Haciendo que hacer - cultivating a Mestiza worldview and academic achievement: Braiding cultural knowledge into educational research,policy, practice

In this article Francisca E Gonzalez shifts the focus from a deficit view of cultural knowledge to an imaginary of the formation of identities and integrity braided with the law, policy, and social formations. In this way, cultural practices cultivate a unique worldview with implications for K-12 educational excellence and academic achievement. Gonzalez situates her research within the national discourse on educational reform so as to direct educational researchers', policy makers', and educators' thinking of young Mexicanas as pensadoras who interrogate the social order, and who give meaning to learning, knowing, and power. She describes a study intended to explore the development of womanhood among young Mexicanas beginning with an explanation of a theoretical lens, a looking prism of critical race feminisms and Latina critical theory interpretive frameworks. Then she explains the study's multimethodological approach of trenzas y mestizaje, the braiding of theory, qualitative research strategies, and a sociopolitical consciousness. The article then details young Mexicana meanings of gendered cultural socialization, educacion, and success as cultural epistemologies and pedagogies, what the young Mexicanas called haciendo que hacer. Gonzalez explains this as the teaching and learning of sociocultural foundations and the cultivation of academic achievement. In closing, Francisca elaborates on how a braiding of different ways of knowing, teaching, and learning brings cultural knowledge to the fore of discourses on human rights, social justice, and educational equity including the formulation of holistic educational policies and practices.     

Against indifference

The idea that university teachers have a public responsibility appears to have been consigned by many to a lumber room of memory. Ideas of objectivity or expertise correspond more closely to a market-orientated higher education system which takes some pride in serving corporate, rather than social interests. Yet the obligation of the teacher to produce critically aware and engaged students demands that the classroom be a place of exchange—of knowledge, experience, passions and aspirations. As public intellectuals, if that is what we choose to be, the onus is on us to maintain a dream, affirm the creative and imaginative possibilities of those with whom we learn. Argument, debate, doubt are the stuff of human liberation; they are also the only known antidote to indifference.     

Primeras creaciones en el lenguaje infantil. El caso de las metáforas

Resumen

La mayoría de los autores reconoce que el niño crea múltiples términos y expresiones cuando empieza a hablar. Estas creaciones (muchas veces erróneas desde nuestro punto de vista), revelan el empleo de diferentes reglas lingüísticas.

Uno de los motivos que conducen al niño pequeño a crear nuevos términos es el metafórico: designar un objeto con un término que normalmente se aplica a otro objeto, similar al primero. Podríamos entonces pensar que el niño, de dos a seis años, es capaz de emplear y comprender el lenguaje figurado, y particularmente las metáforas. Esta hipótesis es criticada a la luz de una serie de hechos experimentales relativos al desarrollo cognitivo del niño.     

Empirical Research on Ethnic Minority Students: 1995–2009

Ethnic minority disproportionality has been a topic of extensive discussion and research for many years. In 1997, Artiles, Trent, and Kuan conducted a seminal review of the special education research literature to identify how often researchers report and disaggregate data in ways that would support conclusions about specific ethnic minority groups. These authors found alarmingly low rates of publication on identifiable minority groups. The purpose of this review is to replicate the work of Artiles et al. and extend this literature analysis to the subsequent 15‐year period (1995–2009). We found increases in the proportion of articles reporting ethnic minority information 15 years following the Artiles et al. publication. Discussion focuses on the gap in our knowledge of evidence‐based practices for ethnic minority students in special education.     

Trajectories from academic intrinsic motivation to need for cognition and educational attainment

This long-term longitudinal study addressed the theoretical underpinning of academic intrinsic motivation (AIM) from childhood through adolescence, to need for cognition (NFC) and educational attainment (EA) during adulthood. AIM was measured from 9 to 17 years old, NFC and EA at 29 years old, and IQ at 8 years old. Latent change and growth mixture modeling were utilized. These models complemented each other, revealing that initial motivational status significantly related to both outcomes. Growth mixture modeling elaborated the findings by identifying distinctive subgroups in initial status and developmental change. In contrast to children with initially higher AIM, those starting lower declined resulting in lower NFC and EA. IQ was controlled in these analyses. Findings enhance understanding of trajectories across two decades of development, indicating that students’ early motivation relates to adulthood NFC and EA. Implications for educational practices are discussed.     

