一台绿色旧打字机——最好的纪念品

纪念品可谓五花八门,作者把母亲用过的一台旧打字机留作纪念品,意义非同寻常。每当遇到困难,畏缩不前时,或是受到挫折,自叹不走运时,他就坐在打字机前打上几行,这样就会获得一往无前的勇气。     

Preparing Elementary Preservice Teachers for Urban Elementary Science Classrooms: Challenging Cultural Biases Toward Diverse Students

This study reports the learning of elementary preservice teachers regarding diversity and teaching science in diverse urban elementary classrooms. From participating in a semester-long book club, the preservice teachers reveal their cultural biases, connect and apply their knowledge of diversity, and understand that getting to know their students are important elements for teaching science in diverse classrooms. These 3 things connect in ways that allow the preservice teachers to understand how their cultural biases impede student learning and gain new knowledge of diversity as they change their cultural biases. Implications of this study reveal that preservice teachers need opportunities to reveal, confront, challenge, and change their cultural models and to develop new models for teaching science in urban elementary classrooms.

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Teaching and guilt: Exploring the feelings of teaching

The paper argues that in research on teachers' mental states, studies of teacher feeeling as compared to teacher thinking have been relatively neglected. It analyzes the nature and importance of guilt as one such feeling which connects the self of the teacher to the system in which the teacher works. Two kinds of guilt are discussed: persecutory and depressive. In relation to two studies of elementary teachers' working lives and of teachers' perceptions of employee assistance programs, four guilt traps of teaching are then identified. These are the commitment to care, the open-endedness of teaching, accountability and intensification, and the persona of perfectionism. Solutions to the guilt traps of teaching involve easing the accountability and intensification demends of teaching; building communities of collegues who can set their own professional standards and limits at school level and thereby reduce the open-endedness of teaching; and reducing the dependence on personal care and nurturance as the prime motive of elementary teaching.     

Introduction to the Special Issue on Teaching Inquiry (Part II): Implementing Inquiry

Abstract

We provide an introduction to the special issue on Teaching Inquiry, through its motivation and themes, focusing here on Part II: Implementing Inquiry.     

Re-imagining learning through art as experience: An aesthetic approach to education for life

Abstract

This paper investigates what it may mean to re-imagine learning through aesthetic experience with reference to John Dewey’s Art as Experience (1934). The discussion asks what learning might look like when aesthetic experience takes centre stage in the learning process. It investigates what Dewey meant by art as experience and aesthetic experience. Working with Dewey as a philosopher of reconstruction of experience, the discussion examines responses to poetic writings and communication in learning situations. In seeking to discover what poetic writing (as art) does within the experience of a reader and writer it considers three specific learning situations. Firstly there is an examination of a five-year old child’s experience of shared communication through the story of Horton the Elephant. Secondly there is an account of the responses of an 11-year-old child to poetry in a 1950s classroom setting, and later reconstructions of those experiences by the child as adult. Thirdly, the paper extends to intensive writing with 12 to 13-year-old children. The focus is on the process of learning via acts of expression as aesthetic experiences. Through art as experience the child develops perceptions that recover a coherence and continuity of aesthetic experience in art as in everyday life.     

Pigeons fail to detect low-frequency magnetic fields

In an attempt to resolve basic inconsistencies in the literature on magnetic reception in birds, we tested 4 pigeons for possible sensitivity to low-frequency magnetic fields. Horizontal and vertical components of an earth-strength field were varied at frequencies of 0.01 to 10 Hz. None of the pigeons seemed able to distinguish between varying and static fields, although each received 1,800 trials of discrimination training. These results, related findings, and the reported failure to replicate a critical field study lead the authors to question the prevailing belief that pigeons can detect magnetic fields.