Holocaust education in Austria: A (hi)story of complexity and ambivalence

In Austria, activities for teaching about and remembering the Holocaust have concentrated mainly on National Socialism and its atrocities. Austria’s history of political anti-Semitism goes back to the 19th century, however, and has been widely and publicly acknowledged. It has always been linked to nationalistic tendencies that are still present today and rarely reflected upon, including the anti-Slavic and anti-Turkish attitudes that right-wing parties use to gain supporters. Vienna’s special place of remembrance, the Heldenplatz, with its monuments and history, is a useful place to begin examining Austrian identities and the course of collective Austrian ways of thinking. Based on that examination, we then consider Austria’s daily politics and treatment of the past. We next turn to Holocaust education after the war, which has had an impressive impact after a late start, and mention some of its drawbacks and problems. We next discuss the lack of serious research about memorials in Austria, as compared with Germany, and present initial results from a project that started in spring 2009 to examine knowledge gains and attitude changes among students after they visit the Mauthausen concentration camp.     

Mental testing and educational streaming in Ontario and Denmark in the early twentieth century: a comparative and transnational perspective

ABSTRACT

This article compares and contrasts the use of mental testing and the formation of educational streaming in Denmark and Ontario during the interwar years. In this sense, the article adds nuances to the meaning of internationalism as well as contributing to our knowledge about how ideas of testing practices circulated among countries and continents. One way ideas and practices circulated was via informal networks promoted by the education traveller. Key proponents of mental testing in both Denmark and Ontario travelled to continental Europe, England, and the United States studying and observing the practices and institutional arrangements associated with educational streaming. Our main findings are that the processes used to implement mental testing in the two countries differed significantly. Mental testing was implemented much later in Denmark than in Ontario. This was due to different contextual, cultural, and historical factors that promoted changes to the existing system, or, alternatively, represented a barrier or even obstructed changes to it. Nevertheless, mental testing was implemented in both education systems as a relatively coherent technology rooted in transnational movements and exchange, but was attended by highly different practices and local meaning-making.     

Falling in love and staying in love with science: ongoing informal science experiences support fascination for all children

ABSTRACT

Ages 10–14 mark a period in which children develop a strong sense of whether science is ‘for them,’ a time that typically coincides with the start of middle school in the United States and their first exposure to more rigorous science classes and testing. Experiences with science in and out of school can shape children's motivation to choose science careers or participate in voluntary science classes later on, for better or worse. We explore the hypothesis that children who engage in more informal educational science experiences at the start of this period are more likely than their peers to obtain and maintain interest, curiosity, and mastery goals in science (together forming a construct called fascination). We measured 983 children's fascination with science at the beginning and middle of sixth grade. We found that the children who participated in informal science during this time were more likely to maintain or have greater fascination than at the start. These findings held while also controlling for many potentially confounding covariates and are robust across subgroups by gender and race/ethnicity. Further, the effects are largest for those children whose family generally supports their learning.     

A citation and co-citation analysis of 10 years of KM theory and practices

In a previous issue of Knowledge Management Research & Practice (KMRP), we analysed the content and keywords of all articles published in the first decade of KMRP. With this article, we extend our preliminary analysis to the citation and co-citations made by these articles. The study covers all the 256 articles published. The most cited article was A dynamic theory of organisational knowledge creation by Nonaka. The most cited KMRP article was by Nonaka and Toyama: The knowledge-creating theory revisited: knowledge creation as a synthesizing process. The co-citation analysis of the 100 most cited articles in KMRP publications showed that four groups of topics emerged, one around communities and situated learning, the second group around networks, knowledge transfer and research methods, a third group around the foundations of knowledge management and a fourth group around intellectual capital.     

Academic Functioning and Peer Influences: A Short‐Term Longitudinal Study of Network–Behavior Dynamics in Middle Adolescence

In this study, the associations between peer effects and academic functioning in middle adolescence (N = 342; 14–15 years old; 48% male) were investigated longitudinally. Similarity in achievement (grade point averages) and unexplained absences (truancy) was explained by both peer selection and peer influence, net of acceptance, and connectedness. Friendships were formed and maintained when adolescents had low levels of achievement or high levels of truancy. Friends influenced one another to increase rather than decrease in achievement and truancy. Moreover, friends’ popularity moderated peer influences in truancy in reciprocal friendships but not in unilateral friendships, whereas friends’ acceptance moderated peer influences in achievement in both unilateral and reciprocal friendships. The findings illustrate the dynamic interplay between peer effects and academic functioning.     

Liquidity and attachment in the mobile hookup culture. A comparative study of contrasted interactional patterns in the main uses of Grindr and Tinder

ABSTRACT

This study compares the interactional practices for the main types of uses of the mobile dating applications Grindr and Tinder. The analysis shows that in both cases, a majority of users share a similar orientation towards a linguistic ideology regarding ordinary conversation as a social institution, as topic-based, as allowing individuals to share and update knowledge so as to enable rapport and intimacy. However, Grindr and Tinder users take almost opposite conversational stances regarding the organization of casual hookups as sexual, one-off encounters with strangers. While many gay Grindr users have to chat to organize quick sexual connections, they become wary of the way their electronic conversations might waylay them into more personal relationships and they try to prevent this by developing an interactional genre made of laconic, fact-checking and very short exchanges. On the other hand, many heterosexual users on Tinder are looking to achieve topically-rich chat conversations. Their interactional dilemma, then, is the achievement of such topically-rich conversation, but with complete strangers. The interaction-oriented comparison provides a more detailed and subtle perspective of the alleged ‘liquefaction’ of romantic relationships into a casual hookup culture through the use of location-aware mobile dating applications.     

Discolouration of Gold Decorations

Discoloured 18-carat gold decorations from Sweden have been analysed by scanning electron microscopy with energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy and X-ray electron spectroscopy (XPS)/electron spectroscopy for chemical analysis (electron spectroscopy).The original gold composition was close to 75% gold, 13% silver, and 12% copper. After manufacture, many details were boiled in sulphuric acid. As a consequence of this, the surfaces are irregular and porous with a gold concentration around 90% and with less than 1% copper. With XPS the outermost 10–20 atomic layers could be examined. No copper was present here, and the silver concentration was significantly higher. Also carbon, sulphur, oxygen, and (in one case) chlorine were present. The valence numbers indicated that gold only occurred in its metallic state, while silver (as Ag⁺) was preferably associated with sulphur to form black silver sulphide (Ag₂S). The grey discolorations are basically due to silver sulphide and organic dirt. Sometimes green, violet, and ‘copper-shining’ colours occur, presumably as a result of light refraction phenomena.     

Football with Friends? How the German Sporting Press Covered the German–Danish Sports Collaboration, 1939–1944

Abstract

This paper concludes that a number of different discourses marked the coverage of Danish–German sports collaboration during the Second World War in German newspapers, sports magazines and newsreels. From the outbreak of the Second World War to the German occupation of Denmark on 9 April 1940, the discourses cover neutrality and friendship with Germany. After the invasion of Denmark, a discourse of Nordic sentiments became very important in the communications of the press, with Danish athletes portrayed as Nordic citizens, which some circles of German society could interpret as a euphemism for the Nazi idea of a strong Aryan Scandinavia. During the autumn of 1941, the rising strain on Germany’s resources made the sports media a supplier of success. The discourse of a strong Germany replaced the previous discourses. As German–Danish sporting events ceased in 1942, Danish sport alone would still make occasional appearances in the German media until 1944, providing a German audience with entertainment and distraction.