On Widening Participation in Higher Education Through Positive Discrimination

Notwithstanding an ongoing concern about the low representation of certain groups in higher education, there is reluctance on the part of politicians and policy makers to adopt positive discrimination as an appropriate means of widening participation. This article offers an account of the different objections to positive discrimination and, thereafter, clarifies and criticises the view that universities ought to select those applicants who are expected to be most successful as students. It distinguishes arguments from meritocracy, desert, respect, and productivity and shows how these arguments are compatible with the use of positive discrimination in higher education.     

Curriculum on the move: the role of English in a Year 7 Cultural Studies programme

This paper describes a curriculum experiment to integrate the English and humanities teaching to a year 7 (age 11) cohort through a pedagogy based on Dorothy Heathcote's work on drama in education. An integrated Cultural Studies programme was devised in order to help students engage with meaningful issues in what Heathcote (1980) terms ‘real and felt’ contexts. As part of the national Creative Partnerships programme, Debbie Kidd, a drama specialist from an Arts organisation, worked with teachers to develop curriculum and pedagogy. The paper describes the project from the perspective of the two outsiders closely involved with the work. Debbie Kidd sets the context and discusses some of the outcomes to date. In an Afterword, Elaine Millard discusses some of the barriers to curriculum integration and argues for greater flexibility in English teaching and it s modes of assessment to make room for more creative engagements.     

#MeToo,sexual harassment: an article,a forum,and a dream for the future

#MeToo has breathed new life into the women’s movement and especially into understanding and rectifying sexual harassment, abuse and assault. It has galvanized activists around the globe. And it has placed thousands of stories of the harassed in full view of the public. Sexual harassment, abuse and assault may occur within the organizational context or beyond; but sexual harassment, in particular has been legally labeled an organizational phenomenon. With this in mind, Robin Clair frames the early part of this article around the most recent organizational communication theories (see the appendix for an overview of these theories). Following the essay is a forum, in which invited scholars address questions related to the #MeToo movement.     

You can lead a horse to water but you cannot make him learn: Smartphone use in higher education

Smartphone technology is penetrating world markets and becoming ubiquitous in most college settings. This study takes a naturalistic approach to explore the use of these devices to support student learning. Students that had never used a smartphone were recruited to participate and reported on their expectations of the value of smartphones to achieve their educational goals. Instrumented iPhones that logged device usage were then distributed to these students to use freely over the course of 1 year. After the study, students again reported on the actual value of their smartphones to support their educational goals. We found that students' reports changed substantially before and after the study; specifically, the utility of the smartphone to help with education was perceived as favorable prior to use, and then, by the end of the study, they viewed their phones as detrimental to their educational goals. Although students used their mobile device for informal learning and access to school resources according to the logged data, they perceived their iPhones as a distraction and a competitor to requisite learning for classroom performance.     

Mapping the Contours of Neoliberal Educational Restructuring: A Review of Recent Neo‐Marxist Studies of Education and Racial Capitalist Considerations

In this article Clayton Pierce reviews three books representative of the recent neo‐Marxist literature on education: David Blacker's The Falling Rate of Learning and the Neoliberal Endgame, John Marsh's Class Dismissed: Why We Cannot Teach or Learn Our Way out of Inequality, and Pauline Lipman's The New Political Economy of Urban Education: Neoliberalism, Race, and the Right to the City. His analysis of these books focuses on how each author remains consistent or advances traditional Marxist interpretations of the role of education in capitalist society. In addition, he puts the arguments of each author into conversation with W. E. B. Du Bois's analysis of schooling in a racial capitalist society — what he called caste education — as a way to generate discussion around some of the inherent limitations of Marxist studies of education. Here, Pierce is particularly concerned with the ability of neo‐Marxist analyses of the neoliberal restructuring of education to articulate how white supremacy is preserved even in revolutionary critiques of capitalist schooling.     

Video game learning dynamics: Actionable measures of multidimensional learning trajectories

Valid, accessible, reusable methods for instructional video game design and embedded assessment can provide actionable information enhancing individual and collective achievement. Cyberlearning through game‐based, metaphor‐enhanced learning objects (CyGaMEs) design and embedded assessment quantify player behavior to study knowledge discovery and application. CyGaMEs is grounded by analogical reasoning theory, cognitive task analysis and knowledge representation. A construct representation argument for validity using evidence‐centered design warrants CyGaMEs, its web‐based learning environment, Selene: A Lunar Construction GaME, its embedded assessment, and a learning dynamics approach to student, measurement and statistical models. Two studies (US volunteers, Study 1: n = 267, mean (M)_age = 15; Study 2: n = 90, M_age = 12) cross‐validate learning dynamics (learner progress, rate of progress and changes in that rate) for Selene's multidimensional goals while players learn and apply standard‐based science about fundamental geology and space science concepts. Gameplay data analyzed using regression, calculus and hierarchical linear modeling exhibit overall relatively high standardized rates of progress toward each goal statistically higher than zero. For example, adjusting for nesting within individual players, average rate of progress toward the goal of accreting lunar mass is a z‐score of 1.4 (99% confidence interval = 1.40_lower, 1.48_upper) or 1.4 standard deviations above zero.     

Against neoliberal pedagogies of plants and people: mapping actor networks of biocapital in learning gardens

This paper attempts to answer this question: what should ecoliteracy mean in a biocapitalist society? The author situates his analysis of this question within the general context of the neoliberal reconstruction of education in the US. Specifically, focus is given to the shared model of governmentality GE food industries and education policies both utilize to manage life in the field and classroom – one where optimizing the value of plants and people for ‘flat world’ economic competition is the defining goal. Given this landscape, I suggest that what some environmental educators have called ‘ecological literacy’ or ‘critical ecoliteracy’ must now include a dimension that rejects the ways both human and nonhumans are progressively being implicated into biocapitalist enterprises. I offer an example of how biocapitalist industries educate market understandings of life by looking at how the GE food industry’s educational projects attempt to teach students and the public to think of nature and themselves as entrepreneurial actors. In the final section, I provide an example from my research using actor network theory in learning gardens as a way to develop a theory and practice of ecoliteracy that is capable of identifying and resisting the ways both human and nonhuman life are being captured and reconstructed within biocapitalist development ventures.     

Finite-time tracking using sliding mode control

Finite-time stability involves dynamical systems whose trajectories converge to an equilibrium state in finite time. In this paper, we consider a general class of fully actuated mechanical systems described by Euler–Lagrange dynamics and the class of underactuated systems represented by mobile robot dynamics that are required to reach and maintain the desired trajectory in finite time. An approach known as the terminal sliding mode control (TSMC) involves non-smooth sliding surfaces such that, while on the sliding surface, the error states converge to the origin in finite time thus ensuring finite-time tracking. The main advantage of this control scheme is in fast converging times without excessive control effort. Such controllers are known to have singularities in some parts of the state space and, in this paper, we propose a method of partitioning the state space into two regions where the TSMC is bounded and its complement. We show that the region of bounded TSMC is invariant and design an auxiliary sliding mode controller predicated on linear smooth sliding surface for the initial conditions outside this region. Furthermore, we extend these results to address TSMC for underactuated systems characterized by the mobile robot dynamics. We demonstrate the efficacy of our approach by implementing it for a scenario when multiple dynamic agents are required to move in a fixed formation with respect to the formation leader. Finally, we validate our results experimentally using a wheeled mobile robot platform.