Recognising Women in Environmental Education Pedagogy and Research: toward an ecofeminist poststructuralist perspective

In the past, women have been overlooked in most environmental education programmes through being subsumed into the notion of ‘universalized people’. However, women have a distinctive contribution to make to environmental education pedagogy and research which needs to be foregrounded. This article reports on research into the gaps and silences present in policies, pedagogy and research in environmental education from a feminist perspective. This research has been inspired by feminist critiques of critical pedagogy and the potentialities of feminist poststructuralist methodologies. In particular I focus on the silencing of marginalized perspectives in environmental education policy development, as well as in research conducted from the perspective of the dominant positivist research methodologies, and argue for the possibilities for new directions when poststructuralist pedagogies and research methodologies are used in environmental education.     

Using tangrams to teach geometry to young children

Unlike a jigsaw puzzle where a piece must fit in only one way to complete a picture, the seven pieces of a geometric tangram can be arranged in many different ways to make figures of birds, animals, people, and objects. This article presents a Tangram Teaching Guide to provide a five-step developmental sequence for teaching tangramming to young children. Teaching resources are included, and a checklist provides a summary outline of the teaching sequence. Tangram experiences help children develop positive attitudes toward geometry, further their shape identification and classification skills, and foster and understanding of basic geometric concepts and relationships.     

The role of the teaching principal in promoting ICT use in small primary schools in Ireland

The focus of this study was to examine the leadership role as lived by teaching principals in a selection of small primary schools in the west of Ireland and in particular the implications information and communications technology (ICT) has for that role. The study involved the use of individual one‐to‐one semi‐structured interviews with a selection of 13 primary school principals in the mid‐west region. Following analysis of the interview data a focus group interview with eight of the principals was conducted to validate and explore the issues to emerge from the one‐to‐one interviews. Principals had enthusiastically responded to the national ICT in schools initiative (Schools IT2000) but it had significantly added to the demands of their positions. While the lack of up‐to‐date resources, poor levels of technical support and time were identified as the main impediments, a lack of familiarity of ways in which the technology could be integrated across the curriculum affected the quality of pedagogical leadership provided by them. The research highlights the need for alternative models of support and leadership to be considered.     

Reappraising Athleticism?

Hickey has presented a powerful rebuttal of Kerrigan's refusal to accept a role for athleticism in the development of English elementary school sport, and has identified further self-contradictions and inconsistencies in this refusal. Much more importantly, however, he has presented compelling evidence of the influence of athleticism on educational thinking and policy-making in relation to this sector of schooling. In doing so, he indirectly points to the need to reappraise the impact of the ideology of athleticism on schooling and society in general. A case can be made that it was even more powerful and pervasive than has been previously argued.     

Locating curriculum studies in the global village

This paper examines the prospect of 'internationalizing' curricula and curriculum studies in the context of increasingly complex patterns of global interconnectedness in social production and organization. I explore some ways in which diverse knowledge traditions can be sustained locally, and amplified transnationally, without being absorbed into an imperialist archive. The homogenizing effects of economic and cultural globalization and internationalization can be resisted by emphasizing the performative rather than the representational aspects of curriculum work. The internationalization of curriculum studies can then be understood as creating transnational 'spaces' in which local knowledge traditions in curriculum inquiry can be performed together, not as local representations of curriculum translated into a universal discourse.