Out of Love for Any Thing? A Response to Vlieghe and Zamojski on Some Pedagogical Problems with an Object‐Oriented ‘Educational Love’

In this paper we consider some of the problems inherent in the attempt to define and circumscribe an exclusively ‘educational love’, as presented by Joris Vlieghe and Piotr Zamojski in a recent paper for this journal. In seeking to move beyond the confusing interpersonal relations involved in student‐centred discourses on teaching, the authors aim to articulate an ‘educational love’ that is more oriented towards subject matter than the student subject. In the process, the concept of love itself becomes increasingly abstract and open to interpretation. Further, the attempt to reconcile these elements in an uncomplicated ‘love for the object’, following the example of Alain Badiou's St Paul, constitutes an injustice to the other subjects—the students—involved in the teaching situation. We consider the ways in which such abstractions might sit with student teachers, to demonstrate how and why the intersubjective dimension—with some of the possible emotive messiness that is implied therein—must not fade from view, if we are to avoid conceiving of education as something that can be purified of individual interest, motivation and desire.     

Tradition Never Goes Out of Style: The Role of Tradition in Women’s Naming Practices

The goal of this project is to explore why, given United States women’s historical struggle to gain legal and social acceptance of nontraditional naming forms, the overwhelming majority of women continue to follow tradition and adopt their husbands’ names upon marriage. To begin to explain this phenomenon, this study focused on Catholic women, who changed their names between 1940 and 1998. This article illustrates the role tradition plays in participants’ worldview and how tradition influences their behavior and attitudes toward naming practices. The naming behaviors and attitudes of the women in this study are then analyzed within a larger sociocultural and political context.     

Book Reviews

Good teaching should be inclusive of all students. There are very strong arguments for making courses/units/modules as inclusive as possible, based on issues of equity and access. Inclusive teaching has been a catch cry in recent times and most universities have policies related to this issue. However, research into the effectiveness of measures taken to ensure that teaching caters to all students is rare. The scarcity of such information may be due to the difficulty in finding an appropriate method of evaluation. One of the means to evaluate teaching of a unit or course is to obtain feedback from students. Although information collected through this method may be subjected to biases, student perceptions can still provide useful data that can be incorporated into a broader evaluation system. This paper discusses an investigation into the inclusive nature of a large number of units offered at The University of Western Australia over 3 years. Student ratings in relation to the issue of inclusivity were also explored for possible influences of the year level of courses, broad discipline areas and student gender. The results of this study indicate that these three factors could affect how students view the inclusive nature of particular units.     

Confirmatory factor analysis of the Competitive State Anxiety Inventory-2

The aim of this study was to evaluate the factor structure ofthe Competitive State Anxiety Inventory-2 (CSAI-2) using confirmatory factor analysis. Volunteer participants (n= 1213) completed the CSAI-2 approximately 1 h before competition and the data were analysed in two samples. The hypothesized model showed poor fit indices in both samples independently (Robust Comparative Fit Index: sample A=0.82, sample B =0.84) and simultaneously (Comparative FitIndex = 0.83), suggesting that the factor structure proposed by Martens et al. is flawed. Our findings suggest that a limitation of the Cognitive Anxiety scale derives from phrasing items around the word ‘concerned’ rather than ‘worried’. We suggest that being concerned about an impending performance does not necessarily mean that an athlete is experiencing negative thoughts, but that the athlete is acknowledging the importance and difficulty of the challenge and is attempting to mobilize resources to cope. The present results question the use of the CSAI-2 as a valid measure of competitive state anxiety.