexical categories were used to talk about movement events, and their selections changed systematically with age. Source and path words were used most frequently at the earliest ages, and goal words predominated at the oldest ages. The children also increased the specificity with which they talked about locative movement events by combining goal words with source and path words as they got older. The observed developmental shifts in lexical use suggest that lexical acquisition is influenced not only by the meaning of the individual locative words but also by the verb relational roles that such words play when embedded in semantic/syntactic contexts.