The quality of student dialogue in citizenship education

This study investigates the relationship between the quality of student dialogue and students’ ability to justify their viewpoints on a moral issue. A curriculum unit for dialogic citizenship education was developed and implemented in the 8th grade of secondary education. In the final lesson, students discussed a moral issue and then wrote an essay on it. The results show that students who made more value-related utterances during the discussion also referred more often and more explicitly in their individually written essays to moral values. This study indicates that the quality of the content of students’ dialogue is important for their ability to substantiate their opinion on moral issues with value-laden argumentation. Approaches to citizenship education in which dialogue is a central element should, therefore, pay specific attention to the validation of ideas in student dialogue.     

Teachers’ motives for learning in networks: costs,rewards and community interest

Background: This paper discusses teachers’ perspectives on learning networks and their motives for participating in these networks. Although it is widely held that teachers’ learning may be developed through learning networks, not all teachers participate in such networks.

Purpose: The theme of reciprocity, central to studies in the area of learning in networks, is often approached from a rational exchange perspective. This study attempts to extend this approach with reference to the concept of symbolic interactionism. The study was guided by the following research question: What is the relationship between teachers’ perceptions of learning networks and their motives for participation or non-participation in these networks?

Design and methods: In order to address this research question, semi-structured interviews among 25 teachers in secondary education in the Netherlands were carried out. The semi-structured interviews consisted of three parts: background information, perspectives on learning networks and personal experiences with those networks. Data were analysed qualitatively and analyses consisted of within-case analysis, and cross-case analysis of interview fragments. Three themes were considered: (1) perspectives on learning networks, (2) motives for participation perceived as rational exchange, (3) motives for participation perceived as related to social order.

Findings: The findings are presented around these three themes. Each theme is discussed in relation to relevant aspects from the literature. Findings indicated that teachers perceived learning networks to be organised both within-school and outside school, and mostly focused around specific content knowledge. Reasons for participation or non-participation were related to rational costs and rewards (such as time, technology, self-efficacy); in symbolic motives (such as joy, sharing and mutual understanding), and also in a sense of meaning that resulted from networking activities.

Conclusions: We conclude that, in addition to social exchange motives, the data suggest that symbolic aspects of communication and interaction play an important role in considerations for participation in learning networks. This may be described in terms of four ‘types’ of networking teachers: the Community focused networking teacher, the Locally focused networking teacher, the Not-yet-networking teacher, and the Non-networking teacher. It is hoped that these exploratory findings could be helpful in supporting the development of learning networks for all teachers.     

Preschool teachers' and students' attitudes towards playful preschool activities: a cross-cultural comparison between Germany and the Netherlands

This study compares the attitudes of preschool teachers and students between the Netherlands and Germany towards typical play activities in preschool. The data were responses to short video clips of preschool children's play and elicited the respondents’ attitudes through questionnaires. The data were analysed by classifying the written responses into four categories. The frequencies of the categories were tested with MANOVA with regard to expert–novice position and country. Differences between professionals and novices were found, and for professionals only, the four categories were interrelated, showing a stronger holistic view of early childhood activities. Differences were also found between the countries, and two of the categories seemed especially sensitive to cultural differences. We discuss how reflection on activities can add to a higher degree of professionalism, as well as a more profound understanding of ways to improve preschool teacher training.     

Teaching together and learning together – Primary science student teachers’ and their mentors’ joint teaching and learning in the primary classroom

This paper focuses on what and how primary science student teachers and their mentors learn from planning and reflecting together on each other’s science lessons for pupils aged 7–9. The student teachers had had training in scientific knowledge, but only brief experience of teaching. The mentors were well experienced in the pedagogy of teaching and mentoring, but did not feel confident about their science content knowledge and the teaching of science. Throughout the process of teaching and reflecting together the student teachers and the mentors expressed several specific examples of their joint learning.     

