Finding a Golden Mean in Education Policy: Centering Religious and Public Schools

The separation between Church and State, private and public education, is blurring, and coming together, as the government gives families vouchers to attend private and religious schools. Religious groups are starting and supporting their own charter schools, and local jurisdictions (cities and counties) are providing free transportation and food services to children attending private schools. What emerges, and is the focus of this analysis, is the new “middle ground,” a “golden mean,” by which public schools learn diversity and choice while private/religious schools are helped by public programs and funds. The oldest, perhaps, was Lyndon Johnson's compromise with the Catholics to get Title 1 passed as part of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act that sends public school teachers into private schools to help children in need. This study examines the emergence of a middle group in public–private education, and how the policies are working and what's changing. It argues that the child is the center of education, and government and private agencies are changing and should come together to serve the clients, the children.     

Increasing Secondary Teachers’ Capacity to Integrate the Arts

Abstract

Examples from a team of collaborating secondary teachers—one visual arts teacher and one science teacher—highlight key aspects of this professional development project in arts integration. The article traces a regional network designed to build teacher capacity with implications for the design, effectiveness, and sustainability of professional development for secondary teachers. It describes the framework for professional development through the first two years of the project. In year one, teachers increased their understanding of arts integration; collegial collaboration; the design and use of assessments that align with standards, benchmarks, and learning goals; and how to reflect on student work. In year two, professional development activity focused on co-teaching and helping teachers to increase the rigor of student learning goals as a way to improve student learning in arts and non-arts content areas. Project outcomes and challenges to sustaining such job-embedded and networked professional learning opportunities are discussed and directions for further research are offered.     

Neural information retrieval: at the end of the early years

A recent “third wave” of neural network (NN) approaches now delivers state-of-the-art performance in many machine learning tasks, spanning speech recognition, computer vision, and natural language processing. Because these modern NNs often comprise multiple interconnected layers, work in this area is often referred to as deep learning. Recent years have witnessed an explosive growth of research into NN-based approaches to information retrieval (IR). A significant body of work has now been created. In this paper, we survey the current landscape of Neural IR research, paying special attention to the use of learned distributed representations of textual units. We highlight the successes of neural IR thus far, catalog obstacles to its wider adoption, and suggest potentially promising directions for future research.     

‘That happened to me too’: young people’s informal knowledge of diverse genders and sexualities

Abstract

This paper explores how young people of diverse genders and sexualities share information about sex, sexualities and genders. Formal approaches to education often fail to consider young people’s communication and information exchange practices, including the circulation of peer knowledge through social media. In the wake of recent Australian backlash against the Safe Schools Coalition, we can observe how homophobia and queerphobia in the broader community can impact upon young peoples’ ability to learn about themselves and their bodies through formal education. Yet young people of diverse genders and sexualities can be observed to support each other in peer spaces, utilising their knowledge networks. This paper explores young people’s informal learning practices, the capacity of peer networks to support and educate young people, and the challenges of recognising such networks in a culture in which health and education discourses present them as ‘risk subjects’ rather than ‘health agents’. These issues are discussed in relation to our own experiences in research and health promotion, including one author’s role as a youth peer educator. Drawing on our workplace experiences, we provide a number of anecdotal examples which highlight the complexities of informal knowledge practice and information circulation, and the ways these can challenge and reform professional health, education, and research approaches.     

Whence Philosophy of Biology?

A consensus exists among contemporary philosophers of biologyabout the history of their field. According to the receivedview, mainstream philosophy of science in the 1930s, 40s, and50s focused on physics and general epistemology, neglectinganalyses of the ‘special sciences’, including biology.The subdiscipline of philosophy of biology emerged (and couldonly have emerged) after the decline of logical positivism inthe 1960s and 70s. In this article, I present bibliometric datafrom four major philosophy of science journals (Erkenntnis,Philosophy of Science, Synthese, and the British Journal forthe Philosophy of Science), covering 1930–59, which challengethis view.

1 Introduction

2 Methods

3 Results

4 Conclusions