Some practical approaches to a course on paraconsistent logic for engineers

This paper describes a non-classical logic course primarily indicated for graduate students in electrical engineering and energy engineering. The content of this course is based on the vision that it is not enough for a student to indefinitely accumulate knowledge; it is necessary to explore all the occasions to update, deepen, and enrich that knowledge, adapting it to a complex world. Therefore, this course is not tied to theoretical formalities and tries at each moment to provide a practical view of the non-classical logic. In the real world, the inconsistencies are important and cannot be ignored because contradictory information brings relevant facts, sometimes modifying the entire result of the analysis. As consequence, the non-classical logics, such as annotated paraconsistent logic – APL, are efficiently framed in the approach of complex situations of the real world. In APL, the concepts of unknown, partial, ambiguous, and inconsistent knowledge are referred not to trivialise any system in analysis. This course presents theoretical and applicable aspects of APL, which are successfully used in decision-making structures. The course is divided into modules: Basic, 2vAPL, 3vAPL, 4vAPL, and Final Project.     

From body to culture: the need for a developmental psychology view. A commentary on the article Learning beyond the body by Juan-Ignacio Pozo / Del cuerpo a la cultura: la necesidad de una mirada desde la psicología del desarrollo. Un comentario sobre el artículo Aprender más allá del cuerpo de Juan-Ignacio Pozo

The necessity of adopting a developmental perspective to understand the role that the body and action play in children’s representations is argued in proposals made by Pozo in his article Learning beyond the body: from embodied representations to explicitation mediated by external representations. The transformative power of action is valued from this developmental perspective, while at the same time revealing the close link between action, cognition and communication. Similarly, the explicitation and implicitation processes are considered to be recurrent phases that occur in any stage of development, applied to embodied knowledge as well as to more elaborate and explicit knowledge.     

The construction of a double-entry table: a study of primary and secondary school students’ difficulties

Tables are a presentation format that is commonly used to organize information, and they are widely present in many scenarios of our students’ everyday activities; however, there is a scarcity of studies devoted to their analysis. Some of these studies point out that the organization of data into a double-entry table presents difficulties for primary and secondary school students. The present study analyzes the following: (1) the level of competency of primary and secondary school students in constructing a double-entry table from a set of data and (2) the main difficulties encountered by these students during the task. Our findings showed that the percentage of middle-school students who succeeded in contructing a conventional table was relatively low, and the number did not significantly increase over four school years. A set of difficulties is identified and discussed in terms of cognitive and graphical processes.     

The direct and indirect effect of motivation for learning on students' approaches to learning through the perceptions of workload and task complexity

The present study investigates the direct and indirect influence of motivation for learning, as understood by the self‐determination theory, on students' approaches to learning. Concerning the direct influence of motivation, results show that autonomous motivation is positively related to a deep approach to learning and negatively to a surface approach. Motivation also has an indirect effect on students' approaches to learning through the perceptions of workload and task complexity, in particular through the perception of a lack of information. The greater the extent to which students are autonomously motivated, the less they perceive that they have a lack of information and the less they are inclined to adopt a surface approach to learning.     

Multicultural education, pragmatism, and the goals of science teaching

In this paper, we offer an intermediate position in the multiculturalism/universalism debate, drawing upon Cobern and Loving’s epistemological pluralism, pragmatist philosophies, Southerland’s defense of instructional multicultural science education, and the conceptual profile model. An important element in this position is the proposal that understanding is the proper goal of science education. Our commitment to this proposal is explained in terms of a defense of an ethics of coexistence for dealing with cultural differences, according to which social argumentative processes—including those in science education—should be marked by dialogue and confrontation of arguments in the search of possible solutions, and an effort to (co-)live with differences if a negotiated solution is not reached. To understand the discourses at stake is, in our view, a key requirement for the coexistence of arguments and discourses, and the science classroom is the privileged space for promoting an understanding of the scientific discourse in particular. We argue for “inclusion” of students’ culturally grounded ideas in science education, but in a sense that avoids curricular multicultural science education, and, thus, any attempt to broaden the definition of “science” so that ideas from other ways of knowing might be simply treated as science contents. Science teachers should always take in due account the diversity of students’ worldviews, giving them room in argumentative processes in science classrooms, but should never lose from sight the necessity of stimulating students to understand scientific ideas. This view is grounded on a distinction between the goals of science education and the nature of science instruction, and demands a discussion about how learning is to take place in culturally sensitive science education, and about communicative approaches that might be more productive in science classrooms organized as we propose here. We employ the conceptual profile model to address both issues. We expect this paper can contribute to the elaboration of an instructional multicultural science education approach that eliminates the forced choice between the goals of promoting students’ understanding of scientific ideas and of empowering students through education.