Developmental Changes in the Relations Between RAN,Phonological Awareness,and Reading in Spanish Children

We examined the developmental relations of phonological awareness (PA) and rapid automatized naming (RAN) with reading in a cross-sectional study with 874 Spanish children from Grades 2 to 6. Our main prediction was that the RAN–reading relationship would decrease due to a gradual change in reading strategy, from serial decoding to sight word reading. Therefore, in contrast to most previous studies, we used discrete reading tasks. Serial RAN tasks for objects, colors, digits, and letters were included. First, we examined whether the RAN tasks loaded on the same constructs across time. An alphanumeric and a nonalphanumeric factor were identified, which were invariant over time. In subsequent multigroup structural equation models we found that the PA–reading relationship was low but slightly increased in the higher grades. As predicted, the RAN–reading relationship decreased for words, whereas the relationship remained stable for pseudowords.     

Patterns of contingent teaching in teacher-student interaction

The present study aimed at investigating the process of scaffolding in a naturalistic setting with focus on a key aspect of scaffolding, namely contingency. Three Social Studies teachers in innovative prevocational schools were observed and interviewed. A coding scheme for the measurement of scaffolding was developed which revealed different patterns of contingent and non-contingent teaching amongst the teachers. In general these teachers of innovative schools showed little contingent teaching. Not adapting the support to students' current understanding and barely diagnosing the students' understanding appeared to be characteristic of this scarcity of non-contingent teaching.     

Fish-out-of-office: How managerialised university conditions make administrative knowledge inaccessible to academics

Academics report feeling unable to cope in the managerialised university. To confirm these feelings are symptoms of managerialism's tightening grip, we use Bourdieusian concepts of field and capital to compare academics and professional staff experiential statements in an Australian university. We compare their field conditions and examine how their differences enable or hinder the accumulation of capital that defines their field. Findings show that managerialism requires professional staff to share work tasks and be on-campus, which enables them to accumulate the capital they require. Managerialism also permits and resources academics to working out-of-office to accumulate their required capital. Consequentially though, university operational knowledge becomes informal and only accessible to professional staff who accumulate the required social capital to access it. Professional staff are thus fish-in-water; easily accumulating social capital through day-to-day activities. But academics become fish-out-of-water (office); they flounder to access operational knowledge, which leads to feelings of not coping.     

Media rich, resource poor: practical work in an impractical environment

Film and media courses appear well placed to exploit technology convergence in exposing students both to practical skills and to theoretical concepts. For the University of Cape Town's (UCT) large film and media studies courses, it is impractical simply to use the technology of professionals as this would typically be too expensive to purchase and time‐consuming to run. Our approach has been to develop activities that can run with large classes in generic computer laboratories and which simulate environments and tools of the real world. Two illustrative examples, emphasising writing skills in context, involve the production of a TV news story and the development of a proposal for an educational soap opera. Using these, we reflect on our experience of integrating practical skills into the curriculum of a traditional academic institution, where these skills have a lower status and must be sufficiently flexible to accommodate changes in the higher‐status academic components. This suggests that such flexibility has to be part of the design of practical interventions and that they should additionally aim to provide a challenge to some of the more theoretical aspects of these courses. While developing one's own interventions allows for some of this flexibility to be incorporated into the design, it remains difficult for academic departments to adopt these solutions as their own, thus requiring continued involvement of the original developers to adapt to changes.     

Using e-mail to support reflective narration

This article presents an exploratory study of e-mail use for reflective narration. Narration is viewed from three perspectives: the narrating act, the narrative statement, and the story. These perspectives are used to characterize the 69 e-mails that were exchanged between 13 groups of children from three primary schools. The findings show that e-mail narration has monologic and dialogic qualities, and leads to cognitive and personal reflections on the learning task. We conclude that e-mail can serve a meaningful function in a narrative curriculum aimed at experiential inquiry. In addition, we suggest a need for future research that adopts a broad view of learning that includes different kinds of dialogues and values affective as well as cognitive aspects of these dialogues.