Images of industrial life and vocational training: Scouting as a liminal space for educating a workers’ elite in 1920s Luxembourg

ABSTRACT

This paper looks at a specific set of corporate images, namely photographs of apprentices of the Luxembourg steel conglomerate ARBED, and analyses how young workers are depicted in these images. The paper draws on a collection of 2251 glass-plate negatives (re)presenting ARBED’s industrial cosmos, including its vocational school the Institut Emile Metz. The roughly 160 images of apprentices contained in the collection put on display the apprentices’ bodies and a variety of activities in different contexts. The images’ contents testify to the institute’s programmatic hybridity and the constant (re-)mix of formal and semi-formal learning activities intended to educate natural, urban, mobile and communal men and future workers. Our focus is on Boy Scouts’ activities in a variety of different environments, which have functioned as a liminal space for educating a workers’ elite, mitigating the risks of industrialisation and fostering social harmony and cultural belonging.     

Frictions Between Formal Education Policy and Actual School Choice: Case Studies in an International Comparative Perspective

This contribution is based on comparative case studies of secondary schools in England, the Netherlands and Scotland. The authors conclude that although opportunities for school choice are offered in a formal sense in each of the locations studied, in certain cases choice is not particularly encouraged. In order to explain this disparity between formal education policy and actual school choice, they identified seven areas of friction which determine school choice. This approach allowed a more detailed and accurate view of the operation of school choice on a local, day-to-day basis. Active or passive discouragement of choice became apparent in factors such as availability of transport and information; bureaucratic procedures; strictly enforced admission criteria; and lack of educational diversity.     

Belief,Knowledge and Understanding

This article discusses how to deal with the relations between different cultural perspectives in classrooms, based on a proposal for considering understanding and knowledge as goals of science education, inspired by Dewey’s naturalistic humanism. It thus combines educational and philosophical interests. In educational terms, our concerns relate to how science teachers position themselves in multicultural classrooms. In philosophical terms, we are interested in discussing the relations between belief, understanding, and knowledge under the light of Dewey’s philosophy. We present a synthesis of Dewey’s theory of inquiry through his naturalistic humanism and discuss its implications for the concepts of belief, understanding, and knowledge, as well as for the goals of science teaching. In particular, we highlight problems arising in the context of possible conflicts between scientific and religious claims in the school environment that result from totalitarian positions. We characterize an individual’s position as totalitarian if he or she takes some way of thinking as the only one capable of expressing the truth about all that exists in the world, lacks open-mindedness to understand different interpretative perspectives, and attempts to impose her or his interpretation about the facts to others by violent means or not. From this stance, any other perspective is taken to be false a priori and, accordingly, as a putative target to be suppressed or adapted to the privileged way of thinking. We argue, instead, for a more fallibilist evaluation of our own beliefs and a more respectful appraisal of the diversity of students’ beliefs by both students and teachers.     

Forging harmony in the social organism: industry and the power of psychometric techniques

This article analyses the initiating role of the steel industry in educational selection by means of psychometric techniques used in the psycho-physiological laboratory associated with a vocational school in Luxembourg founded in 1914. It first considers the origins of, and initial meanings bestowed upon, this first (and perhaps also last) Luxembourg Laboratory of Psychophysiology. Second, it investigates whether and, if so, to what extent psychometric techniques developed in this laboratory for vocational orientation were used strategically to foster an ethic of individual harmony by means of objectified observation and categorisation of the aptitude. What hidden agendas underpinned the industry’s rhetoric regarding the rebirth of the individual and the empowerment of personal vocation through science-oriented processes like quantification, measurement and rational assessment? Did such rhetoric legitimise the industry’s self-image as a privileged force in structuring the social fabric as well as individual lives?     

Competition and students’ perceptions in a game-based language learning environment

Although educational games have become quite popular in recent research, only a limited number of studies have focused on the effectiveness of these games. While numerous claims have been made about the effectiveness of games, the studies that examine educational effectiveness often contain flaws resulting in unclear conclusions. One possible solution for these shortcomings is to focus on separate game elements rather than on games as a whole. A second solution is to take into account students’ perceptions of instruction as they are likely to affect students’ interpretations and learning outcomes. This study investigated whether the addition of the gaming element ‘competition’ to a computer-based language learning environment is related to students’ motivation, perceptions and learning outcomes. Additionally, this study probed into the effect of instruction, i.e., the instruction of a gaming or learning environment, on students’ perceptions of the environment, their motivation and learning outcomes. 83 students participated in this study, all working in a game-based learning environment for learning business English conversation skills. The results demonstrate that competition is not significantly related to students’ learning gains and only partly related to students’ motivation. Moreover, the majority of students perceived the environment as a learning environment, even when they were instructed to be playing in a gaming environment. To conclude this paper, the practical and theoretical implications for the fields of instructional design and educational games research are discussed.     

The sequence of conceptual information in instruction and its effect on retention

Two experiments were carried out to study the effect of the sequencing of the information in an instructional program. In both experiments, two different ordering principles were used. These principles were based on the relation between the to be learned concepts. The ordering of the information could be successive or simultaneous. The relationship between concepts is categorized either successive or coordinate. It was hypothesized that a simultaneous presentation would show better learning results than a successive presentation if between the to-be-learned concepts exists a co-ordinate relationship. A successive presentation would lead to better results in case of a successive relationship. Results suggest that the definition of both types of relationships needs refinement. Further the results show that for coordinate related concepts a simultaneous presentation is preferable.This study was supported by a grant from the Institute for Educational Research in the Netherlands (SVO), Grant No. 6620. I wish to thank S. Dijkstra for his stimulating ideas, and M. C. Reisinger for his assistance during this project. I also wish to thank the students, the biology teacher and the management of the Willem van Oranje Mavo (Hengelo, the Netherlands) and Streekcentrum voor Tuinbouwonderwijs (Enschede, The Netherlands) for their friendly co-operation. The author is now with Boertien and Partners Educational Technology, Gooimeer 5, 1411 DD Naarden, The Netherlands.     

A conversation of teachers: In search of professional identity

The authors describe teacher professional identity as lived experience in the context of educational change. Adopting activity theory and its genesis in cultural historical theory (Stetsenko &; Arievitch, 2004) as a framework, the article discusses the way teachers see themselves as professionals and how they compose their identities in schools, the educational space, which is their workplace. Activity theory is utilised as the broad theoretical lens and the design type and methodology are discussed accordingly. The school and the classroom are activity systems (Engeström, 1991), and social and semiotic ecosystems (Lemke, 1995). It is therefore in the tensions within the activity system that we capture and represent a constructed teacher conversation, composed of the voices of three social actors on an imaginary social stage, which is the empirical text of the article. Main findings speak to multiple roles, struggling voice and forging professional identity in the changing educational landscape.