Airtime for Newcomers

This article explores the British and West German public service radio’s abilities to reflect on and to address the specific needs and expectations of migrant groups in their programmes between the 1960s and 1980s. Mechanisms of social inclusion and exclusion alike can be investigated here. Empirically, it is based on comparisons of radio broadcasts on and for different immigrant communities, produced by BBC Radio Leicester on/for the post-war Asian migrants in England and by West German public service broadcasting on/for ‘Gastarbeiter’ (foreign workers) as well as for ‘Spätaussiedler’ (German repatriates from East Europe). Radio is studied as an agent of identity management and citizenship education. Not only did radio talk about migrants and migration to introduce these topics and the newcomers to the local population. It also offered airtime to selected migrant communities to cater for their needs and interests as well as to facilitate their difficulties of adjusting to an unfamiliar environment.     

Improving teaching: Enhancing ways of being university teachers

My aim in this paper is to theorize my teaching in a course for experienced university teachers, in a context of increased attention to such courses. My focus in the course is transforming and enhancing ways of being university teachers, through integrating knowing, acting and being. In other words, epistemology is not seen as an end in itself, but rather it is in the service of ontology. In the paper, I explore and illustrate how this focus on ontology is enacted in the course.     

Linked Data Annotation Without the Pointy Brackets: Introducing Recogito 2

Recogito 2 is an open source annotation tool currently under development by Pelagios, an international initiative aimed at facilitating better linkages between online resources documenting the past. With Recogito 2, we aim to provide an environment for efficient semantic annotation—i.e., the task of enriching content with references to controlled vocabularies—in order to facilitate links between online data. At the same time, we address a perceived gap in the performance of existing tools, by emphasizing the development of mechanisms for manual intervention and editorial control that support the curation of quality data. While Recogito 2 provides an online workspace for general-purpose document annotation, it is particularly well-suited for geo-annotation, in other words annotating documents with references to gazetteers, and supports the annotation of both texts and images (i.e., digitized maps). Already available for testing at http://recogito.pelagios.org, its formal release to the public occurred in December 2016.     

Action research through lesson study for the reconstruction of teachers’ practical knowledge. A review of research at Málaga University (Spain)

ABSTRACT

This article aims to set out our discussions, reflections and research at Málaga University (Spain) in relation to Lesson Study (LS), as a cooperative action research process. The paper aims to summarise the main findings of ten years of research, addressing the concepts and dilemmas found both in forming teachers’ practical thinking and in the complex processes of reconstruction through LS. The results of our research provide evidence that it is a useful way to deal with the reconstruction of teachers’ practical knowledge in teacher training. Teachers’ practical knowledge should be more broadly seen as an active combination of theoretical knowledge, procedural knowledge and skills, attitudes, emotions, believes, and values: i.e. teachers’ practical thinking. Most of these personal and professional resources are unconscious, or rather sub-conscious. Changes in teachers’ practical thinking require more practical experience and reflexion: a dialectical process based around two key components: theorisation of practice and experimentation of reconstructed theory. The results of our research show that these dialectical process could be developed with LS as a particular way of developing AR, adding a complex, systematic, flexible and cooperative way of dealing with specific and contextual curricular innovation projects. We therefore conclude that LS could be a very useful path to follow in reconstructing teachers’ practical thinking from within, strengthening the professional teaching community.     

Predictive and concurrent relations between literacy skills in Grades 1 and 3: A longitudinal study of Italian children

A sample of 170 Italian children was assessed for reading accuracy, reading speed, text comprehension and spelling in Grades 1 and 3 in order to investigate the concurrent and longitudinal relationships among literacy skills. Main results from multivariate analyses (regression, discriminant and path analyses) indicated that reading speed was the best predictor of later literacy and that spelling was the most stable measure and influenced text comprehension and reading speed. An asymmetry was also observed in the longitudinal relationship between reading and spelling errors, with reading errors predicting later spelling errors and a non-significant result in the opposite direction.