Text and Context: the Passion of the Christ and Other Jesus Films

Looking back on his vocational journey, the author explores three “conversations” among academic and local church religious educators originating in teaching practice that culminate in a discussion of religious education as a field of study. These conversations focus attention on teaching in the transformation of persons and communities, on community as context and agency of teaching, and on public life as the setting for teaching to live responsibly into the providential intent of God. From this perspective religious education is described as an inherently theological practice emerging from the engagement of teachers and students in faith communities at the edges of our collective ignorance of the “intent of God” and at the intersection of our various religious traditions.     

Knowing Your Limitations

This article reflects on whether probability statements can usefully be made about one‐off exceptional events.     

A Framework for Creating a Climate of Transparency for Professional Performance Assessment: Fostering Student Investment in Gatekeeping

Students unfamiliar with their counseling program's professional performance assessment policies may consider such policies pejorative. Moreover, student beliefs about the primacy of ethical service to clients may be confounded when faculty members are reluctant or fail to formally address concerns about deficient professional performance of students. The authors propose a framework intended to promote openness and transparency in professional performance assessment and believe this framework is critical to students' accurate perceptions of the assessment process, their trust in faculty members, and their future investment in safeguarding public welfare and the ethical integrity of the counseling profession through gatekeeping.     

Students as co-producers in a multidisciplinary software engineering project: addressing cultural distance and cross-cohort handover

This article reports an undergraduate software engineering project in which, over a period of 2 years, four student teams from different cohorts developed a note-taking app for four academic clients at the students’ own university. We investigated how projects involving internal clients can give students the benefits of engaging in real software development while also giving them experience of a student-staff collaboration that has its own benefits for students, academics, and the university more broadly. As the university involved is a Sino-Foreign university located in China, where most students are Chinese and most teaching staff are not, this ‘student as co-producer’ approach interacts with another feature of the project: cultural distance. Based on analysis of notes, reports, interviews, and focus groups, we recommend that students should be provided with communicative strategies for dealing with academics as clients; universities should develop policies on ownership of student-staff collaborations; and projects should include a formalised handover process. This article can serve as guidance for educators considering a ‘students as co-producers’ approach for software development projects.     

Ethnic Heterogeneity,Group Affinity,and State Higher Education Spending

A rich interdisciplinary literature exists exploring the determinants of state higher education funding policies. However, that work has collectively ignored an important finding from political economy literature: namely, that citizens’ preferences regarding public spending are strongly influenced by the state’s ethnic and racial context. Drawing on a unique panel of state-level data covering the years 1982–2009, we find that states demarcated by increased racial and ethnic diversity and eroding white majorities do tend to spend less on subsidies to public higher education, resulting in decreased state appropriations as well as more tepid support for financial aid programs. Critically, however, we find that the negative effects of increased ethnic and racial fractionalization can be mitigated—and in some circumstances, fully offset—by a high degree of positive social interaction between ethnic and racial groups. These results are discussed within the pragmatic context of continued state emphasis on degree attainment as a mechanism to foster economic growth as well as broader considerations about equality and social justice.     

THE POSSIBLE USE OF SOCIODRAMA AS A TRAINING TECHNIQUE FOR THE MODERATELY MENTALLY HANDICAPPED IN SCHOOL,HALF ‐ WAY TRAINING CENTRE,AND SHELTERED WORKSHOP.

This is a brief inquiry into the possibility of using sociodrama as a technique for developing social skills in the moderately mentally handicapped. The acquisition of acceptable social behaviour is regarded as a central factor in the recognized aim of helping this population of the handicapped maintain independence in the end community in which they find themselves.

It is considered a serious diagnostic‐prognostic error to forecast the end community at any early period in time within the developmental cycle of any individual.

For the moderately mentally handicapped the provision of the school, the half‐way centre and the sheltered workshop must still be deemed the result of community project effort rather than the just responsibility of central political institutions.     

中国信息产业如何面对21世纪的挑战

数据库产业是现代化信息产业的基础，本文分析国内数据库和信息服务业与国外的差距，建议开发国家级的综合性大型数据库，扩大数据库的覆盖面，保证数据库质量。作者认为，我国应将数据库生产和数据库检索服务分家，由信息服务部门对数据库进行高质量的增值处理，同时建立配套的文献源服务体系。我国以ＩＮＴＥＲＮＥＴ为基础的信息服务技术起步并不算晚，应该尽快培养一批跨世纪的信息人才，首先建立我国信息服务业在亚洲的领先地位，缩小与发达国家间的差距。