Higher education for the elderly: Continuing in the mainstream of American life

Research in Higher Education - Do persons over age 62 enroll in universities to maintain their social interaction and stay in life's mainstream? This question was researched through a...     

Culture Clashes,Value Conflicts and Professional Education

Radical changes have taken place in the conditions of professional practice in recent decades, which have been recorded and analysed by a number of authors, together with various proposals for the adaptation of courses of professional training. One area in this evolution which has received less than systematic investigation is the greatly increased occurrence of clashes arising from ethical complications in much professional practice, a major source of which has been the greatly increased intermingling of cultures worldwide. In the present paper it is argued that the training of professional practitioners in the understanding of value conflicts is different in nature from the training in the knowledge and techniques specific to a profession. The distinction is traced and a definition offered of the educational problem involved in preparing professional practitioners for handling such matters. The remainder of the paper is taken up with a review of several approaches that have been reported.     

Redefining the ResponsibiIities of Teachers and the Social Position of the Technical Communicator

As we increasingly recognize the social nature of technical communication, our responsibilities as teachers need to be redefined. Three levels of responsibility are suggested: at the theoretical level, we should study technical communication as a historically emergent social practice; at the pedagogical level, we need to incorporate social and historical perspectives into technical communication courses and curricula; at the level of social action, we should participate in defining and creating new sites of practice for technical communicators. Several suggestions are offered for helping students locate or develop alternative sites of technical communication practice.     

Focus-on-form instructional methods promote deaf college students' improvement in English grammar

Focus-on-form English teaching methods are designed to facilitate second-language learners' noticing of target language input, where "noticing" is an acquisitional prerequisite for the comprehension, processing, and eventual integration of new grammatical knowledge. While primarily designed for teaching hearing second-language learners, many focus-on-form methods lend themselves to visual presentation. This article reports the results of classroom research on the visually based implementation of focus-on-form methods with deaf college students learning English. Two of 3 groups of deaf students received focus-on-form instruction during a 10-week remedial grammar course; a third control group received grammatical instruction that did not involve focus-on-form methods. The 2 experimental groups exhibited significantly greater improvement in English grammatical knowledge relative to the control group. These results validate the efficacy of visually based focus-on-form English instruction for deaf students of English and set the stage for the continual search for innovative and effective English teaching methodologies.     

Investigating populations via penguins and their poo!

We describe an activity that introduces students to population modelling, enables them to use estimates obtained from a sample to infer back to the population, and understands how the findings are translatable via penguins and their poo!     

Primary physical education subject leadership: along the road from in-house solutions to outsourcing

The modern primary school is a complex institution containing a growing community of individuals and organisations with potentially competing agendas. Within this environment, subject leaders are typically looked upon for advice and guidance within a given subject area such as Physical Education. Yet for those endeavouring to provide Physical Education subject leadership within primary schools, the challenge has grown significantly over the last two decades amidst an ever-changing policy landscape. This paper is for and about primary Physical Education subject leadership; the purpose of which, to plot primary Physical Education's policy journey and explore the implications of reform in shaping the subject leader's role. The paper addresses the current lack of guidance for the subject leader and examines the professional knowledge, skills and experience required to do the role effectively.