Books to Use for the Making of Americans

This article describes a professional development program that inspired some high school teachers to drastically reshape their teaching of chemistry toward a more learner-centered practice. Through interviews, they identified a freedom to explore and a sense of being trusted and respected as key aspects that supported this new approach. Rather than advocating a single outcome, the expectation is that teachers will refine their practice in ways that are important for their own contexts.     

Investigating teachers' ‘take-up’ of reflective practice from an In-service professional development teacher education programme in South Africa

One of the key phases in ‘the action research cycle’ is reflection (Kemmis & McTaggart, 1988; McNiff, 1988). The extension of teachers' reflective capabilities is one of the stated goals of the University of the Witwatersrand's teacher education programmes. In this article aspects of the findings of a 3-year research project, which investigated teachers' ‘take-up’ from a mixed-mode, inservice professional development programme initiated by the university in 1996 are discussed. The research team has described the overall project as ‘a practice-based case study of cases’. Data sources included classroom observations, videotapes of some of the lessons observed, interviews with teachers, written teacher narratives and questionnaires, and samples of learners' work- all obtained from working with the same sample of primary and secondary school teachers of English, Mathematics and Science for each of the 3 years of the project. The authors engage with what counts as ‘evidence’ of the reflective practices of teachers and consider what factors might enable or constrain the development of reflective capability by teachers working in underresourced, multi-lingual contexts. They reflect on their practices as teacher educators and outline some changes to the programme that could assist teachers to become more reflective practitioners in their classrooms and schools.     

Willystine Goodsell (1870–1962) and John Dewey (1859–1952): history,philosophy and women’s education

This article explores the work of history and philosophy in publications by Willystine Goodsell, professor of history and philosophy at Teachers College, Columbia University, and the entanglement of Goodsell’s approach to scholarship with that of her doctoral supervisor John Dewey. The article experiments with diffractive reading to examine Dewey’s and Goodsell’s approach to history, as well as Goodsell’s configuration of women’s historical and contemporary participation in education. It looks at Dewey’s comment that women’s ‘philosophising’ would not be the same ‘in viewpoint or tenor’ as that composed from the ‘different masculine experience of things’ and investigates the principles that order liberal and vocational education in Goodsell’s view of a reformed education for women. The conclusion asks whether diffractive reading is an enhanced form of intertextuality.     

‘We have our own religion’: a pupil perspective on minority religion and ethics instruction in Finland

The Finnish system of religious education offers instruction in the pupil’s own religion or in ethics throughout comprehensive school. By taking the pupil’s background as a basis for instruction, this system aims at promoting equality and integration with respect to religion and one’s worldview. However, there has been little knowledge about how the system of instruction is experienced by pupils themselves and how it affects pupil’s identities at school. This study illuminates through a participant observation study in grades 1–6 how pupils in five minority instruction groups experience their classes and perceive themselves in relation to other pupils in school. The study shows how working in small groups represents an important element in pupils’ experiences. Pupils generally experienced participation in instruction as positive and fun, but age integration, organisation of schedules and classrooms were also important concerns. Even if pupils were content about having their own instruction group, feelings of otherness and a negative sense of difference in relation to the majority of pupils were found particularly among pupils of religion.     

Traversing the Challenges of Conducting Research with Young, Immigrant Children: The Case of Korean Children

Based on a qualitative study on young Korean immigrant children’s interpretation of American popular culture, this paper reflects on the researchers’ role by examining the research challenges faced. Prior to discussing the research obstacles in conducting the study, we begin with briefly describing its methodology and design. Next, we discuss the various obstacles we encountered when conducting our study and howwe attempted to overcome these dilemmas by discussing two major struggles during the research process: a) the relationships between the researchers and our young participants, and b) the cultural sensitivity that was needed in initially gaining permission from and working with the parents of our informants. It then illuminates how the researchers attempted to cope with such difficulties by rethinking a researchers’s role emphasizing the importance of cultural context in research. Finally, the paper provides some discussions and implications based on our research experiences.     

The Role of Semantic Context and Memory in the Acquisition of Novel Nouns

Three studies assessed the ability of 2-year-olds to use semantic context to infer the meanings of novel nouns and to retain those meanings a day later. In the first experiment, 24 2-year-olds heard novel nouns in sentences that contained semantically constraining verbs (e.g., "Mommy feeds the ferret"). They chose from a set of four novel object pictures to indicate the referent. Children learned a majority of the novel words. However, they occasionally failed to choose the correct object even when they understood the verb. Experiment 2 examined whether this was due to an inability to identify some of the pictures of novel objects. Experiment 3 tested 24 2-year-olds' memory for the newly learned nouns following a 24 hr delay and found significant retention. Results are discussed in terms of learning mechanisms that facilitate vocabulary acquisition in young children.     

Communication Patterns of African American Girls and Boys from Low-Income, Urban Backgrounds

This study investigated gender effects on the conversational strategies used among 106 African American children ( mean age = 7 years) from urban, low-income family backgrounds. Same- and mixed-gender pairs of children from the same grade level in an inner-city school were provided with toy bear puppets and asked to play together for 5 min. Conversations were coded using Leaper's Psychosocial Processes Coding Scheme, which classifies communication acts as either collaborative, controlling, informing, obliging, or withdrawing. Girls and boys were more similar than different. However, gender-related variations were found. Boys were more likely than girls to use controlling acts and domineering exchanges in same-gender pairs but not in mixed-gender pairs. Girls were more likely than boys to use a combination of collaborative and informing acts. For partner gender effects we found that controlling acts and domineering exchanges were less likely — whereas informing acts were more likely — to take place when children were matched with a girl than when they were matched with a boy. Findings replicate many of the gender effects on communication style reported in a prior study (Leaper, 1991) that used a similar procedure and coding strategy with a sample of middle-income children from mostly European American backgrounds.