Mapping the typology of transition systems in a liberal market economy: the case of Canada

This research explores links between tertiary education institutions and between tertiary education and the labour market as determinants of provincial and national transition patterns in Canada. The study consists of a provincial analysis that maps the typology of transition systems across Canada’s devolved federated tertiary education structure. The results show that, nationally: the links between education and work are relatively loose aside from regulated occupations; there is an emphasis on general education; and qualifications are used as a screen for entry to the labour market. However, while Canada can be broadly understood as a liberal market economy, there is provincial diversity within the nation; and there are varying logics for the development of skill, deployment of labour, and relations between institutions. The institutional and policy frameworks, structure of jobs, and formation of skill in Canada’s largest provinces of British Columbia, Alberta, Ontario and Quebec reveal diverse characteristics of transition systems. However, despite internal differentiation in the value of vocational education, variations at the provincial level have not been enough to shift the federal pattern as a whole. Instead, in Canada vocational education is generally stigmatised and viewed as signalling low ability and motivation.     

Diffractive pedagogies: dancing across new materialist imaginaries

ABSTRACT

We theorise an interdisciplinary arts practice university course and consider the forms of educational imaginary challenged by our curriculum. We argue for the disruptive and generative potential of what we call diffractive pedagogy as an example of the type of learning that can take place when materiality and entanglement are considered as vital constituents. Through self-expression and interweaving across disciplinary boundaries, the potential to produce, embody and theorise simultaneously can be realised. Student bodies do not exist in isolation from one another, or from the environment. It is indeed impossible to separate the dancer from the dance, the teacher from the student, and the bodies from the environments and objects to which they relate. This being true, our student body reproduced our teaching bodies as abject, as messy and peripheral to their imaginings of university education. Materially, student bodies remade the limits to which their consciousness was imaginatively drawn. Through our embodied work, unconscious change began the processes of affecting students’ imaginaries of university education.     

Information access and retrieval with hypermedia information systems

Students' success with interactive information systems (IIS) such as those found in many CD-ROM applications depends to large degree on their capacity accurately to choose and apply search strategies in response to information needs. IIS systems provide many ways to retrieve information, with some methods being more efficient and effective than others. The purpose of this study was to investigate the search strategies employed by novice users of an IIS system and to analyse the problems and issues that were impediments to successful use. A class of 12 year old students was instructed in the use of an electronic encyclopaedia. The students used the encyclopaedia as an information source for individual projects and on completion their information skills tested and analysed. The study found that students tended to employ inefficient search strategies and experienced difficulty in creating search requests for information related problems.     

Principals and teachers as partners in critical,participatory action research

Abstract

This article reports on a two-year study of one principal’s professional learning practices in ‘Transform,’ a professional learning program in Edmonton Catholic Schools, Alberta, Canada. Transform was designed to be a bottom-up, morally-oriented professional learning approach in which principals and teachers worked as partners on critical, participatory action research projects. This article examines the research question ‘How are principals shifting from technically- to morally-oriented professional learning practices in their schools?’ and explores one theme – co-creating social spaces for risk-taking – to illustrate how principals shifted from being managers of teachers’ learning to being partners with teachers in researching and refining classroom practices.     

Effects of Traditional Versus Montessori Schooling on 4‐ to 15‐Year Old children's Performance Monitoring

Through performance monitoring individuals detect and learn from unexpected outcomes, indexed by post‐error slowing and post‐error improvement in accuracy. Although performance monitoring is essential for academic learning and improves across childhood, its susceptibility to educational influences has not been studied. Here we compared performance monitoring on a flanker task in 234 children aged 4 through 15, from traditional or Montessori classrooms. While traditional classrooms emphasize that students learn from teachers' feedback, Montessori classrooms encourage students to work independently with materials specially designed to support learners discovering errors for themselves. We found that Montessori students paused longer post‐error in early childhood and, by adolescence, were more likely to self‐correct. We also found that a developmental shift from longer to shorter pauses post‐error being associated with self‐correction happened younger in the Montessori group. Our findings provide preliminary evidence that educational experience influences performance monitoring, with implications for neural development, learning, and pedagogy.     

Understanding Pre-Service Teachers' Emerging Practices Through Their Analyses of a Multimedia Case Study of Practice

The limits inherent in field experiences and the difficulties in learning howto use student thinking in instructional practice are significant challengesin pre-service teachers' preparation. In this research, we haveinvestigated how multimedia case studies of practice can support pre-service teachers in making meaning of complex classroom experiences andin developing strategies and rationales for using student thinking to guideinstruction. In this paper, we present a brief review of the research on casestudies to situate our particular approach that builds on the notion that amultimedia case study can be a site for investigation, analysis andreflection by pre-service teachers. We then report the results of examiningthe issues that one cohort of pre-service mathematics teachers (grades 7–12) identified as meaningful for them in terms of their own emergingpractice and the ways in which they connected the case study teacher'spractice to their own practice. We found that the pre-service teachers wereable to use their perspectives on a common practice to highlight some of thedilemmas and tensions found in teaching. In particular, these pre-serviceteachers focused on the difficulties encountered when trying to usestudent thinking and to follow their own mathematical goals in a lesson.They were able to frame many of the issues that they encountered in theirown practice (such as checking for student understanding and the use ofquestioning) in terms of their analysis of the case study teachers' practice.     

Signatures of quality teaching for Indigenous students

This paper presents findings from the validation of a survey instrument constructed in response to what Indigenous parents/carers and students believe constitutes culturally responsive pedagogies that positively influence Indigenous student learning. Characteristics of culturally responsive pedagogies established through interviews with Australian Indigenous parents, community members and students generated themes which were distilled into survey items by a team of Indigenous and other educators. The instrument was then put on trial with 141 teachers for statistical validation. Analyses employing the Rasch model confirmed that the instrument measured a unidimensional latent trait: culturally responsive pedagogy. Seven subscales, content validities of which were determined by a panel of experts, were also confirmed. Results highlighted differences between primary and secondary teachers’ self-reported practice, and important facets of teacher pedagogy in the two different school contexts emerged. Analyses of four of the subscales of the instrument—Indigenous cultural value, self‐regulation support, literacy teaching and explicitness—are presented in the context of current emphases on quality teaching and Indigenous student outcomes. The instrument can be used to measure teachers’ nuances in pedagogy, and the resulting teacher profiles can be used to assist teachers to focus on particular aspects of their pedagogy to meet the needs of their students.     

Concept mapping in research on mathematical knowledge development: Background,methods, findings and conclusions

The theoretical background and different methods ofconcept mapping for use in teaching and in research on learning processes are discussed. Two mathematical projects, one on fractions and one on geometry, are presented in more detail. In the first one special characteristics of concept maps were elaborated. In the second one concept mapping allowed students' individual understanding to be monitored over time and provided information about students' conceptual understanding that would not have been obtained using other methods. Regarding the students' individual concept maps in more detail there were some additional findings: (i) The characteristics of the maps change remarkably from fourth grade to sixth grade; (ii) There is some evidence that prior knowledge related to some mathematical topics plays a very important role in students' learning behaviour and in their achievement; (iii) Concept maps provide information about how individual students relate concepts to form organised conceptual frameworks; (iv) Long-term difficulties with specific concepts are able to be traced. These findings are discussed with regard to results of other studies as well as to their implications for the teaching of mathematics in the classroom.