Global citizenship in intercultural communication: Spatial awareness of globalization through map your consumption*

Courses: This teaching unit is for intercultural communication but could be used for any course related to globalization, including public speaking, popular culture and communication, or environmental communication. Additionally, the teaching unit is well-suited for other disciplines, including geography, environmental studies, and global studies.

Objectives: Students trace the manufacturing origins of their belongings in order to analyze their connections with other countries through plotting them on a world map. Students research economic, cultural, and/or political globalization of one or two countries plotted on their map in order to consider how to practice ethical consumption.     

Storying Joanne, 1 an undergraduate mathematician

In this article two different accounts are juxtaposed. In one, we use a variety of texts to narrate the story of Joanne, a woman undergraduate student of mathematics. Like many of our mature students Joanne came to the university with a ‘non‐traditional’ academic background. We describe how Joanne developed as a learner of mathematics and connect this to our ways of working in the undergraduate mathematics classroom. We believe that our pedagogy is unusual outside (some) school classrooms and suggest it allows our students to develop positive ‘disciplinary relationships’. In the other, we grapple with the issues raised by telling other people’s stories especially when we are also characters within it. Our intention has been that, in interweaving these two threads, each helps us understand more about the other.     

Complicating methodological transparency

A historical indicator of the quality, validity, and rigor of qualitative research has been the documentation and disclosure of the behind-the-scenes work of the researcher. In this paper, we use what we call methodological data as a tool to complicate the possibility and desirability of such transparency. Specifically, we draw on our disparate attempts to address calls for transparency about methodological processes in our respective dissertation studies in order to examine how novice researchers can explore transparency as a situated, ongoing, and philosophically informed series of decisions about how, when, and if to be transparent about our work. This work contributes to conversations about how qualitative researchers in education can understand, discuss, and teach qualitative inquiry while continuing to push the boundaries of the field.     

Developing Conceptual Understanding in Primary Science

Over the past 30 years research has generated considerable insights into children's ideas related to science and the process of conceptual change. Using this knowledge to inform teaching is not straightforward. This paper outlines some general guidelines for teaching for conceptual development and then focuses on the introduction of new ideas in the primary classroom. Two pieces of teaching, about light and electricity, are used to exemplify how relevant ideas of science can be introduced and related to children's thinking and to everyday phenomena. The role of the teacher in 'talking ideas into existence' is discussed and directions for future research identified.     

Critical literacy: Beyond reason

In this paper, I argue that critical literacy is essentially a rationalist activity that does not sufficiently address the non-rational investments that readers bring with them to texts and tasks. I begin by looking at playful advertising texts that work with humour and the transgressive in order to consider the role of pleasure rather than reason. Then I examine the force of powerful identifications in relation to reason to show that educational interventions cannot ignore them. Finally, I tentatively suggest that we may need to find ways to combine socio-cultural and psycho-analytic theory in order to imagine new directions for pedagogy in the critical literacy classroom.     

Private Education in Poland: Breaking the Mould?

The burgeoning private sector is perhaps the most tangible of the changes in education which followed the upheavals of 1989/90 in Central and Eastern Europe. This article sets out to analyse the growth of private education in Poland and its contribution to the ongoing processes of democratisation and educational development. The authors argue that the euphoria of the period immediately following the overthrow of one-party communism encouraged unrealistic expectations of educational reform. Their analysis of private sector schooling in Poland suggests that its development has occurred in a haphazard fashion, reflecting the uncertainties of a society undergoing a painful process of transition. Symptomatic of this has been the failure to establish a clear regulatory framework for the private sector – an omission which has undermined the credibility of private schools. Nevertheless, the authors argue that the development of private sector schooling in Poland has brought diversity and a degree of innovation to a system previously almost devoid of either. There is now an urgent need for the evaluation and dissemination of private sector initiatives, which can serve as examples for future educational decision-making in Poland.